For the past half-century or more the brain has been spoken of in terms of a computer. What are the biggest flaws with that particular model?
Itโs a very seductive comparison. But in fact, what weโre looking at is three pounds of material in our skulls that is essentially a very alien kind of material to us. It doesnโt write down memories, the way we think of a computer doing it. And it is capable of figuring out its own culture and identity and making leaps into the unknown. Iโm here in Silicon Valley. Everything we talk about is hardware and software. But whatโs happening in the brain is what I call livewire, where you have 86bn neurons, each with 10,000 connections, and they are constantly reconfiguring every second of your life. Even by the time you get to the end of this paragraph, youโll be a slightly different person than you were at the beginning.
In what way does the working of the brain resemble drug dealers in Albuquerque?
Itโs that the brain can accomplish remarkable things without any top-down control. If a child has half their brain removed in surgery, the functions of the brain will rewire themselves on to the remaining real estate. And so I use this example of drug dealers to point out that if suddenly in Albuquerque, where I happened to grow up, there was a terrific earthquake, and half the territory was lost, the drug dealers would rearrange themselves to control the remaining territory. Itโs because each one has competition with his neighbors and they fight over whatever territory exists, as opposed to a top-down council meeting where the territory is distributed. And thatโs really the way to understand the brain. Itโs made up of billions of neurons, each of which is competing for its own territory.
You use this colonial image a lot in the book, a sense of the processes and struggles of evolution being fought out within the brain itself.
Thatโs exactly right. And I think this is a point of view thatโs not common in neuroscience. Usually, when we look in a neuroscience textbook, we say here are the areas of the brain and everything looks like itโs getting along just fine. It belongs exactly where it is. But the argument I make in the book is, the only reason it looks that way is because the springs are all wound tight. And the competition for each neuron โ each cell in the brain to stay alive against its neighbors โ is a constantly waged war. This is why when something changes in the brain, for example, if a person goes blind, or loses an arm or something, you see these massive rearrangements that happen very rapidly in the brain. Itโs just as the French lost their territory in North America because the British were sending more people over.
One of the great mysteries of the brain is the purpose of dreams. And you propose a kind of defensive theory about how the brain responds to darkness.
One of the big surprises of neuroscience was to understand how rapidly these takeovers can happen. If you blindfold somebody for an hour, you can start to see changes where touch and hearing will start taking over the visual parts of the brain. So what I realized is, because the planet rotates into darkness, the visual system alone is at a disadvantage, which is to say, you can still smell and hear and touch and taste in the dark, but you canโt see any more. I realized this puts the visual system in danger of getting taken over every night. And dreams are the brainโs way of defending that territory. About every 90 minutes a great deal of random activity is smashed into the visual system. And because thatโs our visual system, we experience it as a dream, we experience it visually. Evolutionarily, this is our way of defending ourselves against visual system takeover when the planet moves into darkness.
Another mystery is consciousness. Do you think we are close to understanding what consciousness is and how itโs created?
Thereโs a great deal of debate about how to define consciousness, but we are essentially talking about the thing that flickers to life when you wake up in the morning. But as far as understanding why it happens, I donโt know that weโre much closer than weโve ever been. Itโs different from other scientific conundrums in that what weโre asking is, how do you take physical pieces and parts and translate that into private, subjective experience, like the redness of red, or the pain of pain or the smell of cinnamon? And so not only do we not have a theory, but we donโt really know what such a theory would look like that would explain our experience in physical or mathematical terms.
You predict that in the future weโll be able to glean the details of a personโs life from their brains. What would that mean in terms of personal privacy and liberty?
Oh, yeah, itโs going to be a brave new world. Maybe in 100 years, maybe 500, but itโll certainly happen. Because what weโre looking at is a physical system that gets changed and adjusted based on your experiences. Whatโs going on with the brain is the most complex system weโve ever come across in our universe but fundamentally itโs physical pieces and parts and, as our computational capacities are becoming so extraordinary now, itโs just a countdown until we get there. Do we get to keep our inner thoughts private? Almost certainly we will. You canโt stick somebody in a scanner and try to ask them particular kinds of questions. But again, this will happen after our lifetime, so itโs something for the next generations to struggle with.
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Do you think in the future that weโll be able to communicate just by thinking?
Communication is a multi-step process. And so in answering your questions, I have many, many thoughts. And Iโm getting it down to something that I can say that will communicate clearly what I intend. But if you were to just read my thoughts and say, โOK, give me the answer,โ it would be a jumble of half-sentences and words and some random thought, like, Oh, my coffee is spilling. Itโs like you wouldnโt want to read somebodyโs book that hasnโt been polished by them over many iterations, but instead is burped out of their brain.
What are your views on Elon Muskโs Neuralink enterprise, which is developing implantable brain-machine interfaces?
Thereโs nothing new about it insofar as neuroscientists have been putting electrodes in peopleโs brains for at least 60 years now. The advance is in his technology, which is making the electrodes denser and also wireless, although even that partโs not new. I think it will be very useful in certain disease states, for example, epilepsy and depression, to be able to put electrodes directly in there and monitor and put activity in. But the mythology of Neuralink is that this is something we can all use to interface faster with our cellphones. Iโd certainly like to text 50% faster, but am I going to get an open-head surgery? No, because thereโs an expression in neurosurgery: when the air hits your brain, itโs never the same.
You didnโt start out academically in neuroscience. What led you there?
I majored in British and American literature. And that was my first love. But I got hooked on neuroscience because I took a number of philosophy courses. I found that weโd constantly get stuck in some philosophical conundrum. Weโd spin ourselves into a quagmire and not be able to get out. And I thought, Wow, if we could understand the perceptual machinery by which we view the world, maybe weโd have a shot at answering some of these questions and actually making progress. When I finally discovered neuroscience, I read every book in the college library on the brain โ there werenโt that many at the time โ and I just never looked back.
How can we maximize our brain power, and what do you do to switch off?
Thereโs this myth that we only use 10% of our brain that, of course, is not true. Weโre using 100% of our brain all the time. But the way information can be digested and fed to the brain can be very different. I think the next generation is going to be much smarter than we are. I have two small kids, and any time they want to know something, they ask Alexa or Google Home, and they get the answer right in the context of their curiosity. This is a big deal, because the brain is most flexible when it is curious about something and gets the answer. Regarding switching off, I never take any downtime and I donโt want to. I have a very clear sense of time pressure to do the next things. I hope I donโt die young, but I certainly act as though that is a possibility. One always has to be prepared to say goodbye, so Iโm just trying to get everything done before that time.
Andrew Anthony has been writing for the Observer since 1993 and for the Guardian since 1990. He is the author of On Penalties, published by Yellow Jersey Press and The Fallout, published by Jonathan Cape.ย
A version of this article was originally posted at the Guardian and is reposted here with permission. The Guardian can be found on Twitter @guardian
