>>: Okay, it's an honor today to have Michio Kaku visiting us. Michio holds the Henry Semat Chair in
professorship in theoretical physics at the City College of New York. The famous alma mater where
my father attended back in the 1940#s#. He's taught there for 25 years. He did his undergraduate
degree at Harvard and his Ph.D. work at UC Berkeley. And he's long pursued the grand quest, set up
by Einstein and others, to unite the fundamental forces of nature, the strong force, the weak force,
gravity, electromagnetism into a single grand unified theory of everything. He's co-founder of an
attempt to do that called string field theory. His theoretical physics research has spanned topics
including string theory, super gravity, super symmetry, hydronic physics, and he did about 70 technical
articles and several textbooks in his own field in physics.
He's also, of course, as you all know, devoted substantial effort and creativity to communicating his
excitement about science and implications of science to lay audiences, authoring a number of wellknown, including best sellers Hyperspace, the Physics of the Impossible, and the Physics of the Future.
And beyond those books, he's written for Popular Science publications like Discover, Wired in the New
Scientists, he's hosted TV specials for BBC, Discovery Channel, The History Channel, and The Science
Channel, and has a couple of fun radio shows, Science Fantastic and Explorations In Science that you
can listen to weekly, or I think sometime when you have time, as I hear.
He's been also, I found in researching some of his bio, been very active -- I didn't even follow some of
this in science and society with activities and and efforts on nuclear weapons and their danger, global
warming, and other challenges we face moving forward.
He's here today to talk about his latest book, released just a couple weeks back, called The Future Of
The Mind, The Scientific Quest To Understand And Enhance And Empower The Mind. This topic
resonates with many of us deeply here at Microsoft Research. For many of us it's the mind that's the
big frontier and the big challenge of understanding, as big as any big bang ever was.
So let me invite Michio up.
>> Dr. Micho Kaku: Wow, after such a great introduction I can't wait to hear the speaker myself. Also,
let me say that sometimes all these accolades can backfire. Recently, New York Magazine voted me as
one of the 100 smartest people in New York, and I thought, "Wow, what an honor." Later, however, I
had to confess, later I found out that Madonna also made that same list. And they told me that next
year Lady GaGa is going to push me off the list entirely. What can I say?
Well, today, I'm going to talk about the future, the future of the mind. And of course it's very dangerous
to talk about the future. Let me quote from the great philosopher of the western world, Yogi Berra.
Yogi Berra once said, quote, "Prediction is awfully hard to do, especially if it's about the future." Well,
I'm a physicist. We can predict the evolution of the universe billions of years from now. So let me
quote from that other great philosopher of the western world, Woody Allen. Woody Allen once said,
quote, "Eternity is an awful long time, especially toward the end."
Well, I'm a physicist. What does a physicist do? Well, we invented the transistor, we invented the
laser, we helped to assemble the first computer and the internet. We wrote the worldwide web. And
along the way, we also invented television. We invented radio, radar, microwaves, and don't forget, we
helped create the space program and the GPS system. And we physicists love to make predictions.
When we helped to assemble the internet, when physicists predicted that the internet would become a
forum of high culture, high arc, and high society. Well, today we know that 5 percent of the internet is
pornography. But that's because teenage boys log on to the internet. Just wait until the grandmas and
grandpas log on to the internet, then 50 percent of the internet will be pornography.
Now, before we begin a discussion of what sits on your shoulders, something that weighs three pounds
and is the most complex object in the universe, before beginning discussion you may be saying to
yourself, "Well, what's the difference between physicists, a chemist?" Well, let me tell you a little
story. During World War II, the Nazis captured a group of American scientists and called them spies,
and they were going to be executed by firing squad. So they pulled up a geologist, a physicist, and a
chemist about to be fired away by execution. Well, they aimed their rifles at the geologist. And the
geologist suddenly said "earthquake, earthquake." Well, in the chaos, the geologist snuck away and
escaped. Well, now it was the physicist's time to have him shot. So the Nazis raised their rifles at the
physicist, and then the physicist said "lightning, lightning," and again, chaos, everyone ran out and the
physicist escaped. And now it was the chemist's turn. They turned their rifles at the chemist and the
chemist said "fire, fire."
Now, we're going to talk about the brain today. And if we were to duplicate the brain using hardware,
computer hardware, it would occupy a city block, a city block of bluejean computers, some of the most
advanced on the Earth. The energy consumption would be that of a nuclear power plant, a gigawatt of
power, and it would take a river, a river, to cool it down. And your brain, however, only consumes 20
watts of power. So when someone calls you a dim bulb, that is a compliment. And your brain doesn't
require a nuclear power plant to energize it, just a few hamburgers. So how is it possible? And now,
because of modern physics, we've learned more in the last five to ten years than in all of human history.
You know, when I was a kid, I used to love reading science fiction. I read about telepathy, that is
reading minds. I read about telekinesis, moving objects with the mind, I read about recording
memories, I read about photographing dreams. However, I tried very hard to read people's minds and I
finally came to the conclusion that maybe telepaths do exist, but I wasn't one of them.
Well, today we can do all of the above. I will show you how we photograph thoughts, photograph
dreams. One day you will push the play button and see the dream you had the previous night. I will
show you how you can record memories, about how we can move objects with the mind and read
minds. All this because of advanced physics, just in the last five to ten years.
And this is my previous book, a New York Times Best Sellers. They used to say that the word physics
would never, ever enter the New York Times Best Sellers List. I did it not once, but twice. Physics Of
The Impossible goes not just 50 years into the future, it goes 500 years into the future. We might have
starships, we might have teleportation, we might even have time machines. And in this book I answer
the question, according to Einstein's theory, is it possible to go backwards in time and meet your
teenage mother before you were born and she falls in love with you? Well, if your teenage mother falls
in love with you before you were born, you're in deep doodoo if that happens.
Well, there's a lot of interest in the mind. Because I'm proud to announce my book, The Future Of The
Mind, is now number 4 on both the Barnes & Noble and the Amazon list of best sellers in the United
States. So it's already -- and it's only been out for one week.
So the two greatest mysteries in the universe, one of them is the origin of the universe, which is what I
do for a living. I'm the co-founder of string field theory. And one day we hope that string field theory
will answer the question "why did we have a big bang any way?" The other great mystery is what sits
on your shoulders, the most complex object known to science. For the first time in history now,
revealing its inner-most secrets.
And you probably heard, President Barack Obama in last year's State of the Union Address shocked the
scientific community by announcing The Brain Initiative. You realize that The Human Genome
Project, only cost $3 billion, it maps all the genes of our body, and it has opened up huge areas of
genetics and medicine. The next big project, already devoted a billion dollars on the European Union
and the United States Government into this project, The Brain Project, to create a map, a map of every
single neuron in your body, which means that one day we will understand mental illness, one of the
greatest afflictions of humanity, and perhaps even create not just a disk of the genome, but a disk
containing your Connectome. Every single neuron, all your memories, your desires, your hopes,
dreams, encoded in a Connectome. And if you have your genome and your Connectome on two disks
and you put them together, then you may even have, in some sense, a form of immortality. This raises
theological, ethical, religious questions, "who are you any way?" If you die, but your genome survives
and we can revive your body any time, if we can bring back your consciousness at any time, then did
you really die? This raises all sorts of questions about who are we, are we nothing but information?
So when I was a kid I used to try to read people's thoughts. I would concentrate real hard to see
whether or not I could be a telepath like we see in science fiction. Ultimately I realized that all this is
bunk. Without physics you cannot read the mind. And then there is the movie The Matrix, where
reality itself is nothing but an uploaded software program. Everything you see around you is fake.
This is The Matrix.
In fact, let me ask you a question. Late at night, just before you go to sleep, have you ever had that
weird bizarre thought that maybe The Matrix is right, maybe the reality you see is an illusion? Maybe
it's a software program. Maybe you are the only one that's really real. Have you ever had that thought
late at night? And maybe it's all a test to see whether you're smart enough to figure it out, that
everything you see is nothing but an uploaded memory. Ever had that idea? Raise your hand if you
ever had that feeling. You're crazy. Give me a break. You think you're the only one in the universe?
I'm the only one in the universe. I'm in bed right now. I'm just about to go to sleep. You are nothing
but an uploaded memory.
Now, is that possible? I will show the answer is yes. Last year the first memory was successfully
uploaded into a brain. I'll talk about that, something that happened just last year. And then here's the
former Governor of California. That's what happens when you have a marriage uploaded into your
memory. His marriage with Sharon Stone was uploaded into his memory, and there he is, reacting to
that. In fact if you saw the movie, it's a very clever movie. Throughout the entire movie, Arnold
Schwarzeneggar is the good guy. You identify with him, he's the good guy battling the bad guys. Then
at the very end of the movie you find out that he's really the bad guy with all the good guy memories
implanted into his mind. This is the only movie in the world in which the hero and the villain are the
same people.
And then what about exoskeletons? Believe it or not, the United States Pentagon is dumping tens of
billions of dollars to connect the mind to mechanical arms, legs, a complete exoskeleton. My
colleague, Stephen Hawking, the great cosmologist, he now has lost control over all of his bodily
functions, except his mind. We have now connected his mind to a laptop. Next time you see him on
television, look at his right frame of his glasses. There's a chip and an antenna that picks up waves
from his brain, decodes it, and allows him to communicate with the world. And so we're talking about
brain machine interface, one of the hottest fields now in neurology.
And then, people say, "well, where do we have robots? Where's my robot maid? Where's my robot
butler?" Well, artificial intelligence turned out to be harder than we thought. But what about
surrogates, Avatars? They use a human brain wired up to control a perfect body. Avatars. You are
placed in a pod and you control the motions of an organism, a living person, or maybe even a robot.
Surrogates already exist. And the question is, is this the future of the space program? When we sent
into outer space robots, robots that are cheap, they don't bellyache, they don't complain, they don't nag,
and they don't have to come back; controlled by astronauts sitting in their living room mentally
communicating with their surrogate.
And then, telekinesis. Telekinesis, the power to move objects with the mind. This is the movie Carrie,
where a young girl who is telekinetic was abused by all her classmates. So in the final scene of the
movie, she destroys the entire high school. What's the lesson here? The lesson here is never bring a
telekinetic to the senior prom.
And then in the latest Superman movie, maybe you've seen it. Every child knows that's Superman's
father and mother died when Krpton blew up. But not in the latest Superman movie. Russell Crowe
here plays Superman's father. He's a hologram, energized by a software program that has memorized
all of the memory circuits, the personality quirks of the father. The father comes back to life to talk to
his son beyond the grave. One day perhaps your great-great-great-great-great grandkids will go to a
library, a library of souls, and have a conversation with you. Because your memories, your personality
or your quirks are all encoded in a hologram that you can bring to life by simply pushing the play
button.
And then the question is, asked in Star Trek, asked by Isaac Ozimov, "can the mind exist outside of the
body?" It was Descartes who said "I think; therefore, I am. Therefore, the mind is different from the
body." That's called dualism. Recently, however, people say "that's a bunch of nonsense. The mind is
nothing but software running on what-ware called the brain. That's all it is, it's one and the same
thing." But now we realize they could be different. This goes back, all the way back, to the middle
ages. We may have the ability to put your consciousness on a Connectome and send it into outer space.
This is the dream of Isaac Ozimov, sending pure consciousness into outer space at the speed of light.
No booster rockets, no movies like Gravity any more. No accidents. Pure thought on a laser beam shot
at the speed of light throughout the universe. That could ultimately be the destiny of homo sapiens.
But, let's get back down to earth. That's Hollywood. Now let's talk about reality. First of all, MRI
scans allow us to look at energy flows, blood flows in the living brain. On the left, for example, is the
brain when it tells the truth. Not much happens. On the right is the brain when it tells a lie. Yes, when
it tells a lie. First you have to know the truth. Then you have to create the lie. Then you have to
calculate the consistency of the lie with all the lies you've been telling all these years. That's a lot of
brainpower. Your brain lights up like a Christmas tree. So we can now see thoughts ricocheting across
the brain like a ping-pong ball and we can now reexamine Freudian psychology, old wives tales. We
can now see what's true and what's not.
For example, the brain. The brain is a museum of all the stages of its previous evolution, starting with
the back. The back of your brain is the reptilian brain, the ancient part of your brain. If you had
whiplash after an automobile accident, you will lose your sense of balance, appetite. Basic reptilian
instincts are encoded in the back. When you're born as a baby, your brain grows in the forward
direction mimicking evolution of the last few hundred million years. So the growth of a baby's brain
mimics our evolutionary past. As the brain goes forward, we get the monkey brain, the mammalian
brain, the brain of emotions, the brain that calculates your relationship to other monkeys. And then at
the very front is the prefrontal cortex, the thinking brain, the human brain. And now we can see
whether or not old wives tales are correct.
For those of you who have children, you have always suspected that your teenage kids have brain
damage. Well, it's true. We can actually show that the prefrontal cortex right behind your forehead,
that's where you are located. Ever wonder where you are? You are located right behind your forehead.
That is not fully formed in teenagers. Just as many parents have always suspected. Another old wives
tale, that when a man sees a pretty girl, he starts to act stupid. True. You can actually see the blood
flow drains from the prefrontal cortex of a man when he talks to a pretty girl and he starts to act
retarded. Absolutely true. This is verified just last year by looking at the brain scans of college kids.
Absolutely true. And so now these old wives tales can now be verified.
Now, if I were to slice the brain horizontally now, you would see the motor cortex. And you can
actually put electrodes on the surface of the exposed brain. The brain has no sense organs. The brain
does not feel pain. You can remove the skull and you don't feel a thing. And then when you touch this
part of the brain, your left side starts to move. You touch this part of the brain, and this part of the brain
starts to move. And you can cut the link between the left and the right brains. For epileptics, the two
halves ricochet off each other, creating positive feedback, that is potentially fatal causing convulsions.
So doctors have to cut the link. And then some bizarre things begin to happen. In a person's brain that
is cut in half, two personality begin to emerge. Different personalities begin to emerge. And each of
them try to control the hand. You can literally struggle with the other part of the brain for control of
your organs, just like in the movie Dr. Strangelove. There's one documented case where one guy's left
brain was an atheist and the other brain was a believer. This is true. You can imagine that one day
we're going to find somebody whose left brain is republican and his right brain is democrat, and when
he goes to the polling booth to pull down the lever, there's this big struggle in the polling booth when
he pulls down the lever. Absolutely true that the two brains start to emerge as two personalities.
And so we can begin to test all the old wives tales of the past.
Now, in the old days we used to put electrodes on the surface of the brain. And what came out was
nonsense, gibberish, very, very complicated, all the average radio waves coming out. Now we have
computers. Now we have MRI scans. So we don't use this old dated technique any more. However,
with computers, you can actually make this sexy. On the upper left is NeuroSky, where toys, toys are
now controlled by a headband. And you can even -- you can go from one level to the other level in the
video game mentally by mentally controlling the pictures. And in Japan, this is the rage in Japan on the
right. It's a headband with two ears on it. When you meet someone at a party who's very interesting,
your two ears go like this. When you meet someone who's a dud, a real jerk, a real bore, your ears go
like that. So you will always know if you're making an impression on somebody at a party and you
will always know whether or not you're going to go home alone that night. And I'm a professor. One
day I'm going to have all my students put on these things, so you will know exactly who gets the A and
who gets the F by looking at their ears. Any way, this is the rage in Japan.
And on the lower left, people are already saying, "well, look, if this technology is that advanced, why
not replace the mouse? Why not mentally commune with a PC?" In the future, we may walk into a
room, control the lights, the temperature, the humidity, the internet, turn things on. And even control
cars. Cars will drive themself themselves, probably by the year 2020. And why not drive your car
mentally? All these things might be possible. But of course there are some hiccups that we have to
negotiate still. But, yeah, this could be the future whereby we control things mentally. And as I said, it
will be sexy. Madison Avenue is going to get a hold of this. All of a sudden fashion models, all of a
sudden the leaders of culture will start to have these headbands and deal with things mentally.
And then here is my colleague, Stephen Hawking. He is paralyzed. He's lost control of his fingers
now. He simply blinks when he wants something. But now on his right frame, we have connected him
to a laptop computer. Here's how it works. Sometimes we take a chip, about the size of a dime, and
put it right on top of the brain. This is what we do at Brown University. And the chip goes right on the
part of the brain that governs the motor cortex. It is then connected to a laptop computer that
understands the impulses. For example, if you move your hand to the right, you move your hand to the
right, the chip registers the electrical impulses of moving the hand to the right, and it knows to move
the cursor of a screen to the right.
So eventually, the laptop gets a dictionary. You move your hand to the right, the curser moves to the
right. It gets a dictionary of motions. And then by mentally thinking, just by thinking "moving your
hand to the right," the cursor will move to the right.
So, this gentleman here is totally paralyzed. He had a massive stroke. He cannot talk to his loved ones.
And yet we've connected him to a chip, to a laptop to his wheelchair. He can now move his wheelchair,
he can surf the web, he can write email, answer email, play video games, operate household appliances,
and he is totally paralyzed.
We can also do this with mechanical arms. This lady here can only communicate by blinking.
Blinking is the only way she can communicate with the outside world. Again at Brown University they
hooked her up to a mechanical arm which can in principal write, she can write messages. So the gift of
mobility is with us.
And the military is now dumping tens of millions into something called revolutionary prosthetics. This
gentleman here, along with thousands of others have lost arms/legs because of roadside bombs in Iraq
and Afghanistan. We are giving them the gift of mobility. These arms are the most advanced arms ever
created. Created at Johns Hopkins University under contract with the Pentagon. You can pick up an
egg with these things. You can fist bump, you can high five; anything an ordinary person can do, you
can do mentally. Mentally control not just an arm, but a leg. These are exoskeletons right out of the
comic books. And they exist. In fact at Duke University there's a Brazilian neuroscientist, one of the
leaders of this technology. He has made a goal that in the next international soccer games in Brazil, the
athlete who starts and opens up the soccer games will be totally paralyzed. Totally paralyzed, outfitted
with an exoskeleton allowing him to initiate the World Cup soccer games. That is a concrete goal by
the Neuroscience Department at Duke University.
And we talked about surrogates. Artificial intelligence turned out to be a lot harder than we thought.
This is Asimo, one of the most advanced robots built in Japan. Japan makes 30 percent of our robots.
Asimo can run, jump, climb up stairs, and he dances. In fact he dances much better than me. I've been
on some programs with him and he outdances me every time. But I went up to the inventer of Asimo,
one of our most advanced robots, and I asked him "How smart is Asimo anyway." And he was quite
honest, right in front of the TV camera, the inventer of Asimo said, "Asimo has the intelligence of a
cockroach," a retarded cockroach, a stupid retarded lobotomized cockroach. He can barely walk across
the room unaided. He is a tape recorder, for the most part. Every motion is pre-scripted. When I'm on
television with him, it takes about three hours, three hours for the handlers to get all the motions just
right.
But now, we can connect him to a human. A human who wears a helmet picks up the brain waves of
the brain and then operates Asimo. You realize that this will eventually revolutionize everything,
including education. Remember when we were kids we used to play hooky? I mean come on, fess up,
right? Well, we can now create a surrogate in the classroom. This surrogate has within it a picture of
you in your bed sick. The teacher can see you, and you from your bed can actually see the teacher's
face. This is going to revolutionize education. Isn't the future wonderful? You will never be able to
play hooky ever again.
And of course another way to input information into the brain is through the eyes. The eyes are a direct
extension of the brain. So why not put the internet in your contact lens? So who are the first people to
buy internet contact lenses? College students taking final examinations. They will blink and they will
see all the answers to my final exam right there in their contact lenses. Who's the second person to buy
internet contact lenses? President Barack Obama, so he doesn't have to have his damn teleprompters
giving him his speech all the time. Who's the third person to buy internet contact lenses, Vice-President
Joe Biden, so he's always on message and never says anything goofy. Who's the fourth person to buy
internet contact lenses? Well, if you fell in love with somebody, but you're tongue tied because you
can't recite poetry, you can't say "oh, your eyes are like the sky, your lips are ruby red." Never fear, the
Romeos of the world will buy these contacts lenses, and they will always have poetic words just
gushing forth from their mouth. So for you Romeos out there, this is for you. And who also is going to
buy contact lenses? Husband and wives. They'll see each other's images and what they're looking at.
So if your husband or wife always buys the wrong thing at the supermarket, never fear, you'll see
through his or her contact lens and you'll say, "no, not that apple. That apple is wrong. No, no, no, not
that." So we will be living in The Matrix.
So the future of surrogates and exoskeletons could be the space program. It costs $10,000 a pound to
put anything in near-Earth orbit. That is your weight in solid gold. The next time you want to go into
orbit, sure, buy gold, the equivalent of your weight, and you too can go into outer space. To put you on
the moon costs $100,000 a pound. To put you on Mars costs a million dollars a pound. That is your
weight in diamonds. So why not send drones? Avatars, surrogates to the moon, controlled by
astronauts sitting in their living room? And firemen dealing with dirty, dangerous, dull jobs, why not
have somebody sitting in the comfort of his living room energize these surrogates. So exoskeletons
and computerized prosthetics, they are here today. In the future they may go into outer space and into
the construction field and revolutionize education.
Now, let's talk about the big one. Uploading memories into the mind. Last year at Wake Forest
University and also Las Angeles, the first memory was recorded and uploaded successfully. Here's
what they did, they took a mouse and they had the mouse learn how to sip water. Then the mouse
forget this trick. But they recorded it. They recorded the hippocampus right there. That is the place
where memory is processed. They recorded it. Then after the mouse forget how to do it, they played it
back into the hippocampus and the mouse remembered.
This has now been done with false memories. You can actually put false memories into a mouse and he
can remember things that he never did. And the next is chimpanzees and primates. Very soon we will
start to do this with primates. And after that, Alzheimers patients. The short-term goal of this is to
create a brain pacemaker, shown on the upper right. A brain pacemaker could be our future. As our
brain deteriorates, the hippocampus deteriorates fastest. Your short-term memories start to disintegrate.
And we may be able to get a brain prosthetic, a pacemaker, to upload memories of who are you, where
you live, what do your children look like, and things like that. And then even beyond that, maybe, just
maybe, we'll be able to upload a vacation you never had. Or courses you flunked in college. Workers
will be able to learn new skills as technology progresses by uploading the memories necessary to
master a new technological skill. This could affect the job market. Students can learn calculus by
pushing a button, okay. This also raises legal questions, because what happens if a criminal uploads a
false memory into your mind.
Now, this is the hippocampus in the middle. When it is damaged you lose the ability to form long-term
memories. The most famous case was Mr. H.M. Many decades ago he had an injury during a surgery
and he lost his long-term memory. When you greeted him -- in fact I was on a TV program with him
one time once. When you greeted him he shakes your hand and says "hello, hello, how are you?"
Then later he forgets that he ever met you and he starts all over again. "Hello, hello, hello, glad to meet
you." And he did this for decades. Once when he was an old man he saw himself in a mirror and he
was horrified. Horrified because he thought he was a young man, saying "Hello, hello, hello, how are
you," every time someone came in the door. He was an old man. He was horrified. But then he forget
the memory of being horrified and was back to "hello, hello, hello, how are you" again. In fact his
story is so strange it's been made into two movies, 50 First Dates with Drew Barrymore, and
Groundhog Day with Bill Murray. Two movies about the man who relives that same moment over and
over and over again. That's what happens with damage from the hippocampus.
And now at Berkeley, what they're doing is something that is outrageous, videotaping a thought. How
could you videotape a dream? Well, here's how you do it. This is the brain in an MRI scan. You
analyze it for 30,000 centers of electrical activity and you get 30,000 dots. These 30,000 dots represent
a map of energy flows in the brain. Then a computer program recognizes these dots and has a
dictionary, and from it creates a picture of what you were looking at.
MRI machines today are huge, bulky; but in the future, they're going to be a lot smaller. On the right
an MRI machine built in Germany the size of a briefcase. According to the laws of physics, the
smallest MRI machine that is compatible with the laws of physics is this big. You will have one day an
MRI machine in your medicine cabinet. You will have more computer power in your medicine cabinet
than a modern university hospital, according to the physicist who built that thing on the right. And
here's how we do it. We MRI the brain, look at electrical activity, construct a matrix of 30,000 dots,
and a computer program prints this out. These are some of the first pictures of a thought. On the left is
Steve Martin. Next to it is the mental image that you create of Steve Martin in your mind, recreated as
a photograph. And we can do it for many kinds of objects. Again, these pictures are fuzzy, but, hey,
look, it's only 30,000 dots. A typical picture may have up to a million pixels.
On the left, an elephant, a person, an airplane.
And then, when I went to Berkeley and I interviewed these people who were doing this experiment, I
asked them what happens if you fall asleep. And they said, yes, they have fallen asleep in this machine.
The MRI machine keeps on chugging away and creates an approximation of what you are dreaming
about. This has also proven another old wives tale. There's something called lucid dreaming. Lucid
dreaming is when you are awake when you are dreaming. You know you are dreaming. You can
actually walk and control the direction of the dream. How many people in this room have ever at some
point in their life felt that they were awake even in the middle of a dream? Raise your hand. Well,
lucid dreaming is something that's written up in Buddhist texts, very ancient phenomenon. There are
lessons about how to become a lucid dreamer. You have to take notes, you have to have a notebook of
dreams. And in Germany, west Germany last year, they proved its correct. They took a lucid dreamer,
put him in an MRI machine, and he controlled the direction of the dream. And so Leonardo Dicaprio in
the movie Inception, the movie is not so farfetched. Because we might be able to actually redirect the
direction of a dream.
And now, let's talk about President Barack Obama's initiative. Why does the President of the United
States want to dump, with the Europeans, a billion dollars, to create Brain 2.0? A disk that mimics your
brain, like the genome? Because the short-term goal is to understand mental illness. You realize that
many familiar people from Hollywood, from the music industry, suffer from bipolar disorder. On the
upper left is Margot Kidder of the Superman movies. Several years ago she was found wandering stark
naked behind garbage cans as a homeless woman. She suffers from bipolar disorder, as many famous
actors and actresses, including Princess Leia of Star Wars.
Well, we can brain scan these people now and we find something amazing. When you talk to yourself,
your left temporal lobe is excited and generates voices. That's how you talk to yourself. But in these
people, who are schizophrenic, they generate voices without their permission. Without their knowledge
or permission, voices are generated in their mind. If one day a voice all of a sudden erupts in your
mind without your permission, you would think you are mad. That is madness. And we it in
schizophrenics under a brain scan.
And we can now look at history. Through the lens of brain scans. This is Joan of Arc. She said she
talked to God. It turns out that if you suffer from epileptic lesions, about 10, 20 percent of people that
suffer from epileptic lesions suffer from hyperreligiosity. They see ghosts, demons everywhere. If it
rains it's because it's punishment. If you fall down, a demon pushed you down. They suffer from
hyperreligiosity.
And it's now possible to create a helmet and induce this effect deliberately with the flick of a switch.
This is called the God Helmet. the God Helmet, you've probably seen it on TV, there have been specials
about it. The God Helmet beams electromagnetic radiation into the mind duplicating this effect. And
you feel that you are in the presence of a great spirit.
And so what do these scientists do? They decided to get an atheist and a believer and put them in the
God Helmet. The atheist was Richard Dawkins. Richard Dawkins, the biologist, he's a famous atheist,
they put the God helmet on him. And then they put the God Helmet on nuns to see if you could shake
their belief in a deity. Well, afterwards they interviewed Richard Dawkins, "Do you believe in God
after having the sensation of being with the internal being?" He said no, he's still an atheist. But the
nuns, that's something interesting. The nuns' belief in God was not shaken. The nuns said "God
created us with a telephone in our mind so we can communicate with God." And therefore they saw
the God Helmet as proof of God's Grace. The point is you can't win. You're not going to change
anyone's belief with something like a God Helmet.
But now, let's talk about super genius. Let's talk about humans who are off-scale, superhuman abilities.
This gentleman here has taken a helicopter ride over New York City Harbor, including Manhattan, and
has drawn the entire harbor, including all of Manhattan, from memory, from one helicopter ride. And if
you wanted to see it, go to New York City, Terminal 11 JFK Airport. Look up, you will see a mural.
All of the sky scrapers, all of the lights, bridges, tunnels, everything, from memory. This guy has also
done Hong Kong, he's done London and many other places.
And also, there's a young boy, as a child a bullet went into the left temporal lobe of his brain. Another
guy dives into a swimming pool, also hits the left side of his brain. Both of them became super
mathematical geniuses. It turns out this effect can be induced by injury to the left temporal lobe. Now,
tonight after this lecture, do not pick up a hammer, do not bang yourself trying to become the next
Einstein. It doesn't work that way; okay? These people are incredible. You can ask them, "What were
you doing 30 years ago on May 2#nd# at 4:00 in the afternoon?" And they will say, "I was reading
Page 320. You want me to recite the paragraph I was reading?" One gentleman can peak, memorize
15,000 books, and can recite line by line any page out of 15,000 books. Some of us can't even
remember the comic book we read last night. Think about what these guys can do.
Now how can they do this? Well, we're not sure. But one theory is, we used to think that forgetting
was a natural process; you learn and then the memory degrades with time. Every textbook says that's
the way memory works. But we now realize that maybe, just maybe, that's not true; that our forgetting
requires complex biochemical mechanisms. In other words, these people have forgot even how to
forget. They remember. But the forgetting mechanism is broken. And therefore, there's no erasing of
these memories, they go back 30, 40 years. One of these people, a woman in Las Angeles, says that her
vision is like split level. One part of her vision is what's happening in reality, and another part is what
happens to her 30 years ago, reliving a day 30 years ago. And she finds it annoying. And she wishes it
would go away. But she's just paralyzed by photographic memory.
And then we have Asperger's and genius. The greatest genius in all of science, bar none, was Sir Isaac
Newton. When he was 23 years old, he discovered calculus at the rate in which you learn it in college.
He discovered the universal law of gravitation. And he discovered a binomial theorem when he was 23
years old. But he's not someone you'd want to have dinner with. He had no social skills that we know
of. He was not the kind of person that would chitchat with you. He had, we think, Asperger's
Syndrome. And if you want to see what Asperger's Syndrome looks like, watch The Big Bang Theory
on CBS Television. Many Nobel Prize winners, Paul Dirac, creator of quantum field theory, he also
perhaps suffered from Asperger's Syndrome.
And then there is Albert Einstein. His brain is still with us. In 1955 when Albert Einstein died, the
doctor doing the autopsy kidnapped the brain, took it home, put it inside a jar in his living room for
about 30 years, drove across country with a Buick with Einstein's brain in a mayonnaise jar. Amazing
what Einstein's brain had to go through. Now it is at Princeton University. And the brain is a little bit
different. If you go through my book I give you the details of how Einstein's brain is a little bit
different from our brain.
And now we can also reanalyze Freudian psychology. Freud talked about the unconscious mind. And
we now realize that the mind is like a large corporation. A large corporation has a very small nerve
center, a CEO, but the CEO does not have to know everything that's happening in the mail room.
Therefore most of the brain's activity is unconscious, like a large corporation. Not only that, not only is
the unconscious mind necessary, but also emotions. Why do we have emotions? We have emotions
because they provide a rapid-fire response to emergencies. If you see a tiger, your prefrontal cortex
will debate whether or not the tiger is strong, weak, or whatever. Emotions say run. You don't want to
debate the finer points of lion anatomy. So emotions serve a purpose. That is also found in a
corporation, which has to have emergency efforts to put out fires independent of the CEO.
And we also see the superego, the id and the ego at work. In fact the pleasure center is located right
here in the nucleus accumbens. We located it precisely in your pleasure center. Scientists have hooked
up a mouse with this pleasure center hooked up telegraph key, so that when you hit the telegraph key,
the mouse has a great time. It turns out the mouse will hit the telegraph key twice a second until it dies
of starvation.
They went up the scale to dolphins. Dolphins have been connected to this device whereby if the
dolphin goes forward it hits a plate which stimulates its pleasure center. So the dolphin would also hit
the pleasure center several times a second until it realized "I am dying. I will die." The dolphin went
out, grabbed food and came back and stimulated itself. The dolphin's not stupid.
And then I want to talk about something that has consumed the lives of thousands of people throughout
history, and that is what is consciousness. If you go to the library or go to the internet, you'll find
20,000 articles written about consciousness by ministers, psychologists, psychiatrists, 20,000 articles.
Never in the history of science have so many people devoted so much time to produce so little. There
is no consensus as to what is consciousness. In fact, Robert Frost once defined consciousness as
something that starts up when you wake up in the morning and then stops as soon as you go into your
office.
So I'm a physicist. I decided to use a physicists' point of view to define consciousness that will give
you a numerical ranking by which we can analyze robots, by which we can analyze animals and
people, a numerical ranking of consciousness. When we physicists look at a star, a planet, or an
electron, how do we think? We physicists try to construct a model, a simplified model of the planet or
an electron in space, locating its position in space, then we try to analyze its interaction with other
planets, other electrons, other stars, and then finally we run the videotape forward in time to understand
how the solar system, the electron evolves with time. So we look at space, then we look at relationship
to others, and then we look at running the videotape forward in time, predicting the future.
I'm now going to give you a definition of consciousness. Consciousness is the continual creation of
models, feedback loops, which describe a model of our place in space, time, and relationship to others.
So how does animal consciousness differ from ours? We humans see the future. We spend the bulk of
our time daydreaming, planning, strategizing. Animals have no concept of tomorrow. So let's rank
consciousness numerically. I say that one unit of consciousness is a single feedback loop, like a
thermostat. A thermostat registers temperature and changes surrounding. I call that one unit of
consciousness. A flower has maybe ten units of consciousness. It measures light, it measures water,
gravity, temperature. A flower has many feedback loops, maybe ten or so. But they are stationary.
Once they become mobile, they become Level 1 conscious. Remember the reptilian brain in the back
of our brain? The reptilian brain represents Level 1 consciousness; understanding your position in
space, but not much more.
And then evolution gave us Level 2 consciousness. That is the animal brain, the mammalian brain,
which gives us emotion, which determines your social hierarchy, where you are in the tribe. Emotions,
I call that Level 2 consciousness. And Level 3 consciousness is what humans do alone, and that is we
see tomorrow. To the best of our ability, animals do not see tomorrow. When it gets cold, they
hibernate instinctively. We, when we feel the air getting cold, we pack our bags, we have to do our
laundry, we have to do this and that. It's a pain in the butt planning for the future, but that's what the
brain does. Level 3 consciousness.
Now, you may say to yourself, "Well, I don't believe it." Maybe there things outside your definition of
Level 1, 2, 3, that cannot be summarized by space, relationship to others, and time. Like humor.
Humor is so ephemeral. How can you possibly judge humor by Level 1, 2, and 3? Well, let's talk
about a joke. Jokes are funny because we actually hear the joke and then we complete the dots, we
finish the joke. But then when the punchline comes, it's different from how we mentally anticipate it,
and we think it's funny. For example, W.C. Fields was once asked a question about the upbringing of
young people and he was asked the question, "Are you in favor of clubs for youth?" And he said, "Yes,
but only if kindness fails." And Teddy Roosevelt's daughter was asked about gossip, and she said, "If
you have nothing good to say about other people, then please sit down next to me." And the Bible says,
"Do unto others as you would have them do unto you," except do it first.
Now, why are these called funny? Because when you hear about kindness towards children and clubs,
are they good for children, you say yes, you complete the dots. Your brain automatically predicts the
future. The future is, yes, clubs are good for people, for young people. But then W.C. Fields twisted it
by saying only if kindness fails, then we can use clubs on kids. So there's a twist. And your mother
told you that if you can't say anything nice about somebody, then don't say anything at all; right? Your
mother told you that. And then the twist is when it's not what you thought. And when you deconstruct
it, it's not funny any more, because you know the ending. Once you know the ending, it's not funny
any more. And so what I'm trying to tell you is the essence of humor is Level 3 consciousness. Why
are jokes funny? Because they violate Level 3 consciousness, and evolution means that we have to
anticipate the unexpected in the forest. We had to know all sorts of bizarre endings if we're going to
survive in a jungle where everything is unexpected. That's why humor was very important for our
existence.
And now, let's talk about robots. What level consciousness do robots have? Well, I think it's kind of
obvious. Robots, like Asimo, have the intelligence of a cockroach. They can barely figure out where
they are in a room. Many robots take about six hours for them to walk across the room. Does that
remind you of any of your friends, any of your relatives? Six hours to walk across the room.
Therefore, are robots conscious? The answers is yes. They have Level 1 consciousness. They can
barely understand their location in a room.
However, sometimes we think that robots will eventually have emotions. So the beginning of
emotional robots is taking place now. A little bit of Level 2. But not much more. So we see how
primitive robots are. They're at Level 1, they can barely navigate across a room, they have a little bit of
emotions, they can smile, but not much more. But no Level 3. Now, you may say to yourself, "Now
wait a minute. Computers can evolve black holes, computers can evolve solar systems." Yeah, in only
one dimension. Only one dimension can computers simulate the future.
Now, this also means, if this theory is correct, it means we can rank intelligence as well. IQ exams
don't work very well. People with a high IQ as children, maybe they'll wind up as petty criminals,
marginal individuals, losers in society. So what is the only indicator of success that psychologists have
found that is reproducible, testable, falsifiable in children, that lasts for 30 years? There's only one
characteristic that children have that you can measure, that correlates with success, 30 years after the
test was done. Does anyone know what that one characteristic is? Psychologists have done this test
over and over again, tracked these kids for decades. It is delayed gratification as seen by the
marshmallow test. "Do you want a marshmallow now or two marshmallows an hour from now?" And
what is the essence of delayed gratification? Level 3 consciousness. They see the future; that two
marshmallows are better than one marshmallow. A college education is better than a high school
education, shortcuts are bad. That means they predict the future. Think of a safecracker. A safecracker
may have low IQ, flunked out of grade school. But a safecracker can simulate the future of a bank
robbery better than the police. That means they are more intelligent than the police because they see
the future in a way that the police don't.
So the point I'm raising is something simple. Robots have a long ways to go. They're not Level 3,
they're at basically Level 1, like a cockroach. But that doesn't mean that they can't eventually become
intelligent. Who knows, maybe one day late in the century, robots will become smarter than us. It's
possible. In which case they may put us in zoos, put us behind bars, throw peanuts at us and make us
dance behind bars. I say when that comes, let us put a chip in their brain to shut them off before they
get murderous thoughts.
And let me wind up on the following note. We talked about the brain project of Obama. But if we can
create a disk with your Connectome on it and you die, your Connectome lives on. And so then the
question is did you really die? Well, it depends on how you define "you." If you are a biological entity
consisting of what, where, and a mind, then, yes, you have died, you are gone. But if all your
memories, your personality, your hopes, dreams, your genome survives, then did you really die? In
some sense, no. But that assumes that you are information. And if that's true, then maybe one day we
will have a brain net. A brain net, perhaps within the next decade or two decades, we will have not just
digital sent over the internet. We have emotions; we'll have feelings, memories sent over the internet.
Teenagers are going to love it. On Facebook, they'll send emotions ricocheting across Facebook,
memories of their first kiss, memories of their first date. It's going to explode. And your kids are going
to say, "Mom, dad, you lived in a world where the internet was digital? How could you? How could
you live in that world? No feeling, no emotion, no experiences." Well, it's coming, a brain net.
And the movies, why is it the movies and the Oscars always talk about a flat screen with sound? I
mean, think about it. Isn't that stupid? Everyone making all this hey about a flat screen and sound?
Why not send emotions through the entertainment channels? Why not have full immersion
entertainment? That could be the future of entertainment. And Isaac Ozimov's favorite short story was
sending consciousness into outer space. Maybe one day we'll take the Connectome, it only has a
zettabyte of memory, put it on a laser beam, and calculate how big the laser beam would have to be,
and shoot it into outer space at the speed of light. This could be our ultimate destiny to explore the
universe as beings made out of pure energy, all consistent with what is known about the laws of physics
and the laws of computer science.
And now I'd like to end on one note, and then take a few questions. When I was a child, my role model
was Albert Einstein. And my favorite Einstein story is this. When Einstein was an old man he was
tired of giving the same talk over and over again. So one day a chauffeur came up to him and the
chauffeur said, "Professor, I'm really a part-time actor. I've heard your speech so many times I've
memorized it. So why don't we switch places? I will put on a mustache, I will put on a wig, I will be
the great Einstein, and you can take a rest and be my chauffeur." Well, Einstein loved the job, so they
switched places. This went along famously until one day, a mathematician in the back asked a very
difficult question. And Einstein thought, "Oh, the game is up." But then the chauffeur said "That
question is so elementary that even my chauffeur here can answer it for you."
Thank you very much. You've been a great audience. [applause]
So I think we have some time for questions.
>>: [inaudible] my question is. Thank you very much first of all. How is digital brain connected to
biochemistry of our body? Because a lot of things, a lot of like neurons are triggered not by anything
else but, you know, some hormones or some, let's say, our body triggers.
>> Dr. Micho Kaku: Yeah, you ask a very important question. First of all is the brain a digital
computer? For 50 years we thought yes, and the answer is really no. In some sense we run a wild
goose chase for the last 50 years thinking that the brain is a digital computer or a turing machine. A
turing machine has inputs, outputs and a program. But the brain has no operating system. The brain
has no programming. There's no windows, there's no Pentium chip, there's no CPU. There are no subroutines, nothing. There's nothing in a computer that even vaguely looks like a digital computer.
So what is the brain? The brain is a learning machine. It is a neural network of sorts where it rewires
itself after learning every task. So therefore, it does use some digital, some analog, and a combination,
but as you correctly pointed out, reading, reading what these neurons do is beyond our capability. So
what we do in the laboratory is we cheat. We simply see a configuration of neurons corresponding to
moving your arm like this. Then we create a dictionary that this means certain number of neurons,
therefore, when you think going like this, it will excite those neurons. So we get a dictionary this way.
Very clumsy, but that's what we do in the laboratory, because we cannot read a neural network's
messages and convert it into digital. That was the problem. Now we have computers that can do that,
create this dictionary. That's how we get these gorgeous pictures of thought, that's how we can move
robot arms. But it's all done by cheating, because we really don't know how this neural network -- how
it operates. And that's why we want to create Brain 2.0. That's why The Brain Initiative is being
initiated so that we can see the miswiring of people with OCD, bipolar disorder, and schizophrenia,
diseases by the way which are even mentioned in the Bible they're so old.
>>: Thank you very much. Thanks to the perfect question. [applause]
>> Dr. Micho Kaku: Thank you very much.