YouSaid · the spoken record

Ed Boyden

lines on the record: 84
first: 2019-04-10
most recent: 2019-04-10
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

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“I'm always looking for new serendipitous things, you know, casting the dots between different fields. And these ideas always seem a bit crazy and are hard to get funded. And I see that both in my group, but also in many other groups. So I think if I was given a pile of money right now, what I would like to do is to find a way, both not just in our group, but across many groups, to try to find those unfundable projects where, number one, if we think about the logic of it, hey, there's a non-zero chance it could be revolutionary. Number two, we can really, in a finite amount of time, test the idea. And if it works, we can.”
2019-04-10 · Conversations with Tyler · Ed Boyden on Minding your Brain · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“See what comes up. Absolutely. I do that a lot too. And that's one thing where I really value those six years I spent learning a bit of chemistry and a bit of physics and a bit of electrical engineering because it allows me to stitch together some facts from different fields and that can be very helpful for launching a new idea or judging whether an idea is actually worth pursuing.”
2019-04-10 · Conversations with Tyler · Ed Boyden on Minding your Brain · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Wow. So I almost think search engines like Google often are trying to look at the most popular things. And I think to advance science, what we almost need is a search engine for the most important unpopular things.”
2019-04-10 · Conversations with Tyler · Ed Boyden on Minding your Brain · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“There were people playing around with controlling brain cells with like going back to the 1940s. So what is different? Well, this class of molecules that we put into neurons hadn't been discovered yet.”
2019-04-10 · Conversations with Tyler · Ed Boyden on Minding your Brain · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“One way to think of it is that if a scientific topic is really popular and everybody's doing it, then I don't need to be part of that, right? What's the benefit of being the 100,000th person working on something? So I read a lot of old papers. I read a lot of things that might be forgotten because I think that there's a lot of treasure hiding in plain sight. And as we discussed earlier, optogenetics and expansionary cost could be both begin from papers from other fields, some of which are quite old and which mostly had been ignored by other people. So I sometimes practice what I call failure rebooting. So we tried something, or somebody else tried something and it didn't work. But you know what? Something happened that made the world different. Maybe somebody found a new gene. Maybe computers are faster. Maybe some other discovery from left field has changed how we think about things. And you know what? That old failed idea might be ready for prime time. So with optogenetics, people were trying to control brain cells with light going back to 1971. And I was actually reading some earlier papers.”
2019-04-10 · Conversations with Tyler · Ed Boyden on Minding your Brain · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“While I started really keeping this calendar of the past not that long ago, maybe 2014-ish, but in the last five years have gotten much better at estimating how long it takes me to do something. And it makes me a much better time manager for my future tasks.”
2019-04-10 · Conversations with Tyler · Ed Boyden on Minding your Brain · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“While I experiment a lot on my own life, I guess. So, for example, this will wake you up early thing. I arrived at by experimenting a little bit. The way that I managed time, I arrived at through lots of experimentation. So, for example, I keep a calendar of future plans, many people do, but then I also keep a calendar of the past, which logs how long it actually took for me to write that grant or to meet with that person or to eat dinner or whatever. And over time, I've learned a lot about how long it takes me to do something.”
2019-04-10 · Conversations with Tyler · Ed Boyden on Minding your Brain · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I try to treat my own Career as an experiment. So I tried to learn what am I good at? What am I not good at? What do I like? What do I not like?”
2019-04-10 · Conversations with Tyler · Ed Boyden on Minding your Brain · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So, I really try to understand how individual people and their unique background and interest could change the world. But it means that we don't have a formula. I try not to have formulas in general when it comes to the actual day of science. I often say to people in my group, we want to revolutionize the world for the better and do the right thing and be ethical. But beyond that, let's not try to make any artificial policies”
2019-04-10 · Conversations with Tyler · Ed Boyden on Minding your Brain · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, I really try to get to know people at a deep level over a long period of time and then to see how their unique background and interest might change the field for the better. And so I have people in my group who are professional neurosurgeons. And then as I mentioned, I have college dropouts. And I have people who we recently published a paper where we ran the brain expansion process in reverse. So take the baby diaper polymer, add water to expand it, and then you can basically laser print stuff inside of it and then collapse it down and you get a piece of nanotechnology. And so the co-first author of that paper doesn't have a scientific laboratory background. He was a professional photographer before he joined my group. But we started talking. And it turns out if you're a professional photographer, you know a lot of very practical chemistry. And it turns out that our big demo and why the paper got so much attention was we made metal nanowires. And the way we did it was using a chemistry not unlike what you do in photography, which is a silver chemistry.”
2019-04-10 · Conversations with Tyler · Ed Boyden on Minding your Brain · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Mixing and matching that helps people sort of go in their own direction. So when Word got out that I had two college dropouts doing the PhD in my group, a lot of other people started contacting me, who also had dropped out of high school or college saying, how can I get into brain technology? And so I kind of designed a little custom curriculum for them where it's like, you need to know some physics, but frankly, gravity waves, you don't need that if you're studying the brain. And then you need to know some chemistry, but this kind of chemistry, you know, that might be not so important. And so in mathematics too, there's some parts of mathematics that are absolutely essential, but other parts, you probably don't need that right away in brain science. And so I kind of designed a little custom curriculum, like maybe in a year or two, you could get up to speed by learning what's most important.”
2019-04-10 · Conversations with Tyler · Ed Boyden on Minding your Brain · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So on the plus sign, I think I got a lot of very good groundings in fundamental sciences. And that was very important because now I can think about the brain in terms of physical principles or chemical tools or engineering thoughts. On the other hand, it's kind of a slow process. I was an undergrad for six years. So I think the world's much faster pace nowadays than it was 25 years ago. And also we have new hybrid interdisciplinary majors. So one of the majors that I advise at MIT is biological engineering, which is only like a decade old, maybe a little bit more. So you can now go to college and major in a discipline which will combine some computer programming and some chemistry and some physical bottling and so forth. So I feel like again a theme of what I try to do as a professor is can we do on purpose what previously we did accidentally? And so one thing I try to do is to help people craft curriculums that are optimized for what they want to do. And sometimes that means prescription.”
2019-04-10 · Conversations with Tyler · Ed Boyden on Minding your Brain · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, yeah, so I started college at 14 and my focus on chemistry for two years. And then I transferred to MIT where then I switched into physics and electrical engineering. And that's when I worked on quantum computing. So five AM.”
2019-04-10 · Conversations with Tyler · Ed Boyden on Minding your Brain · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, here's how I think about it. So I think a lot of us have sort of a skill phase of our career where we're learning how to program computers, where we're learning how to machine metal, or we're learning how to And the impact I wanted to do really required me to get my hands dirty, get into a laboratory, and start playing around with real matter. But if somebody's more mathematically inclined or you might not need to go into a laboratory, right? Lots of great people do mathematics on their own.”
2019-04-10 · Conversations with Tyler · Ed Boyden on Minding your Brain · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, yeah, so, yeah, around age eight or nine, I got obsessed with this question of can we address the meaning of life through science and maybe very ambitious and hardworking and focused. And so I started college and started working on this origins of life project when I was only 14. I went to a program at the University of North Texas where they take people kind of young. And so a lot of my classmates were 16 years old. But yeah, it was great to kind of jump directly into science. I grew up in a suburb of Dallas, Texas, which didn't have a lot of scientific stuff going on at the laboratory or research level. So actually getting to jump into science was just transformative for me.”
2019-04-10 · Conversations with Tyler · Ed Boyden on Minding your Brain · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“write down every possible way of doing it. So I call this method the tiling tree method, where you try to take the space of possibilities and break it down into parts so that if you draw it properly, it looks like a tree diagram. Here's the space of possibilities, split into two parts, and each of those splits into more parts, and eventually it covers a page and it looks like a tree. And then the leaves of the tree, the bottom nodes are ideas you could actually test by doing a literature search or doing an experiment. And so a lot of our projects actually at some point or another involve this kind of can we think of every possible idea approach. And so we did not pioneer this. Fritz Zicki called this morphological analysis in the 1930s, and he claims to have thought up dark matter and gravitational lensing. And a lot of these hot topics of astrophysics that are being investigated today, but of course he thought these up almost a century ago, he claimed to have thought these ideas through this sort of tiling tree or morphological analysis kind of approach.”
2019-04-10 · Conversations with Tyler · Ed Boyden on Minding your Brain · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It does. Well, two thoughts. So, one thought is we're neurotechnologists for the most part. We do some science, but mostly technology. So a lot of people, of course, have built tools for biology over the years, but not all the tools have been equally useful. So one of the things we do is to think backwards from a problem so that when we build the tools, we actually can solve the problem with optogenetics, the problem was how do you control the brain to repair it. With expansionary microscopy, the question was, how do we make a map of the brain that's precise but scalable? So thinking backwards from major problems is really, really important. Now, how do you actually then do anything about it? Well, one strategy we try to do is then to think of every possible idea of how to solve the problem. So with Optogenetics, my co-inventor, Carl Estroth and I, when we were both students, we just started going through all the laws of physics. How would you control the brain? Well, there was only so many kinds of energy. There's mechanical force. There's magnetism. There's light. The list is pretty short, actually. And so you can actually try to”
2019-04-10 · Conversations with Tyler · Ed Boyden on Minding your Brain · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, in biomedicine, systems didn't evolve to be understood. They evolved to survive and reproduce and all that. So one can hope for structure. Biology does give you more structure than we deserve, I think. I mean, DNA has a double helix, and you can read out the genetic code. So there's always this question of why is the universe understandable in the first place? And maybe now we're entering the realm of complexity where things are less understandable. But again, we have to accept reality for what it is.”
2019-04-10 · Conversations with Tyler · Ed Boyden on Minding your Brain · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“products interact with each other and how they're architected into cells and tissues and organs and how those go wrong. So the problem is this combinatorial explosion of possibility is so staggeringly huge that a lot of what we try will fail. And so what do we do about it? Well, one point of view is, well, if we have better tools and we can map those building blocks and those interactions, maybe we could reduce the risk of biomedical science. And again, it's not my field. More of this than I do. I'd love to hear your opinion. But in economics and in other fields, it also seems like people are trying to make better maps of things and how they interact. So that's one idea is, you know, what if we could make these problems, progress might seem to be slower because the problems are so hard, but with better tools, maybe we can level the playing field and make 21st century sciences more tractable in the same way that 20th century sciences gave us lasers and computers and the internet.”
2019-04-10 · Conversations with Tyler · Ed Boyden on Minding your Brain · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It's a good question. I think what's happening is we're tackling bigger problems. Let me explain what that means. So in physics, there's a small number of building blocks like protons and electrons and a small number of ways they interact, like electromagnetism and so forth. Chemistry, there's more stuff. There's 100 odd things in the periodic table, although maybe there's only like 30 to 50 that you actually have to work with if you're trying to make something actually happen. And again, there's a small number of bonds covalent and ionic and so forth. I think the problem right now is a lot of the scientific questions we're wrestling with, whether it's in biology and medicine, but I'm not an expert in this. You know more about some of these things than I do, but like in economics and education and so forth, it also seems like from my distant view, some of these problems, they relate to this idea that there's a lot of different building blocks in a lot of ways they interact. So in biology, we have, what, 30,000 genes in the human genome. And while we know their sequence, for the most part, we have no idea how these genes”
2019-04-10 · Conversations with Tyler · Ed Boyden on Minding your Brain · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Committee of people who have multiple non-overlapping domains of knowledge can be quite productive. What if I brought together to evaluate a proposal and I have a physicist who can tell me what that amount of energy won't kill the brain and then I have a biologist who says, you know what, that's a really important problem. And then a chemist who would say, you know what, that molecule probably won't be toxic. You actually need a committee to judge some of these ideas.”
2019-04-10 · Conversations with Tyler · Ed Boyden on Minding your Brain · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Or maybe individuals that can dynamically bring together committees. Hey, you're a yogurt scientist that's curious about this weird CRISPR molecule just found. Here's some bioinformaticists who are looking to find patterns. Here's some protein engineers who love to”
2019-04-10 · Conversations with Tyler · Ed Boyden on Minding your Brain · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Improvements in the mathematics, but largely, I think we'd all agree, better compute power and a lot more data. So how could we find the treasure that's hiding in plain sight? And so one of the ideas is to have sort of a SWAT team of people who go around looking for how to connect the dots all day long in these serendipitous ways.”
2019-04-10 · Conversations with Tyler · Ed Boyden on Minding your Brain · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And the third thing I would do is I would go looking for trouble. I would go looking for serendipity. If you look at CRISPR for genome editing, that was found by some scientists working on yogurt. If you look at fluorescent proteins, that was identified by a person who just was obsessed with jellyfish. And in my own fields, if you look at our optogenetics work or our expansionary costs we work, these fields owe adept to basic curiosity about critters living in bodies of water for optogenetics. And expansion microscopy goes back to the 1980s where people were wondering why do certain polymers swell so hugely with no practical purpose implications of it. So one idea is can we, how do we find the diamonds in the rough, the big ideas, but they're kind of hidden in plain sight. I think we see this a lot, right? Machine learning, deep learning is one of the hot topics of our time. But a lot of the math is worked out decades ago, backpropagation, for example, in the 1980s and 1990s. And what has changed since then is no doubt some...”
2019-04-10 · Conversations with Tyler · Ed Boyden on Minding your Brain · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Okay, so just very briefly, the second thing I would do is to be more dynamic in my funding. Right now, maybe there's a grant that you apply for, and then a year later you get the money. But what if somebody tries something out one Friday afternoon and whoa, that could cure a disease or that could yield an amazing new insight into biology, or that could allow us to diagnose brain diseases earlier or whatever, why wait a year? So what if one could dynamically allocate funding up and down based upon the real-time metrics of science? In my own group, sometimes we begin a project out of the blue and, hey, that's pretty cool. And then we'll dynamically try to understand if we can reallocate.”
2019-04-10 · Conversations with Tyler · Ed Boyden on Minding your Brain · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That if we think about the logical underpinnings of it, the rationale is actually pretty solid in terms of its being linked to ground truthable sciences like physics and chemistry. In other words, if we take a step back and apply more logical principles of evaluation to the outcomes of peer review, can we actually improve the ranking of these proposals? So this is something I'm thinking a lot about right now. And as I evaluate people and evaluate ideas that people propose to me as well, I'm trying to hone those skills in myself. So that's one of the three things I would do.”
2019-04-10 · Conversations with Tyler · Ed Boyden on Minding your Brain · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“In charge, they're bored. You do it. Yeah. Well, free thoughts. So the first thing that I thought a lot about studying these past cases and then going through it myself is thinking about peer review. So what is peer review? Well, when you propose a project, a bunch of your peers will then critique it. And the problem that a lot of these daring-sounding projects encounter is that they sound bad during peer review. And so because they're so off the wall or they bring together multiple fields so that maybe nobody's qualified to evaluate them. And so one thought is what if instead of taking people's opinions and then just sort of combining those opinions and then, okay, you're in or you're out in terms of getting the money, what if we take a step back and we think about why the peers are thinking this way? You know, if somebody critiques a proposal, but they're doing it from a vantage point that doesn't see a certain part of the proposal as valuable because they're missing an underlying piece of knowledge. Or they're evaluating a proposal based upon opinion.”
2019-04-10 · Conversations with Tyler · Ed Boyden on Minding your Brain · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Other specimens a hundred times in volume to map them. People thought it was nonsense. People were skeptical. People hated it. Nine out of my first 10 grants that I wrote on it were rejected. And if it weren't for the open philanthropy project that heard about our struggles to get this project funded through, again, a set of links that were, as far as I can tell, largely luck driven. Maybe our group would have been out of business. But they came through and gave us a major gift and that kept us going.”
2019-04-10 · Conversations with Tyler · Ed Boyden on Minding your Brain · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I like to look at the history of science to learn about its future. And one thing I've learned a lot over the past couple years, and it's even happened to me, is that it's really hard to fund pioneering ideas. Brian Kabilka, who recently won the Nobel Prize for solving the structure of the G-protein coupled receptor and for context, like one-third of all drugs target this class of molecules. So it's a very, very important class of drugs. He lost his funding because he wasn't making progress fast enough. If I recall, he had to moonlight as an emergency room physician to keep going on his research. Doug Prasher, who cloned the gene for green fluorescent protein, which has been used in something like a million biology studies ballpark, he lost his funding and eventually left science and ended up driving a shuttle bus for, I believe, a rental car facility or something. Anyway, there's so many stories. And for me, it became personal because when we proposed this expansion microscopy technology where we blow up brain specimens,”
2019-04-10 · Conversations with Tyler · Ed Boyden on Minding your Brain · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That's a good question. I mean, again, this is not my area of expertise because I'm relatively new to entrepreneurship. It's only over the past couple years that I've really been pushing hard at starting companies. But it does seem like many East Coast investors are like Third Block Ventures, for example. They like to build companies, bring together many co-founders and so forth. Maybe in the West Coast, there's more of a founding team, let them drive it. Maybe investor more passive model. Again, this might be me new to this whole world, but having now talked to a few people, it seems like there are definitely differences in the personality, at least on the investing side.”
2019-04-10 · Conversations with Tyler · Ed Boyden on Minding your Brain · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think there's so much crosstalk nowadays. I read a statistic that 40% of the professors at MIT trained at one point in their career at Stanford, Harvard, or MIT. So it's a lot of crosstalk that goes back and forth. I think one of the themes in science is that you end up learning different things and brain multiple things to bear. In terms of how the venture capital side of science and the startup side of science, though, I think there might be some differences.”
2019-04-10 · Conversations with Tyler · Ed Boyden on Minding your Brain · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, one of them had been a teal fellow and then decided that it could be good to have an ecosystem in academia to support a long-term biotechnology play. It's hard to do biotechnology all by yourself. And then the other was a college dropout who was working as a computer tech support person next door. And yeah, both of them are now leading very independent projects. So I think, again, I try to look more at the individual. And I try to get to know people over a long period of time to learn what they're good at and how they can maybe make a contribution based upon their unique experience that's different from what people have done traditionally.”
2019-04-10 · Conversations with Tyler · Ed Boyden on Minding your Brain · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, I think I learned more different things from different individuals than from the categories of people because some of the people who come to take the class are they might have been an executive in a big company before and I might learn something very deep about how to lead a team. Whereas somebody who is a new business student or even a business undergrad might have some untested ideas but not that deep bench of experience that a seasoned executive would. So I think I learned more from individuals and their variability than from categories of people. For example, in our group at MIT, I have two PhD students who neither finish college, actually. I can't think of any other neuroscience groups in Earth where that's true.”
2019-04-10 · Conversations with Tyler · Ed Boyden on Minding your Brain · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Why do you do? Well, many, many years ago, when I was a student at MIT, Joe Sponson, who was then also a student and I, were brainstorming about an idea about a neurotechnology class that would train people how to get ideas out of the lab and into the world so that brain technology is more than a And so we brought in the class to call it revolutionary ventures because we realized that a lot of the ways we thought about neurotechnology could apply to other fields that could also benefit from a big jolt in the arm, like alternative energy or other parts of healthcare and so forth. And so, yeah, we have about 30 students or so take the class each term and we teach it every fall.”
2019-04-10 · Conversations with Tyler · Ed Boyden on Minding your Brain · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So it's a great place for people between one field and another where there's sort of some space. But you know what? It could be an entire new discipline. And now Flash Forward 12 years later, we actually started a center for neuroengineering here at MIT that I co-dire”
2019-04-10 · Conversations with Tyler · Ed Boyden on Minding your Brain · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I can't recall the details. It might have been a professor of education or something. I forget what it was, but they said, you know what? The media lab, maybe our new mission is to hire misfits. So in the old days, of course, the media lab did media. But now media is everywhere, right? And so a lot of the newer hires at the MIT Media Lab are working at the intersection of a life science and some other kind of science, like Kevin Esfeldt, who's trying to build CRISPR gene drives to edit ecosystems. It also thinks about the ethics and the politics and the sociology, right?”
2019-04-10 · Conversations with Tyler · Ed Boyden on Minding your Brain · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, well, I was writing up these faculty applications to propose to set up a full-time neurotechnology group. Let's control the brain, let's map the brain, and yeah, at the time, the majority of the places that I applied to for faculty jobs, they actually turned me down. And so I went to the media lab to talk to people there. I'd been an undergrad researcher there. That's when I was doing work on quantum computing, for example. And it was just sheer dumb luck. They had a job opening that they couldn't fill. And so they said, why don't you apply a job?”
2019-04-10 · Conversations with Tyler · Ed Boyden on Minding your Brain · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, I've been thinking about this a lot, actually, lately. I think there are different philosophies. Like we should have open offices so everybody can see and talk to each other. Or that's wrong. You should have closed spaces so people can think and have quiet time. And what I think is actually quite interesting is this concept that maybe neither is the right approach. You might want to think about having sort of an ecosystem of environments. So in my group, we're partly over at the media lab, which has a lot of very open environments. And our other part of the group is in a classical sort of neuroscience laboratory with offices and small rooms where we park microscopes and stuff like that. And I actually get a lot of productivity out of switching environments in a deliberate way.”
2019-04-10 · Conversations with Tyler · Ed Boyden on Minding your Brain · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I do like that building, yeah. So I parked my car in the basement of that building, and when my kids were there for daycare, I spent a lot of time in that building, and I do like it. I think architecture is very important. I find architecture to be very inspiring for scientific ideas. And so my group started out at the MIT Media Lab, and now we have half our group over here in the MIT Media Institute. But I used to wander the halls of campus late at night and just look at stuff, posters in the hallway and get inspiration by trying to connect dots from different fields or disciplines or even entirely separate unconnected topics. And I find a lot of productivity from inspirational environments and connecting dots between random things.”
2019-04-10 · Conversations with Tyler · Ed Boyden on Minding your Brain · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Exactly. And again, the story of science, especially in this sort of pre-history era where documentation was not as good as it is nowadays, you can't just Google all the things Archimedes wrote down day by day and hour by hour. We have these fragments of story. It's hard to know. Certainly the accomplishments have yielded untold insights into physics and mathematics and all sorts of stuff.”
2019-04-10 · Conversations with Tyler · Ed Boyden on Minding your Brain · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Archimedes I don't know the details of who he worked with and how they all contributed to each other, but certainly the famous stuff that he did in terms of Archimedes' principle and the stuff that he innovated and discovered stands the test of time. I guess the big question is if we actually were there and saw what people were doing, what happened in the trenches, right? And again, it boils down to some of these questions. You might have heard many collections.”
2019-04-10 · Conversations with Tyler · Ed Boyden on Minding your Brain · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It's a good question. So, I don't know much about neuroeconomics. I mean, most of my work is at the circuit level, looking at very small circuits. On the other hand, I think that anything that advances the study of human behavior, given its murkiness and complexity, is much to be desired. And I'm starting to meet people in this field now, and it's quite exciting. The idea that you could actually make a prediction about human behavior based upon some kind of insight that's mathematically extractable from prior behavior or from brain imaging. I mean, this free will experiment I mentioned earlier where you can predict somebody's behavior 10 seconds later by looking at what their brain is doing now. I find such things fascinating.”
2019-04-10 · Conversations with Tyler · Ed Boyden on Minding your Brain · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You can save resources. Well, on the other hand, I think that if you look at how science is evolving with more and more collaboration and longer and longer timescales, one of the issues is that the number of people who contribute is getting larger and larger. So you've probably seen all these controversies with CRISPR, for example, where the list of people who some people discovered CRISPR and other people figured out how it works, and still other people figured out that the way it worked was modular and therefore programmable, and that still other people applied it to human cells. And so it's a long list of people. Now, what if we could tell the whole story in a way that allows it to be appreciated in a broad audience fashion? So part of me often wonders about storytelling as a modality for conveying the value of science. But the idea that you should limit it to a small number of people, I think, is partly because of this limitation that it's hard to understand a story with 100 characters.”
2019-04-10 · Conversations with Tyler · Ed Boyden on Minding your Brain · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It's a good question. So I think of prizes as a way of storytelling. It's a way of celebrating an achievement that makes it accessible to a broader audience. But you also don't.”
2019-04-10 · Conversations with Tyler · Ed Boyden on Minding your Brain · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Octopuses are very interesting. Yeah, yeah. And dolphins, of course, also have a unique form of intelligence, it's pretty clear. Yeah, the list goes on and on about ways that brains solve problems or create things. And it's just amazing the sort of evolutionary set of possibilities out there that remain to be explored.”
2019-04-10 · Conversations with Tyler · Ed Boyden on Minding your Brain · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Oh, it's funny you bring that up because working on birdsong as a neural circuit problem was my very first neuroscience experience in 1998. Yes. And I worked on zebrafinches, which are not famous for having a particularly sweet bird song, but there's certainly a wide variety of other species that I think have more appealing songs. But yeah, there's a lot of species-specific stuff out there. And parrots, of course, can emulate human speech and mockingbirds can pick up all sorts of interesting patterns from their environment. I think one of the things that I really love about the space of ecological diversity is if you think of brains as computing things, then ecological diversity might provide many ways of computing the same thing, but in different ways that actually yield interesting computational insights or aesthetic outcomes.”
2019-04-10 · Conversations with Tyler · Ed Boyden on Minding your Brain · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“What depends on what your goal is? I mean, there are certain points in a project where I need to be interrupted a lot because I'm putting together lots of ideas or connecting lots of people to form a massive collaboration. We just published this paper on applying expansion microscopy for whole brain.”
2019-04-10 · Conversations with Tyler · Ed Boyden on Minding your Brain · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, for me, I get four or five hours of time to think and write without constant barrages of people emailing me and knocking on my door and so forth. So I really value that time. The downside is maybe a less adventurous social life since I go to bed at 8 or 9 at night.”
2019-04-10 · Conversations with Tyler · Ed Boyden on Minding your Brain · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Of different things that people say. And what about things that are coupled to external influence? Like the example I just gave, where the memory was affected by an external photograph or story. So anyway, I think that we have to make sure that the science accelerates as fast as the technology. Sometimes I say that the hard part of neurotechnology is the neural part. Maybe we'll have the ability to scan brains and read out information with unprecedented accuracy at some point in the future. But if we don't understand the underlying processes and what the information means, then we might do the wrong thing with that information.”
2019-04-10 · Conversations with Tyler · Ed Boyden on Minding your Brain · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“A good question. Yeah. Well, I think there's a lot of questions about lies and memories that make the question very nuanced. So for example, there's a field in memory research where they look at what's called reconsolidation. What happens is basically when you recall a memory, it becomes fragile. And there are studies about how even false memories can be induced. They then experiments where you show somebody something in a photograph or in a story, and then a week later you asked, oh, how is your experience? And it wasn't their experience. It was in a photograph or a story. And some fraction of the people will remember it as their experience. So I think if we start thinking about these kinds of topics that connect to everyday human experience, like lies and memories and so forth, I think we also have to delve very deeply into the underlying neuroscience so we know what we're talking about and what we're doing. So for example, if somebody talks about something in a certain way, but it was not in an intentional lie, it was a false memory, what are the subcommittees?”
2019-04-10 · Conversations with Tyler · Ed Boyden on Minding your Brain · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source