Invest Like the Best with Patrick O'Shaughnessy
00:39:27 · Andrew Huberman
And that's one of the unspoken like within our field And people are trying to understand that and what it means, but it's going to present a serious problem for the neurotechnologies. Again, it's going to alleviate some problems because maybe you don't need as much spatial fidelity. But in my mind, this is a huge gap in understanding. And then the other piece is that we don't really understand what a thought is. And so if you're gonna get in there and start stimulating neurons in even just motor cortex to generate movement without the acknowledgement that these neurons are extensively interconnected with structures involved in thinking and planning, you could send the system into haywire. That said, if there's a goal in mind, like drink the glass of water, the brain generally figures it out. And that's what's incredible. I mean, there are people working on brain damaged patients that are finding that if you just go to the areas of the brain where the signals are generated to inform the action output ends of the brain, then you can do pretty well. That's how my friend Eddie Chen gets people with locked in syndrome to speak through a computer. He's not measuring from the speech production areas. He's carefully characterized for many years, decades, the signals coming out of the speech planning areas. And because the signals can't get down to the pharynx and larynx, because speech is just the pharynx and larynx controlling exhales, what he's doing is just transforming those signals into electrical signals, so that the person can talk through a computer. So there's advantages and disadvantages to this non specificity. I think that's the big one. That's the really big one.
00:40:59 · Patrick O'Shaughnessy, Andrew Huberman
[00:40:59] S0: What about all this excites you most and scares you most? Like, some of this, it feels to sort of strip me of my humanity or my identity in some weird way. If I knew that you could just like play me like a piano or something like this, given high precision technology that's underneath the skull or something. The bigger question is like, where do you actually think we're going like five, ten years from now? What kinds of things do you think we'll have? But I'm also just curious about the cyborg line here that we're probably going to cross that gets philosophically weird. [00:41:27] S1: I have to acknowledge I was born and raised in Palo Alto and I have friends in the technology medical sector. So sometimes I get a little bit of the blinders on how other, you know, lot of people are terrified of AI and I'm told lately that I'm not scared enough. [00:41:38] S0: Yeah.
00:41:39 · Andrew Huberman
[00:41:39] S1: But I acknowledge that people are concerned, afraid they don't understand it. But I remember the same discussions about computers, which is not to say that we don't need to be careful, but people are okay now with reading from the nervous system. People are okay now with the fact that our phones are recording everything that we're saying. Remember why we're like, is it really listening? How could it really know? It's a little bit like the autonomous driving. In San Francisco, like I got into Waymo. I didn't even think about it. I just like got in. I think measurement of the nervous system directly in waking states is the next mental hurdle, and I think it's going to be a healthy one to cross. Right now we get heart rate, HRV, and a few other things, but mostly heart rate and HRV, and from that, we get told how stressed we are, how well recovered we are, how well we are sleeping. None of that is direct readout from the autonomic nervous system. I actually have a former postdoc of mine who did her undergraduate Stanford graduate work at Harvard, and was at Caltech briefly. Her name is Malise Olmes. She's a brilliant neuroscientist, and now biotechnologist. She's developing a tool, it's like a little cuff that actually directly measures activity from the autonomic nervous system, and then gives you a readout. This is so cool, I got to try it, it gives you a readout at the end of the day of how different activities and different patterns of speech and breathing in you related to levels of distress versus eustress. Right now, we just think all levels of increased heart rate and decreased levels of HRV are bad, but she's discovering that there are certain things in your day, like when you're stressed out doing things that you love, that actually sets you up for better sleep, more focus. The data have hinted in that direction for a while, but these devices are the sort that she's developed, and she's brought this to police departments, first responders, and eventually this will be a broadly available technology. Direct measurements from the nervous system of how stressed are you when you are stressed? Or are you actually doing great? You just are in a high arousal state. That might change your perception of how stressed you are. I think accurate feedback about those things will have a real positive effect on our health metrics.
00:43:41 · Andrew Huberman
Maybe you'll discover that there are a lot of things in your day that really stress you out that you weren't aware of. You'll also learn how long is the tail on your stress from a given stressful interaction, stress in air quotes. How well are you focusing will probably need to be picked up from measurements of pupil size changes. This is how it's done in animals. This is why I think confidently it'll be done from eyeglasses. So you need a lot of access from a wristband and eyeglasses, or an eye mask in sleep. I think people are gonna be really comfortable with that. The big one is how willing are people going to be to set up their entire brain for a vulnerability to non invasive control? So we're not going to drop wires into people's brains for a while, unless they have a clinical issue. Maybe something under the skin, but you still don't have access to all the neurons. What I want for me is I want access to all the neurons where I can turn things up or turn them down, at least by brain structure. And I have control over it. There has to be some benevolence written into that, you know, and vaulted into the device, right? We can't have things that are just like, and you just suddenly you're in a rage. You would hope that the companies building these things would put safeguards in place. They have them for vagal stimulators. Why wouldn't they have them for brain stimulators? And so the vulnerability, or let's call it accessibility that I'm talking about would be the following. My lab, when I was running a lab and a lot of people tickle neurons right to neurons, increase their activity a little or a little bit more or a lot these days, not through electrical stimulation, but by putting some sort of gene in them that isn't normally expressed in them. Typically, are genes that express channels that come from either algae or other things like non human little things. Sounds scary, right? But the way this is done is you can do it locally by making one injection. Okay, problem, got to breach the skull. Or what a lot of people do is they will inject an animal with an adeno associated virus, or some sort of virus that can stably express genes in all the types of cells that you want. You can direct them to neurons, you can direct them to immune cells, you do this by putting specific promoters. Sounds fancy, but straightforward in primates and mice and so on.
00:45:46 · Andrew Huberman
You can do this in humans. They've done it in humans for other purposes, but it's more localized, like into the eyes. So here's where we're going. This is where we're going to end up. I know it sounds scary, but at some point in the not too distant future, if you're willing and it can be done safely, you get an injection of a virus. Everyone knows, Oh my God, it's gonna make me sick. No, it's not gonna make you sick, it's not the active virus. The virus is just a vector, it's just a carrier for some genetic cargo that puts into your brain a channel such that if you have a hat on, wool cap, or a baseball cap, that it can direct stimulation of only those neurons, because it will cast a nonspecific stimulus, like a cone of maybe light that can go through the skull, like long wavelength light, that seems the most likely, or ultrasound, in a nonspecific way, so not illuminating or activating the whole brain, but it'll sort of send a beam of sound or light onto these neurons that if they express that tag, will be active. You can increase the intensity of the light, you could flicker the light. We'll work through all the different parameters that allow you to turn those neurons from inactive to active, to more active to hyperactive, and dial it down. And then with most likely through AI, you're not going be turning a knob, You, if you're somebody who is suffering from severe motivational issues, or you have healthy levels of motivation, you want to ramp it up. We'll just increase the stimulation. Now, does this open up into people cranking the circuit for themselves? Yeah. But we also have this thing called caffeine and we also have this thing called methamphetamine. Methamphetamine is a problem. Ninety percent plus of the adult world's population drinks caffeine every day, which increases excitability in the brain, basically.
00:47:22 · Patrick O'Shaughnessy
[00:47:22] S0: Yeah.