1 00:00:00,000 --> 00:00:03,480 It's the question of why things are. 2 00:00:03,480 --> 00:00:06,320 It's just at its basic level, it's fascinating. 3 00:00:06,320 --> 00:00:09,840 And it's so satisfying if you get even the tiniest bit 4 00:00:09,840 --> 00:00:11,600 of something you think that's interesting in that. 5 00:00:11,600 --> 00:00:13,080 You hear a cell, like you're recording 6 00:00:13,080 --> 00:00:14,240 from cells in the brain. 7 00:00:15,880 --> 00:00:19,840 That listening to a cell, it's mind boggling. 8 00:00:19,840 --> 00:00:22,240 It's one of those things that does not get old. 9 00:00:22,240 --> 00:00:34,840 I'm John Fox, director of the Del Monte Institute for Neuroscience 10 00:00:34,840 --> 00:00:36,360 at the University of Rochester. 11 00:00:36,360 --> 00:00:38,640 And I'm delighted to welcome you to another episode 12 00:00:38,640 --> 00:00:40,640 of Neuroscience Perspectives. 13 00:00:40,640 --> 00:00:42,760 Today, I'm absolutely thrilled to be joined 14 00:00:42,760 --> 00:00:45,840 by a very good friend of mine, Dr. Christopher Moore, 15 00:00:45,840 --> 00:00:48,200 who is the associate director of the Kearney Institute 16 00:00:48,200 --> 00:00:50,360 of Brain Science and professor of neuroscience 17 00:00:50,360 --> 00:00:53,800 and brain sciences at Brown University. 18 00:00:53,800 --> 00:00:56,080 His research contributed to understanding 19 00:00:56,080 --> 00:00:58,440 how the brain processes information, 20 00:00:58,440 --> 00:01:01,480 has advanced our understanding of how brain dynamics relates 21 00:01:01,480 --> 00:01:04,640 perception, and provided us with new insights 22 00:01:04,640 --> 00:01:07,600 into important brain mechanisms related to sleep 23 00:01:07,600 --> 00:01:09,400 and sensory processing. 24 00:01:09,400 --> 00:01:11,840 Chris, I'm absolutely delighted to have you here today. 25 00:01:11,840 --> 00:01:13,440 It's really exciting to be here. 26 00:01:13,440 --> 00:01:15,280 It's fun to talk with you. 27 00:01:15,280 --> 00:01:19,000 And I think we're going to have a wide ranging conversation. 28 00:01:19,000 --> 00:01:23,720 But I want to dive in on something. 29 00:01:23,720 --> 00:01:26,200 Most people who sit in the seat that you're sitting in, 30 00:01:26,200 --> 00:01:29,160 neuroscientists, neuroscience perspectives, 31 00:01:29,160 --> 00:01:31,080 studying neurons. 32 00:01:31,080 --> 00:01:34,200 And they study neurons and their dynamics. 33 00:01:34,200 --> 00:01:36,960 And you take a more expansive view. 34 00:01:36,960 --> 00:01:42,000 And I think you call it embodied neuroscience. 35 00:01:42,000 --> 00:01:43,800 Tell us why that? 36 00:01:43,800 --> 00:01:46,680 Why do we need to be thinking about a more expansive view? 37 00:01:46,680 --> 00:01:47,320 Sure. 38 00:01:47,320 --> 00:01:47,840 Sure. 39 00:01:47,840 --> 00:01:50,880 So neuroscience is, of course, the name 40 00:01:50,880 --> 00:01:54,880 for studying the biology that underlies our behavior 41 00:01:54,880 --> 00:01:59,240 in that wonderfully, beautifully narcissistic quest 42 00:01:59,240 --> 00:02:01,640 to understand ourselves and think it might somehow 43 00:02:01,640 --> 00:02:05,280 turn into this, that we could somehow understand 44 00:02:05,280 --> 00:02:08,840 the cells that live behind it. 45 00:02:08,840 --> 00:02:14,560 And the problem we have with neuroscience, 46 00:02:14,560 --> 00:02:16,120 or maybe I should say neuroscience, 47 00:02:16,120 --> 00:02:19,280 we have a problem, is neuroscience 48 00:02:19,280 --> 00:02:21,440 is named after a cell type, which 49 00:02:21,440 --> 00:02:23,960 is a very famous cell type, which is neurons. 50 00:02:23,960 --> 00:02:25,160 And neurons are wonderful. 51 00:02:25,160 --> 00:02:28,600 They're the crown jewel of how we see, how we act, 52 00:02:28,600 --> 00:02:30,840 how we perceive, how we have conversations. 53 00:02:30,840 --> 00:02:35,120 Amazing networks for remembering. 54 00:02:35,120 --> 00:02:38,480 However, there's really good evidence now, 55 00:02:38,480 --> 00:02:40,560 and there has been for a long time, 56 00:02:40,560 --> 00:02:45,680 that the biology that happens in us that creates behavior 57 00:02:45,680 --> 00:02:47,760 is so much more than neurons. 58 00:02:47,760 --> 00:02:50,440 And that's true at a lot of levels, 59 00:02:50,440 --> 00:02:54,480 but it's profoundly true at the level of wonderful cells 60 00:02:54,480 --> 00:02:57,520 like astrocytes, named after stars. 61 00:02:57,520 --> 00:03:00,200 We're doing work that show that the blood vessels in the brain 62 00:03:00,200 --> 00:03:04,120 seem to be computing, that they're not just pizza delivery, 63 00:03:04,120 --> 00:03:06,280 but that actually their very local dynamics might 64 00:03:06,280 --> 00:03:10,040 do things like hold memories and help us to perceive. 65 00:03:10,040 --> 00:03:14,880 So most neuroscientists, self-defined neuroscientists, 66 00:03:14,880 --> 00:03:16,480 that's the name they give to themselves, 67 00:03:16,480 --> 00:03:18,440 don't have a problem with that idea. 68 00:03:18,440 --> 00:03:21,760 But when you name a field after a single cell type, 69 00:03:21,760 --> 00:03:25,040 it's going to bias the work of the field towards that cell 70 00:03:25,040 --> 00:03:25,840 type. 71 00:03:25,840 --> 00:03:28,280 And we might miss out on understanding behavior 72 00:03:28,280 --> 00:03:32,600 and what causes it if we don't find a way to shake that up. 73 00:03:32,600 --> 00:03:35,000 So you're saying more, you know, I 74 00:03:35,000 --> 00:03:37,440 think there's a good appreciation now 75 00:03:37,440 --> 00:03:41,920 that in between our two ears, there's this mass of cells, 76 00:03:41,920 --> 00:03:43,760 and that it's not just neurons. 77 00:03:43,760 --> 00:03:48,560 We know there are support cells, glia, astrocytes, cells 78 00:03:48,560 --> 00:03:49,440 that move around. 79 00:03:49,440 --> 00:03:51,760 They don't just stay in the one place and all the rest of it. 80 00:03:51,760 --> 00:03:53,040 But you're going further. 81 00:03:53,040 --> 00:03:54,560 You're saying that the blood supply, 82 00:03:54,560 --> 00:03:57,720 that the cells delivering blood to the brain 83 00:03:57,720 --> 00:04:00,640 are actually playing a role in cognition? 84 00:04:00,640 --> 00:04:01,520 Would you go that far? 85 00:04:01,520 --> 00:04:03,040 100%. 86 00:04:03,040 --> 00:04:04,200 Absolutely. 87 00:04:04,200 --> 00:04:08,280 And I could be 100% wrong. 88 00:04:08,280 --> 00:04:11,880 But I'm 100% sure that we cannot rule it out. 89 00:04:11,880 --> 00:04:19,560 And that, John, actually we met when we were both much younger. 90 00:04:19,560 --> 00:04:22,120 And the reason we met was we were both fascinated 91 00:04:22,120 --> 00:04:24,600 by this new method of fMRI. 92 00:04:24,600 --> 00:04:27,040 And the central idea of fMRI is you 93 00:04:27,040 --> 00:04:30,320 can map where meaningful activity is going on 94 00:04:30,320 --> 00:04:33,200 in the brain with regards to our behavior and our cognition 95 00:04:33,200 --> 00:04:36,920 by picking up the accumulation of vasodilation in the brain, 96 00:04:36,920 --> 00:04:40,200 meaning local areas where blood flows in the brain. 97 00:04:40,200 --> 00:04:44,400 And it's a beautiful method for that and really exciting way 98 00:04:44,400 --> 00:04:45,760 of looking inside the human brain 99 00:04:45,760 --> 00:04:48,400 without having to open up the skull or something like that. 100 00:04:48,400 --> 00:04:50,520 It's incredibly useful. 101 00:04:50,520 --> 00:04:53,160 And it's incredibly useful precisely 102 00:04:53,160 --> 00:04:58,440 because local blood dynamics so nicely predict 103 00:04:58,440 --> 00:05:02,400 in a very subtle, often very measured way 104 00:05:02,400 --> 00:05:04,720 how the brain is doing its business with regards 105 00:05:04,720 --> 00:05:06,960 to behavior, with regards to activity. 106 00:05:06,960 --> 00:05:08,200 But let me lean into that. 107 00:05:08,200 --> 00:05:12,320 So I think in our naive way when you and I met 100 years ago, 108 00:05:12,320 --> 00:05:13,520 we won't get into it. 109 00:05:13,520 --> 00:05:14,520 We're old vampires. 110 00:05:14,520 --> 00:05:17,760 It's actually in the Habsburg Republic. 111 00:05:17,760 --> 00:05:21,160 So at that time, and I think many people would believe this 112 00:05:21,160 --> 00:05:25,320 today, so you have a vascular system, your blood flow. 113 00:05:25,320 --> 00:05:29,040 And the job of that is to deliver nutrients and oxygen 114 00:05:29,040 --> 00:05:30,840 to tissue that's active. 115 00:05:30,840 --> 00:05:32,800 So neurons are very active. 116 00:05:32,800 --> 00:05:35,000 We're burning all kinds of energy 117 00:05:35,000 --> 00:05:37,720 to do the computations we're doing. 118 00:05:37,720 --> 00:05:39,920 But that ultimately, it was just the plumbing. 119 00:05:39,920 --> 00:05:41,720 And we were getting this proxy measure. 120 00:05:41,720 --> 00:05:44,440 And you're saying, no, that's not enough here. 121 00:05:44,440 --> 00:05:49,360 It is a wonderful rhythm in our field. 122 00:05:49,360 --> 00:05:51,120 So in the history of ideas, I think 123 00:05:51,120 --> 00:05:52,880 this probably happens in every field where 124 00:05:52,880 --> 00:05:56,080 they go through periods of domination of one idea. 125 00:05:56,080 --> 00:05:57,800 And people kind of forget about the findings 126 00:05:57,800 --> 00:06:00,280 of the previous 20 years. 127 00:06:00,280 --> 00:06:02,640 And if you rediscover those, you can get a nature paper 128 00:06:02,640 --> 00:06:05,680 or a very fancy publication and get tenure. 129 00:06:05,680 --> 00:06:09,160 And every 20, 25, 30 years or so, 130 00:06:09,160 --> 00:06:11,880 there is a major paper that comes out and rediscovers 131 00:06:11,880 --> 00:06:16,160 the fact that fast dilations in the brain, the things that 132 00:06:16,160 --> 00:06:18,640 led us to fMRI that mark this, are not 133 00:06:18,640 --> 00:06:22,120 related to local need for glucose or oxygen. 134 00:06:22,120 --> 00:06:25,000 Your brain is a hog, not yours personally. 135 00:06:25,000 --> 00:06:26,320 That actually wasn't meant to. 136 00:06:26,320 --> 00:06:28,200 My brain's a hog, too. 137 00:06:28,200 --> 00:06:29,680 It uses a huge amount of energy. 138 00:06:29,680 --> 00:06:31,920 Something like 20% of the body's energy 139 00:06:31,920 --> 00:06:34,280 goes into something that is only 2% of its mass. 140 00:06:34,280 --> 00:06:35,040 Just two pounds of tissue. 141 00:06:35,040 --> 00:06:36,080 Two pounds of tissue. 142 00:06:36,080 --> 00:06:38,320 It is a huge energetic sink. 143 00:06:38,320 --> 00:06:41,680 It has lots of energy flowing to it all the time. 144 00:06:41,680 --> 00:06:43,920 It has a huge reservoir. 145 00:06:43,920 --> 00:06:45,520 And there is no reason to believe 146 00:06:45,520 --> 00:06:47,720 that the really fast fluctuations that 147 00:06:47,720 --> 00:06:51,600 are tracked by these dynamics, that that's a feeding event. 148 00:06:51,600 --> 00:06:54,720 In fact, every time people have looked, 149 00:06:54,720 --> 00:06:56,680 every time there's a new set of methods, 150 00:06:56,680 --> 00:07:00,080 they find, actually, it's not well, it doesn't match up. 151 00:07:00,080 --> 00:07:05,200 Now, even if it did match up, the body is opportunistic. 152 00:07:05,200 --> 00:07:09,000 And even if that local dilation, the local change in blood flow, 153 00:07:09,000 --> 00:07:12,160 did matter to supply local brain areas, 154 00:07:12,160 --> 00:07:14,040 it doesn't mean it can't do two things. 155 00:07:14,040 --> 00:07:15,520 It could be acting as a local way 156 00:07:15,520 --> 00:07:20,720 of conveying information of you and I both study attention. 157 00:07:20,720 --> 00:07:24,600 And one of the great examples of attention 158 00:07:24,600 --> 00:07:27,320 is the cocktail party effect, where number one, you 159 00:07:27,320 --> 00:07:29,320 can block out the noise, and you and I have done this, 160 00:07:29,320 --> 00:07:31,240 and have a great conversation with somebody. 161 00:07:31,240 --> 00:07:32,200 It's just a wonderful. 162 00:07:32,200 --> 00:07:34,720 And then someone says, John, over there. 163 00:07:34,720 --> 00:07:37,800 And your attention, without even moving your eyes, immediately, 164 00:07:37,800 --> 00:07:40,080 they can feel it dragged away. 165 00:07:40,080 --> 00:07:42,480 Blood flow is amazing at tracking that. 166 00:07:42,480 --> 00:07:44,400 That kind of change in your brain 167 00:07:44,400 --> 00:07:48,320 doesn't seem to need any additional context to it. 168 00:07:48,320 --> 00:07:51,320 It may actually be not only blood flow. 169 00:07:51,320 --> 00:07:53,160 It's not as if neurons aren't involved. 170 00:07:53,160 --> 00:07:55,560 It's just that we're not getting the whole picture unless we 171 00:07:55,560 --> 00:07:58,120 include these other cell types. 172 00:07:58,120 --> 00:08:02,160 I mean, it's completely fascinating and provocative. 173 00:08:02,160 --> 00:08:03,680 It's very provocative. 174 00:08:03,680 --> 00:08:06,480 You're definitely saying things that a lot of folks in the field 175 00:08:06,480 --> 00:08:09,880 would be mystified. 176 00:08:09,880 --> 00:08:10,640 That's a kind. 177 00:08:10,640 --> 00:08:11,140 Right. 178 00:08:11,140 --> 00:08:12,480 That's a kind word, putting it. 179 00:08:12,480 --> 00:08:17,040 So let's go to the timing component of this, 180 00:08:17,040 --> 00:08:18,200 which is super important. 181 00:08:18,200 --> 00:08:21,720 Because again, maybe in our naivety, 182 00:08:21,720 --> 00:08:24,520 we would say, OK, when we're looking at the blood flow, 183 00:08:24,520 --> 00:08:26,440 we're looking at the brain's plumbing. 184 00:08:26,440 --> 00:08:29,440 And that really is fluid flow through vessels, 185 00:08:29,440 --> 00:08:33,600 ever smaller vessels as you get to the core of the stuff that 186 00:08:33,600 --> 00:08:35,720 matters where the neurons are living. 187 00:08:35,720 --> 00:08:37,280 And that happens on a slow time scale. 188 00:08:37,280 --> 00:08:38,040 It has to, right? 189 00:08:38,040 --> 00:08:40,840 Because it's like water flowing in the stream. 190 00:08:40,840 --> 00:08:43,960 Whereas our neurons and the networks 191 00:08:43,960 --> 00:08:46,400 are talking to each other in milliseconds, thousands 192 00:08:46,400 --> 00:08:47,280 of milliseconds. 193 00:08:47,280 --> 00:08:49,960 This is why we can do what we're doing now with such rapidity. 194 00:08:49,960 --> 00:08:50,480 Yeah. 195 00:08:50,480 --> 00:08:53,480 So now, so we talked about that coupling, 196 00:08:53,480 --> 00:08:54,600 the temporal coupling there. 197 00:08:54,600 --> 00:08:55,720 It's a great question. 198 00:08:55,720 --> 00:09:00,120 It's a really, really deeply appropriate question, I think. 199 00:09:00,120 --> 00:09:04,960 Which is, we do have as much as the brain's a mystery, 200 00:09:04,960 --> 00:09:08,600 the world gives us clues as to the timing on which it 201 00:09:08,600 --> 00:09:11,480 has to operate to do certain things. 202 00:09:11,480 --> 00:09:14,520 So there are a variety of thoughts to bring to that. 203 00:09:14,520 --> 00:09:19,040 And it's as rich as the topic of behavior itself. 204 00:09:19,040 --> 00:09:21,600 So right now, we're having a conversation. 205 00:09:21,600 --> 00:09:24,480 And humans love to talk. 206 00:09:24,480 --> 00:09:26,080 I mean, here we are. 207 00:09:26,080 --> 00:09:27,520 Particularly these two humans. 208 00:09:27,520 --> 00:09:31,200 These two humans are hard to shut up in a very, very good 209 00:09:31,200 --> 00:09:32,160 way, right? 210 00:09:32,160 --> 00:09:34,160 So humans love to talk. 211 00:09:34,160 --> 00:09:35,960 And I talk for a little while. 212 00:09:35,960 --> 00:09:38,360 And that's like a unit of me doing stuff. 213 00:09:38,360 --> 00:09:40,880 And then you will talk for a little while. 214 00:09:40,880 --> 00:09:43,280 It's a very relevant time scale of behavior. 215 00:09:43,280 --> 00:09:44,560 Incredibly relevant. 216 00:09:44,560 --> 00:09:47,920 Maybe it's the basis of human interaction. 217 00:09:47,920 --> 00:09:50,600 That happens on tens of seconds. 218 00:09:50,600 --> 00:09:51,800 And we're doing it now. 219 00:09:51,800 --> 00:09:56,960 So one answer to the question of, can non-neural systems 220 00:09:56,960 --> 00:10:01,000 play a deep role in real-time behavior, 221 00:10:01,000 --> 00:10:03,680 is that real time has many meanings. 222 00:10:03,680 --> 00:10:06,080 That we live on a wake-sleep cycle, which 223 00:10:06,080 --> 00:10:07,440 is super important for behavior. 224 00:10:07,440 --> 00:10:08,840 We live on an hourly cycle. 225 00:10:08,840 --> 00:10:11,480 We live on a couple hours between my cups of coffee 226 00:10:11,480 --> 00:10:12,280 cycle. 227 00:10:12,280 --> 00:10:16,400 We live on, there's an old idea that alpha oscillations 228 00:10:16,400 --> 00:10:18,080 recycle every 22 minutes. 229 00:10:18,080 --> 00:10:19,240 Maybe it's a magical idea. 230 00:10:19,240 --> 00:10:21,760 But there's even teaching theory that goes with that. 231 00:10:21,760 --> 00:10:24,880 And then there's a conversational time scale. 232 00:10:24,880 --> 00:10:30,480 So if you bought the thesis that maybe the vast culture was 233 00:10:30,480 --> 00:10:32,440 a tick too slow in some way. 234 00:10:32,440 --> 00:10:35,480 But let's revisit that in a second. 235 00:10:35,480 --> 00:10:37,840 You could still say that for a huge range of what 236 00:10:37,840 --> 00:10:40,400 it is to be us, the way in which we have ideas emerge, 237 00:10:40,400 --> 00:10:41,880 like when I'm talking and then you 238 00:10:41,880 --> 00:10:45,120 think of something that's like, oh, that's why Chris is wrong. 239 00:10:45,120 --> 00:10:47,240 But it takes a while to percolate as a thought. 240 00:10:47,240 --> 00:10:48,960 On that time scale, it's absolutely fine. 241 00:10:48,960 --> 00:10:50,680 Those time scales are fine. 242 00:10:50,680 --> 00:10:53,200 Exactly. 243 00:10:53,200 --> 00:10:53,840 The other. 244 00:10:53,840 --> 00:10:55,920 Biological motion would be another good example. 245 00:10:55,920 --> 00:10:58,800 Like the speed of humans or animals 246 00:10:58,800 --> 00:11:02,160 is really on the second scale. 247 00:11:02,160 --> 00:11:05,200 And something you've studied really nicely 248 00:11:05,200 --> 00:11:07,640 and is one of the foundations, I think, 249 00:11:07,640 --> 00:11:11,720 of how most people think about cognition in the brain 250 00:11:11,720 --> 00:11:15,880 is perception is as much prediction as it is reception. 251 00:11:15,880 --> 00:11:19,120 It's a combination of those two words even. 252 00:11:19,120 --> 00:11:21,880 And prediction works on those time scales. 253 00:11:21,880 --> 00:11:24,240 So that's one answer. 254 00:11:24,240 --> 00:11:30,680 Another answer is that you're totally right about the notion 255 00:11:30,680 --> 00:11:32,040 of ambient fluid. 256 00:11:32,040 --> 00:11:34,760 And I think that the fluid that's in us 257 00:11:34,760 --> 00:11:38,440 is a great reporter of all of the states, 258 00:11:38,440 --> 00:11:39,800 like how hungry are we? 259 00:11:39,800 --> 00:11:41,240 How thirsty are we? 260 00:11:41,240 --> 00:11:44,760 How much do we care to have social interaction versus be 261 00:11:44,760 --> 00:11:46,800 a bit introverted and reset our batteries? 262 00:11:46,800 --> 00:11:49,000 Like all those deep cues that we have. 263 00:11:49,000 --> 00:11:52,080 So it's like a superhighway of that kind of information. 264 00:11:52,080 --> 00:11:55,320 And admittedly, that might update on, say, minutes 265 00:11:55,320 --> 00:11:57,640 time scale or tens of seconds. 266 00:11:57,640 --> 00:12:00,600 Something is released that changes what we need. 267 00:12:00,600 --> 00:12:02,280 But that's the kind of information 268 00:12:02,280 --> 00:12:04,640 that our brains evolved to deal with. 269 00:12:04,640 --> 00:12:07,320 In the wild, if you make a bad judgment about whether or not 270 00:12:07,320 --> 00:12:08,680 you should be meeting a need, you 271 00:12:08,680 --> 00:12:14,840 will be lunch for the hawk flying above you very quickly. 272 00:12:14,840 --> 00:12:17,080 But the other answer, and not to go on and on, 273 00:12:17,080 --> 00:12:20,320 but just to mention it, is the vasculature in work 274 00:12:20,320 --> 00:12:25,120 that we're doing now can have amazingly quick responses 275 00:12:25,120 --> 00:12:29,520 on the time scale of 100 milliseconds in its dynamics 276 00:12:29,520 --> 00:12:30,640 in a couple ways. 277 00:12:30,640 --> 00:12:34,040 One is we're imaging the calcium activity in blood vessels, 278 00:12:34,040 --> 00:12:38,040 following on really nice work that's emerging in the field. 279 00:12:38,040 --> 00:12:41,520 And those events look like action potentials. 280 00:12:41,520 --> 00:12:42,640 They're amazing. 281 00:12:42,640 --> 00:12:43,560 They last. 282 00:12:43,560 --> 00:12:46,240 The fundamental sort of unit of information transfer 283 00:12:46,240 --> 00:12:47,920 between neurons. 284 00:12:47,920 --> 00:12:48,400 Absolutely. 285 00:12:48,400 --> 00:12:50,080 When we think of networks like this 286 00:12:50,080 --> 00:12:53,760 and you see the vibrating brain and glowing, 287 00:12:53,760 --> 00:12:55,680 on the same time scale, more or less, 288 00:12:55,680 --> 00:12:57,600 as the rate of action potentials, 289 00:12:57,600 --> 00:13:00,360 you can have these very brief moments of electrical activity, 290 00:13:00,360 --> 00:13:03,960 calcium activity, in vessels. 291 00:13:03,960 --> 00:13:08,240 You might then say, OK, but actually in the wiring diagram 292 00:13:08,240 --> 00:13:10,960 behind us, a lot of people think of it as a big circuit 293 00:13:10,960 --> 00:13:13,280 diagram, a voltage map. 294 00:13:13,280 --> 00:13:16,520 You might say, well, but vessels, nobody 295 00:13:16,520 --> 00:13:20,000 has ever looked at the voltage of vessels 296 00:13:20,000 --> 00:13:21,760 in a behaving brain. 297 00:13:21,760 --> 00:13:27,120 So it is an unseen universe of possibility 298 00:13:27,120 --> 00:13:29,360 that may just be happening there. 299 00:13:29,360 --> 00:13:32,520 And given how dense that network is, 300 00:13:32,520 --> 00:13:34,360 we don't even know to rule it out, 301 00:13:34,360 --> 00:13:37,080 because we've never had the methods to even see it. 302 00:13:37,080 --> 00:13:39,040 And so hopefully those methods are coming soon. 303 00:13:39,040 --> 00:13:40,800 You know, I remember the first time 304 00:13:40,800 --> 00:13:44,880 you described this hemoneural theory was 305 00:13:44,880 --> 00:13:47,680 on the side of the road near Washington Square Park. 306 00:13:47,680 --> 00:13:49,040 We were both visiting NYU. 307 00:13:49,040 --> 00:13:50,000 I don't remember why. 308 00:13:50,000 --> 00:13:51,240 I remember vividly as well. 309 00:13:51,240 --> 00:13:52,720 And you were very excited about it. 310 00:13:52,720 --> 00:13:55,040 But it's a while back. 311 00:13:55,040 --> 00:13:56,160 Tell me about traction. 312 00:13:56,160 --> 00:13:57,120 Is it catching hold? 313 00:13:57,120 --> 00:13:59,080 Do you find other people? 314 00:13:59,080 --> 00:14:04,360 Yeah, I have to say, as a scientist, 315 00:14:04,360 --> 00:14:12,000 you have the papers you write that a wonderful postdoc 316 00:14:12,000 --> 00:14:15,760 of mine, Jessica Cardin, who's now very just a former guest 317 00:14:15,760 --> 00:14:16,800 with us here at Neuroscience. 318 00:14:16,800 --> 00:14:18,320 A former guest with you on this show, 319 00:14:18,320 --> 00:14:21,400 and who's now running a wonderful lab making 320 00:14:21,400 --> 00:14:23,080 amazing discoveries. 321 00:14:23,080 --> 00:14:25,560 She and I published a paper in 2009, 322 00:14:25,560 --> 00:14:27,480 which easily is a paper of mine that's 323 00:14:27,480 --> 00:14:29,840 gotten the most attention, where we showed we could create 324 00:14:29,840 --> 00:14:32,320 brain oscillations like those that people think 325 00:14:32,320 --> 00:14:34,600 might relate to consciousness. 326 00:14:34,600 --> 00:14:37,360 And as Jess put it to me then, we 327 00:14:37,360 --> 00:14:41,000 did a great job of kicking down an open door. 328 00:14:41,000 --> 00:14:42,560 I said, final nail in the coffin. 329 00:14:42,560 --> 00:14:45,400 She's like, that's too morbid. 330 00:14:45,400 --> 00:14:48,120 In other words, it's a famous paper in part 331 00:14:48,120 --> 00:14:50,200 because it takes things people thought they knew, 332 00:14:50,200 --> 00:14:52,720 but we were lucky to have elegant methods that 333 00:14:52,720 --> 00:14:53,840 kind of nailed it. 334 00:14:53,840 --> 00:14:56,400 And it was in a way that made people understand maybe 335 00:14:56,400 --> 00:14:58,640 how these oscillations could work. 336 00:14:58,640 --> 00:15:01,160 Those are exciting papers and wonderful contributions. 337 00:15:01,160 --> 00:15:02,680 And then as you and I both know, you 338 00:15:02,680 --> 00:15:04,840 have those papers you write because you're like, 339 00:15:04,840 --> 00:15:06,520 this is going to be true. 340 00:15:06,520 --> 00:15:09,480 And admittedly, I might not be able to test it in my lifetime, 341 00:15:09,480 --> 00:15:10,760 but I got to put this down. 342 00:15:10,760 --> 00:15:14,040 It's almost like it really is honestly 343 00:15:14,040 --> 00:15:16,200 the stuff we're supposed to do. 344 00:15:16,200 --> 00:15:19,280 It's a big part of what we're supposed to do. 345 00:15:19,280 --> 00:15:23,040 There's two important questions that I wanted to ask you. 346 00:15:23,040 --> 00:15:25,520 So as long as I've known you, you 347 00:15:25,520 --> 00:15:27,280 are one of those people who's trying 348 00:15:27,280 --> 00:15:30,760 to think outside the box and just really 349 00:15:30,760 --> 00:15:32,360 push the boundaries. 350 00:15:32,360 --> 00:15:36,880 And I know right now you're on a sabbatical, 351 00:15:36,880 --> 00:15:38,960 which folks may not even know what that is. 352 00:15:38,960 --> 00:15:40,040 So we'll explain that. 353 00:15:40,040 --> 00:15:41,640 You can do it. 354 00:15:41,640 --> 00:15:43,320 But I was struck by some of the stuff 355 00:15:43,320 --> 00:15:47,240 that you said earlier today around just being thoughtful 356 00:15:47,240 --> 00:15:49,040 and taking some time to think. 357 00:15:49,040 --> 00:15:52,240 And is this sabbatical a key thing for you right now? 358 00:15:52,240 --> 00:15:54,120 Is it an important moment in your career? 359 00:15:54,120 --> 00:15:55,520 Yeah, absolutely. 360 00:15:55,520 --> 00:16:01,320 So sabbatical is a wonderful thing in the life 361 00:16:01,320 --> 00:16:06,280 of being an educator, which is every seven years or so, 362 00:16:06,280 --> 00:16:09,560 you're allowed to take some time where you're allowed to try 363 00:16:09,560 --> 00:16:14,160 and think about problems and get in touch with ideas that maybe 364 00:16:14,160 --> 00:16:16,760 you didn't have time to go deep because you were teaching 365 00:16:16,760 --> 00:16:19,280 a lot of classes and writing a lot of grants 366 00:16:19,280 --> 00:16:22,760 and serving as a really ineffective middle manager 367 00:16:22,760 --> 00:16:24,720 of academia. 368 00:16:24,720 --> 00:16:26,800 All these things that we get to be part of. 369 00:16:26,800 --> 00:16:28,600 Right, that we have no training for. 370 00:16:28,600 --> 00:16:29,920 That we have no training for. 371 00:16:29,920 --> 00:16:33,760 And we are blessed to get to doing podcasts. 372 00:16:33,760 --> 00:16:38,560 So it gives you the right to be allowed to be a nerd 373 00:16:38,560 --> 00:16:40,520 and really nerd out and be weird. 374 00:16:40,520 --> 00:16:42,900 And that brings me to the other side of that question, which 375 00:16:42,900 --> 00:16:45,920 is, of course, the way our system is set up 376 00:16:45,920 --> 00:16:49,560 and the funding models and that keep us in a safe space 377 00:16:49,560 --> 00:16:50,520 a bit, right? 378 00:16:50,520 --> 00:16:53,080 The old days where you could take time 379 00:16:53,080 --> 00:16:58,240 to really ferment and mature an idea or dive deep 380 00:16:58,240 --> 00:17:00,080 or try some wacky stuff. 381 00:17:00,080 --> 00:17:02,920 That's hard to do in this modern environment, right? 382 00:17:02,920 --> 00:17:06,360 I think it is literally our job to keep trying. 383 00:17:06,360 --> 00:17:08,480 And I think you're absolutely right. 384 00:17:08,480 --> 00:17:13,320 That there's a concept in people who 385 00:17:13,320 --> 00:17:15,640 think about science as an overall thing that 386 00:17:15,640 --> 00:17:19,160 is done in the world of the paradigm. 387 00:17:19,160 --> 00:17:21,240 And the idea of a paradigm, I always 388 00:17:21,240 --> 00:17:24,720 like to think of it as like a haystack. 389 00:17:24,720 --> 00:17:28,680 It's a tendency of the hay to be in the stack of belief, right? 390 00:17:28,680 --> 00:17:33,440 And it's our job to try and find out true things, 391 00:17:33,440 --> 00:17:37,320 not to find out things that are for the sake of it. 392 00:17:40,280 --> 00:17:45,280 But part of our job is to see if the haystack has no close. 393 00:17:45,280 --> 00:17:47,000 And one of the most mixed metaphors 394 00:17:47,000 --> 00:17:49,240 in the history of your podcast, if not 395 00:17:49,240 --> 00:17:50,920 the history of mankind. 396 00:17:50,920 --> 00:17:53,120 It's our job to say, wait a minute. 397 00:17:53,120 --> 00:17:55,240 Wait a minute, what are we missing? 398 00:17:55,240 --> 00:17:56,160 That is part of it. 399 00:17:56,160 --> 00:17:58,040 It's not the sole part of our job. 400 00:17:58,040 --> 00:18:00,520 We also have to do things. 401 00:18:00,520 --> 00:18:02,880 Doing something that will matter for human health 402 00:18:02,880 --> 00:18:05,480 is maybe the paramount part of our job, right? 403 00:18:05,480 --> 00:18:07,320 And that will have a lot of different things 404 00:18:07,320 --> 00:18:07,880 you need to do. 405 00:18:07,880 --> 00:18:11,120 And some, that said, doing things 406 00:18:11,120 --> 00:18:14,320 that have what we refer to as discovery value, which 407 00:18:14,320 --> 00:18:16,080 is the degree to which you might change 408 00:18:16,080 --> 00:18:18,240 the way we think about the brain, 409 00:18:18,240 --> 00:18:21,560 I think has a role in the portfolio, the investment 410 00:18:21,560 --> 00:18:24,520 of time portfolio that we all have. 411 00:18:24,520 --> 00:18:27,720 So do you find yourself now on sabbatical, 412 00:18:27,720 --> 00:18:29,400 that you've parked things at the lab. 413 00:18:29,400 --> 00:18:31,880 I presume you've got some management there that's, 414 00:18:31,880 --> 00:18:33,440 or do you find yourself drawn back? 415 00:18:33,440 --> 00:18:34,560 I have a great lab. 416 00:18:34,560 --> 00:18:36,800 Do you find yourself in a different mode of thinking? 417 00:18:36,800 --> 00:18:38,160 Is it different? 418 00:18:38,160 --> 00:18:40,640 Are you approaching life for this period of time 419 00:18:40,640 --> 00:18:41,400 in a different way? 420 00:18:41,400 --> 00:18:43,000 It's just a great question. 421 00:18:43,000 --> 00:18:45,760 So I mean, I'm actually interested, 422 00:18:45,760 --> 00:18:48,520 because of course, you've made tremendous creative 423 00:18:48,520 --> 00:18:50,880 contributions to our field. 424 00:18:50,880 --> 00:18:54,760 And it takes work, right? 425 00:18:54,760 --> 00:18:57,320 It does, yeah, absolutely. 426 00:18:57,320 --> 00:19:01,880 It takes work, and it takes, and again, 427 00:19:01,880 --> 00:19:04,200 thinking back to absolutely fabulous conversations 428 00:19:04,200 --> 00:19:07,000 we've had at many moments, including in Cambridge, Mass, 429 00:19:07,000 --> 00:19:12,360 where I remember meeting, it takes practice 430 00:19:12,360 --> 00:19:15,720 to try to be weird. 431 00:19:15,720 --> 00:19:17,720 I mean that in the fullest sense. 432 00:19:20,480 --> 00:19:25,040 You need to find the National Geographic documentaries, 433 00:19:25,040 --> 00:19:29,440 where you see the lion cubs playing, and the voiceover says, 434 00:19:29,440 --> 00:19:31,600 and now they're practicing hunting 435 00:19:31,600 --> 00:19:33,960 on the brothers and sisters. 436 00:19:33,960 --> 00:19:36,520 It's the sisters, right, though, because the lioness 437 00:19:36,520 --> 00:19:38,680 is doing all the hunting. 438 00:19:38,680 --> 00:19:44,040 OK, you've got to always have an attitude 439 00:19:44,040 --> 00:19:48,760 to that lion cub of finding your good friends that you trust, 440 00:19:48,760 --> 00:19:54,440 that won't be upset that you tried an idea on them, 441 00:19:54,440 --> 00:19:57,240 but won't fail to be critical in that useful way also. 442 00:20:01,000 --> 00:20:03,080 It's work, but it's fun. 443 00:20:03,080 --> 00:20:06,080 You can have fun trying out a crazy idea on. 444 00:20:06,080 --> 00:20:10,760 You have to practice that to be able to do it. 445 00:20:10,760 --> 00:20:12,280 It's a muscle, too. 446 00:20:12,280 --> 00:20:15,320 So that leads me to a thought, too, as well, 447 00:20:15,320 --> 00:20:17,600 because I worry about this a lot. 448 00:20:17,600 --> 00:20:21,240 I think you and I arrived into science at a really great time. 449 00:20:21,240 --> 00:20:24,880 We were both extraordinarily lucky to be at Mass General 450 00:20:24,880 --> 00:20:28,280 at the advent of functional magnetic resonance imaging. 451 00:20:28,280 --> 00:20:31,000 And I always say this, a lot of it's luck. 452 00:20:31,000 --> 00:20:34,800 But I worry about youngsters today. 453 00:20:34,800 --> 00:20:38,040 We had a lot of latitude that I'm not sure they do now. 454 00:20:38,040 --> 00:20:41,080 There's a programmed component to the way youngsters 455 00:20:41,080 --> 00:20:42,000 go through grad school. 456 00:20:42,000 --> 00:20:43,200 Are you worried about that? 457 00:20:43,200 --> 00:20:45,240 What do you say to your own graduate students? 458 00:20:45,240 --> 00:20:48,360 I'm incredibly worried. 459 00:20:48,360 --> 00:20:50,360 Neil Young has a great quote that there's 460 00:20:50,360 --> 00:20:53,280 a lot to learn for wasting time. 461 00:20:53,280 --> 00:20:56,000 And actually, Rick Rubin, who wrote a fabulous book 462 00:20:56,000 --> 00:20:59,040 on discovery and creativity, The Creative Act, 463 00:20:59,040 --> 00:21:00,880 an absolutely wonderful book. 464 00:21:00,880 --> 00:21:02,120 I can't recommend it. 465 00:21:02,120 --> 00:21:06,880 Get it on audio, because he is, of course, a god of recording. 466 00:21:06,880 --> 00:21:11,720 And he reads the book to you, which is just. 467 00:21:11,720 --> 00:21:16,120 And there's something about having time to make mistakes. 468 00:21:16,120 --> 00:21:18,280 So would you recommend that to a graduate student? 469 00:21:18,280 --> 00:21:20,320 Go to this book. 470 00:21:20,320 --> 00:21:23,720 I have given it to any number of people. 471 00:21:23,720 --> 00:21:26,240 It's almost like, here, take this. 472 00:21:26,240 --> 00:21:27,080 You know that feeling. 473 00:21:27,080 --> 00:21:29,160 Yeah, of course. 474 00:21:29,160 --> 00:21:32,800 But it's really tricky, because some people also 475 00:21:32,800 --> 00:21:36,320 want to do things that are different. 476 00:21:36,320 --> 00:21:40,120 I think being creative has to be a part of what you do. 477 00:21:40,120 --> 00:21:44,600 That doesn't mean it has to be your North Star all the time. 478 00:21:44,600 --> 00:21:46,080 Everyone's going to have a different. 479 00:21:46,080 --> 00:21:48,200 It takes a team in science. 480 00:21:48,200 --> 00:21:49,600 Controlled creativity. 481 00:21:49,600 --> 00:21:51,880 Because I sometimes have a youngster come to me, 482 00:21:51,880 --> 00:21:53,920 and they've got a fantastic idea. 483 00:21:53,920 --> 00:21:55,520 And I say, that's great. 484 00:21:55,520 --> 00:21:58,080 There's literally no way to measure that, given 485 00:21:58,080 --> 00:21:59,200 the tools we have available. 486 00:21:59,200 --> 00:22:01,120 You're going to have to constrain this. 487 00:22:01,120 --> 00:22:02,840 Yes. 488 00:22:02,840 --> 00:22:07,720 You know, there are fabulous ideas and ideas you can test. 489 00:22:07,720 --> 00:22:10,880 What you'd love to do, and we so rarely achieve. 490 00:22:10,880 --> 00:22:13,520 But the dawn of fMRI was a time to do it, 491 00:22:13,520 --> 00:22:16,040 where that intersection was well-posed. 492 00:22:16,040 --> 00:22:20,000 And that's why sometimes people are accused of chasing methods. 493 00:22:20,000 --> 00:22:23,760 And they're always trying to add some fancy new method. 494 00:22:23,760 --> 00:22:25,600 Hopefully, you're guided by knowing, 495 00:22:25,600 --> 00:22:27,880 oh, if I can just get this to work, there's an idea. 496 00:22:27,880 --> 00:22:30,320 I think everyone would have wanted the answer to. 497 00:22:30,320 --> 00:22:33,440 But if we can just get this to work, 498 00:22:33,440 --> 00:22:36,200 it's just so frustrating. 499 00:22:36,200 --> 00:22:37,640 I appreciate that. 500 00:22:37,640 --> 00:22:39,520 Let's go back a little bit to science. 501 00:22:39,520 --> 00:22:46,000 I saw some images that you were showing of pancreatic cells, 502 00:22:46,000 --> 00:22:49,920 ensembles of cells, electrically coupled, 503 00:22:49,920 --> 00:22:52,520 communicating with each other. 504 00:22:52,520 --> 00:22:56,440 Going back to this embodied mind, embodied body, 505 00:22:56,440 --> 00:23:01,000 this holistic thought about the whole organism, 506 00:23:01,000 --> 00:23:03,800 is that a form of neural activity? 507 00:23:03,800 --> 00:23:05,120 How are you thinking about that? 508 00:23:05,120 --> 00:23:08,440 The word embodiment has a really cool history. 509 00:23:08,440 --> 00:23:10,160 It came on the scene in neuroscience 510 00:23:10,160 --> 00:23:15,400 in the early 1990s, when another fabulous book, The Embodied 511 00:23:15,400 --> 00:23:18,040 Mind, by Varela Thompson and Roche, 512 00:23:18,040 --> 00:23:21,000 a philosopher, a psychologist, and a biologist 513 00:23:21,000 --> 00:23:24,600 with very strong psychology and philosophical skills, Varela, 514 00:23:24,600 --> 00:23:25,760 wrote. 515 00:23:25,760 --> 00:23:27,120 And the idea of the embodied mind 516 00:23:27,120 --> 00:23:29,880 was we're not going to get the answer of behavior right, 517 00:23:29,880 --> 00:23:34,120 unless we think of all the ways in which our sense 518 00:23:34,120 --> 00:23:38,640 of our own self and our sense of behavior is situated. 519 00:23:38,640 --> 00:23:39,960 It's situated in the world. 520 00:23:39,960 --> 00:23:41,520 We're not going to understand who we are, 521 00:23:41,520 --> 00:23:44,160 except that we're defined a lot by our good conversations, 522 00:23:44,160 --> 00:23:46,360 which is why it's great to hang out with you 523 00:23:46,360 --> 00:23:48,400 and why we've been hanging out for decades. 524 00:23:48,400 --> 00:23:52,280 You know what it put me in mind of today is, here at Rochester, 525 00:23:52,280 --> 00:23:56,160 in medicine, this is the home of the biopsychosocial model 526 00:23:56,160 --> 00:23:56,800 of medicine. 527 00:23:56,800 --> 00:23:57,760 Yes. 528 00:23:57,760 --> 00:24:01,800 And it was a way to stop seeing human beings. 529 00:24:01,800 --> 00:24:03,920 So I'm not talking about neuroscience anymore, really, 530 00:24:03,920 --> 00:24:06,880 but stop seeing human beings as the disease 531 00:24:06,880 --> 00:24:08,500 that they walk through the door with them, 532 00:24:08,500 --> 00:24:10,300 but to see them as a holistic person that 533 00:24:10,300 --> 00:24:15,080 had a biology disease, but a psychology and a social setting. 534 00:24:15,080 --> 00:24:17,320 And that those three combined really 535 00:24:17,320 --> 00:24:20,680 defined the phenotype, the clinical presentation. 536 00:24:20,680 --> 00:24:23,040 And it was a game changer in medicine. 537 00:24:23,040 --> 00:24:25,480 And the biopsychosocial model has gone everywhere. 538 00:24:25,480 --> 00:24:27,520 But I was thinking about that today with you 539 00:24:27,520 --> 00:24:30,520 when you were talking about the brain as not this thing that's 540 00:24:30,520 --> 00:24:33,440 just sitting in there protected by the skull, 541 00:24:33,440 --> 00:24:37,640 but that it's part of a much more interactive system. 542 00:24:37,640 --> 00:24:38,520 I agree. 543 00:24:38,520 --> 00:24:44,160 And that is a fabulous point of reference for this. 544 00:24:44,160 --> 00:24:47,480 We really will not understand someone's illness 545 00:24:47,480 --> 00:24:49,840 or even how you're going to be able to approach it in a way 546 00:24:49,840 --> 00:24:51,480 that could reach them. 547 00:24:51,480 --> 00:24:53,720 I mean, the body is going to do the best work. 548 00:24:53,720 --> 00:24:56,080 So you have to get them behind it if you're going to. 549 00:24:56,080 --> 00:24:57,840 Your point's just fabulous. 550 00:24:57,840 --> 00:24:59,880 So the word embodied is often used 551 00:24:59,880 --> 00:25:01,240 for how we're situated that way. 552 00:25:01,240 --> 00:25:02,880 We're situated in the world. 553 00:25:02,880 --> 00:25:04,800 There's another notion of embodiment 554 00:25:04,800 --> 00:25:08,720 which is completely continuous with it, which is we 555 00:25:08,720 --> 00:25:11,480 like kings and queens. 556 00:25:11,480 --> 00:25:13,760 We really like to see things as top down. 557 00:25:13,760 --> 00:25:16,200 And we have this notion that we have a mind. 558 00:25:16,200 --> 00:25:18,920 And our mind lets us do stuff. 559 00:25:18,920 --> 00:25:19,920 I don't think it's wrong. 560 00:25:19,920 --> 00:25:20,880 It's a real feeling. 561 00:25:20,880 --> 00:25:21,400 I don't know. 562 00:25:21,400 --> 00:25:22,160 You feel that way, right? 563 00:25:22,160 --> 00:25:22,720 Yeah, sure. 564 00:25:22,720 --> 00:25:24,640 You don't feel like a distributed set of atoms 565 00:25:24,640 --> 00:25:26,240 that happen to be accidentally created 566 00:25:26,240 --> 00:25:30,000 by a violation of entropy. 567 00:25:30,000 --> 00:25:31,280 I like this shirt. 568 00:25:31,280 --> 00:25:32,200 And I like it. 569 00:25:32,200 --> 00:25:35,400 And I like to play Magic the Gathering with my son. 570 00:25:35,400 --> 00:25:38,040 He beats me, but I still like it. 571 00:25:38,040 --> 00:25:40,360 That feeling makes us feel as if there's 572 00:25:40,360 --> 00:25:44,280 like a leader in our head that's in charge of our thoughts. 573 00:25:44,280 --> 00:25:49,360 It's the most intuitive way we can think about things. 574 00:25:49,360 --> 00:25:53,320 And so it absolutely is. 575 00:25:53,320 --> 00:25:56,000 We think, and therefore we are. 576 00:25:56,000 --> 00:25:58,040 That view is not wrong. 577 00:25:58,040 --> 00:25:59,360 That's our phenomenology. 578 00:25:59,360 --> 00:26:01,400 That's our OK. 579 00:26:01,400 --> 00:26:04,080 I think partly because we love that view. 580 00:26:04,080 --> 00:26:05,640 And we love it for a good reason. 581 00:26:05,640 --> 00:26:06,560 It's our experience. 582 00:26:06,560 --> 00:26:09,120 There's every good reason to love it. 583 00:26:09,120 --> 00:26:10,400 Partly because we love that view. 584 00:26:10,400 --> 00:26:13,120 We love the idea that there's a super fancy kind of cell 585 00:26:13,120 --> 00:26:15,160 that humans must have more of. 586 00:26:15,160 --> 00:26:18,480 And it's that magic cell that does this magic computation. 587 00:26:18,480 --> 00:26:20,720 And it's like the battery in a Tesla, 588 00:26:20,720 --> 00:26:24,320 or it's like the secret sauce in our favorite super successful 589 00:26:24,320 --> 00:26:25,360 restaurant's meal. 590 00:26:25,360 --> 00:26:27,640 That's the thing that makes it different. 591 00:26:27,640 --> 00:26:30,480 That's not probably wrong at some level. 592 00:26:30,480 --> 00:26:32,240 But we really like the hierarchical idea. 593 00:26:32,240 --> 00:26:38,120 And I think that when we think of embodiment as you absolutely 594 00:26:38,120 --> 00:26:42,440 cannot make an airtight argument that the immune system isn't 595 00:26:42,440 --> 00:26:48,280 controlling your behavior as much as neurons are, 596 00:26:48,280 --> 00:26:52,160 it's a wonderful debate point to try and chase that down. 597 00:26:52,160 --> 00:26:54,040 Immune cells learn. 598 00:26:54,040 --> 00:26:56,240 Immune cells respond to the environment 599 00:26:56,240 --> 00:26:59,640 to work for your preservation to lead to adaptive behaviors. 600 00:26:59,640 --> 00:27:02,080 And through really complex memory. 601 00:27:02,080 --> 00:27:03,800 I mean, the immune system's amazing. 602 00:27:03,800 --> 00:27:05,120 You get chicken pox when you're 10. 603 00:27:05,120 --> 00:27:06,640 And you might, well, of course, we 604 00:27:06,640 --> 00:27:07,920 might get other diseases later. 605 00:27:07,920 --> 00:27:09,400 But for now, right? 606 00:27:09,400 --> 00:27:11,040 Yeah. 607 00:27:11,040 --> 00:27:13,840 And somehow it remembers it without getting the function. 608 00:27:13,840 --> 00:27:15,440 And you don't just remember one thing. 609 00:27:15,440 --> 00:27:17,640 You remember tens of thousands of diseases. 610 00:27:17,640 --> 00:27:18,360 Right, yeah. 611 00:27:18,360 --> 00:27:21,120 OK? 612 00:27:21,120 --> 00:27:23,440 Things that adaptively learn and change your behavior 613 00:27:23,440 --> 00:27:26,880 and have amazing resolution and information bit depth. 614 00:27:26,880 --> 00:27:29,000 That sounds like cognition. 615 00:27:29,000 --> 00:27:29,880 Fair enough. 616 00:27:29,880 --> 00:27:31,280 It's almost entirely continuous. 617 00:27:31,280 --> 00:27:33,280 They just don't have the levers to your motor system 618 00:27:33,280 --> 00:27:34,200 the way your neurons do. 619 00:27:34,200 --> 00:27:35,200 Well, OK. 620 00:27:35,200 --> 00:27:38,200 But here's a way to think about it. 621 00:27:38,200 --> 00:27:38,880 Let's do this. 622 00:27:38,880 --> 00:27:40,120 OK, let's do this together. 623 00:27:40,120 --> 00:27:44,560 We reach down to get our glass of water. 624 00:27:44,560 --> 00:27:46,880 Because we're forming a very fancy neuroscience 625 00:27:46,880 --> 00:27:49,600 perspective mug. 626 00:27:49,600 --> 00:27:51,760 So we have our neuroscience perspective mug. 627 00:27:51,760 --> 00:27:52,760 We reach down. 628 00:27:52,760 --> 00:27:55,120 Now, most of the time when I think about that, 629 00:27:55,120 --> 00:27:57,880 most of my colleagues who say they work on motor control 630 00:27:57,880 --> 00:28:00,400 or the act of doing that actually record 631 00:28:00,400 --> 00:28:01,920 from neurons in the brain. 632 00:28:01,920 --> 00:28:06,040 Now, did my muscles do the computation? 633 00:28:06,040 --> 00:28:07,960 Let's imagine we're going to say they didn't. 634 00:28:07,960 --> 00:28:08,840 That's OK. 635 00:28:08,840 --> 00:28:11,080 And we'll say the neurons did do it. 636 00:28:11,080 --> 00:28:13,960 So we think the interesting thing that makes us us 637 00:28:13,960 --> 00:28:15,160 was the motor neurons. 638 00:28:15,160 --> 00:28:18,200 And this was just implementational after that. 639 00:28:18,200 --> 00:28:20,560 Why can't we think of the neurons as just, 640 00:28:20,560 --> 00:28:22,280 that's a muscle. 641 00:28:22,280 --> 00:28:25,000 It's a relay from our immune system to moving stuff. 642 00:28:25,000 --> 00:28:26,560 Yeah, you need the neurons. 643 00:28:26,560 --> 00:28:27,600 They're nice. 644 00:28:27,600 --> 00:28:30,760 They do a transformation of the actual computation, 645 00:28:30,760 --> 00:28:33,320 which is occurring in the pancreas or the immune system 646 00:28:33,320 --> 00:28:34,960 or the vasculature. 647 00:28:34,960 --> 00:28:36,840 And there's a downstream necessary thing, 648 00:28:36,840 --> 00:28:39,280 which is it uses the neurons. 649 00:28:39,280 --> 00:28:41,920 It's nice to have them around. 650 00:28:41,920 --> 00:28:43,760 That isn't actually my view. 651 00:28:43,760 --> 00:28:45,680 I think it's a much more cooperative thing. 652 00:28:45,680 --> 00:28:48,760 But you see by analogy, we disregard all kinds of things 653 00:28:48,760 --> 00:28:50,320 are essential to a process. 654 00:28:50,320 --> 00:28:52,440 Because we view them as derivative 655 00:28:52,440 --> 00:28:54,000 or simply playing out the commands 656 00:28:54,000 --> 00:28:55,720 of another part of the process. 657 00:28:55,720 --> 00:28:59,320 Why can't the immune system be commanding the neurons 658 00:28:59,320 --> 00:29:00,920 in our brain the same way? 659 00:29:00,920 --> 00:29:02,840 I guess the point is the question actually 660 00:29:02,840 --> 00:29:04,520 hasn't been asked, technically. 661 00:29:04,520 --> 00:29:06,720 And the more we study it, the more we find. 662 00:29:06,720 --> 00:29:09,840 The more we find that our guts, our microbiome in our gut, 663 00:29:09,840 --> 00:29:13,840 does an amazing job of regulating our reward system, which 664 00:29:13,840 --> 00:29:16,120 in turn does an amazing job of regulating whether we stay up 665 00:29:16,120 --> 00:29:18,560 too late and play that extra game 666 00:29:18,560 --> 00:29:22,160 or make a choice about dessert that maybe we regret later. 667 00:29:22,160 --> 00:29:23,800 Or maybe we shouldn't regret it. 668 00:29:23,800 --> 00:29:25,960 And maybe when we have dinner tonight. 669 00:29:25,960 --> 00:29:26,560 Absolutely. 670 00:29:26,560 --> 00:29:27,560 Yeah. 671 00:29:27,560 --> 00:29:29,080 Let me ask you a little bit. 672 00:29:29,080 --> 00:29:32,280 Let's go back to the youngster that was Chris Moore, 673 00:29:32,280 --> 00:29:35,360 short pants, heading off to school. 674 00:29:35,360 --> 00:29:37,440 Was it all was going to be science? 675 00:29:37,440 --> 00:29:40,120 I have it on good authority that at one point 676 00:29:40,120 --> 00:29:42,320 you started writing in ABCs of the brain or something 677 00:29:42,320 --> 00:29:44,320 when you were a kid. 678 00:29:44,320 --> 00:29:45,680 Wow, this is dangerous. 679 00:29:45,680 --> 00:29:47,600 Background intel. 680 00:29:47,600 --> 00:29:49,360 We have very good researchers here. 681 00:29:49,360 --> 00:29:50,360 Let me ask you a question. 682 00:29:50,360 --> 00:29:52,360 I want to ask you a question too, because again, 683 00:29:52,360 --> 00:30:00,160 I think we have such a set of parallelisms in lots of ways. 684 00:30:00,160 --> 00:30:01,960 Do you think of yourself as a scientist? 685 00:30:04,640 --> 00:30:05,720 That's a good question. 686 00:30:05,720 --> 00:30:08,280 Boy. 687 00:30:08,280 --> 00:30:09,680 In part. 688 00:30:09,680 --> 00:30:10,160 A little. 689 00:30:10,160 --> 00:30:10,960 Yeah. 690 00:30:10,960 --> 00:30:11,800 I do. 691 00:30:11,800 --> 00:30:14,120 I guess the answer is yes. 692 00:30:14,120 --> 00:30:15,920 I think I do too. 693 00:30:15,920 --> 00:30:17,600 I, of course, think of you as one. 694 00:30:17,600 --> 00:30:19,040 And I think of myself as one. 695 00:30:19,040 --> 00:30:20,600 I certainly think of you as one. 696 00:30:20,600 --> 00:30:24,240 I'm certainly happy to have that as our job name, 697 00:30:24,240 --> 00:30:27,120 like fire person or police person, 698 00:30:27,120 --> 00:30:31,120 or we could even be less non-gendered about that. 699 00:30:31,120 --> 00:30:32,040 I don't know though. 700 00:30:32,040 --> 00:30:34,240 Don't you feel like you're a person trying to figure out 701 00:30:34,240 --> 00:30:36,760 stuff in a way that will actually help people the most? 702 00:30:36,760 --> 00:30:37,760 Yeah, for sure. 703 00:30:37,760 --> 00:30:40,640 Science is an amazing vehicle, and you're trained in it. 704 00:30:43,520 --> 00:30:46,800 So I guess I'm not trying to be overly dramatic about this. 705 00:30:46,800 --> 00:30:47,400 No, that's OK. 706 00:30:47,400 --> 00:30:50,560 No, but these things keep us both up 707 00:30:50,560 --> 00:30:51,720 at night. 708 00:30:51,720 --> 00:30:52,360 So it was that. 709 00:30:52,360 --> 00:30:53,640 It's the driving force. 710 00:30:53,640 --> 00:30:55,760 It may not have been that I want to be a scientist, 711 00:30:55,760 --> 00:30:58,000 but I want to answer questions that matter to people. 712 00:30:58,000 --> 00:30:59,000 And that came early. 713 00:30:59,000 --> 00:31:01,680 Yes, and absolutely. 714 00:31:01,680 --> 00:31:04,400 Let me ask you another question too. 715 00:31:04,400 --> 00:31:06,480 This is not how it's supposed to work, but it's OK. 716 00:31:06,480 --> 00:31:07,160 No, no, no. 717 00:31:07,160 --> 00:31:10,080 But I'm partly doing it to stall so I 718 00:31:10,080 --> 00:31:13,840 can make sure I've got my answer well posed before. 719 00:31:13,840 --> 00:31:22,800 But when did you become an addict of discovering stuff? 720 00:31:22,800 --> 00:31:23,440 Oh, it's good. 721 00:31:23,440 --> 00:31:23,960 Yeah. 722 00:31:23,960 --> 00:31:25,800 Well, see, I had a very different trajectory 723 00:31:25,800 --> 00:31:28,120 into science, so I started very late. 724 00:31:28,120 --> 00:31:30,560 Actually, my undergraduate was in English and history 725 00:31:30,560 --> 00:31:31,120 and literature. 726 00:31:31,120 --> 00:31:34,000 And I came over here to the States. 727 00:31:34,000 --> 00:31:35,960 I started science after I came to the States, 728 00:31:35,960 --> 00:31:37,800 and I had a previous career for a little while 729 00:31:37,800 --> 00:31:39,000 as a track and field person. 730 00:31:39,000 --> 00:31:40,120 So it came late. 731 00:31:40,120 --> 00:31:46,880 But funnily enough, I think the way of thinking was almost there. 732 00:31:46,880 --> 00:31:48,000 That was there. 733 00:31:48,000 --> 00:31:52,080 And I had one of those things where I loved science courses 734 00:31:52,080 --> 00:31:54,040 in school, but I had all the teachers telling me, 735 00:31:54,040 --> 00:31:55,560 well, you really should go into the humanities. 736 00:31:55,560 --> 00:31:55,920 You're better. 737 00:31:55,920 --> 00:31:57,240 You're a good writer, and so on. 738 00:31:57,240 --> 00:32:00,200 So I ended up sort of, it was a circuitous route back to it 739 00:32:00,200 --> 00:32:01,200 for me. 740 00:32:01,200 --> 00:32:04,080 But I'm with you on the mode of thought. 741 00:32:04,080 --> 00:32:06,840 I was always super inquisitive, and I really 742 00:32:06,840 --> 00:32:11,320 did not like people giving me pat answers to things 743 00:32:11,320 --> 00:32:13,680 where they couldn't explain why. 744 00:32:13,680 --> 00:32:18,680 So I was that kid who kept saying why way past the due date. 745 00:32:18,680 --> 00:32:20,680 That was fabulous, actually. 746 00:32:20,680 --> 00:32:26,000 So to the question of are we scientists, of course. 747 00:32:26,000 --> 00:32:29,720 And I'm super comfortable with that definition, certainly 748 00:32:29,720 --> 00:32:33,760 professionally, 100%. 749 00:32:33,760 --> 00:32:35,960 But I do think, I don't know. 750 00:32:35,960 --> 00:32:37,440 I feel like a person who's blessed 751 00:32:37,440 --> 00:32:41,000 to work in a field where my addiction can be satisfied. 752 00:32:41,000 --> 00:32:47,640 Every day, it's so exciting when you learn something new. 753 00:32:47,640 --> 00:32:49,680 And to think that you can turn that 754 00:32:49,680 --> 00:32:53,920 into operational knowledge that might somehow 755 00:32:53,920 --> 00:32:55,600 help the world go forward. 756 00:32:55,600 --> 00:32:57,360 You studied philosophy. 757 00:32:57,360 --> 00:32:59,720 There's this idea of positivism that's 758 00:32:59,720 --> 00:33:01,520 learning more and knowing more about the world 759 00:33:01,520 --> 00:33:03,680 will help the world. 760 00:33:03,680 --> 00:33:08,560 Widely debated with Oppenheimer, the movie having recently 761 00:33:08,560 --> 00:33:10,360 come out that we learn more and that we learned 762 00:33:10,360 --> 00:33:12,160 how to make nuclear bombs. 763 00:33:12,160 --> 00:33:15,040 I will admit it, I'm a positivist. 764 00:33:15,040 --> 00:33:17,760 I actually think that openness and communication 765 00:33:17,760 --> 00:33:20,360 and the search for more knowledge 766 00:33:20,360 --> 00:33:23,360 is the way to get past all the crappy things we do as humans. 767 00:33:23,360 --> 00:33:24,240 I totally agree. 768 00:33:24,240 --> 00:33:25,400 I could not agree more. 769 00:33:25,400 --> 00:33:28,560 And given that belief, then it's easy for me 770 00:33:28,560 --> 00:33:35,360 to feel like it's deep to want to learn stuff if you 771 00:33:35,360 --> 00:33:36,960 buy into that view. 772 00:33:36,960 --> 00:33:39,600 Because it is a path to helping people. 773 00:33:39,600 --> 00:33:42,720 It's really fantastic. 774 00:33:42,720 --> 00:33:46,200 If it hadn't been science, if the big job fair 775 00:33:46,200 --> 00:33:49,040 in the sky came out and said, I'm sorry, Chris, it's out. 776 00:33:49,040 --> 00:33:49,840 You can't be. 777 00:33:49,840 --> 00:33:50,960 Would you have done something else? 778 00:33:50,960 --> 00:33:53,080 Is there something else that's sort of burning there? 779 00:33:53,080 --> 00:33:55,600 That's a great question. 780 00:33:55,600 --> 00:33:58,080 I want to be really clear about something, too. 781 00:33:58,080 --> 00:34:01,560 I honestly think I became a scientist just out of curiosity. 782 00:34:01,560 --> 00:34:05,920 I was so much a fan of discovery, 783 00:34:05,920 --> 00:34:08,480 of people discovering things that could change the way 784 00:34:08,480 --> 00:34:10,480 we think about how they work. 785 00:34:10,480 --> 00:34:13,120 And science was one really exciting. 786 00:34:13,120 --> 00:34:15,400 I was also a philosophy major. 787 00:34:15,400 --> 00:34:16,440 I was very gratified. 788 00:34:16,440 --> 00:34:18,160 We mentioned Rick Rubin earlier. 789 00:34:18,160 --> 00:34:21,120 I was gratified to learn that until he switched to his 790 00:34:21,120 --> 00:34:22,840 something like television media major, 791 00:34:22,840 --> 00:34:24,960 he was a philosophy major. 792 00:34:24,960 --> 00:34:28,920 As was, I just learned Phil Jackson, the bull's coach. 793 00:34:28,920 --> 00:34:30,880 And I think I probably was for the same reason 794 00:34:30,880 --> 00:34:34,440 you were interested in the topic, the more broader 795 00:34:34,440 --> 00:34:36,640 thinking topics of humanities. 796 00:34:36,640 --> 00:34:40,160 It's the question of why things are. 797 00:34:40,160 --> 00:34:43,000 It just at its basic level is fascinating. 798 00:34:43,000 --> 00:34:46,280 And it's so satisfying if you get even the tiniest bit 799 00:34:46,280 --> 00:34:48,240 of something you think that's interesting in that. 800 00:34:48,240 --> 00:34:49,880 You hear a cell, like you're recording 801 00:34:49,880 --> 00:34:51,160 from cells in the brain. 802 00:34:51,160 --> 00:34:53,440 Yeah. 803 00:34:53,440 --> 00:34:56,520 Listening to a cell is mind boggling. 804 00:34:56,520 --> 00:34:59,080 It's one of those things that does not get old. 805 00:34:59,080 --> 00:35:01,120 Well, Chris Moore, you are an original thinker. 806 00:35:01,120 --> 00:35:03,520 I imagine that the students at Brown 807 00:35:03,520 --> 00:35:06,040 get a great kick out of you and your lectures 808 00:35:06,040 --> 00:35:08,040 and all the students that are associated with you. 809 00:35:08,040 --> 00:35:09,720 It's been an absolute pleasure having you here. 810 00:35:09,720 --> 00:35:11,560 It's been a pleasure knowing you over the years. 811 00:35:11,560 --> 00:35:13,080 Absolutely my pleasure. 812 00:35:13,080 --> 00:35:14,760 Great conversations ahead. 813 00:35:14,760 --> 00:35:15,840 Yeah, absolutely. 814 00:35:15,840 --> 00:35:16,600 Thanks a lot, John. 815 00:35:16,600 --> 00:35:17,120 Thank you. 816 00:35:17,120 --> 00:35:17,960 This is a lot of fun. 817 00:35:17,960 --> 00:35:23,640 Are you excited we're starting to start steel industry 818 00:35:23,640 --> 00:35:26,120 and,이었 Gerald? 819 00:35:27,120 --> 00:35:28,160 Yep. 820 00:35:28,160 --> 00:35:29,160 Good to hear you. 821 00:35:29,160 --> 00:35:32,080 Very. 822 00:35:34,480 --> 00:35:37,840 Um, so very excited to have you here guys is 823 00:35:37,840 --> 00:35:44,440 it's a lower than it seems it has been since