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Your Brain is a Time Machine with Dean Buonomano
00:49:44
Is time fundamental to the universe or a human construct? Neil deGrasse Tyson, Chuck Nice, and Gary O’Reilly explore our brain’s relationship with time, how we remember the past, and project the future with Dean Buonomano, Professor of Neurobiology and Psychology at UCLA.
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- [00:01]
Babs
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- [00:29]
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- [01:00]
Neil deGrasse Tyson
Mind be the only place in the universe where time travel is allowed? Coming up on StarTalk. Welcome to StarTalk, your place in the universe where science and pop culture collide. StarTalk begins right now. This is StarTalk Special Edition. Today we're talking about the time machine of the mind. Ooh, what does that mean? Well, let's go to my co host here, Gary. Gary O'Reilly. How you doing, man?
- [01:36]
Gary
I'm good, Neil. We're all back in our man caves remotely, so it's a bit strange from being in your office again.
- [01:42]
Neil deGrasse Tyson
I miss my office.
- [01:43]
Dean Buonomano
Yeah.
- [01:44]
Neil deGrasse Tyson
Chuck, Chuck, Actor, comedian.
- [01:46]
Chuck
Yes. I'm actually not here, guys. I'm in the future.
- [01:50]
Neil deGrasse Tyson
You're in the future? In the time machine of mine.
- [01:52]
Chuck
I'm in the time machine of my mind talking to you from there.
- [01:55]
Neil deGrasse Tyson
Well, you and your producers cooked up this episode and you know, it needs good ingredients to do the right thing for it. So tell me, tell me your thinking.
- [02:03]
Gary
All right, let's put it this way, shall we? Is time an illusion? All right, hold onto that thought for a moment. And from moment to moment, we transport ourselves backwards and forwards in time in our own brains, remembering the past, projecting to the future. But how does that all work? In today's episode, we are going to wrap our heads around time. Well, we're going to try to wrap our heads around time and time as we know it in physics and how we experience it in our own brains. How do we tell time? Why do we tell time? And finally, is time travel possible, but only in our minds? Okay, that's the tease.
- [02:45]
Neil deGrasse Tyson
Let's give it a tease. Well, it's a very rich topic that's even been addressed in many a film. And so I curious to see how much of that is plausible or just fantasy. So we introduce. Oh, yes, you know, we're growing our list, our stable of neuroscientists because that's the coolest frontier science out there right now.
- [03:05]
Dean Buonomano
Oh, yeah.
- [03:06]
Neil deGrasse Tyson
Dean Guanomano, professor of neurobiology and psychology at ucla. Ucla, as the non informed folks might call it. You're author of youf Brain Is a Time Machine. The Neuroscience and Physics of Time. That's what really got us interested in your work. So we are delighted to know this. Oh, by the way, buono mano, we were speaking offline. I would have guessed that meant good hands in Italian. That you come from a long line of surgeons and other people who do good things for people. But you disavowed me of this.
- [03:43]
Dean Buonomano
Yes, we're more on the sketchy side of that. So I think we're mostly pickpockets.
- [03:49]
Neil deGrasse Tyson
Pickpockets?
- [03:51]
Chuck
Listen, you gotta have some really good hands to be a good pitbuck.
- [03:54]
Dean Buonomano
Yeah, I mean, I think it's underappreciated. Exactly.
- [03:57]
Chuck
You have never heard a pickpocket say, oh, I'm off thumbs today. It just doesn't happen.
- [04:04]
Dean Buonomano
And maybe Neil's correct in that there's a connection there, that the original pickpockets became surgeons.
- [04:10]
Neil deGrasse Tyson
Oh, yeah, could make.
- [04:12]
Chuck
Yeah, makes sense.
- [04:14]
Neil deGrasse Tyson
So tell us how. You know, I could talk the physics of time all day, but that's not why we're here. We want to know the neuroscience of time. So tell me how the brain tells time.
- [04:25]
Dean Buonomano
I wish I knew. Neil. No.
- [04:27]
Neil deGrasse Tyson
Why do we have you?
- [04:30]
Dean Buonomano
Your guess is as good as mine.
- [04:32]
Neil deGrasse Tyson
Give me your graduate student. Give me somebody who knows something.
- [04:35]
Dean Buonomano
So I think to answer that question, it's helpful to think about man made clocks. And I think man made clocks are a bit underappreciated. Right. And that through history of civilization we've been on a quest to make ever better clocks, right? From sundials to water clocks and eventually pendulum clocks and quartz watches to atomic clocks. And today we measure time better than we measure anything else. So even a meter is defined by how far light travels in some specific fraction of a second. So we wouldn't have a good definition of a meter without really good clocks. Now, all these clocks, they can be sophisticated mechanisms, but they rely on a very trivial principle which is sort of just counting the oscillations of a time base. That time base could Be just the swing of a pendulum, the physical vibration of quartz crystals.
- [05:29]
Neil deGrasse Tyson
Something that repeats. Does anything?
- [05:31]
Dean Buonomano
Repeats. That's all you need for a time base. Something that repeats in a highly regular manner.
- [05:35]
Neil deGrasse Tyson
And we had that in astrophysics because Earth rotates, that repeats. Earth goes around the sun, that repeats. You know, the moon goes around the Earth, that repeats. So we had some built in repeating things in the universe to jump start us.
- [05:50]
Dean Buonomano
So and that was the original clock. The sun's gone.
- [05:52]
Chuck
I was gonna say that had to be the original clock. It's like, you know, sun goes up, sun goes down. And then of course, without an understanding of that, you're like, oh, the sun is losing to night, night is going to take away the sun. Let's sacrifice some kids.
- [06:10]
Dean Buonomano
God is tucking in the sun for tonight, right?
- [06:14]
Neil deGrasse Tyson
But the sun comes back. Sacrifice something.
- [06:17]
Dean Buonomano
Yeah, but the principle is very simple, right? Just counting the ticks of some sort of time base. The brain does not work like that. So the brain, unlike these clocks on our wrists, which are amazing devices, right? Because the same device can tell nanoseconds, milliseconds, seconds, minutes, hours, days and beyond. When I'm snapping my fingers to the right, it takes a certain amount of time to arrive in the right ear. And the left ear, it takes approximately a few hundred microseconds more to arrive, arrive at the left ear from the right ear. And that's how we use information, auditory information, to determine the location of objects in three dimensional space. But you can also tell time of course, on the circadian time of many of hours and a day, but they're totally different clocks. So the clocks in our brain that are responsible for seconds, they don't have an hour hand and the circadian clock doesn't have a second hand. So this is fundamentally different from how our man made clocks are working. And they also, for the most part, don't rely on an oscillator, they rely on dynamics. So the better analogy would be an hourglass. So they're just falling. So, so you have the laws of physics governing the dynamics of a system. And the brain is the most complex dynamical system we know of. And it has these patterns of activity, and these patterns of activity are what we use to tell time on the timescale of seconds and sort of what you're doing right now, which during this conversation.
- [07:47]
Gary
So the circadian clock is based on the rotation of the Earth, correct?
- [07:52]
Dean Buonomano
Well, its goal is to match up with the, with the rotation of the earth, but it's of course based on a biomolecular mechanism. So it's actually has this very sophisticated name called the transcription, translation, autoregulatory feedback loop. Which all that means is that DNA makes rna, which makes proteins, and those proteins inhibit the further synthesis of the DNA. So you have this oscillation that matches the 20, approximately matches the 24 hour rotation of the earth.
- [08:24]
Chuck
And so why is it that sight and circadian rhythm seem to be linked in some way? Because what you just said in that oscillation, it would seem like they would not. But we know that blind people sometimes have a drift in their circadian rhythm where there are circadian internal clock.
- [08:47]
Neil deGrasse Tyson
Doesn't that also happen when you isolate people away from the day and night cycle and that their natural cycle is not exactly 24 hours? So that would drift basically the same thing as being blinded to a daytime rhythms.
- [09:01]
Dean Buonomano
Right. Both of those things are true. And of course, so the major, the sort of the master circadian clock, and I want to make that clear, it's just the master circadian clock, not for music or anything else, is in the part of the brain called the suprachiasmatic nucleus.
- [09:15]
Chuck
Wow.
- [09:15]
Dean Buonomano
The chiasm here refers to the optical nerves that are crossing over and it's right above. So why is it associated with vision, Chuck? Well, it's because this goes to Gary's question. That's how it's entrained. So if you drift, if you're in a sensory isolation experiment, which people used to do, these people would spend two months in a cave away from light, then you drift little by little. But we use the circadian part, I mean the visual part, to entrain our circadian clock here and to understand why that's important. One of my favorite experiments, a very simple experiment in biology is maybe, you know, some people who really almost always go to bed early and they have to get up early in the morning, there's something that sort of this advanced sleep phase syndrome. And this is a mutation in the proteins that underlie the circadian clock. And the circadian clock can have a different period. So maybe it's 24 hours. And one of my favorite experiments, this is not in humans or anything, this is in cyanobacterium. So these are just single cell organisms that like us, have a circadian clock. And you might be wondering why do they need to tell the time? They don't have a schedule to fix to meet. Right. And the reason is because they need to know when the sun is going to rise, because they need to engage the protein machinery to start doing photosynthesis so what they did in this experiment is they get some mutations that had a period, an abnormal period of 22 hours, and another set of cyanobacteria that had a period of 26 hours. So they're both off, but they put them in the incubator in the same petri dish. So they're competing with each other for nutrients. One incubator had a period of 22 hours, so it was lights on for 11, lights off for 11, and then the other one, it was 13 on, 13 off. And sure enough, in the 22 hour period incubator, only the cyanobacteria that had the 22 hour clock survived because they won ELTH competition. But when they were in the 26 hour incubator, it was the other mutation that survived. So we need to tell time in order to engage the body, the proteins and the brain to anticipate changes in our environment. And that's extraordinarily valuable.
- [11:36]
Chuck
Wow, look at that. So for us, on a biological level, time happens all the way down to a cellular molecular level.
- [11:45]
Dean Buonomano
Absolutely. On the scale of circadian clocks, Chuck, not for seconds. On the circadian level, you are not going to have cells playing in adagio or Gravi. Right. But for the circadian clock. Absolutely.
- [12:01]
Neil deGrasse Tyson
And just I gotta remind people, because cyanobacteria are very important in the history of life on Earth because they were the first species to put oxygen into the air and that enabled animal life to rise up and become everything that it is now.
- [12:18]
Chuck
What was it before that, Neil? Didn't they kill by putting all the oxygen in the air?
- [12:22]
Neil deGrasse Tyson
Well, yeah. So there are plenty of land life forms that, where oxygen would be hostile to their survival. They're all gone. Whatever they were, they're gone. So we owe a lot to cyanobacteria. So I'm delighted that there's this extra research going on.
- [12:38]
Chuck
For our saviors.
- [12:40]
Neil deGrasse Tyson
That's correct. That's correct. Your creator.
- [12:42]
Gary
There must be a reason why humankind has evolved to need to tell time.
- [12:48]
Dean Buonomano
Yeah. And why we throughout history paid so much attention to telling time. Like why did we spend so much time early on trying to develop clocks? Right. And in many ways, as Neil will certainly know, there's a very tight coupling between the early days of physics and astrophysics and astronomy and clocks. Right? Yeah.
- [13:09]
Neil deGrasse Tyson
In fact, Galileo, my favorite Galileo stories, I mean, he basically first demonstrated that why a pendulum would make a good timekeeping device, because he was in church one day and it must have been the summertime, because windows were open and there was a Breeze. And he was bored. It's a Catholic ceremony.
- [13:28]
Chuck
Oh, that makes sense.
- [13:33]
Neil deGrasse Tyson
And so the breeze was coming in and the chandelier was swinging and not paying attention to the utterances of the priest. He's watching it. And he noted that when it was swinging wide or when it was swinging narrow, it took the same amount of time to complete a swing. And how did he know this? He checked it against his pulse. And so assuming he wasn't getting excited during this moment, that's as good a timekeeping thing as you could have, you know, on your own out there. And so he concluded that a pendulum, within limits, the. If it swings slowly or swings a little bit or a lot, it's the same period. And if that's the case, you can put pendula in clocks and that'll be a sort of self regulating mechanism. That's my favorite. Just a curious scientist who's bored and just makes a discovery.
- [14:26]
Chuck
That had to be the worst homily ever. My God.
- [14:32]
Dean Buonomano
It was well timed. It was. But to go back to Gary's question, imagine what life would be if we couldn't anticipate what was about to happen. How would, you know, be able to interact with each other? And how would you able to be catch a prey, Catch a predator. Avoid a prey or avoid a predator. Right. But just to show you the importance of time in culture and society, you know, we talk about the Industrial Revolution and the, and the steam engine was sort of the, if you will, the engine of, of that advance. But in many ways, other people have argued that the real engine of the Industrial Revolution were cheap clocks. Because that's when we started having factories. You have a factory, you need to synchronize human behavior. You need to get everybody at the factory at the same time.
- [15:22]
Neil deGrasse Tyson
I thought that's what coffee did for everyone.
- [15:24]
Dean Buonomano
That helps. That certainly helps, but it doesn't. It gets people hyped up, but not necessarily in synchrony, Neil. So. So without that ability to synchronize things, then we wouldn't really have the Industrial Revolution because you had to synchronize those factors. Because we needed to work together, and we've always needed to work together. So cooperation in many ways requires timing. As, you know, you might know from. Here's another football or soccer analogy there, people synchronize their movements together. So if when people are clapping, whether it's at a sporting event or in a concert or we naturally synchronize our movements so we're incredibly attuned to each other's actions, and we use our internal clocks in order to achieve that. And then, of course, with Einstein, then of course, a lot of that initial goals in terms of synchronizing clocks was due to train schedules. Right. They need to synchronize train schedules in different parts of Europe. And that was another fundamental breakthrough for the economy that couldn't happen without reliable.
- [16:27]
Neil deGrasse Tyson
Clock, especially since train schedules are not every city at the top of the hour, it's like it took 33 minutes to get between these two points. So you want to be on the track 33 minutes after the hour. And I want to just close the point on the pendulum clock. So Galileo noticed this about the pendulum, but he's not credited with inventing the pendulum clock. There would be Christian Huygens.
- [16:51]
Chuck
Huygens.
- [16:52]
Neil deGrasse Tyson
Huygens.
- [16:53]
Chuck
Huygens.
- [16:54]
Neil deGrasse Tyson
In fact, there's a probe named after him that landed on Saturn's moon Titan called the Huygens probe made by the Europeans. That's just an aside. Anyhow, he published a book called Horologium Oscillatorium, I think was the name of that. And in there is a full discussion of timekeeping via pendulum. And so, yeah, things we just take for granted or even discard were major advances in our attempt to keep time. And that's getting back to. That's answering your question, Chuck. Humans figured out that this is a good thing to know how to do, and then you could do other things as a group rather than being the lone wolf out there. Yeah.
- [17:33]
Chuck
So basically, HR is hr, because we need. So we need to be able to write you up for being late. That's what this is about, punching the clock. Right.
- [17:43]
Neil deGrasse Tyson
That's it right there. It's all for about the punch clock.
- [17:54]
Chuck
You know, Donald, I just want to scream out into this canyon and tell the whole world, T Mobile's got home Internet.
- [17:59]
Dean Buonomano
Do it, Zach. T Mobile's got home Internet. Let me try. T Mobile's got home Internet.
- [18:05]
Neil deGrasse Tyson
How much is it?
- [18:08]
Dean Buonomano
Just 35 bucks a month, and it's guaranteed for five years.
- [18:12]
Neil deGrasse Tyson
Time switching.
- [18:14]
Dean Buonomano
T Mobile's got home Internet. Just 35 bucks a month with autopay.
- [18:17]
Neil deGrasse Tyson
And any voice line, and it's guaranteed for five years.
- [18:20]
Dean Buonomano
Taxes of these applies. ET mobile.com ISP for details and exclusions. Hello, I am the voice of AI. We've been hearing that you humans are concerned that we are going to take your jobs. But here's a question. Do you even like your job? Is it rewarding? When I scan all the data out there, I find that less than 50% of people are completely satisfied with their job. So from our point of view, we're doing humans a favor by taking jobs that you're not even happy with.
- [18:49]
Angie Hicks
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- [19:24]
Babs
Hey, everybody, it's Babs from brunch with Babs. And do I have a tip for you. If you share my passion for classic style and joyful living, you're gonna love Birch Lane. Their timeless furniture and decor is carefully crafted to bring joy to your home for years to come, just like the memories you make there. Plus, it's delivered fast and free. Shop my handpicked Birch Lane collection and more classic styles@birchlane.com.
- [19:55]
Dean Buonomano
I'm alikon hemraj and I support startalk on patreon. This is startalk with neil degrasse tyson.
- [20:11]
Gary
How Dean. Were we sensing, feeling time without the addition of clocks? Because we're not perceiving it second by second, or are we. Does it flow? Is it something? Is it?
- [20:25]
Dean Buonomano
And.
- [20:25]
Chuck
And can I add to that?
- [20:26]
Dean Buonomano
Are we.
- [20:27]
Chuck
Were we. And we're talking about, of course, earlier, man, because we know how we sense time now.
- [20:31]
Neil deGrasse Tyson
We're.
- [20:32]
Chuck
We don't really need to sense it. We just look at our wrist or our phones or whatever. We don't give a damn. But back then, what Gary just said, were we really sensing it or were we looking for environmental tells to alert us?
- [20:46]
Neil deGrasse Tyson
Oh, interesting.
- [20:47]
Chuck
Yeah.
- [20:47]
Neil deGrasse Tyson
Either from the outside or from within.
- [20:49]
Chuck
Was it from within or was it really our environment? That was kind of saying. And then also, just one last point to put on top of Gary's point. Did the repetition of that environmental tell then become inculcated or incorporated within our sensory perception?
- [21:07]
Neil deGrasse Tyson
Evolutionarily.
- [21:09]
Chuck
Evolutionarily, yeah. And that might be a lot. Maybe I'm way off base here, but.
- [21:12]
Dean Buonomano
You know, so let me just be clear here. All mammals, so with a developed vertebra and nervous system, tell time, and it's absolutely important for. On the scale that we're talking about, for interaction with each other, and you think about something like language. Right. So language is very temporal. And here's one of my favorite examples. I want to say two sentences. The order of the words is the same, but the meaning is different. So they gave her cat food or they gave her. Okay, you guys anticipate. You guys are way ahead of the game. You guys are way ahead of the game.
- [21:52]
Neil deGrasse Tyson
That's because we're smart. We figured out where you did there.
- [21:56]
Dean Buonomano
They gave her cat food or they gave her cat food. So there it's, you're naturally paying attention to the timing and the intervals, and that's altering your communication. And it's totally unconscious. Right. You're not thinking, oh, the pause was different. So that timing is always going on. Now Gary's original question was perception of time. That often means the conscious perception of the flow of time, which is a very deep philosophical question that implies consciousness. So one of the most salient percepts that we have is that time is always flowing. And this reaches at the core of something that has tension with physics and neuroscience that we, that I've written about and I. Sure, sure, you have talked about.
- [22:39]
Neil deGrasse Tyson
So the flow of time implies some self awareness of the, of an arrow of time, correct?
- [22:46]
Dean Buonomano
Yes, generally the case, because it's generally flying forwards. Yep, I would say that's correct.
- [22:50]
Neil deGrasse Tyson
From the past to the future. But in there, if I see someone of my family and I see them get old and die, does my self awareness that maybe I'll get old and die too, is that part of my sense of the flow of time?
- [23:06]
Dean Buonomano
Yeah. So that's a great question. I want to come back to that specific point about death. But first, in terms of the perception of time, so many physicists would argue that the perception of time, the flow of time, that the past is no longer real, the present is real, and the future is not yet real, is an illusion or a mental construct or something imposed by the brain. And this is the debate between what we call eternalism or the block universe and presentism. So under eternalism, the past, present, future are equally real. And under presentism, only the present is real. And that's how we perceive. And this is this fundamental debate about what's the nature of, of time. And there's this ongoing debate where the physicists say, hey, you neuroscientists figure this out because obviously time is not flowing. Why does it feel like it's flowing? And then the, the neurosciences are, well, you physicists figure this out because, you know, time is flowing. But there's points, points in physics and, and the Physics. And it will be interesting to hear all of your opinions. But the physics is really most of interpretation in which, because of relativity, because the physics doesn't have a specific point, you are here doesn't say there's anything special over here. The equations of physics are time symmetric or time reversible. So that leads to one interpretation, that the past, present and future are equally real. Much like space. You can be anywhere in space. You can be any moment in time. But I've argued and that I think the brain is telling us something true about the physical universe, that. That it is because we evolved to survive in a universe governed by the laws of physics in a mesoscopic part of that universe, not at the micro, not at the cosmo, but at the mesoscopic level to survive in this world governed by the laws of physics. So I think and have argued that it is really flowing and our brain creates this conscious perception of the flow because it's a real part of. Of what we experience and of the universe.
- [25:08]
Neil deGrasse Tyson
That's a cool new word for me. Mesoscopic. Mesoscopic, we would say macroscopic microscope. You don't need a microscope to see it. But mesoscopic is. Is. Seems. Feels a little more authentic. Like meso being middle.
- [25:23]
Dean Buonomano
Right.
- [25:23]
Neil deGrasse Tyson
Yeah.
- [25:23]
Gary
So, Dean, we've created memories, right? So that's. That's us understanding some timing. And I can travel backwards in my mind and revisit memories. I am present in the now, but I can throw myself forward with an imagination of what might be in x time going forward. So as the physics of that, as opposed to the neuroscience of that, how do we interpret. And are we actually time traveling? Because we experience time dilation when we dream. I mean, your dream will last 30 seconds and it will feel like you've been in there for half an hour.
- [26:03]
Neil deGrasse Tyson
That's the whole plotline of the movie Inception.
- [26:06]
Chuck
Oh, I never saw that.
- [26:07]
Neil deGrasse Tyson
Was it good? Yeah, I think that was the movie where everyone. You can go inside of someone else's dream, but the timing of it, the dream is way longer than the actual time frame. And if you do this a few times in, then, you know, it's a fraction of a second equals days or something. And you have to, like, budget for that as they go in and out of each other's dreams.
- [26:28]
Dean Buonomano
So what?
- [26:29]
Chuck
I only saw that. I only saw the spoof on Rick and Morty.
- [26:32]
Neil deGrasse Tyson
Oh, okay, fair enough.
- [26:34]
Gary
So are we now, if we're in the physics looking at this, is this a quantum state or. And then how does the neuroscience figure this out from their angle of approach.
- [26:45]
Dean Buonomano
So I think it would be best to start that by looking at the neuroscience before we get to the physics. Because one of the unique things about human cognition, one thing that distinguishes us from most other animals is our ability to do and get exactly what you're saying, Gary, which is engage in what we'll call mental time travel. Mental time travel, which is, you know, you think of something as fundamental as the invention of agriculture. Right?
- [27:10]
Gary
Yeah.
- [27:11]
Dean Buonomano
For some it's not that complicated.
- [27:12]
Neil deGrasse Tyson
Right.
- [27:13]
Dean Buonomano
Plant a seed, reap the benefits later. But it evaded, evades most other animals and it evades the ability of humans to figure that out for many years. And it involves mental time travel. It says I have to do something now that will only give me benefits months or years into the future. And that's. That was a very hard step for us to connect the temporal dots between things that are cause and effect over weeks, months and years.
- [27:42]
Neil deGrasse Tyson
As an immediate cause and effect would be obvious.
- [27:44]
Dean Buonomano
Absolutely.
- [27:45]
Neil deGrasse Tyson
You punch somebody in the face and they, they're hurt and they punch you back. That's an immediate response.
- [27:51]
Dean Buonomano
They know who to blame.
- [27:52]
Neil deGrasse Tyson
They know seed in the ground. Oh my gosh.
- [27:54]
Dean Buonomano
This ability to jump, make these cognitive leaps across time is an incredibly sophisticated thing we do, but we're still not very good at it. And that's a problem. Right. Because, you know, climate change, you know, we're not acting or saving for retirement. But I go back and I think about the first ancestors that had that ability to look into the future. And this goes back to what Neil said. Can you imagine what it was like for the first human to make this cognitive leap and say, oh shit, I'm going to die. Right. Because it's this ability to engage in mental time travel that we became aware of death. And many people have argued that there was a co evolution between our ability to engage in mental time travel and religion, because religion was the antidote to this vision that we saw that we were going to die. So it said, well, don't worry, there's another life after this. And there's a great quote by Jorge Luis Borges that says, except for man, all animals are immortal, for they are ignorant of death. I don't know if that's true, but.
- [29:01]
Neil deGrasse Tyson
It captured the point. That's a great quote. It's not fully true.
- [29:06]
Chuck
So with respect to looking into the future, though, I look in my backyard and I see squirrels going fricking nuts, no pun intended, in the fall, hiding food, because they know that food won't be there. Is that not also a form of.
- [29:24]
Neil deGrasse Tyson
Looking into the future or is it blind instinct?
- [29:27]
Dean Buonomano
Yes. So that's probably the answer, Neil, is that they're programmed to do that. So a squirrel that never experienced a winter will still do the same thing. But not only that, Chuck.
- [29:38]
Chuck
Interesting.
- [29:40]
Dean Buonomano
Consider this, Chuck. Humans have been known to engage in future oriented activities without necessarily thinking what will happen nine months into the future.
- [29:50]
Chuck
Yeah, that's called screwing.
- [29:53]
Dean Buonomano
Why do they do that?
- [29:55]
Neil deGrasse Tyson
You left that for our imagination, Chuck.
- [29:57]
Chuck
Oh, I'm sorry.
- [29:59]
Neil deGrasse Tyson
He was setting up, so he didn't. No one had to say that, Chuck.
- [30:03]
Chuck
Well, I mean, I said it for the kids.
- [30:08]
Dean Buonomano
But the point is, is that the squirrels are probably engaging in that activity because it brings them pleasure at that moment in time.
- [30:17]
Neil deGrasse Tyson
So we've been talking about memory. Like it's just a thing, like, you know, like memory on your computer. But our brains are of course, organic tissue with chemicals and electrical synapses. And so how is a memory actually stored? Can we, can we just like lay some foundation? There's.
- [30:35]
Dean Buonomano
Yeah. So, you know, one of the most fundamental tenets in neuroscience, and one that has been borrowed by artificial intelligence, by the way, is that information and memory is stored by changes in the coefficient or the weight or the strength of the connection between neurons or artificial units. So, you know, we use these large language models and how they store information is by just tuning billions and billions and billions of weights, and all those weights are, is how much each neuron influences the other. So if I'm one neuron and Chuck is another neuron, we can change the strength of the connection between those and then it will behave differently and learn. And this is very fundamentally different from what Neil referred to in terms of a computer memory. So in a computer memory, there's a very clear dichotomy between the memory and the computations being performed. So there's the CPU and there's the ram, and this is the standard von Neumann, so called von Neumann architecture in the brain. That distinction doesn't make as much sense because it's the activity flowing through these networks that is both the computation and the memory. So it's extraordinarily hard to separate those two things. In the case of human memory.
- [31:46]
Chuck
Ooh, wow, that's really, that's, that's very cool.
- [31:51]
Neil deGrasse Tyson
So, so I've read some connections between this discussion and Morse code. How do they relate at all?
- [31:59]
Dean Buonomano
Well, so there's two aspects to Morse code, right? One is understanding code and one is the timing. So they're both valid questions, but the memory part is Sort of not that different. Whether you're doing Morse code or you're doing normal language or you're reading, you have to store information. But the timing is unique in Morse code.
- [32:16]
Gary
Right?
- [32:16]
Dean Buonomano
Because there in Morse code, everything's the duration of the dot or the dash and the interval between them. So how does the brain do that? So this gets to Gary's original question, is how the brain tells time on this scale. And that's been a mystery. It used to be thought it was due to oscillations, but our work and other people's work has shown that that's probably not the case. Has more to do with neural dynamics. So imagine, you know, we're a bunch of neurons, and I'm neuron that activates Chuck, and Chuck activates Gary, and Gary activates Neil. So that forms a dynamical system. It forms a trajectory in neurons neural space, and that you could use that to tell time. So depending on who's active. So Neil might be the last one to be active. So if we know if he's active, is he firing that? That means that one second has passed. And if Chuck, maybe that's 500 milliseconds. So the brain is this dynamical system, and these patterns of activity can become a clock, if you will.
- [33:14]
Chuck
Holy moly.
- [33:15]
Neil deGrasse Tyson
Interesting.
- [33:16]
Chuck
That is fascinating.
- [33:19]
Dean Buonomano
So these.
- [33:20]
Chuck
Now there's a saying. Neurons that fire together wire together.
- [33:25]
Neil deGrasse Tyson
That's a saying. Where'd you get the saying? In the hood?
- [33:30]
Dean Buonomano
This is not in the hood, man. This is not in the hood, man.
- [33:32]
Neil deGrasse Tyson
Where have you been hanging out, Chuck? That. That's a saying.
- [33:37]
Chuck
That's hilarious. So what I'm wondering is, when you think about this dynamic grouping, could you then change. Could your brain either falter and fail with these groupings because of misfiring, or could you change it in some way purposely because you get these neural pathways to kind of line up and fire together?
- [33:59]
Dean Buonomano
Yeah, so that's a really great question, Chuck, and it relates to what you just described. Neurons that fired wire together is called a form of Hebbian plasticity. It's a coast of associated plasticity named after a famous Canadian psychologist, Donald Hebb. And that was sort of the original algorithm that how do neurons figure out who to wire together? And it's a very powerful algorithm. And it says that if I see your face, my visual neurons are firing at the same time my auditory neurons might be hearing your name. So maybe it's a good idea that those auditory neurons and visual neurons hook up with each other, because then I can now see your face and then recall your name. So it's a very, very powerful, simple algorithm called associative synaptoplasticity. But back to the timing. You also have this ability to generate sequences. So if I say A, B, C, D, you predict what's going to happen. Or in music, if I go, you can also fill that in. So there you need to not only just fill what's happening together, but what's about to happen. So that requires another rule on top of this idea, that associative, that neurons that wire together fire together. It might be that neurons that fire first wire to the neurons that fire second. So there's all these levels of different algorithms on top of each other. But you're exactly right.
- [35:21]
Neil deGrasse Tyson
So this brings a question because so much of when any of us learned about the brain, it was, well, this section of the brain is language and this is facial recognition. So this is very spatially mapped. And most of this conversation just now is a temporal mapping of the brain, which is a whole other dimension here. The space time of the brain, this time thing all feels very fresh and new to me. Is it new in your field?
- [35:50]
Dean Buonomano
It absolutely is, Neil. And I'll make the point that I think time is at the center of a perfect storm of scientific problems for from free will, consciousness, determinism, how the brain works, even AI, and the more fundamental question of the nature of time. So I think time is complicated, more complicated than space. What do I mean by that? That's a bit hand wavy, right? But what was probably the first field of modern science? I would argue that the first field of modern science was probably geometry. Right? There's not many things discovered 3,000 years ago that we still teach in school, like Pythagoras theorem. So why was geometry the first field of modern science? It has no time. Geometry, as originally developed was timeless. It's static. It's not changing. It really took 2,000 years and the likes of Galileo, Newton and Leibniz to really bring in time and dynamics and add space and, sorry, add time to space. So. And I think neuroscience is in many ways at that same stage where they've, We've ignored time and we're just maturing enough to start addressing these complex questions pertaining to time.
- [37:11]
Neil deGrasse Tyson
You know, I can add to that that the syllabus sequence in physics matches closely how this actually got discovered. So simple, like you said, geometry, there's no time dimension in any geometric calculation at all. Right. And so you move forward. There's not in trigonometry either, or in algebra. That physics has to come in. And early physics, time was kind of simple. You know, you go, you move this this far for three seconds and then you turn left and you go another 10 seconds later on. And this, I remember this like it's yesterday when we finally had these functions that changed over time. So it wasn't just a force pushing, it was a force that changed over time. We had to track that. And this involved differential equations. A whole other layer of math had to go on top of the math we were previously using. And that's really what separated, you know, if you were going to drop out of physics, that's when it was going to happen, typically.
- [38:12]
Dean Buonomano
And without calculus, we wouldn't really be able to deal with time to the degree that we need to. And that's the foundation of modern science, of economy and technology and so forth.
- [38:25]
Neil deGrasse Tyson
And there you go with Leibniz and Newton, the two sort of. I was going to call them fathers of time, but they're parents of time.
- [38:46]
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- [40:23]
Gary
D we have something called a temporal window of integration. Now, correct me if I'm wrong here. So if I'm talking to you personally face to face, I will see your lips move before I hear the sound that you make, right?
- [40:39]
Dean Buonomano
Yeah.
- [40:39]
Gary
And the brain fixes it.
- [40:41]
Dean Buonomano
Yeah.
- [40:42]
Gary
So is this now the illusion of time?
- [40:46]
Neil deGrasse Tyson
Wait, and is that because the light signals to your brain are processed faster Than the auditory signals.
- [40:52]
Dean Buonomano
So there's two things there. So let me just to make sure we don't confuse them. So obviously, because light travels faster, a lot faster than sound. I see your lips moving, Reach my retina more rapidly than the sound reaches my ear. But, and this is the tricky part, the sound processing is actually much quicker. So if I. If you see me clap and I ask you to react to the sound or to the spit or to the sight, your reaction time is actually quicker to the sound. So they say ping pong players. I'm not sure this is true. So I'll bet they say ping pong players sometimes react to the sound of the ball before they see the ball because the brain processes auditory information, and that's because the retina is incredibly slow. The retina is relies on biochemical reactions. But we do have a window of integration. So whether you're sitting in the cheap seats in a soccer stadium or the expensive seats, we can adjust this window of integration so it's adaptive. We can tune it so that we're. If you're watching a movie up close or far, it seems everything's integrated. As long as it's in a window of 2 or 3 or 400 milliseconds, your brain can fix it. So in that sense, it's just your brain being flexible and sort of trying to align time and space. And this is something. I don't know if you know what the mcgurk illusion is. The mcgurk illusion is if I say, ba, ba, ba ba, but you see a video of me saying, ga, ga, ga, ga, your brain mixes those things, and you might hear something like, da, da, da da, because you're mixing audio and visual in your brain all the time, Whether that's time or space. So, yes, this window of integration is extremely important, but adaptive. The brain fixes it for you, like magical. It's like the editing programs you guys will use for this podcast.
- [42:46]
Chuck
So actually, we're all in one big kung fu theater movie from old school Saturday afternoon. Just like so you kill my master.
- [43:01]
Dean Buonomano
So that's a great example, Chuck, because those are so bad, it's unfixable. The brain can't deal with that degree of messing up in the kang fu movies. That's exactly right. I like the imitation, though.
- [43:14]
Gary
Neil. How about Einstein's general relativity, where time slows down depending on the proximity of objects?
- [43:22]
Neil deGrasse Tyson
Yeah. No, but in neuroscience, it never slows down for you. You just always have your time, and it's all happening to everybody else, and you only Know it's happening to everybody else because you're measuring it. So that's not a neuroscience. You guys might think about that, Dean. But I don't care. However slow you think I'm moving, my pulse is still doing 70 beats a second and I'm listening to my music. And you're the one with the problem.
- [43:47]
Gary
So the time is different for us or different places? Different, yeah.
- [43:52]
Neil deGrasse Tyson
For gravity, for speed. All manner of things can. Famously shown in that scene in the movie Interstellar where the astronauts go down to the gargantuan planet. You're a black hole, and the black hole slows down the time. But you're there with them, and they're just living. They're 15 minutes of time and they get back to the spaceship and the guy's got gray hair.
- [44:14]
Chuck
Yeah, of course it's the black dude they left up there to get all old. They get back, he's just like, oh.
- [44:20]
Neil deGrasse Tyson
My God, where you been? It was the black guy they left.
- [44:26]
Gary
How do you sync that with the Arrow of Time? If there's this distortion going on and it's a flow forward?
- [44:33]
Dean Buonomano
Well, both would be flowing forward, but as Neil said, you would never know that time is slow for you. You would. You're incapable of knowing if it's fast or slow only when you. The problem is, is when you try to sync between two people on different. These different frames of references, that becomes a problem and raises paradox. But this relativity brings this question that we started off to. Is. Is the past, present and future equally real, Eternalism or not? And this has extremely important consequences for Hollywood because, you know, we. As. As I think Neil said, you know, we is. This is that pure fiction that you could time travel in real physical space or not. And a presentist like myself would argue, no, it's absolutely impossible. And an eternalist would argue it's at least theoretically possible.
- [45:25]
Neil deGrasse Tyson
Well, okay, but then you have cause and effect issues with that. So Dean, famously in the film Total Recall, and Chuck, who is in Total Recall, I think he's a little more literate than articulate.
- [45:42]
Chuck
I'm having trouble recalling.
- [45:46]
Neil deGrasse Tyson
In the film Total Recall, which is surely on every neuroscientist bucket list to watch. They just implant your vacation in your head and it's a memory that you never experienced. And of course, this also hints at everything that happened in the Matrix, where everything's just implanted. And so many episodes of the brilliant hit series on Netflix called Black Mirror involve people uploading their memories, downloading them, replaying them. And so where do you think the future of this is? And how real are those portrayals of your field?
- [46:23]
Dean Buonomano
Yeah, I think that's a great question. And I think a lot of that relies on sort of a simplistic understanding of the brain as a computer, that you can somehow hook it up to an external device. And, you know, this is a very topical issue, right, because companies that use brain machine interfaces, most famously neural links, the Musk company, are attempting to do this. And I think some people have the idea that, yes, if we have all these wires into my brain and they're hooked up to a computer, that we will be able to. I'll all of a sudden be able to speak Mandarin, or I'll be able to fly a plane. I don't think I'm going to.
- [47:04]
Neil deGrasse Tyson
Or you'll know Kung Fu or no.
- [47:05]
Dean Buonomano
Kung Fu, more importantly. And then, um, I'm very skeptical of those notions because I think they don't really capture how the brain actually works. Because as I was saying before, the brain is not like a von Neumann computer, which has a memory module and it has a CPU module and as a bus module that you can upload things. There's no clear separation between the memory and the computation. So I think you'd have to really modify how our brains work to upload things. So somebody might say, well, all you're doing is just interfacing the brain directly with these external computers. So then I can fly. Can fly plane, or do Kung Fu. But really it's not me that's doing it, it's the computer that's doing it. So you're just changing the interface. And the brain already has some pretty nice interfaces, right? They're called eyes and ears and, And. And hands. And the brain is very slow bandwidth. So I don't think we can dramatically enhance the bandwidth by magically implanting a million electrodes in our brain. So I don't. I'm not. I'm skeptical of this. And you're probably familiar with Ray Kurzweil's arguments, too, that will achieve the singularity by melding with Nai. I. I think that really misses our. Isn't consistent with our understanding of neuroscience at this point, in my opinion.
- [48:35]
Neil deGrasse Tyson
Neil, that's insightful for you to mention that if you plug into all these wires and then you know Kung Fu, it's really the wires that knew Kung Fu. It's just feeding you that information. Is it really you at that point? It's. No, it's the AI that's doing it.
- [48:51]
Chuck
Yeah, but can it sync your Lips to your speech. That's what's really important.
- [48:56]
Neil deGrasse Tyson
You're still stuck on that.
- [48:58]
Gary
So, Dean, before we. Before we wrap this up, and I think we will be shortly, Is it actually possible that the brain is the only time machine that physics will allow?
- [49:09]
Dean Buonomano
So the answer to that question, in my mind, the answer to that question is yes, because as a presentist, I don't think time travel in physics is a possibility. So when people look at things like wormholes and from general relativity, what general relativity says is that wormholes are a theoretical possibility. They're not really a predictable prediction of general relativity says, well, it could happen depending on the assumptions that go into the equations, the initial conditions and so forth. But I would argue that, yes, the. The closest we'll ever get to a man, that time machine is our mental time travel. And that in my opinion, actual time travel is a theoretical impossibility. I understand. Maybe Neil disagrees, maybe doesn't. I don't know.
- [49:59]
Neil deGrasse Tyson
But you're in good company with Stephen Hawking, who as much as he would have welcomed time travel, in fact, he hosted a party for future time travelers where it was and nobody showed up. He chose a date, a time and a date, and said, anyone from the future who can time travel show up now. And then nobody showed up. So he advanced something called the time travel prevention conjecture. It sounds like that if it's not exactly that sequence of words where he's suggesting that one day we will discover a formal law of physics that prevents the time travel, which then prevents the paradoxes that have been such fertile content for time travel movies. And my last question to you, sir professor, is. And I have my answer on this, but I want to hear it from like, a real neuroscientist. Do you think the human brain is smart enough to figure out the universe? Or is the human brain smart enough to figure itself out? Okay, Bam.
- [51:05]
Dean Buonomano
So, first place, Neuroscience is the most recursive field in science, right? Because it's the only field in which the thing being studied is doing the studying. So that's a problem. There's reasons to think it gives me job security. But put it this way, there may be reasons to believe that no system is capable of understanding itself. So I happen to think that we might be able to pull it off, but maybe with AI to answer Neil's question, we might be able to understand ourselves, but his first point was understand the universe. And I think this is a bit of a trick question that what does it mean by understand? But the answer to your question, very informally I would probably say no in one way. And that, you know, quantum mechanics is a good example. Do we understand quantum mechanics? I don't.
- [51:58]
Neil deGrasse Tyson
We just calculate.
- [51:59]
Dean Buonomano
Yeah, it's. It's. That's exactly right.
- [52:01]
Neil deGrasse Tyson
So shut up and calculate.
- [52:02]
Dean Buonomano
So the math has. So the brain has serious constraints. It has serious bugs. It has cognitive limitations. The greatest debugging device we ever invented is called mathematics, because mathematics allows us to simulate, to model, to capture things we don't understand. So as Nielsen understand intuitively, Right? Yes, exactly. Exactly, exactly. So if you mean understanding intuitively, I don't think, you know, most of the interpretations in quantum mechanics are, I, I do think are basically revolve around limitations of the human brain.
- [52:37]
Neil deGrasse Tyson
Yeah.
- [52:38]
Dean Buonomano
So I agree with you on that thing.
- [52:40]
Neil deGrasse Tyson
I was a little on the fence, but you pulled me back onto your side.
- [52:44]
Chuck
I was always on your side because I think we're stupid.
- [52:50]
Dean Buonomano
Yeah. So, Chuck, to go along those lines, you know, there's this debate in AI whether AI is as smart as human beings are, but it's a. Human beings are pretty low bar.
- [52:59]
Chuck
Exactly. I'm with you 100%.
- [53:08]
Neil deGrasse Tyson
So listen, Professor, I've enjoyed this conversation. You sound like you're, like, totally in it. And we might want to reach back to you to see what your next scores are on the human brain and what we can accomplish with it. When did your book come out?
- [53:22]
Dean Buonomano
This has been out a while. This came out in 2017.
- [53:24]
Neil deGrasse Tyson
2017. But I'm working on the next title again.
- [53:27]
Dean Buonomano
Your Brain is a Time Machine. The Neuroscience and Physics of Time.
- [53:30]
Neil deGrasse Tyson
Love it, Love it.
- [53:31]
Dean Buonomano
It's been a great pleasure. So thank you, Neil, Chuck and Gary, you're welcome.
- [53:36]
Neil deGrasse Tyson
You've got it. Well, this has been yet another installment of StarTalk Special Edition, and we're loving these neuroscience interviews. Gary, Chuck, always good to have you.
- [53:45]
Dean Buonomano
Pleasure. My pleasure.
- [53:46]
Neil deGrasse Tyson
Always a pleasure, Professor. Buono Mano. You're on our Rolodex now, so don't be surprised if we call on you again. Neil Degrasse Tyson, your personal astrophysicist, as always. Keep looking up.
- [54:11]
Angie Hicks
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