YouSaid · the spoken record

Theodore Schwartz

lines on the record: 74
first: 2025-05-21
most recent: 2025-05-21
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

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“So you'll appreciate this. I'm starting a company to make a device. It's something I've always wanted to do. And I'm hopeful that it's something that will allow me to touch not just one individual and help one individual, but it'll be a medical device that will help thousands of people and hundreds of thousands of people. So I'm going to move a little bit in that direction.”
2025-05-21 · Conversations with Tyler · Theodore Schwartz on Neurosurgery, Consciousness, and Brain-Computer Interfaces · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You look at the Oedipal complex and just judge him that way, then sure, there's a lot to criticize. But if you look at his structure of the mind and how he has subverted the power of the ego and sort of validated the unconscious, I think he was brilliant.”
2025-05-21 · Conversations with Tyler · Theodore Schwartz on Neurosurgery, Consciousness, and Brain-Computer Interfaces · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Look, I think at the time, the fact that Freud realized that we have an unconscious that is controlling what we do based on what was going on at the time, you know, some people think just like Copernicus and Darwin, you know, Freud was that revolution that sort of took our own agency and our control of ourselves, the ego, and sort of said, no, the ego is like this little tiny thing. The unconscious is really what's making all these decisions. And now circa 2025, we realize that the brain is doing an enormous amount of processing, that we're not conscious of that unconscious processing is exactly what Freud was getting at back in Victorian London. So in Vienna, excuse me, I think he was probably underrated. And I think, you know, if you look at Freud from a feminist perspective and you don't like penis envy,”
2025-05-21 · Conversations with Tyler · Theodore Schwartz on Neurosurgery, Consciousness, and Brain-Computer Interfaces · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I read a lot about philosophy of mind and philosophy of intelligence and consciousness and self and agency. So I'm constantly reading and listening to podcasts of new thinkers about those ideas. I find that fascinating. And it's certainly based on my knowledge of the brain. My father was a Freudian psychoanalyst, so I grew up in a household that was very concerned with the brain and the mind and behavior. And I will often try to carve out an hour or two a day to try to read and better myself and think about those types of philosophical ideas.”
2025-05-21 · Conversations with Tyler · Theodore Schwartz on Neurosurgery, Consciousness, and Brain-Computer Interfaces · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think that changes person to person. I know some neurosurgeons who are quite talented and they are humble, sweet. They don't appear to be arrogant in other aspects of their life. And I know others who are differently. I really think that there's no stereotype for that.”
2025-05-21 · Conversations with Tyler · Theodore Schwartz on Neurosurgery, Consciousness, and Brain-Computer Interfaces · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“But these are the risks, and these are the known risks. Because if you're too confident, you get to be arrogant. And if you're arrogant, then you're telling your patients that they're going to do perfect. You're lying to them. And then you don't change. You don't look introspectively when you make mistakes and say, all right, you know, this wasn't perfect. How do I go to do this better next time? So I think you have to be confident, but you have to be humble at the same time and you have to have just that right balance.”
2025-05-21 · Conversations with Tyler · Theodore Schwartz on Neurosurgery, Consciousness, and Brain-Computer Interfaces · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And you have to feel that, right? And you have to earn that. At the same time, when you make a mistake and it doesn't come out the way you want it, and that will inevitably happen to everyone, you have to have the humility to say, what did I do wrong? How can I do it better? You also have to have the honesty to say to your patients, look, I'm going to do my best for you. That I can promise you.”
2025-05-21 · Conversations with Tyler · Theodore Schwartz on Neurosurgery, Consciousness, and Brain-Computer Interfaces · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, it's funny you mentioned my brother in law who works at Goldman Sachs was telling me that he was at some meeting where someone was giving them a lecture about ego and confidence and you can imagine Wall Street traders have a lot of ego and confidence. And the conclusion was that neurosurgeons have more ego and confidence than any of the Wall Street traders. But the way I talk about it is you have to at the same time have confidence and humility. And you have to combine the two. And it's very difficult to do. But yes, you have to have a certain amount of confidence to tell someone sitting in front of you, I want you to trust me with the most important thing in that you possess, which is your brain and your health. You're going to basically go to sleep and give it to me for four hours and put it under my care and I'm going to do some risky stuff. But you need to have that done. And I have to have the confidence to say I'm the best person to do this or I'm one of the best people to do this for you.”
2025-05-21 · Conversations with Tyler · Theodore Schwartz on Neurosurgery, Consciousness, and Brain-Computer Interfaces · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I would say somewhere in the early 70s, there are surgeons in their early 70s who are quite good. And everyone, there's going to be a bell-shaped curve, right? You understand that, obviously. And so some people are going to be on the tail end of that curve and operate well later than that. But I would say the middle of that bell-shaped curve is going to be late 60s, early 70s.”
2025-05-21 · Conversations with Tyler · Theodore Schwartz on Neurosurgery, Consciousness, and Brain-Computer Interfaces · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, age is, as you can imagine, different with everybody, right? Just like the president of the United States. There's no absolute age that a president is too old. It really has to do with the competence of age. But on average, right?”
2025-05-21 · Conversations with Tyler · Theodore Schwartz on Neurosurgery, Consciousness, and Brain-Computer Interfaces · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I do. I do. I'm in my office now. I have three bases and two guitars. And I played with a group of neurosurgeons in a band called the Neurosurgery Jazz Quintet for many years. We played at all our meetings. And I'm playing, I have a friend whose 60th birthday is coming up, who's a friend of mine, who's a musician, and he asked me to bring my bass guitar, so I'm practicing a little bit for that.”
2025-05-21 · Conversations with Tyler · Theodore Schwartz on Neurosurgery, Consciousness, and Brain-Computer Interfaces · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You know, I think you become more efficient at things as you get older because you become better at them. So an operation that would take me eight hours, you know, 10 years ago, takes me four hours now, and then three hours, you also have people who help you, right? So if I'm writing a paper, I have a resident and I may say, you know, I have an idea for a paper. Why don't you write the paper and send me the rough draft? Here's the data. And so if I have six or seven of those people who are writing papers for me based on my ideas and giving me a rough draft and all I have, then I have to edit it and make sure that the data is correct and help them with the introduction and the discussion, you can be much more efficient because you have people who are helping you. And when you start your career, you don't have those people under you who are helping you. But once you've proven that you can write a lot of papers, then you get contacted by millions of people who say, hey, I want to write a paper with you because they know that you can get it done. And so you say, I say, great. I have a great idea. You realize that idea. I will help you write it. And then it allows you to sort of multiply yourself.”
2025-05-21 · Conversations with Tyler · Theodore Schwartz on Neurosurgery, Consciousness, and Brain-Computer Interfaces · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, again, it takes time, right? I think it's efficient over time. Given enough time, it's that efficient. Given day to day, year to year, no, it's not that efficient.”
2025-05-21 · Conversations with Tyler · Theodore Schwartz on Neurosurgery, Consciousness, and Brain-Computer Interfaces · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“But it was our best guess at that moment in time based on the available evidence, right? And that's all science is. It's our best guess based on the available evidence. And once that evidence changes, then we could all be wrong. I mean, I think the best scientist is the one who says, this is how I do it now, but I could be completely wrong. So just if you can show me better evidence, I will change my mind. But based on what I know now, this is what I'm saying.”
2025-05-21 · Conversations with Tyler · Theodore Schwartz on Neurosurgery, Consciousness, and Brain-Computer Interfaces · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, I mean, I think, yes, there's always going to be politics involved, and we always come to any problem from a unique single perspective, and institutions are going to have their biases. So yes, that is true. But in the long run, the scientific method will figure it out. And there will be one right answer. And that institution, whatever their biases will be proven wrong in the long run. Now, those people might be dead and won't be able to apologize at that point. But I think we're not in the long run.”
2025-05-21 · Conversations with Tyler · Theodore Schwartz on Neurosurgery, Consciousness, and Brain-Computer Interfaces · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Could be accomplished. So I think there are some instances where you've experienced something firsthand and other people haven't experienced it and you may hold a belief that's different than them. But ultimately, science will prevail, right? And ultimately the burden of proof is on you to show that your new technique is as good or better than the other technique. And I wouldn't expect them to believe me until I was able to prove it by writing dozens and dozens of articles and having other people who also were doing that surgery. So it was reproducible to prove that it was correct. But in general, I tend to follow the science. So I'm not much of a wing nut.”
2025-05-21 · Conversations with Tyler · Theodore Schwartz on Neurosurgery, Consciousness, and Brain-Computer Interfaces · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That's a tough one because I tend to be very scientifically motivated in the opinions that I give. I try to follow the literature. I tend not to be out on a limb too much. But I will say there was a period of time in my career when I was starting to do minimally invasive neurosurgical procedures. And what that means is instead of doing the procedures that I had learned where you open up the side of the head and take off the skull and pull down the muscle and go around the brain, I'm learning and pioneering surgeries where we go in through the nostrils with endoscopes or make little incisions in the eyelid. And I think at the time when I was doing those operations, most neurosurgeons thought they were crazy and that they shouldn't be done and that they were unsafe. But it was only because I was doing them at the time and I knew that I could do it. And the other surgeons had never seen it done. They had never experienced it. So they didn't realize what”
2025-05-21 · Conversations with Tyler · Theodore Schwartz on Neurosurgery, Consciousness, and Brain-Computer Interfaces · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think there was one shooter. There are many controversies about Kennedy, whether Lee Harvey was motivated by the FBI or the mafia. I'm not going to weigh in on. But in terms of the bullets, what's fascinating about that controversy is that when JFK rolled into Parkland Memorial Hospital and was examined by neurosurgeon Walter Kemp Clark, he did not find an entrance wound in the back of the head. And the Warren Commission said that Kennedy was shot in the back of the head, and that's where Lee RV Hawd was standing. And it was never quite clear why the surgeon examining him didn't find an entrance wound. And one of the things I tried to do with this book is that there's a lot of papers written in the neurosurgical literature that the general public is not aware of. And so 50 years after Kennedy was shot, a guy named Bob Grossman, who was the chairman of neurosurgery down in Houston, wrote an article.”
2025-05-21 · Conversations with Tyler · Theodore Schwartz on Neurosurgery, Consciousness, and Brain-Computer Interfaces · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, I mean, you know, Fantastic Voyage, if you know that old movie where they would shrink the scientist and the ship down into a nanobot size and put them into the blood. Yeah, sure. I think that would be great. But again, you have to get out of the blood vessels and into the parenchuma of the brain to do things. There are some diseases you can treat from within a blood vessel, but there are other diseases that you can't treat within a blood vessel. So the nanobots have to be able to get out and get back in.”
2025-05-21 · Conversations with Tyler · Theodore Schwartz on Neurosurgery, Consciousness, and Brain-Computer Interfaces · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Brain and find the aneurysm and put a clip around it. And it was very invasive and would take hours and hours. And now we can do it almost non-invasively with a little needle stick. So I think our biggest problem is that we have the skull in the way.”
2025-05-21 · Conversations with Tyler · Theodore Schwartz on Neurosurgery, Consciousness, and Brain-Computer Interfaces · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think the fact that we have to open up the head with a scalpel and drill to get into the skull. And I think the holy grail for us is to put down the scalpel and to not have to drill through the skull and to be able to deliver energy into the brain without opening up the head. And we can do that now with radiation, with focused radiation. But focused radiation can only do so much. We can do it with focused ultrasound as well. Someday we'll be able to optically focus light into the brain in certain areas and maybe have optogenetic things that we give into the brain so that the light alters the circuitry of the brain. We can operate on the brain through the blood vessels, which is great. You can treat an aneurysm literally by sticking a needle into someone's wrist and threading a catheter up into the brain and putting metal coils into an aneurysm, whereas in the past we would have to open up their skin and their skull and open the skull and go around the brain and dissect into the brain.”
2025-05-21 · Conversations with Tyler · Theodore Schwartz on Neurosurgery, Consciousness, and Brain-Computer Interfaces · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It's mostly randomly distributed. It doesn't say anything specific about who you're going to be, what kind of a person you're going to be. Unfortunately, there's different types of epilepsy. There are epileptics who the medicines don't really work that well, and epilepsy can be a devastating disease to those people. And if you have it when you're younger and you're developing, your brain may not develop normally. But there are some people who have epilepsy and take medication and have very few seizures and they have very high IQs and are very highly functional. So it doesn't have to alter your brain or your personality in any particular way. And there are some lucky people who can live with it without any noticeable alterations.”
2025-05-21 · Conversations with Tyler · Theodore Schwartz on Neurosurgery, Consciousness, and Brain-Computer Interfaces · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And I'm not trying to diminish religious experiences per se, but the fact that you can alter someone's beliefs and their religious experiences by altering the brain tells us a lot about religion and about the human mind and the human brain.”
2025-05-21 · Conversations with Tyler · Theodore Schwartz on Neurosurgery, Consciousness, and Brain-Computer Interfaces · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Epilepsy is a fascinating disease because it's a disease of the circuitry of the brain and not the anatomy of the brain. You know, a lot of neurological neurosurgical illnesses in particular, brain tumors, aneurysms, there's an anatomic problem. Often when we operate on epilepsy, we see epilepsy. The brain looks completely normal. It's the circuitry that's abnormal. And some of the symptoms that an epileptic can have are symptoms that mimic human experience. So there are famous cases of, for example, I write about Dostoevsky, who was an epileptic, and he used to experience the presence of God in all of his, when he had a seizure. He was 100% certain that God exists and he would have a religious experience associated with that seizure. And that's been well described. And then when you treat them either with medicine or surgery and you cure them of their epilepsy, their religious experiences go away.”
2025-05-21 · Conversations with Tyler · Theodore Schwartz on Neurosurgery, Consciousness, and Brain-Computer Interfaces · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, I think as we talked about, depression is a mechanical, neurologic, biochemical disorder, or it's the normal of someone, but they don't want that to be their normal. And anything, any emotion that you have can be altered based on changing the chemicals and the connections in your brain. And ECT does that. A seizure is a wave of neuronal depolarization and chemical release that's very, very powerful in the brain that alters the network functioning of your brain”
2025-05-21 · Conversations with Tyler · Theodore Schwartz on Neurosurgery, Consciousness, and Brain-Computer Interfaces · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah. So ECT basically is giving someone a seizure. We found out years ago that patients who had depression and then suffered a seizure got much better. Their depression got better. So we thought, huh, maybe we can trigger a seizure by essentially putting a cardiac defibrillator on the skull, stimulating the brain, causing a seizure with the patient under anesthesia, then wake them up. And it does work. It makes people better. I wouldn't say it's the most delicate, refined treatment for depression at the moment, and it's only used for very refractory depression. But right now, it is one of the best treatments we have for depression. And so I think it should be used in capable hands and qualified hands. Hopefully we'll have more refined treatments for depression in the future. And we'll look back at ECT and be like, wow, that was crazy. We were doing ECT. We have such a better treatment now.”
2025-05-21 · Conversations with Tyler · Theodore Schwartz on Neurosurgery, Consciousness, and Brain-Computer Interfaces · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, but there's an indication for it. So, no, I think the time will come if it can be completely safe to hook you up to a computer safely. You don't need permission to buy a cell phone, right? Like right now, we already have a brain computer interface. It's a cell phone. It's just that it's very slow. So once it's perfectly safe, then absolutely. It will not need to be regulated any more than Facebook and X need to be regulated by the government because of abuse. I mean, those types of things may need to be regulated. What you can do with it if we feel like it's detrimental to society. But just the fact that you want to buy a cell phone, no one's regulating your ability to buy a cell phone. And it'll be the same thing.”
2025-05-21 · Conversations with Tyler · Theodore Schwartz on Neurosurgery, Consciousness, and Brain-Computer Interfaces · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That's the difference. So you're talking, I don't like that analogy of the appendix because you need your appendix out for a medical reason, right? As opposed to you just want to be hooked up to chat GPT.”
2025-05-21 · Conversations with Tyler · Theodore Schwartz on Neurosurgery, Consciousness, and Brain-Computer Interfaces · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“No, you can pull them out. You can pull them out. So the electrodes that go in the brain, that's one of the risks, right? Because if you have a normal human being, you don't want to put electrodes in the brain and risk damaging the brain. Right now, the neural link device puts electrodes in part of the brain, the control movement, and these are people are paralyzed, so they're not using that part of the brain. But there are other brain computer interfaces that just put the electrodes on the surface of the brain. So they don't damage the brain at all. And that's the kind of thing you can do in a normal human being. And you can get the same information from an electrode on the surface of the brain as you can from electrodes in the brain. And so the issue is you have to open up the skin and the skull and slip them in. And there are some risks to doing that. But just getting the electrodes on and off the brain without damaging the brain is something we can already do.”
2025-05-21 · Conversations with Tyler · Theodore Schwartz on Neurosurgery, Consciousness, and Brain-Computer Interfaces · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Know who have ALS or are locked in and need that type of a device, although the market is bigger. What will be fascinating is if we get to the point where we can do it in a non-invasive way and enhance normal human beings. So someday, Tyler, we could have this podcast and you could have a device in your brain that allows you to communicate with me wirelessly through a computer. That is not unrealistic. And we could have this whole conversation virtually just by thinking about what we want to say to each other.”
2025-05-21 · Conversations with Tyler · Theodore Schwartz on Neurosurgery, Consciousness, and Brain-Computer Interfaces · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Computer interfaces in Neuralink is just one company among many companies out there that are creating brain computer interfaces that in institutions, academic institutions around the world, we've already seen that you can put a brain computer interface into someone's brains paralyzed. And you can have them move a robotic arm. You can have them drive a car. You could have them speak. If you have someone who cannot talk because they can't move their mouth, you can take the language, production out of their brain, put it into a computer, and have a robot or a picture of someone's face speaking as that person is thinking what words they want to say. So that technology already exists and it's just about making it commercially available and making it self-contained so you don't have wires sticking out of your head. And so I think Neurolink's going to be very successful. I really do. What I worry about in the short run is the business plan and the market. Right now there's a limited market for paralyzed people.”
2025-05-21 · Conversations with Tyler · Theodore Schwartz on Neurosurgery, Consciousness, and Brain-Computer Interfaces · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, so I am very interested in brain computer interfaces. I think that Neuralink has created a very unique and interesting device. There are different ways to create brain computer interfaces. There are basically two different classes of devices. And what Neuralink does is it puts electrodes into the brain itself to record from individual neurons. There are other devices out there that put electrodes on the surface of the brain. And we don't know at this time which one is going to be better. They're probably both quite good. But what Musk has done with Neuralink is a great device because the electrodes that he put in are malleable, right? They're not rigid electrodes. So the brain is constantly pulsating and moving. And so the electrodes can move with the brain, which is great. Previously, all electrodes put in the brain would create a dense scar around the electrodes to try to pop them out. Those electrodes don't appear to do that. But I think what's important for the audience to understand about brain”
2025-05-21 · Conversations with Tyler · Theodore Schwartz on Neurosurgery, Consciousness, and Brain-Computer Interfaces · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, again, I think it says the same thing that I've been saying all along. You speak about addiction. There's another famous story about people who are taking a certain Parkinson's drug, and they became compulsive gamblers, right? We know that certain medications that you take, changing the chemistry of your brain can make you more prone to risky behaviors and gambling. And the same is true of addiction. I think using deep brain stimulation to modify addiction is something that's being tried right now. You know, there are animal models where that's being done fairly effectively.”
2025-05-21 · Conversations with Tyler · Theodore Schwartz on Neurosurgery, Consciousness, and Brain-Computer Interfaces · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Brain. So, not everything gets in. So you could imagine a time in the near future where you take a pill for depression that's very effective and then you do focused ultrasound, open up the blood brain barrier only in those circuits, in those anatomic areas that are important for depression, and that drug will only get into those specific areas in very high doses. And that could be a much more effective treatment than what we have now.”
2025-05-21 · Conversations with Tyler · Theodore Schwartz on Neurosurgery, Consciousness, and Brain-Computer Interfaces · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, I think we have some, right? I mean, there are medications that we take that are pretty effective at alleviating depression. The thing about medications and the biochemical part of it is that when you take a medication as a pill, it goes everywhere in your brain, right? And depression is probably only in certain places in your brain. There are only certain frontal lobe circuits that probably mediate the depression. But if you take a drug that alters a neurotransmitter in your brain as a pill, right now that goes to everywhere in your brain. So it's going to have side effects. It's not going to be selective for just the circuits that are causing the depression. There's a new technique that we have called focused ultrasound, which is a fascinating device where we can focus ultrasound beams through the skull into the brain and open up what's called the blood brain barrier. So when I take a drug orally, take a pill, put an IV drug in, a lot of those drugs don't get into the brain because there's protection because the brain doesn't want poison or toxins to influence the brain.”
2025-05-21 · Conversations with Tyler · Theodore Schwartz on Neurosurgery, Consciousness, and Brain-Computer Interfaces · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Fine. I just wanted to make sure you were differentiating. But yeah, I mean, you could imagine disorders. You know, there's another famous case of someone who had a large brain tumor. And as the tumor got bigger pushing on their frontal lobe, they became very interested in child pornography and couldn't control themselves and they were going to go to jail and they found this huge brain tumor and they took the tumor out and those desires went away. And then five years later they came back and they re-imaged the patient's head and the brain tumor had recurred. So that's the frontal lobe. It's the area where we did frontal lobotomies that is very sensitive for behavior. So it's clear that so much of who we are is based on the circuitry of our brain and how well it's functioning and alterations in those circuits can have profound effects on personality and behavior.”
2025-05-21 · Conversations with Tyler · Theodore Schwartz on Neurosurgery, Consciousness, and Brain-Computer Interfaces · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, I think we'll have a very effective treatment for depression and certain mental diseases, things where it's circuitry that's involved, but the biology is still intact. And then we can also talk about brain-computer interfaces, because I find that to be one of the most exciting forefronts. And I don't know if you, when you said deep brain stimulation, were you also referring to brain-computer interfaces? Not yet, but I am going to ask.”
2025-05-21 · Conversations with Tyler · Theodore Schwartz on Neurosurgery, Consciousness, and Brain-Computer Interfaces · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think any part because all parts of your personality are based on brain circuitry. And once we alter that circuitry, we will alter who you are. Just like when someone develops Alzheimer's disease and no longer recognizes their children, they become a different human being.”
2025-05-21 · Conversations with Tyler · Theodore Schwartz on Neurosurgery, Consciousness, and Brain-Computer Interfaces · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And when they turned it off, they no longer liked that musician anymore. So those kinds of desires can be created and extinguished with stimulating an electrode in the brain. The truth is really any part of your personality can be altered with an electrode or a number of electrodes placed in the right places and altering the circuitry of your brain appropriately.”
2025-05-21 · Conversations with Tyler · Theodore Schwartz on Neurosurgery, Consciousness, and Brain-Computer Interfaces · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So, I mean, it not only has potential, but that's what we do right now. So, the treatment of Parkinson's disease right now is to put an electrode in the brain, and that will stop your tremor in your hand if you have Parkinson's disease as a tremor. So we use deep brain stimulation for that purpose. We also can reduce seizures. We can treat patients with epilepsy with deep brain stimulation and reduce their seizures. And we're getting to the point where we can start to treat depression and obsessive-compulsive disorder and Tourette's and certain psychological issues with deep brain stimulation. We can alter someone's behavior, someone's desires, feelings based on deep brain stimulation, because all of our behaviors derive from circuits in the brain that are firing in a particular way. So one great example was a patient who had deep brain stimulation. And when they turned on the stimulator, they started to like a particular type of music, a musician.”
2025-05-21 · Conversations with Tyler · Theodore Schwartz on Neurosurgery, Consciousness, and Brain-Computer Interfaces · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, I don't think the storyteller part has free will. I don't think we know where those stories come from. I don't think we know where our ideas come from. I think they just emerge into our consciousness. I can't explain consciousness. I can't explain why it's something it's like to be Tyler Cowan and it's like something different to be Ted Schwartz. I have no idea why that is. So that's still a mystery.”
2025-05-21 · Conversations with Tyler · Theodore Schwartz on Neurosurgery, Consciousness, and Brain-Computer Interfaces · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So I think that there are hundreds of different modules processing information in the brain and determining what behaviors we should do and making decisions for us. And then we carry out that behavior. And then there's another part of the brain that basically is a storyteller that tries to make sense of it all after the fact. I do not think we have free will in the way that most people do. I think that our brains make decisions for us. We carry out those behaviors and then we write a story that makes it into a logical timeline that makes us feel as if we were the ones that there was a self that made that decision, whereas in fact that self didn't really exist.”
2025-05-21 · Conversations with Tyler · Theodore Schwartz on Neurosurgery, Consciousness, and Brain-Computer Interfaces · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, so I don't think that the unified self really exists in the way that we think it does. You know, as you mentioned, there's a neurosurgical operation called a corpus calisotomy where we can split the two sides of the brain in half so that they become two independently functioning brains. And that person does not feel like two people. They feel like one self. Even though the left side of the brain will make the right hand do one thing and the right side of the brain will make the left side do something else. So both halves of their body are being controlled by different brains. And sometimes they're behaving in opposite ways. But yet the individual still feels like a unified individual. How is that possible to have two brains and still feel like one's self? We can also remove half a brain. We do a surgery called a hemispherectomy where we take out half the brain. And that person doesn't wake up feeling like half a person, right? And we know that all that we are is our brain. That's what creates our...”
2025-05-21 · Conversations with Tyler · Theodore Schwartz on Neurosurgery, Consciousness, and Brain-Computer Interfaces · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, I would argue over time, we all change, right? So the Tyler Cowan of five seconds ago is different than the Tyler Cowan that's sitting here right now. So if you could replicate yourself so that there were two Tyler Cowen, I think those two people would diverge in who they are because they would be completely different people one second after they became a different person because their molecules would be on a different path, they'd have different experiences, they'd be in a different location in space. So I think we're constantly changing. So I think I would go in the transporter.”
2025-05-21 · Conversations with Tyler · Theodore Schwartz on Neurosurgery, Consciousness, and Brain-Computer Interfaces · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“There was that other, what was that magic, the show about the magicians with Hugh Jackman? Do you remember that show, The Prestige, I think it was called? That's right. He would do this magic act and it would literally kill him every time he did it and he would be revived.”
2025-05-21 · Conversations with Tyler · Theodore Schwartz on Neurosurgery, Consciousness, and Brain-Computer Interfaces · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Is there a way around that? Yeah, well, let's hope that AI is, right? Because the brain is just a very complex information processing machine. So the hope is that someday we'll have some sort of inorganic way of reproducing the same connections we have in the brain so that we can live on more permanently in another form. But certainly the biology, the biological material of the brain is problematic because those cells don't reproduce and they deteriorate. they don't regenerate.”
2025-05-21 · Conversations with Tyler · Theodore Schwartz on Neurosurgery, Consciousness, and Brain-Computer Interfaces · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“If you're a busy neurosurgeon doing complex neurosurgery, that will happen one or two times a year, and you carry those patients with you constantly.”
2025-05-21 · Conversations with Tyler · Theodore Schwartz on Neurosurgery, Consciousness, and Brain-Computer Interfaces · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think we're as happy as our last operation went, honestly. I think that, yes, if you go to a nursery meeting, people have smiles on their face and they're going out and shaking hands and telling funny stories and enjoying each other's company. But it is a way that we deal with the enormous pressure that we face. Not all surgeons are happy-go-lucky. Some are very cold and mechanical in their personalities. And that can be an advantage, right, to be emotionally isolated from what you're doing so that you can perform at a high level and not think about the significance of what you're doing, but just think about the task that you're doing. So on the whole, yes, we're happy. But the minute you have a complication or a problem, you become very unhappy and it weighs on you tremendously. And it's something that we deal with and think about all the time. The complications we have, the patients that we've unfortunately hurt and not helped, although they're few and far between.”
2025-05-21 · Conversations with Tyler · Theodore Schwartz on Neurosurgery, Consciousness, and Brain-Computer Interfaces · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Because I want to make sure I perform it my best, but that patient doesn't really know what I've been through. They don't know that there wasn't some horrible tragedy in my life the night before. They don't know that I didn't binge on some, you know, not a drug addict at that moment in time because we don't do drug testing and we don't do any sort of testing for surgeons before they walk into the operating room. I'm not saying that should be done because I think we'd all like our freedoms and not like to be under that kind of scrutiny. But it is ironic. We do give an enormous amount of trust to the”
2025-05-21 · Conversations with Tyler · Theodore Schwartz on Neurosurgery, Consciousness, and Brain-Computer Interfaces · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, think about it. Back when Harvey Cushing was a neurosurgeon, there was no one to sub in for him. There were no neurosurgeons. The field didn't exist. He was the first surgeon to dedicate his life just to neurosurgery. So it wasn't like there were other surgeons that had even remotely the ability. So even Harvey Cushing with his son's death weighing on him would have given you a better outcome than any other surgeon of that error. Now, in the modern day, Yes, of course, there are hundreds and hundreds of competent surgeons who could sub in. And yes, a surgeon nowadays should cancel that operation and hand it off to someone else. You can't arrange for that in advance. We don't have the ability to do that. I often think about that the morning when I see my patient before we go into surgery. Every morning we come in, we see them and we do consent and we talk to them. I can speak for myself. I usually go to bed at 10 o'clock the night before and I haven't had a bit of alcohol.”
2025-05-21 · Conversations with Tyler · Theodore Schwartz on Neurosurgery, Consciousness, and Brain-Computer Interfaces · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source