Charan Ranganath: belief

Transcript context

…Let me ask you both a practical question and an out there question. Let’s start with a more practical one. What are your thoughts about BCIs, brain computer interfaces, and the work that’s going on with Neuralink? We talked about electrodes and different ways of measuring the brain, and here Neuralink is working on basically two-way communication with the brain. The more out there question will be like, where’s this go? More practically in the near term, what do you think about Neuralink? I can’t say specifics about the company because I haven’t studied it that much, but I think there’s two parts of it. One is, they’re developing some really interesting technology I think with these surgical robots and things like that. BCI though has a whole lot of innovation going on. I am not necessarily seeing any scientific evidence from Neuralink, and maybe that’s just because I’m not looking for it, but I’m not seeing the evidence that they’re anywhere near where the scientific community is. There’s lots of startups that are doing incredibly innovative stuff. One of my colleagues, Sergey Stavisky is just a genius in this area, and they’re working on it. I think speech prosthetics like they’re incorporating, decoding techniques with AI and movement prosthetics. This is just the rate of progress is just enormous. Part of the technology is having good enough data and understanding which data to use and what to do with it. Then the other part of it then is the algorithms for decoding it and so forth. I think part of that has really resulted in some real breakthroughs in neuroscience as a result. There’s lots of new technologies like Neuropixels for instance, that allow you to harvest activity from many, many neurons from a single electrode. I know Neuralink has some technologies that are also along these lines, but again, because they do their own stuff, the scientific community doesn’t see it. I think BCI is much, much bigger than Neuralink and there’s just so much innovation happening. I think the interesting question which we may be getting into is, I was talking to Sergey a while ago about a lot of language is not just what we hear and what we speak, but also our intentions and our internal models. And so, are you really going to be able to restore language without dealing with that part of it? He brought up a really interesting question, which is the ethics of reading out people’s intentions and understanding of the world as opposed to the more concrete parts of hearing and producing movements. Just so we’re clear, because you said a few interesting things, when we talk about language and BCIs, what we mean is getting signal from the brain and generating the language, say you’re not able to actually speak, it’s as a kind of linguistic prosthetic. It’s able to speak for you exactly what you want it to say. Then the deeper question is, well, saying something isn’t just the letters, the words that you’re saying, it’s also the intention behind it, the feeling behind all that kind of stuff. Is it ethical to reveal that full shebang, the full context of what’s going on in our brain? That’s really interesting. That’s really interesting. Our thoughts, is it ethical for anyone to have access to our thoughts? Because right now the resolution is so low that we’re okay with it, even doing studies and all this kind of stuff. If neuroscience has a few breakthroughs to where you can start to map out the QR codes for different thoughts, for different kinds of thoughts, maybe political thoughts, the McCarthyism, what if I’m getting a lot of them communist thoughts, or however we want to categorize or label it? That’s interesting. That’s really interesting. I think ultimately this always… The more transparency there is about the human mind, the better it is. There could be always intermediate battles with how much control does a centralized entity have, like a government and so on. What is the regulation? What are the rules? What’s legal and illegal? If you talk about the police, whose job is to track down criminals and so on, and you look at all the history, how the police could abuse its power to control the citizenry, all that kind of stuff. People are always paranoid and rightfully so. It’s fascinating. It’s really fascinating. We talk about freedom of speech, freedom of thought, which is also a very important liberty at the core of this country and probably humanity. It starts to get awfully tricky when you start to be able to collect those thoughts. What I wanted to actually ask you is do you think for fun and for practical purposes, we would be able to modify memories? How far away we are from understanding the different parts of the brains, everything we’ve been talking about, in order to figure out how can we adjust this memory at the crude level from unpleasant to pleasant? You talked about we can remember the mall and the location, the people. Can we keep the people and change the place? This kind of stuff, how difficult is that?…

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