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Episode 10: Augmenting the Brain
10 Plays5 years ago
We discuss the article:
Augmentation of Brain Function: Facts, Fiction, and Controversy
...a collection that explores recent research and opinion on ways of enhancing brain functioning, from classroom learning to the use of electrical and laser stimulation on the brain.
Recommended
Transcript
Introduction & Support
00:00:06
Speaker
This is Cognition, the podcast about cognitive psychology, neuroscience, philosophy, technology, the future of the human experience and other stuff we like. It's hosted by me, Joe Hardy. And by me, Rolf Nelson. Welcome to the show. Before we start today, I just wanted to say a little bit about support for the show.
00:00:30
Speaker
If you like what you're hearing, then just give us a good rating on iTunes or whatever service it is that you're listening on. We don't have any sponsors yet. If you like it, we would be happy to get positive reviews on your service. You can also follow us on Twitter. My Twitter is jlhardyphd. You can also follow the show at nationcog.
00:00:55
Speaker
as well as on Facebook, but Twitter is a little easier to follow us. If you're interested in participating on the show, if you're a neuroscientist or a cognitive psychologist or just have thoughts and opinions about it, reach out to us. A topic that you'd like to hear about, certainly. I would give you my Twitter address, but I am totally never on Twitter, so I don't even know what my Twitter account is. I think I checked it twice. You can send me a telegram about it.
00:01:24
Speaker
All right, so the paper for
Editorial on Brain Augmentation
00:01:27
Speaker
today. It's technically an editorial in a journal called frontiers and systems neuroscience and it is called augmentation of brain function facts fiction and controversy.
00:01:40
Speaker
This is an article by Mikhail Lebedev, Ione Opress, and Manuel Casanova. It essentially distills down a whole bunch of articles that appeared in the journal. It's a total of 148 articles that are on different aspects of brain augmentation, over 600 authors that contributed in some way to this, and a lot of stuff that's really on the cutting edge of research in brain augmentation.
00:02:09
Speaker
So this includes original research and some opinion pieces, ethics of brain augmentation, and from all different kinds of perspectives. Some of this may sound familiar from some of our previous episodes, but this also may give a broader perspective on a little more research in the area and what kinds of new things are on the radar for the future. They break it down into three volumes.
Categories of Brain Augmentation
00:02:35
Speaker
The first volume is brain-machine interfaces.
00:02:38
Speaker
The second volume is neurostimulation and pharmacological approaches. And then the third one is from clinical applications to ethical issues and futuristic ideas. They sort of see those as being like the three broad categories that they can group this brain augmentation series into, into those three big buckets.
00:03:04
Speaker
So we can kind of tackle these just in order, I guess.
Brain-Machine Interfaces
00:03:08
Speaker
So the first one is brain-machine interfaces. And we've talked a little bit about those. On our show with Adrian Nestor, we talked about neural decoding and getting information from the brain. And he was looking at reconstructing the kinds of perceptions that you'd be having. If you haven't listened to that episode, it's a great discussion of this kind of stuff by someone with his boots on the ground that's actually doing this kind of research.
00:03:33
Speaker
Episode five, I believe. Episode five. I literally dozens of downloads. Dozens. Yeah. So the some of the topics that they covered in brain machine interfaces here are interesting developments in brand machine interfaces for controlling bipedal walking. You know, if you think about what would be the canonical application of a brain machine interface,
00:04:03
Speaker
that would be useful to people that you could imagine working in the relatively near future. It would have to be that one. You have someone who's paralyzed from the waist down and you've basically given them legs.
00:04:20
Speaker
or maybe in this case, I don't know if they're paralyzed from the waist down, maybe somehow their legs are missing from the thigh down or something along these lines, and now you can augment their experience of the world by giving them robot legs, essentially, that they can control with their brain. Yeah, and this is obviously exciting and has a direct usefulness that you can see in it. No, for sure. I think of all of the things that you
00:04:49
Speaker
can look at, I mean, I think a lot of the brain machine interface technologies that are out there, whether they be invasive or non invasive, they really, it's a big distinction if you're trying to go after cortical outputs, versus if you're trying to go for more peripheral outputs. And I think it's a question mark, I guess it was whether we're going to define peripheral
00:05:14
Speaker
outputs as being brain machine interfaces or not, but I think some people would. So, I mean, for example, you can imagine having robot legs that were controlled where the inputs for the machine were outputs that were recorded from neurons in the periphery.
Robotic Assistance Technologies
00:05:35
Speaker
So, for example, neurons
00:05:37
Speaker
that were in the upper leg, for example. That would be like one type of interface, versus if you were trying to control it from recordings from the cortex, for example, that would be a very different output or recordings from the spinal cord or spinal neurons. All of those would be very different kinds of experiences. Yeah. And I think there's a range of the kinds of recordings that they're doing.
00:06:06
Speaker
I mean, this also depends a little bit on the kind of robotic technology that you're connected to. So, in one of these, there's a description of robot assisted exoskeletons, right? So the exciting version of this is Iron Man. This would be like an early form of Iron Man. I mean, that'd be useful for anyone with damage to their outer limbs or
00:06:33
Speaker
I guess for remote control robots too, right? Eventually. That's right. Yeah, exactly. Avatar type stuff. Yeah, I was just watching. This is not mentioned in this article, but I was just watching a video from a company called Control Labs, which is based out in New York, and they have a peripheral neural interface where basically they're measuring from the wrist, actually, in this case, and they're basically trying to argue that they can
00:07:03
Speaker
measure the neural responses in the wrist. So this is with like an electrode on the outside of the wrist? That's right. Exactly. Like a wristband. And you can just think about typing, for example, and basically essentially control a computer. That is rad. How well does it work? I mean, in the video, it was pretty compelling for sure.
00:07:33
Speaker
You could definitely see, well, for sure, what worked super well is if the CEO was showing a video of himself typing without a keyboard. The electrodes were recording from the neurons in the wrist. OK, so he's actually moving the fingers in the same way that you'd move if you were typing. That's right. It's getting some kind of potential off of
00:08:00
Speaker
off of the muscles moving and the signals to move muscles. That's right. Now, the interesting thing here is that, you know, you can, there's always the question of how much of the signal that you're recording is actually neural signal versus signals from the muscles themselves.
Challenges in Neural Interfaces
00:08:20
Speaker
And that was my question when I was watching the video. I was like, I wonder how much of this is signals coming just from the neurons themselves versus from the muscles.
00:08:29
Speaker
And why is that important? Well, it has some consequences as to the kinds of control that you can have. If you have to literally move your fingers exactly the same way that you would move your fingers when you were typing, then there's really not, I mean, it's not that much of an advantage.
00:08:46
Speaker
Right. I mean, maybe you don't have a typewriter there. Yeah. Especially, especially for the lazy person who just wants to think and have things typed out. Right. That's right. But that's right. You still have to move then. Right. If you actually have to move your muscles. What a pain that is. What a pain. What a pain. Yeah. The whole point of brain machine interfaces, it should it should require less work. Exactly. Exactly. Or if you don't if you don't have the ability to move, for example, for whatever reason. Yeah. And then the other
00:09:15
Speaker
demonstration was they were arguing that they could show these control movements without any muscle movement. But I was, you know, if you look carefully, even in the video, you can see that while they're nominally thinking about making these movements and not actually doing them. So, for example, when tried, if you ball up your fist and then try to extend your hand, but you hold your hand, your fist in the other hand, they could basically show
00:09:46
Speaker
a representation of a hand opening. So you could actually essentially use the signal of a hand opening at that point. And they were arguing that they could have these control systems where they were essentially recreating the movements of the hand or arm when the hand or arm was not moving. But you could see that they were making these little micro movements.
00:10:14
Speaker
Yeah, and it wasn't just thinking about it. We know that electrical signals from muscles moving can give a much stronger signal than neural signals. Yeah, and in these public presentations, they don't mention that at all, which I think is interesting. Yeah. Well, this is like a lot of the EEG stuff.
00:10:43
Speaker
The versions of the sort of toy EEG things like... NeuroSky. NeuroSky, exactly. They make the force one, the Star Wars version, where you're using your attention to raise something up. And it seems pretty clear that most of the signal that you're getting that's moving it is just tensing up in your forehead. Right. Exactly. Rather than some kind of neural synchrony or a genuine neural signal.
00:11:14
Speaker
And it's much easier to do too. And, you know, if you're trying to make something, if you're trying to raise, uh, you know, uh, an X wing up, you're going to kind of squinch your forehead a little bit anyway. Right. So yeah, I mean that, but it is never the, nevertheless, the case that certainly, you know, for people who have amputations, for example, you're taking advantage of those more peripheral neurons could be really powerful.
00:11:44
Speaker
Yeah, I guess one of the issues might be if you've got a large, you know, if your whole leg is missing, it would be hard to take signals from that and get sort of a detailed signal that would move around your entire leg in all different ways and say move your toes and everything that's extended out there. It might give you a gross movement like, you know, a small signal that could
00:12:10
Speaker
move you forward or backward or something like that, but it'd be difficult to get a good representation of everything that's missing. I wonder.
Invasive vs Non-Invasive Interfaces
00:12:18
Speaker
Yeah. I don't know. I don't know how hard it is to get that. You would probably have to be a, you would have to learn and remap. Certainly it wouldn't be like the natural thing. And of course, feedback has to be part of that. Somehow you need to get a feedback signal. So that's where having the robot move itself actually is a way to develop that feedback. So it's like a loop.
00:12:39
Speaker
But in the, you know, I guess in the meantime, you could develop feedback that was more, you know, maybe just some sort of visual representation, you know, using a kind of virtual reality or something like that. Yeah. That might be an interesting approach. Well, I was just, you know, talking about the idea that there's the peripheral versus more central types of
00:13:02
Speaker
devices. So if you have devices that are measuring from the brain itself, a lot of these brain computer interfaces are more the EEG type devices, as we mentioned, and EEG has its own challenges. And then you can have the more implantable type devices, which have a different set of challenges, obviously, because now you have to worry about the integrity of the tissues.
00:13:28
Speaker
But you're much closer to the signal. So there's potential opportunities as we discuss. And I think was that was one of our earlier episodes. We discussed this in some depth talking about the you know, you can have these electrode arrays that you lay over the cortex and you can get a level of granularity and definition that you can't get or is difficult to get from EEG electroencephalography where the electrodes are on the outside of the skull.
00:13:57
Speaker
Yeah, exactly. And I mean, one of the things that I guess people wouldn't necessarily think of is that because the cortex itself is all folded up, you get kind of a mixing up of signals. So it's hard to locate exactly where a signal is coming from. The brain's just kind of squished in your head. And if you have something that's actually on the surface of it, you can get a better idea of where the signal is coming from. It doesn't get mushed up and averaged, does it?
00:14:28
Speaker
as it goes through the skull. Exactly. And the way they describe that here in the editorial, they say, while EEG-based BMI's brain machine interfaces are easy to implement and safe to use, their information transfer rate is limited. So information transfer rate can be improved if the electrical activity is recorded from the surface of the brain using electro-corticography, okay, E-C-O-G.
00:14:57
Speaker
a minimally invasive method. I mean, the minimal is like a little bit in the eye of the beholder there. Well, it is on the surface of the brain. So there you have to be somewhat invasive to, you know, take off your take off part of your skull and put it there. So for sure, for sure. I'm not I'm not signing up for that one yet. Not yet. Give it a couple of months, not a casual usage one. No, no, no. Well, maybe we can. Oh, you had another point you want to make there.
00:15:28
Speaker
I think some of this is in the. In summit when we talk about some of the actual articles to will get to some of the most interesting stuff. That's right. We're going to dive into the top 10 most interesting articles from this from this topic. Yeah, and we can make our own top 10 too. I think they give the. Well, we'll hold on. We'll hold off for that for a minute. So the other the second category that that is talked about is neuro stimulation and pharmacological approaches.
Neurostimulation & Pharmacology
00:15:58
Speaker
And neurostimulation, first of all, you can do brain writing, you could potentially communicate something to the brain, but there's also another set of neurostimulation technologies that have been used in recent years that people suggest have some beneficial effects on brains. Right, exactly. So if you think about augmentation coming from very different perspectives, so in this volume one,
00:16:27
Speaker
brain-machine interface, augmentation is you have some peripheral device that you're essentially trying to hook the brain into. So you're trying to basically control using neural signals in a less direct way. Well, whether it's more or less direct way. I mean, it's a different kind of interface than using your hands or your
00:16:52
Speaker
mouth or any other sort of modality that you naturally have trying to augment the brain by adding a peripheral device to it, hooking it up. And the most commonly used device today that you'd see in psychology labs and also for therapeutic uses is TMS or transcranial magnetic stimulation, which is a way of directing a magnetic pulse into an area of the brain
00:17:21
Speaker
that can have essentially two effects. It has both effects at the same time. It can cause stimulation of an area or excitement in neurons of an area, and then afterwards it sort of wears that area out, and then you see a reduction in activity there. So what TMS is often used for in research is figuring out what an area of the brain does by essentially deactivating it or scrambling it for a little while. But there are other sort of
00:17:50
Speaker
promising things for TMS2 in terms of therapy, TMS seems to be something that can be helpful with depression. That's right. So in this volume two style augmentation, now you're trying to act on the brain directly through either some sort of electrical stimulation or some pharmacological stimulation. And that stimulation can be either
00:18:20
Speaker
excitatory or inhibitory or some complex combination of the two. So there are several questions that come up in this space around whether you're talking about TMS, transcranial magnetic stimulation, or TDCS, transcranial direct current stimulation.
00:18:40
Speaker
And that's the kind of stimulation that's essentially hooking a nine volt battery up to your brain. That's right. Exactly. So just basically putting that electricity right into your brain. And as you can imagine, activating neurons because they're responsive to electricity. It's an interesting area, but
00:19:06
Speaker
We don't know exactly what the future of transcranial direct current stimulation is going to be. It seems like there's a lot of promise with
00:19:13
Speaker
some recent articles. But the one thing that it kind of makes me think of is in Minneapolis, there used to be a museum called the Museum of Questionable Medical Devices. Okay. Where they had stuff like phrenology machines and there was a lot of stuff that was, you know, electricity is, you know, it's a cure-all for everything. So, you know, electrical belts and electrical zappers of all kinds. And this, in a way,
00:19:43
Speaker
kind of feels like that. It's like electricity is exciting and interesting and a bit like the fakiness of wearing magnets to help out, right? That's right. Well, we know that it has some beneficial effects. Well, I don't know whether it has beneficial effects or not. There are certainly some effects. Exactly. There are definitely effects. The brain is
00:20:13
Speaker
responsive to electricity. And if you apply electricity to the brain, it will have an impact if you apply enough of it in the right places. And then there's the question of what is that effect? Is it something that you want or not? And under what conditions? Yeah, should you just always be exposed to more electricity? Is that just going to help you think in general?
00:20:36
Speaker
That seems unlikely, but yeah, I think there's there's situations where the stimulation of certain parts of the brain.
00:20:46
Speaker
have benefits. And I think one of these areas where this comes up is in Parkinson's disease, like very advanced Parkinson's disease where you have someone with a movement disorder and applying some stimulation to the, this is now like an invasive technique, but implantable electrodes that can apply some stimulation to parts of the brain that are involved in movement that are impaired in Parkinson's disease.
00:21:12
Speaker
can have some beneficial effects, for example. Yeah, unquestionably, I think implanted devices like that have been useful. I guess the association that I have is just YouTubers that make a transcranial direct current device out of, you know, 9 volt battery and some home electronics and then just pop it on top of their head and see how it affects their memory.
00:21:39
Speaker
Right, exactly. But I think it's more than that. I'm just kind of making fun a little bit. I know that there are ideas about mechanisms of how this is actually helping. Yeah, I think it's similar to pharmacological augmentations. So for example, I was thinking about reading this, the application with Ritalin as a study drug, for example. People sometimes will use Ritalin as a
00:22:08
Speaker
way to help them focus better. And it definitely works for some people. So, you know, it definitely helps people focus on their studies and maybe study longer into the night or what have you. And similarly, you know, you could imagine there might be a mechanism electrical stimulation mechanism that would have a similar impact. You know, I don't know that that's been as clearly established, but you could imagine it.
00:22:32
Speaker
But then the question starts to become with those types of applications is at what cost or is there somehow a negative downside in what balance?
Ethical Considerations in Augmentation
00:22:43
Speaker
What's the balance point there? Right. And that's where they start talking about some of the ethical implications or what have you. But there starts to be like a question is, is there such a thing as a free lunch here? Yeah. And I think that's where it gets interesting because people have talked about
00:22:58
Speaker
drugs that may augment memory and cognition for a long time. And there have been a whole bunch of different times at which it seemed like we were just right on the verge of discovering something that would work in humans, maybe something that had an effect on rats and was going to work in humans so that we'd have essentially almost perfect memory for things. That never seems to pan out perfectly.
00:23:21
Speaker
A lot of the kinds of drugs that are talked about, they call them nootropics, are ones that essentially just seem to increase your attention, like Ritalin or Adderall or something like that, and aren't as specific in targeting as you might think. There isn't a drug that can just specifically increase your IQ, which is what people would love to have.
00:23:45
Speaker
Yeah, I think the issue of trade-offs is a good one because our mind is a pretty carefully calibrated machine. We have mechanisms for remembering the important stuff and forgetting the unimportant stuff, and meddling around too much with one can potentially have a debilitating effect on who knows exactly what in your mind. I mean, it's a pretty balanced system.
00:24:08
Speaker
Yeah, the study of the side effects is something that needs to be thought about pretty carefully in all these cases when we're talking about any kind of stimulation or pharmacological approach. We're talking sometimes here about non-invasive stimulation where the stimulation is essentially coming from the outside where you're putting something on the skull. But the point that one of the authors here makes is that maybe that's not right to call that non-invasive because you're injecting
00:24:38
Speaker
electricity into the brain, for example. In the case of a pharmacological approach, you're putting chemicals directly into the brain and the consequences of that need to be considered when you're doing these, when you're applying these techniques. And probably what's going to happen is you're going to find that they're
00:25:04
Speaker
Probably is not a free lunch. I mean, that's just interesting that in life that is just seems to be not the case Most frequently, right? I mean you think about it you wake up every day There's no drug that everyone just takes every day to just perform Generally better. Well, maybe that's not true. Maybe caffeine maybe caffeine. Yeah, maybe caffeine but I mean you would argue there that you know, there's of course addictive and
00:25:30
Speaker
Yeah, it's not necessarily optimal to drink as much coffee as I drink anyway. Right, right, exactly. But even for the body, I mean, we don't take specific, you know, even just other parts of the body, we don't take specific drugs every day just to be generally better. Yeah, which is yeah. And there's also I mean, I think
00:25:50
Speaker
You know, recent evidence on taking vitamins every day suggests that it may not be as beneficial as people have thought it to be, that taking vitamins every single day is going to be something that everybody should do, but it's not always the case. And I think there's also a good discrimination that you make between, you know, when you're talking about brain stimulation for Parkinson's disease, that's not, it's not playing around with the
00:26:14
Speaker
with the balance of the normal healthy brain, that's remedial. It's an effect that you're using to sort of bring things back into balance. I think that would be different than what a lot of people want, which is an augmentation of what they already have. Yeah, exactly, exactly. And I think, again, it depends on where you're coming from to start with. Parkinson's is a great example.
00:26:37
Speaker
you know, in a situation when you're going through this procedure, we're already quite impaired. So the trade off is very different for you than someone who's coming at it from a healthy perspective. Similarly, you know, the trade offs, I mean, I think about this from the context of say, for example, steroids. So if people take, for example, human growth hormone to be a much better baseball player, well, that's cheating. So you know, that's, that's bad from that perspective. But
00:27:03
Speaker
You know, maybe from like an economic perspective, it makes sense, right, to take this human growth hormone that is going to hurt your body in the long run in different ways and potentially cause diseases. But you maybe make tens of millions of dollars. It may make sense or individual incentive for it anyway. Exactly, exactly. Or, you know, someone, you know, there are lots of real medical applications for human growth hormone where someone's coming from a different perspective of not being just someone who's just normally developing.
00:27:33
Speaker
And maybe extremely beneficial for that person. So it depends on where you're coming from. But it's not the case that this is the kind of thing that you just want to take as an average person just to be bigger. That's probably not like a good trade off for most people. And I think in terms of
00:27:49
Speaker
Cognitive augmentation, I think some people have a natural discomfort with the idea of it, even if it isn't based on upsetting the normal brain or thinking that there might be some trade-off. I think some people are uncomfortable with the idea, maybe especially in, say, college, where if I do better, then maybe other people are doing worse. People can be uncomfortable with the idea of a drug that would just enhance
00:28:15
Speaker
and make you smarter and perform better just because it feels unnatural, I guess, to people. I don't have that discomfort. I would happily take a smart pill if there was one that had no side effects and just made me smarter because of it. I think one of the things to consider in that case is what would it be like to be smarter? In other words, what would be the kind of improvement that you would see that would convince you that, hey, I want to take this pill
00:28:45
Speaker
because I feel like I'm better and there's not a negative trade-off. So let's just take for example, let's say there's no physical side effect, there's no liver damage, there's no kidney damage, et cetera, and it's just a change in your mental profile, your cognitive performance profile. I guess I would just feel that whatever it is that you,
00:29:08
Speaker
Whatever it is that you want, whatever motivations you have, whether it's personal gain or something for the greater good, you would have a higher capacity to make a change. By extension, if the human race was smarter, I had a better ability to concentrate and think that
00:29:28
Speaker
Overall conditions would be better in the world. Maybe that's maybe that's optimistic or maybe that's well, you know, I think it comes interfaces with values at that point. Yeah, there's a family. There's certainly a there's certainly a moral component and an ethical component and what you consider important for quality of life.
00:29:47
Speaker
Yeah, I mean, because again, to the point of I think what's often conflated of cognitive cognitive augmentation or improved intelligence that you're necessarily going to be a better person. And I don't think that follows. I don't think it follows that a smarter person is a better person. I think they're different axes. I think that you can have an highly intelligent, extremely devious and nasty person and you can have
00:30:14
Speaker
a relatively less intelligent person who's nevertheless very good. Yeah, but you personally, whatever you feel about your, everybody thinks that they themselves are good, or their values that they aim for are good, and if they had a little more power to implement them, they should want them. You may not want it for the rest of the world, but is that something you would, would you take a smart pill if you could?
00:30:39
Speaker
Again, it depends on what it does. I think this brings up another issue here, which is that sometimes what you want to do through neurostimulation is actually knock something out rather than add something in. For example, the case of memories. If you just think about it, yeah, sure. If I could remember people's names, that would be amazing because I am horrible.
00:31:06
Speaker
Horrible, but it would just be make my life it would make my life and the lives of the people who I interact with better Right remember their fucking names. You have less guilt about you have less guilt about Interacting with someone if you can't remember their name or something. Yeah, yeah, no, absolutely and it would be and people like to hear their names I want to say their names because I like you know want to connect with them Yeah, so it'd be so much better if I could remember their names. Yes, so that no, but it's hard to imagine a person
00:31:35
Speaker
hill that would just improve name recognition and not have others, right? Yeah, yeah. It's something I want to forget. I think the reality of these things is always much different than the idealization of it. So it is true that every time we talk about the far future stuff, you can get into interesting ethical debates that are probably different from any sort of reality that's actually going to happen.
00:32:04
Speaker
And I think the reality right now is that there isn't much in the way of smart pills that's any different from 10, 20 years ago. And you can't have that ideal, only the ideal stuff that you want and nothing else that comes along with that. Right. Yeah, exactly. And I think it's complicated too. One of the really interesting applications of a TMS and maybe a TDCS as well is to actually
00:32:32
Speaker
you know, say, for example, helping someone with depression might be not necessarily as much, you know, maybe it's partly actually just an activation component. So like, actually stimulation, but part of it could actually be knocking out obsessive thoughts. Yes. Yeah, that's how I think about how TMS works. Yeah, right. Yeah. So you could actually interrupt an ongoing thought process. And that in itself has benefit.
00:33:02
Speaker
And that's nothing like what we think of when we think of like the default position of thinking about augmenting cognition where you just think of everything being sharper. That's really not what you're doing there at all. Yeah, that's a good point because I mean, certainly that's a way that interference in memory works is that when you're trying to remember that person's name, sometimes it's a matter of getting interference because they remind you of something totally different. So if you kind of knock out that interference, that could be useful too.
00:33:32
Speaker
Yep. Yeah. No, absolutely. Absolutely. Well, I mean, you know, the one area where, you know, in the physical domain that there is, it's not a free lunch because it is work, but where there is benefit and very little negative down foot downside is an exercise in the world of exercise. There's always been the thought like, if I could just take a pill and I'd be perfectly fit, that'd be amazing, but doesn't work that way.
00:33:58
Speaker
But if you exercise, that has all kinds of great benefits. And the thought is that is there something like that in the world of cognition where you can do an exercise and be better? And I think there is. I think there is. I mean, we won't get into some of the more controversial aspects here, you know, because we do. We have our own things that we've written on the topic and you can read those if you want to go read Hardy and Nelson.
00:34:25
Speaker
Yes, you can you can download that article and read what we've said about it already. But I think there is another area where you can look at and say, actually, people do improve their cognition. I believe fundamentally that people do improve their cognition through exercise when they go to school.
00:34:43
Speaker
I think that I believe in that. And I don't think everybody necessarily sees it that way or would agree with that statement. But I really believe it. I think you get smarter by going to school. It's not just that you're remembering more, you have more information or you have things that you can remember that you know about that other people don't know. I think you are, in fact, smarter. I would agree with that. People want something that's quicker and seems more straightforward than that. But
00:35:11
Speaker
And I think then getting better at that and getting better at the cognitive exercise is really all about understanding better, having a better understanding of what you're trying to do. And I think that's the hard part. It's trying to figure out what are your goals? What are you trying to accomplish with your brain? That's the hard thing. And once you have that in mind, then I think constructing, whether it be
Cognitive Exercise & Education
00:35:33
Speaker
better instruction or better exercises for improving those cognitive abilities is tractable.
00:35:40
Speaker
Yeah. And this is what educators think about all the time is what sorts of what sorts of ways can you direct your attention towards exactly these things and use educational techniques so that you so that you're encouraging greater critical thinking and and metacognition and real intentional learning. That's a it's a big tough topic. So I put that in the category of brain augmentation. Yeah, it's not usually the way that people talk about it.
00:36:09
Speaker
So then we can, if we, I guess then the third way, I guess we have actually already been talking about the third topic here, which is clinical applications, ethical issues. Okay. That's what we've been talking about just now. That was the third volume, uh, clinical applications, ethical issues, and futuristic ideas. Futuristic ideas. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, there's obviously the robot apocalypse type stuff and there's plenty of articles that they included in this about, you know,
00:36:35
Speaker
just looking in the far future and seeing what the eventual consequences of any of these kinds of technologies are, whether they're good or bad, and mostly calling for more attention to be paid to them, and so that we think about some of the ethical issues earlier rather than later. I guess for me the interesting thing to think about in this context, again, is
00:36:55
Speaker
What is coming around the corner? And I think that's what this article is cool. It's like, what are we looking at today? What are people doing today that has some potential? Maybe that's a good segue to jump into the top 10 list. Okay. Should we take a little break and then we'll get into that? Yeah, let's do it. Okay. So if you are, well, you're not just joining us because this isn't radio, but
00:37:26
Speaker
just to remind you of what we're talking about. The name of the article is Augmentation of Brain Function, Facts, Fiction, and Controversy. It's a collection of articles about this topic. And on the first half of the show, we talked about the three main topics that are covered. So brain-machine interfaces, neurostimulation and pharmacological approaches, and then sort of futuristic and clinical applications of it. So now we're going to talk about
00:37:51
Speaker
the highest viewed articles in the topic. So we can think of this as a top 10 list of some of the most exciting stuff that's coming out at the cutting edge of augmentation of brain function. So. Number 10. Number 10. Number 10. When is diminishment a form of enhancement? Rethinking the enhancement debate in biomedical ethics. Earp at all.
00:38:16
Speaker
This is kind of what you were talking about before, so this is the ethics debate of when reducing some kind of function can have a helpful effect on your well-being. That's right. I don't know how much else we need to say about this because this is... Exactly, that's what we were just talking about. Okay, number nine. Number nine is enhancement of cognitive and neural functions through complex reasoning training, evidence from normal and clinical populations.
00:38:44
Speaker
So this is a cognitive training exercise. Yeah, this is a cognitive training one. Certainly not the first paper to discuss effects of cognitive training. But it made their top 10 list, which is interesting. And I guess this one is really talking about what you might call metacognition training, as well as more lower level training. So it's a complex, what they call complex reasoning training. And there are a whole class of these and many, many articles written about this. So trying to train people to think.
00:39:13
Speaker
a little bit more effectively, give them strategies, strategy training for thinking more effectively. And there's a lot of a lot of articles have been written about this. And obviously, its impact remains controversial. And but the fact that you can adopt strategies to think in certain ways to reason in certain ways is something that has been discussed since I mean, since the ancient Greeks. Mm hmm.
00:39:38
Speaker
Yeah, and what they're using here is not necessarily brand new, but it is a comprehensive study looking at this stuff. And one of the things that they do is they do something called gist reasoning training. So the strategy of understanding the gist, using attention in the right way, reasoning in the right way, and using what they call innovation. So the bottom line here is that
00:40:07
Speaker
you can get effective cognitive training by focusing on these larger kinds of training. So it's not quite as absolutely specific, like just training focused attention or focused spatial attention. You can get results on larger kinds of training. Okay, so that's number nine. I don't know how much else we have to say about it, right? I think that's good. Number eight. Number eight.
00:40:33
Speaker
Donor recipient enhancement of memory and rat hippocampus. Now this is a cool, a cool article.
Memory Transfer Research
00:40:40
Speaker
So in this one, you have rats and you have electrodes recording from the hippocampus of the rat, the so-called donor rat. This donor rat is performing a difficult task, challenging and requires memory. And the recipient animal then is able to do the task.
00:40:59
Speaker
based on the presumably based on the memory trace from the donor rat. So having never seen this task before they're able to perform the task based on the memory from the other rat. And that is just plain cool. That's cool. I mean, all right. Yeah, that's now you're sorry. Now you're talking about some futuristic futuristic type shit at that point. This is an article worth looking at if if anybody's interested in this.
00:41:27
Speaker
They're plugging in an electrode array into a couple areas of the hippocampus. And we know that the hippocampus is involved in memory consolidation and spatial processing. So they have some complex computer algorithms that decode all of this neural firing. Then they ship it over to the second rat and program him or her up. And then that rat can all of a sudden perform better on this delayed
00:41:57
Speaker
match to sample task. So does this mean that we're ready to transplant memories? What do you think? Well, yes, yes, yes, I think so. I mean, but it's not the kind of memory that when you think of like colloquially what you think of as a memory, right? You're not going to be able to like I'm not going to be able to see Rolf's trip to to Paris. You know, that's disappointing.
00:42:27
Speaker
I would love to have been there in my mind, but I don't think that's going to happen right now. Well, you know, maybe I mean, maybe there if you, for example, had if you record it from a part of the brain.
00:42:43
Speaker
And you basically overlearned some response pattern, you know, maybe you could improve, I don't know, improve someone's response to a similar pattern. I'm not thinking martial arts, maybe, maybe you could do some martial arts with it. Maybe, maybe. Well, this obviously has all the same difficulties in, you know, mapping one brain onto another brain that we've talked about before, too, which is, I mean, people's brains work differently. So it's not
00:43:12
Speaker
There isn't really an easy language of brain activation that you can translate directly from one to another. The hippocampus is probably a nice area for doing this kind of thing because there is a, you know, it's very spatially oriented and might be a good place to test this out. We wouldn't necessarily expect that this would work in all different brain areas, but. No, but you know, another area where this would work would definitely work.
00:43:38
Speaker
And again, you could argue how much this counts, but it would definitely work is if you took an electrode array and you recorded from your V1, your visual cortex area one, right? And let's just say you were just looking at letters, say like simple letters like H, T, E. And you decoded that. And then you planted some electrodes into my visual cortex area one and the right
00:44:04
Speaker
And you got the right spatial mapping. So you got the translation of whatever the different orientation of my cortical surface of my brain is, etc. And you plop that array down, you could give me the
00:44:19
Speaker
quote unquote memory of having seen the E and the T and the H and that sort of thing. So I would actually see those things. I would actually see the letters. It would be like more like phosphines is the way this is described when people have done this in the past, you know, where someone has had it. You see like little spots of light.
00:44:40
Speaker
This seems like a natural for the next rat study too. I wonder if that's coming up. That seems like that would be very doable. Number seven. Number seven. Transcranial direct current stimulation. Five important issues we aren't discussing, but probably should be. This one is, that's that nine volt battery on the head thing.
00:45:05
Speaker
I think this one's kind of straightforward that when you hook a nine volt battery up to the top of your head and put electricity in, we don't know exactly what's happening. And we should probably think about it and figure out what we're doing and whether it's a good idea to do that. Right? Right. Yeah, exactly. Exactly. You know, they point out that, you know, it doesn't not everyone responds exactly the same way to this. And even when you do it to the same person a couple of different times, they don't necessarily always have exactly the same experience.
00:45:34
Speaker
And I like that one of the important issues is that changes in electric current are related to hair thickness. Okay. Yeah. Yeah. There you go. There you go. Yeah. Makes sense. Yeah. It's so not super precise. Let's just say that. Yeah. I think it's true. It's an important issue. I think. Oh, absolutely. I mean, no, I mean, I think, right. With the TMS and the TDCs, there's a lot of hype and you have a lot of people hooking themselves up to these things and
00:46:04
Speaker
That's fine, but when you put somebody else up to one of these things, you should really think about what you're doing. If you wanna do it yourself, that's fine. Okay, number six, sleep for cognitive enhancement.
Sleep & Cognitive Performance
00:46:22
Speaker
Ooh, that's a good one. This one confused me a bit. This one confused me a bit because the issue as I kind of understood it here is that
00:46:32
Speaker
How do you know whether sleep, whether you can use sleep for enhancing cognition or how do you know that it's just something that's kind of restorative? Right. So I think it's a little bit of a red herring here for this particular topic area, but it is the case that sleep is very important for memory consolidation. Absolutely. And for cognitive performance. And we've known that for a long time from a whole bunch of different studies.
00:47:01
Speaker
Yeah. And so there's some interesting research into exactly why and how that's working. What is it about the way that the brain is operating when you're asleep? So there's different patterns of activation across the entire cortex at different frequencies that people have looked at.
00:47:22
Speaker
And that's a topic area that's a huge area for research, this whole idea of REM sleep, for example, what's going on in the brain in REM sleep versus non-REM sleep. And so I guess one question involved here is, so if you learn this from observing sleep, then some researchers might say, all right, if we know that
00:47:43
Speaker
this is helpful for cognition, then can we just isolate this and induce this and increase cognition? Right. And I think there's there's some interesting research too. And like, if you're trying to learn something, when do you want to go to sleep?
00:48:01
Speaker
So one of the things that I remember from, from this research area was that you have some amnesia for things that happened a few minutes before you fall asleep. So like the five minutes before you fall asleep, you tend to not remember things very well for those like few minutes right before you fall asleep. So if you're trying to study late into the night, for example, for a test the next day, probably don't want to study the most important thing right before you go to sleep.
00:48:30
Speaker
That's like one area, for example. So is there some way to manipulate the timing and the amount and type of sleep that you get to better learn and remember? That makes sense. They also did some nifty studies where you can increase or you can augment memories by using olfactory cues or giving them a smell while they're sleeping that increases their memory for certain kinds of things. I thought that was kind of nifty.
00:48:57
Speaker
Right. Yeah. It's always interesting to think about, you know, there's such a relationship between the olfactory system and the memory system. There's just an ancient connection in the brain between those systems. Always interesting to see when they, when you can draw those things out. But the bottom line conclusion that they came to is sleep seems like less of a way to augment cognition than just a restorative.
00:49:22
Speaker
It brings you up to baseline normal performance, but extra sleep is not going to buy you more. It's not like if you slept 18 hours a day that you would be that much better. Right. Or at all better. Probably a lot worse. It's probably like an optimal amount for each person. Yeah. Okay. Number five. Attitudes towards pharmacological cognitive enhancement, a review.
00:49:50
Speaker
Right, so this just looks at how people think about different kinds of pills that may or may not make you smart. Yeah, this is the least interesting conclusion that I can possibly imagine. The authors conclude that the public concerns regarding pharmacological enhancement, medical safety, coercion, and fairness match the agenda of academic debates. Number four. Number four.
00:50:17
Speaker
increased intelligence is a myth so far this is by higher and he is talking about the problems of quantifying the effects of cognitive training so this guy always is talking about cognitive training and how it's useless and yeah except for when he's writing the study writing the article about the one that he did basically he makes the point that
00:50:39
Speaker
It's difficult to evaluate the enhancement from cognitive training because the measures that we have for doing so are not great. And that is, that is again, certainly true. I buy that, that it is difficult to give a good measure of intelligence. We would love to have something that perfectly measured what we meant by intelligence. We just don't have anything.
00:51:07
Speaker
Yeah, and I think this actually conflates two separate issues and both are discussed in this article and both implicated by this article. One is that we don't really know what we mean by intelligence. And so measuring it effectively is a challenge. That's that's probably a whole episode itself right there. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And so we won't get too deep into it here. But basically, it's hard to know what that actually means. But then it's also hard just to reliably measure cognition from an individual
00:51:37
Speaker
there's a lot of difference in performance across individuals and within an individual over time. And so one of the consequences of that is that tests of cognition to be reliable need to be relatively long. So, you know, short tests. Which makes it harder to carry out a study and yeah. Exactly. And also then there's this whole idea of
00:52:04
Speaker
both performative elements, like is someone really going to be focused and paying attention for a very long test? And what is the implication for that? And then how much is the actual testing then actually changing performance, right? So you start to get a lot of practice on the test. The test is very long, and then that has implications for the retest effects. So it's a what I would call a real problem. In other words, it's not just people talking.
00:52:34
Speaker
That it's a problem. It's an actual problem that is in fact difficult to solve It is hard to know the way that that you could work your way out of this eventually I think it's that it's just it's been a real problem for a long time difficult. Yeah. Yeah number three and this is my favorite one augmentation of cognitive brain functions with transcranial lasers lasers
00:52:59
Speaker
But this is cool. So this is this is a suggestion. So this is like the those direct current kinds of things. So, except it has lasers, which is lasers are have been proven to be cooler than electricity. Oh, yeah, I mean, it's it's a fact. But what I like what I like about this is the no microwaves. Oh, yeah, that's true. Yeah. And that's been a topic we've been on is.
00:53:26
Speaker
Microwaves are less cool though. I mean, lasers are cooler than for sure. Yeah, we know that. There's research that has shown that to be true. So this is nifty because it is not only just that they say we think lasers are cool and we should point them at people's heads, but they suggest a
Transcranial Lasers & Bioenergetics
00:53:46
Speaker
way that this may actually be improving cell function and improving general metabolic processes.
00:53:56
Speaker
They're saying that the lasers could affect brain bioenergetics, which is awesome. Yeah. I don't know what that means exactly, but that is, that sounds really cool. So yeah, I, I barely have an understanding of it. I sort of get it. So it seems to affect cytochrome oxidase in mitochondria. And from what I remember.
00:54:21
Speaker
of mitochondria is that's where energy comes from in the cell. So, yes. So you want that. So you want that. And if you can get it through lasers. Yeah, it's much easier than eating, for example. It is much easier than eating. And I love the idea that we can sustain ourselves on lasers.
00:54:41
Speaker
This is, I see, I see no problems with this whatsoever. This is swimmingly. In fact, I'm going to stop eating today. I would, yeah, it's just all about shooting your head with lasers now. So that's, and there's not going to be, there's not going to be any problems with that whatsoever. No, no, but it is exciting and it is nifty.
00:55:10
Speaker
That there's an actual, an actual mechanism for how you might get some improved effects. So cytochrome oxidase is something that can be affected by photons of light. And you can increase the energy level of the cell with it. So that, that seems in, that seems like it could be positive. Yeah, absolutely. I mean, lasers are, as you say, super awesome and you can focus them and you can shoot them in different ways and they can different wavelengths, what kinds of stuff you do.
00:55:40
Speaker
And interestingly, I think they suggest, just like we said, microwaves, there's only a certain set of wavelengths that actually work in creating that sound in your head. They suggest that 600 to 1,150 nanometer wavelengths are the best kind to shoot at your head. That's right. Good. Good. All right, me? Yep. OK. Number two, non-invasive brain stimulation is not non-invasive.
00:56:10
Speaker
We talked about this a bit already. And hinted in it in the laser thing. That's right. Exactly. They're saying, hey, TMS, TDCS, guess what? You're shooting either magnetic stimulation or electrical direct current stimulation into the brain. That's having an impact directly in the brain. Maybe it shouldn't really be considered non-invasive.
00:56:38
Speaker
I mean, the non-invasive is that you're not cutting the skull open. That's what's non-invasive about it. There's not something physically going in there. That's right. I think, well, there is, I mean, physically there is, in the sense of physics, right? Like there's electromagnetic radiation. Yeah. Right. But it's cutting. You're not cutting. That's what it is, right? You're not cutting. You're not poking. Pet scans are, I don't know if you consider pet scans invasive or not, but a pet scan is,
00:57:08
Speaker
positron emission tomography. So that uses radioactive substances that go in your bloodstream. Right. As they get emitted. I don't know. Well, I don't know whether it would be or not. But I mean, it's invasive in the sense that like, if you're talking about like the difference being like poking versus not poking, it's like you're sticking a needle in your arm or but yeah, it's a question mark. Yeah, I get I get their point. They get their point. It's what non what does non-invasive mean, really?
00:57:35
Speaker
And what it should not mean, and their point is it should not mean that it's necessarily safer. Yeah, if it's not totally passive, if there's something going into your skull, then it is invasive in a way, even if it's just low levels of electricity. So it may be a misnomer. Because I think a lot of researchers strive for something that's noninvasive. They want something that is not
00:58:02
Speaker
Harmful and maybe they conflate the terms non-invasive with non harmful. I think that's what that's what they're getting at here That's right. Exactly. And I think right. I mean if you're Trying to pass it by the institutional review board The term non-invasive is probably an attractive term to use but yes to all you IRB People out there. Yeah, keep in mind that doesn't mean that it's not not dangerous. Mm-hmm. Yep point taken totally makes sense. I
00:58:31
Speaker
And the number one article, performance enhancement at the cost of potential brain plasticity, neural ramifications of nootropic drugs in the healthy developing brain.
The Trade-offs of Cognitive Enhancements
00:58:44
Speaker
So this one is really talking about this idea that there's no free lunch. That's their big argument, right? You can take a drug that might enhance your cognition for a period of time through- Such as cocaine, for example.
00:59:01
Speaker
Yeah and I don't know I mean I'm just suggesting here yeah but how much enhancement that is but yeah I mean yeah maybe that's not actually enhancement but I guess it does seem like the bottom line here is drugs have unwanted consequences. They often do yeah I mean
00:59:24
Speaker
And in fact, we can't really even come up with examples or any that don't. By having some effect and being able, especially when it comes to drugs that affect the brain, the same mechanism that has an impact on the brain that may be positive in a certain situation, in another situation, the effect would be considered negative. And I think one of the things they're kind of getting at is the idea that
00:59:54
Speaker
It's sort of like using a performance enhancing drug as a crutch. It decreases your ability to be flexible, describes it as loss of potential brain plasticity. So the idea that you're less able to be flexible and sort of employ different kinds of brain strategies if you're relying on something like a drug.
01:00:19
Speaker
Yeah, I don't know. I don't know if I love the use of the term brain plasticity in this context. Um, I think that might be, they might be, uh, abusing the term here a little bit neuro speak. Yeah. Yeah.
01:00:38
Speaker
I mean, brain plasticity is a very general thing, right? The brain changes in response to experience, in response to drugs, in response to aging, everything, right? So brain plasticity is just always happening. It's always there. I would say maybe if you're saying potentially at the cost of brain health, maybe that would be like a more specific way of saying what they're trying to say.
01:01:06
Speaker
But I get the point, right? There's no free lunch. Yeah. Point taken. Point taken. So what of these, you said your favorite was the lasers? So, okay. So yeah, I would say my two favorite, I have two clear winners here. Okay. One is the donor and recipient and recipient rats for rat hippocampus, where they hook two rats up and transfer memories across them. And the other one is the lasers.
01:01:34
Speaker
Yeah, transcranial lasers What about you? My clear favorite is the donor recipient enhancement of memory and rat hippocampus That's just that's a clear where That's a good one. Yeah, I mean because it captures all the the things right, you know it's the input and the output and the mapping between two different two different organisms and It's cool. It's cool. I mean, yeah, I wonder if there's a
01:02:03
Speaker
I wonder if there's anything you could do along those lines with so-called non-invasive techniques. Is there anything you could extract from someone's brain using EEG and then transfer that to another person? Well, I mean, the difficulty is probably in the writing. Right, exactly. You could probably do that in the peripheral, right? Like one person could be
01:02:35
Speaker
Yeah, you could control someone else's hand, right? Something like that. Yeah. Yeah. But you could do that. But you could do that. Have people done that? I feel like people must have done that already. Controlling another person's hand? Well, there's those. Yeah, there's some of those where they have they control something from a distance where they move a robot arm. Right. But if they have done it where that you control, like Rolf controls Joe's arm. I have seen they have a they have a
01:03:03
Speaker
easy version of this that just does the muscle movement and then makes your arm and then zaps your arm to make your muscle move at the same time. But yeah, no, I did that one for me. I did that one at yeah, the Society for Neurosciences. There was a company that has had a thing where they were doing that. We were zapping each other. I remember that backyard brains. Yep. That was fun.
01:03:28
Speaker
But I didn't feel like the writing was really quite primitive. It was literally the term zapping. Yeah, it was also a little bit painful. Yeah, it was. It's like, yeah, I would say invasive. Yeah, exactly. Exactly. Kind of a little bit like along the lines of like, you know, touching like electrical fence. Yeah. Kind of sensation. I wouldn't want to do it long term. No. Doesn't seem like an augmentation strategy.
01:03:58
Speaker
Yeah. Okay. Well, this is great. It's fun going over all of these new experiments and new trends and stuff that's going on in brain augmentation. Yeah, absolutely. Thanks everyone for listening to the show and we'll be back next week with another episode.