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

Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

“Well, that's one possibility, but if you look at the history of biology around 1975 or so, Paul Berg, who won the Nobel Prize for his work in biochemistry, convened in a Silomar, California a bioethics conference about, because this is the dawn of gene cloning, making transgenic organisms that have genes that shouldn't be there. It was a period of great distrust in political systems, maybe not unlike our time in a way as well. And they decided to actually get together and figure out how to self-regulate and regulate molecular biology. And so now half a century later, this has yielded a lot of huge benefits to human health. And for the most part, they've been able to proactively discuss things. It's not perfect, of course. But I think one can try to take action. It doesn't guarantee perfection, but we can certainly put our best efforts forth.”
2019-04-10 · Conversations with Tyler · Ed Boyden on Minding your Brain · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Working together and coming up with guidelines for what we want to do and what we don't want to do, and maybe some things we want to do, but it should be thought about in detail by an objective, or at least as objective as possible panel that's not connected to the work and so forth. So I'm talking to people now about what if we could get maybe a global neuroethics conference going, which would bring together the companies and the scientists, the investors and the governments, religious leaders and lawyers, and people with stakes in different parts of this and to get that going before is headline news that we don't necessarily appreciate.”
2019-04-10 · Conversations with Tyler · Ed Boyden on Minding your Brain · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“While neurotechnology in general, I think, presents a lot of ethical implications that I think we need to Proactively start discussing and start self regulating and start making people aware of. And I think part of the problem is that people, I think, often don't feel comfortable talking about their brains. I was on a panel once at a conference where the chair of the panel asked the audience how many of the people in the audience had used a cognitive enhancing drug and nobody raised their hand. And then the chair of the panel said, you know what, probably 20% of you should have raised your hand because they had done an anonymous poll earlier of a similar population. And so I think there's a stigma about talking about the brain. I most feel like we need a new language. I want to talk about me, but I also want to talk about my brain. Is there a new word which combines both of those words so that I don't have to talk about my brain in a dehumanizing sense? I also think we need to start getting neuroethics on the table. You know, we just all heard about the CRISPR baby debacle in China. And now, of course, there are lots of people making statements about you shouldn't do that. In neurotechnology, can we get out ahead of the problem before it happens by”
2019-04-10 · Conversations with Tyler · Ed Boyden on Minding your Brain · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Oh, yes, yes. Groups for many years have been using functional MRI, a kind of brain scanner, to read out what people are seeing. So you can show somebody a movie, scan their brain, and you can statistically guess what they actually are seeing. So that's been well known. And many groups now have been refining this kind of approach. So it sounds like this group has made an advance in that area”
2019-04-10 · Conversations with Tyler · Ed Boyden on Minding your Brain · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I've been so focused on writing manuscripts the last couple days that I haven't known stuff in the last couple days in the scientific literature.”
2019-04-10 · Conversations with Tyler · Ed Boyden on Minding your Brain · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“While it also might be that we have to think of empathy in a new way. So as we talked about earlier, suppose that what we are consciously aware of is being generated by some unconscious processes that happen right beforehand, maybe when we are trying to experience empathy at a certain point in time, there are other processes in the brain that occurred beforehand that we don't have access to. But if we could access those processes, we could have a greater kind of empathy. And some of this language is used in meditative and conscious-oriented and mindfulness practices that try to understand compassion and empathy in a greater way. But I wonder if there's a precise neuroscientific way to tackle such things.”
2019-04-10 · Conversations with Tyler · Ed Boyden on Minding your Brain · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Great question. Well, I mean, the thing that got me interested in confronting philosophical questions through science as a kid was about human suffering. I guess I would want to wait to help make empathy possible. So right now, it's very hard to know what somebody's feeling in their mind. We use language to try to convey that, but it doesn't quite seal the deal, right? That's one of the reasons some people think why there's so much conflict that you can't understand the internal state of somebody else at a true level. So what if I could read out what happens in my mind and somebody else could experience that literal state and vice versa? This is something I've been thinking a lot about that I would like to work on in the long term, but obviously has a lot of basic research to go into before we're even close to ready for that.”
2019-04-10 · Conversations with Tyler · Ed Boyden on Minding your Brain · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Here's another way of looking at it, which is there's so many things that we're consciously aware of, but the vast majority of the things that the brain is doing we're probably unconsciously aware of, right? So, for example, here we are in my office, and there's all sorts of stuff around, and your brain has been processing a lot of it. And so if I point at that blue highlighter over there, you probably saw it earlier, but we're not paying conscious attention to it. But now that I point at it, you are consciously aware of it. So I actually think that something that we have to understand is how are all these unconscious processes, this roiling sea of stuff that we have no access to, how are those processes contributing to the emergence of consciousness? And that's one reason why I'm very excited to study the process of consciousness, if you will. What are the processes in the brain that lead to it that happened beforehand and that might help us understand in a causal way what gives rise to consciousness? But again, this is just an idea right now.”
2019-04-10 · Conversations with Tyler · Ed Boyden on Minding your Brain · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Oh, I think this is fascinating. And AI pioneers like Marvin Minsky wrote about the Society of Mind about this idea that your brain is a bunch of independent agents that can work together in the form of meditation that I practice. This internal family systems model, you actually do explicitly try to consider parts of your mind as having their own drives and their own wants and their own plans. And that helps you understand them in a way.”
2019-04-10 · Conversations with Tyler · Ed Boyden on Minding your Brain · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, so again, I think we don't have a good definition of consciousness in the sense that we cannot detect it through a consciousness meter and we don't have a creation method of consciousness engine. So the jury is still out on that front, but I hope to study it, science can fail. There are certain things that science can't yet answer, like what happened before the Big Bang and so forth. But I think we have to give it our best shot.”
2019-04-10 · Conversations with Tyler · Ed Boyden on Minding your Brain · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Benjamin Lebette and John Dylan Haynes and others, where they ask people to, whenever they want, move their hand or do some other task. And then they image the human brain and they try to figure out what areas of the brain are active when people feel like they are making that decision. And they can actually detect changes in the brain up to 10 seconds before people feel like they're making the decision and move their hand. So that's a clue that maybe you could try to understand the process through which something comes into conscious awareness. And if we can map out the detailed circuitry, the electrical wires and the molecules along those wires that yield that. Maybe we could actually try to simulate it in a computer. But this is a very early stage way of thinking about it.”
2019-04-10 · Conversations with Tyler · Ed Boyden on Minding your Brain · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, I try not to have opinions, but I do try to think about, which I know is impossible, but I do try to think out the approach that one could take, because I'm an engineer at heart, and then the question is, what can we do about it? And so here's one thing I've been thinking a lot about. Suppose that at a certain moment I am conscious of something and my brain has a certain state. Presumably that brain state was caused by a previous brain state, and during that previous brain state, we were not conscious, otherwise we would have called that the conscious experience. So one reason why I'm so focused on brain circuit mapping is if we could catch the brain circuit in action as a conscious sensation or feeling comes into fruition, maybe we could understand the process of consciousness. And so maybe that would give us a clue about what consciousness is because we could understand how it arises. So this is a very early stage way of thinking about the problem, and we don't have any data yet, really. But there are other people who have actually done some cool experiments.”
2019-04-10 · Conversations with Tyler · Ed Boyden on Minding your Brain · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“had found some evidence that when you activate a brain cell, interesting transcriptional spatial changes occur. In fact, one of my favorite studies was done by a group in Utah. They found when brain cells are active, they turn on a gene. And this gene looks a lot like the coat protein of the HIV virus, the same virus that causes AIDS. And maybe even more amazingly, when a brain cell is active, it manufactures virus-like particles that can bring genetic material from one brain cell to another. So it's kind of wacky to think about it when you actually put your mind to it. When you're forming a memory, is your brain manufacturing HIV-like things and you're exchanging genetic material from one brain cell to the next? What the heck is going on? But I think that just shows how little we know about the mechanisms of brain function.”
2019-04-10 · Conversations with Tyler · Ed Boyden on Minding your Brain · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Think what we have learned from the history of biology is that if a biological system could use some biological resource to get something done, it will. And so you bring up the question of RNA. Brain cells have one nucleus with the genome inside, but thousands of synaptic connections. So does it make sense to only have genes on or off at the nucleus level? You might want to turn genes on or off at the synapse level. And so one of the things, actually, that our group published a couple years ago is a technology, a version of expansion microscopy, where we could actually try to map out which expressed genes are located at which synapses. We can take a break and blow it up and then look at where the expressed genes are cached or stored throughout the brain cell. So now several groups are, I think, using such technologies to try to map out whether indeed all the different biomolecular types are involved with plasticity. So it's kind of early days, but previous groups before we even unveiled this technology.”
2019-04-10 · Conversations with Tyler · Ed Boyden on Minding your Brain · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, it's a good question. One possibility is that if you are emulating the brain, maybe you can run the simulation for a short period of time. But if you want to integrate all the changes that are due to the rest of the body to encompass more complex things like long-term emotions or moods you might call them or memory or personality, you might have to think about the body as an ecosystem. And then there's also the concept of extended intelligence, where I'm not So I think what's going to happen is we're going to need to be able to simulate as much of the biology as possible. And then there might be a point where things kind of become unpredictable. What do we need to know next? Do we have to map out the structure of human interactions as well?”
2019-04-10 · Conversations with Tyler · Ed Boyden on Minding your Brain · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Oh, we've now realized as a community my group doesn't work on this yet, but it's a very exciting area, that the brain is almost like part of an ecosystem that you could call the body. And the whole body is computing together. So maybe over the time course of several seconds, when you have an individual thought or feeling, maybe a lot of that is contained within the brain. But if you go beyond that time scale, there might be microbes in the gut that secrete molecules that can actually get into the brain and modulate complex functions, like maybe even social behavior, some people think.”
2019-04-10 · Conversations with Tyler · Ed Boyden on Minding your Brain · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, and this is a question I think that is going to become more and more urgent as neurotechnology advances. So already there are questions about attention focusing drugs like ritalin or adderol. Maybe they make people more focused, but are you sacrificing some of the wandering and creativity that might exist in the brain and be very important for not only personal productivity, but the future of humanity? And I think what we're realizing is that when you intervene with the brain, even with brain stimulation, you can cause unpredictable side effects. So for example, there's a part of the brain called the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex. And that's actually an FTA-approved site for stimulation with non-invasive inetic pulses that treat depression. But patients, when they're stimulated here, people have done studies, it can also change things like trust. It can change things like driving ability. So there's only so many brain regions, but there's millions of things we do. Of course, intervening with one region might change many things.”
2019-04-10 · Conversations with Tyler · Ed Boyden on Minding your Brain · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It's a good question. I think that there are a lot of different ways of trying to confront everyday stressors that cause anxiety or despair and so forth. For me, I played with a lot of different strategies, including other kinds of meditation that aren't so focused on the parts of your mind. And to be honest, I felt relaxed after doing those kinds of meditation, but I didn't feel like the parts of my mind were becoming allies. So that was unique with me anyway, and other people might differ, but with the IFS method.”
2019-04-10 · Conversations with Tyler · Ed Boyden on Minding your Brain · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I personally find it effective. I meditate every day, and I've been practicing a form of internal family systems meditation where you kind of treat the parts of your mind like members of a family and show compassion for them and thank them and love them and they relax and become more of your ally. And I've done this about 10 years now, 2009. My landlady in Palo Alto, when I was a grad student at Stanford, taught me about it. And it took me a while to actually get going on it. But yeah, I find it transformative because the parts of your mind that might be driving you anxious or causing despair, you realize what they're trying to do for you. And you, by loving them and showing gratitude to them, can make them, you know, on your team rather than trying to rebel against you.”
2019-04-10 · Conversations with Tyler · Ed Boyden on Minding your Brain · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You know, that's not my area of expertise. I mean, personally, I think that there's a lot of interesting questions about how chemicals modulate brain circuits and psychedelics and lots of other chemicals could have interesting effects. So another psychedelic ketamine which causes hallucinations has actually been seeing a lot of trials recently for its effects on rapidly helping depressed patients feel better. So most antidepressants take three weeks or more to help people ketabine will help within tens of minutes to hours. So that's an example where Hellacinogenic drug can actually have a rapid acting effect on a psychiatric illness. I wouldn't be surprised if there are other interesting findings that could be brought out of this, but I'm not an expert on that area, unfortunately.”
2019-04-10 · Conversations with Tyler · Ed Boyden on Minding your Brain · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So that's the big question, isn't it? And I think the honest answer is since we don't know what consciousness is, right? You don't even know for sure if I'm conscious, right? Maybe I'm just a very accurate robot that's sitting here while my true self is lying on the beach somewhere soaking up the rays. That's kind of the big open question. There's no conscious meter that says, oh, that being is a conscious being. There's no way to create consciousness from scratch as far as we can tell. So I think one of the things we have to figure out is how can you detect consciousness and how can you create consciousness? Alan Turing proposed the Turing test where you would converse with something and you could try to decide whether it's conscious. But with Siri and Alexa and all this stuff in homes and on phones nowadays, I think everybody would agree that's probably not enough. You need to know something about the internal state as well. But we don't have a firm grasp on that yet.”
2019-04-10 · Conversations with Tyler · Ed Boyden on Minding your Brain · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, if we had a detailed map of the wiring, and also we could locate and identify where the key biomolecules are, I wouldn't be surprised if someday we could make a biophysicalally accurate simulation in a computer. In fact, for very small neural circuits, like in the Krabs to Madagastric ganglion, Eve Martyr at Brandeis already has been able to do biophysically accurate human understandable simulations. So then the question, though, is the...”
2019-04-10 · Conversations with Tyler · Ed Boyden on Minding your Brain · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, so brain circuits are very densely wired electrical circuits. So a brain cell will have electricity flow throughout, and then brain cells have connections called synapses, which exchange chemicals. And in a cubic millimeter of your brain, you have about 100,000 brain cells with about a billion connections between them. So how are they wired up? That would give you a big clue about what the computation is that's occurring. How does the information flow and how is it transformed? So what we want to do is using our expansion technique, we want to make a map of the brain which literally would tell you where the wires are and how they're connected to each other, but also which biomolecules are on those wires. Are some connections fast? Are some slow? Are some strong? Are some weak? To tell those things, we have to know more than the shape of the cells. We have to also know where the molecules that do the business of the neural computations, where they are located as well.”
2019-04-10 · Conversations with Tyler · Ed Boyden on Minding your Brain · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That's right. So now we've actually taught hundreds and hundreds of research groups how to do this, and we ourselves are trying to use the technique to make entire maps of initially small brains, like fish and flies and worms and so forth. But if it works well, we want to scale it up to mammalian brains, like mice and then to human brains. If we can make a map of the brain so detailed that we could simulate decisions or emotions in silico, in software, we would be very excited about this because it would kind of tie into my own desires for neuroscience, which is to understand something deep about the human condition. also the practicality of it is that we can make very detailed maps of the brain and figure out where diseases begin.”
2019-04-10 · Conversations with Tyler · Ed Boyden on Minding your Brain · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, so two then grad students, Faith Shen and Paul Tilberg and my group, we decided, what if we could take a piece of the brain preserved, of course? These are not living brains, and we infuse the specimens with the same kind of chemical that you find in baby diapers, a swellable polymer. And if you do it just right and you soften up the brain so that it doesn't resist the forces that you're going to apply, add water, the diaper material swells, and the brain will become bigger by like 100 times or 10,000 times in volume. And so it turns out we discovered that you can The process is very even. It preserves the information of how the molecules are organized. It's just bigger. And that can help us make.”
2019-04-10 · Conversations with Tyler · Ed Boyden on Minding your Brain · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, for three hundred years people have been trying to zoom into biology, lenses to see bacteria, and then about 100 years ago people started finding out about brain cells and other interesting things. But there's a problem. You can't see things much smaller than the size or wavelength of light, and light has a finite wavelength of a couple hundred nanometers. Now, that might sound small, but biomolecules are much smaller. They're a couple nanometers. So they're like 100 times smaller than the limit of a microscope. So there are tricks you can play. A bunch of people won the Nobel Prize a couple years ago for inventing super resolution microscopes, which are very accurate, but they can be expensive and slow and they're hard to use to image three-dimensional objects. So in my group, we often start by trying to think about, can we do the opposite of what other people have done? And so we started thinking, what if we, instead of zooming in, like they've done for 300 years, let's blow it up? And so to then grad students like”
2019-04-10 · Conversations with Tyler · Ed Boyden on Minding your Brain · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Out of optogenetically inspired Yeah. Well, there's a lot of people who are discovering regions of the brain that you can modulate to shut down, for example, epileptic seizures. People have found that if you stimulate the brain in certain patterns, you could actually help with Parkinsonian symptoms. Again, in mice, and again, it requires a gene therapy, which is expensive to deploy to humans. But if you use the information they've gotten by studying Parkinson's and epilepsy in mice and then try to build non-invasive ways of controlling the brain to repair it, I think that could translate to humans quite rapidly. And so in my group near Grossman, who was then a postdoc in the group, we actually found a way to focus the effects of electricity deep in the brain from the outside. So imagine now that we use optogenetics to discover a pattern of activity, and then we try to induce it through non-invasive means, like watching movies, hearing sounds, focusing electricity from the outside and so forth. I think that could be a pretty good pipeline for the future.”
2019-04-10 · Conversations with Tyler · Ed Boyden on Minding your Brain · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So this is an interesting, you know, I think of Uptogenetics as a tool for discovering how to repair the brain, but then you can build very practical technologies to try to help people. And so my collaborator, Lee Wei Sai, led a project where she used our optogenetic tools initially to discover a pattern of brain activity that in mice engineered to get the symptoms of Alzheimer's disease that would actually make them better. And then the teens went on to actually discover that through a movie, a bunch of blinking lights and so forth, you could simulate the same pattern of activity. So Lee and I have now co-founded a company called Cognitotherapeutics to effectively do human trials of movies to treat Alzheimer's.”
2019-04-10 · Conversations with Tyler · Ed Boyden on Minding your Brain · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“We've given the technologies to thousands and thousands of research groups at this point. So people have been using the techniques to study even very complex things like memory or aggression or complex emotions. One of my favorite studies was done by Da Yu Lin and David Anderson and colleagues. They took a molecule that lets you activate neurons with blue light. And they put it into a region of the brain deep, deep in the brain. And then they implanted an optical fiber connected to a laser and aimed the optical fiber at this cluster of cells. Now what happened when they turned on the laser, these cells were activated and this was done in mice. The mice would become aggressive or violent. They would attack whatever was next to them, even if it was a rubber glove. And so what I like about these technologies is we can start to ask questions about why does the brain do what it does? What is the nature of something like a decision or an emotion or even something like aggression or violence where it has ethical implications?”
2019-04-10 · Conversations with Tyler · Ed Boyden on Minding your Brain · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, this is where we got really lucky. So it turns out that these solar panels are actually proteins, and proteins are encoded by DNA, so you can use all these tricks from gene therapy to deliver the gene into the brain, and then it'll make the product, this little protein-encoded solar panel.”
2019-04-10 · Conversations with Tyler · Ed Boyden on Minding your Brain · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So, algae have these, archaea have them. Yep. So they make these little molecules, proteins, that convert light to electricity. We transplant them into brain cells, and then we can control the electrical pulses of brain cells with light.”
2019-04-10 · Conversations with Tyler · Ed Boyden on Minding your Brain · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, I think it's important to point out the goal. So the goal here is that if you could precisely control neural activity, maybe you could actually repair a brain or discover the principles of how to repair the brain, which could inspire better drugs or better non-invasive brain stimulation methods. So what we do is to speak the natural language of the brain, which is electrical pulses, we borrow from the natural world effectively tiny solar panels that exist in bacteria and plants. And those are archaeons.”
2019-04-10 · Conversations with Tyler · Ed Boyden on Minding your Brain · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“While this is a big mystery, so there are two issues which really need to be addressed. So, one is that mental illnesses, for the most part, are defined by the symptoms. I have a lack of appetite. I feel apathy. I don't feel pleasure in things that I normally do take pleasure in. And then the chemical side is also a bit murky. If we think about pharmaceuticals to treat brain conditions, it's bathing the brain, this complexly wired circuit in a substance. And so, of course, it's going to affect parts of the brain that you want to change as well as parts of the brain that you'd rather leave alone. So I think part of the problem is we need to define brain conditions in terms of the underlying wiring and circuitry. And so most of the technologies we build are oriented around two classes of approach. One is can we make maps of the brain detailed maps of the wiring, if you will, of the brain. And the other is can you watch and control the high-speed dynamics of the brain? In other words, can you watch the brain in action and then perturb it so that you can heal the brain by speaking the natural language of the brain?”
2019-04-10 · Conversations with Tyler · Ed Boyden on Minding your Brain · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think something that people don't appreciate is how little we know about the brain. So if you think about brain diseases, you know, like Alzheimer's and Parkinson's and epilepsy, basically none of these can be cured. And that treatments, if they do exist, are very partial and have a lot of side effects. And similarly, we don't actually have theories, detailed knowledge enough to make predictive, interesting models, for example, of how we form emotions, of how we make decisions. So I think that I sometimes half-jokingly say we should write a book about the brain called ignorance. What we don't know about the brain, not sure how many copies it would sell, though.”
2019-04-10 · Conversations with Tyler · Ed Boyden on Minding your Brain · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source