Neurohacking: rewiring your brain | Don Vaughn | TEDxUCLA

Translator: Rhonda Jacobs Reviewer: Peter van de Ven Inside each of us is a beautiful symphony. 100 billion neurons fire in unison, building this vivid reality in which we live. And within each small part of that neural activity lives a little bit of what makes you you. And after

your

experiences today, that activity will have changed and you will never be the same again. You are inextricably linked to

your

brain

. When I first learned these principles, when I was 16, I fell in love with the

brain

and have been researching neuroscience ever since. Now, one day, we were doing a new MRI experiment and I was surprised because the experiment went well, but much to everyone's surprise, I had a hole in my brain.

It was also quite large; It was like 30 percent of my cerebellum just wasn't there. (laughs) Which, as you can imagine, was quite surprising to me because I didn't feel like anything about me or my life and my experience of the world had changed or was missing. The cerebellum is one of the most fundamental parts of your brain. It has like 80 percent of all your neurons. Then I got interested. Now, there's a collision between what the brain is supposed to do and what it comes up with, and it somehow finds a middle ground. And I became very interested in the idea of ​​the brain as a dynamic, flexible system.

And to that end, I want to tell you the story of Cameron Mott. Just after his third birthday, Cameron began having violent seizures. They began to get worse and worse and eventually he was losing the ability to speak. Doctors diagnosed him with something called Rasmussen encephalitis, and the only real treatment for this was a hemispherectomy: removing half of his brain. And keep in mind that half of his brain controls and is responsible for movement and sensations in the other half of his body. So this surgery would immediately leave Cameron hemiplegic. But just four weeks after the operation, he left the hospital.

And he's still dealing with a little bit of hemiplegia and a little bit of peripheral vision loss, but otherwise, he's able to run with his peers and is cognitively quite adept; he is amazing. And I wondered, you know, consider that for a second: If I gave you half a car or half a phone, you wouldn't go anywhere in Los Angeles and you wouldn't be on Twitter right now tweeting about how expansive TEDxUCLA is. . (Laughs) Because for most devices, 50 percent equals broken. But somehow, in this case with Cameron, 50 percent is almost equal to 100 percent. How is that possible?

Well, the remaining part of Cameron's brain sensed the massive loss of neural tissue and physically rewired and reorganized itself to take over everything the other half had previously handled. That's an ability known as neuroplasticity. It is the brain's ability to change itself, to reconnect. That's why I think it's not a very good analogy when people say that the brain is like a computer. Actually, it's really bad because your brain is not static hardware. And although the prevailing view in neuroscience for a long time was that the adult brain is a fixed processing unit, it seems like every day we find a new result that says that's not the case at all.

Although the brain has a structure, it is a dynamic and flexible biology. Let me say it again: you and your brain are static, but you are also dynamic: you can change yourselves. So the idea worth spreading is this: What if we could treat injuries and disabilities in a whole new way, by hacking the brain's ability to rewire? To show you what I mean, let's look at how we have treated depression. Since 1952, scientists and doctors have approached the question of treating depression as a fixed hardware problem in which there is a deficiency of "happy" neurotransmitters such as serotonin, dopamine and norepinephrine.

And in this context, it makes a lot of sense that the way to do this is to discover and design drugs that increase these neurotransmitter levels. Enter MAOIs, tricyclics, and SSRIs: there are hundreds of them, but they all work in pretty much the same way. And these are wonders of modern medicine. I mean, with antidepressants, we see that about two-thirds of people experience some type of symptom relief. But that still leaves 1.5 million people, in the United States alone, who are still struggling to enjoy their lives, who are disconnecting from their friends and families. It is a terrible and debilitating disease.

So what if we could (what would be possible) if we approached the problem from the perspective of neuroplasticity? So what we're doing is essentially finding regions in the brain that show different activation in depressed patients than in normal people. So, for example, if someone with depression shows a dorsolateral prefrontal cortex (it's not as active as in other brains), we actually use electromagnetic currents from devices placed on the scalp to induce neural

rewiring

in those areas. So for the area that was less active than normal, we give it a pulse, we stimulate it, we do everything we can over several sessions to say, Can we regulate that?

Can we essentially make this brain regress toward normal behavior, one area at a time? And while this is new technology, some of the pioneering work by Dr. Jonathan Downer of the University of Toronto shows a remission rate of almost 33 percent for treatment-resistant depression, which is depression in which Patients have seen no relief from the therapy, according to them. I haven't seen any relief from antidepressants and they are running out of options. And another wonderful thing about the idea of ​​neuroplasticity is that while medications are very specific at the molecular level, they are still quite general in their administration, often affecting a large number of parts of the body that we had not anticipated, and leading to the long list of side effects that you are probably used to hearing quickly at the end of drug commercials.

But neuroplasticity takes the other approach. Instead, we focus on very large areas of your brain, but leave the rest alone. We are now in the midst of the personal medicine revolution: you can sequence your genome; you can get SNP: they cost between 100 and 200 dollars. I think neuroplasticity can fit into this because the devices we use can be tailored very specifically to each individual. We can provide the right stimulating pulse for John and we can provide the right area of ​​focus for Jenny. There is a lot of flexibility to make sure we address the fact that we are just as different on the inside - probably more so - than on the outside, and any optimal treatment mechanism should address that.

So, to me this seems like science fiction come true. I mean, we're on the frontier of being able to non-invasively rewire the brain to alleviate certain types of mental disorders. While there is certainly a debate in the literature, as there always is: what is the correct farce? What is the correct control? Where are you aiming? It doesn't matter. We're almost there and the possibilities are amazing. And once we get there, the next question is: if we can rewire your brain using devices, would it be possible to help your brain reconnect with just your own thoughts? I know it sounds crazy, but that's the idea of ​​something called real-time neurofeedback.

Essentially, what we are doing, if you give us the example, we are going to be addiction. In cocaine addiction, we show a subject attracting images of cocaine and induce his craving networks. So these are cocaine addicts. And then we present them with real-time feedback of what their brain is actually doing. What is the craving network in your brain really doing? And the idea is that we're asking people to navigate their mental landscape and do whatever it takes to lower that bar, which is essentially exploiting any conscious control, and probably in most cases, unconscious control, that you have. on your own brain to intelligently rewire it at just the right moment, with just a little biofeedback.

Now, I think this has real implications for the legal system because we're getting to the point where our neurochemistry is getting really good. Now we can administer different types of medications to change moods. And in one case, we as a government are now disarming criminals with drugs. And that might sound like a 1984-style statement, but consider that we already do that. In California and many other states, we require what is called chemical castration for repeat sex offenders. That is why they are forced to take medroxyprogesterone acetate to reduce their libido, and it is effective. And I'm not here to comment on the morality of the issue, but I feel that as we look for new ways to rehabilitate criminals instead of warehousing them, neuroplasticity would be an amazing option, where, before I say, you have to If you take this medication or we won't let it out, instead we see: Is there any chance for this person to be reconfigured or reconnect to themselves?

And going beyond the deficits, what if instead of just treating the deficits, we actually used this to improve ourselves, just our own impulse control - where... yeah, okay, I don't know which one I want. right now... (Laughter) where to use our own intelligent brain plasticity to modulate and positively regulate our long-term decision making, our attention and our impulse control. What if we went to the mental biofeedback gym as much as the real gym, and lifted our behavioral problems with as much vigor as we lift our 45-pound plates? I think it's a beautiful idea. And there is one more application of neuroplasticity that I would like to talk to you about, but to do so, we are going to perform a quick experiment.

Everyone look under your seats. Some of you will see a pair of earplugs; they look like this. And some of you stole them before the break. (Laughs) I know who you are. Take them out. Well. So here is the experiment. Those of you who have earplugs will be speakers, and everyone else will be listeners. Well? Open the. Get prepared. Now I would like to introduce you to my friend Mimi. Mimi is seven months old and she loves to talk. When she presses Play, her job, speakers, is to imitate what she says. Listeners, her job is to see how well you did.

Okay, put on your earplugs. And for those of you at home, go ahead and plug your ears the old fashioned way and see if you can play along. (Cute baby noises) (Laughs) Yeah, pretty terrible, actually. And look, I set you all up to fail at that because reading lips is a really hard problem. But lip-reading babies who, like all the ones you missed, can make vocalizations without their mouth moving at all, and then talk with toys in their mouths is a really, really difficult problem. This is harder than neuroscience. (Laughs) And then imagine that Mimi is your daughter and this is every day of your life.

That's the reality for deaf parents and the more than 90 percent of their hearing children. And this can lead to a real divide between families because parents cannot engage in traditional baby talk. And it is now abundantly clear that traditional baby talk is not the cute or annoying musings of parents, but rather a tool specifically designed by nature to teach language and foster connection. And you can imagine if that went away, it would be a really difficult topic. So the question Dr. Arianna Anderson and I asked at UCLA was: If infant vocalizations cannot be picked up through the ears, is there another option?

Well, when you scan the brains of the entire population, you see that there are very specific parts of your cortex that are dedicated to processing one type of sensory modality or another. So, for example, this morning on the TEDx tour of the UCLA Staglin Center, we see that there is a very particular part of Stephanie's brain that lights up with just visual information. And regardless, there is a completely separate part of the brain that responds only to touch. But this is where it gets really interesting. When you scan the brain while blind people sense braille, you not only activate the tactile parts of their brain, but you also see the visual areas activate.

And similarly, when you scan the brains of the deaf population as they communicate using sign language, you not only see the visual areas active when viewing gestures, but you also see the auditory cortex activated. In some ways, your brain is not just plastic, it is not just random, it is intelligently plastic. And in some ways, it is being reconfigured to maximize and process as much information from the outside world as possible. In some ways your brain is learning to see braille and hear sign language. So this is called sensory substitution, and the idea, as Paul Bach-y-Rita and David Eagleman have exploited it, isthat information can be taken from a sense that has been lost, translated into a different sensory modality, and placed in that sense. shape.

Surprisingly, your brain notices because it's plastic. And this is the idea that we took and moved forward in developing an app with a small grant from UCLA called "Chatter Baby." And what Chatter Baby does is convert auditory information into visual information: it's a type of sensory substitution. So now Mimi's talk comes to life in visual form. Don't miss anything now. Although her lips don't move, you can see what's happening. And the idea is that deaf parents can use this tool to learn how to talk like babies and connect as deeply as possible with their child, and we believe that eventually, once they master using this tool, they will be able to hear their child through of sight.

And to me, that's a very important application of neuroplasticity. And this shows that it's not just a fun tool to convert auditory information into images, but instead, the plasticity of sensory processing has the ability to connect deaf parents and their babies. That is the power of plasticity. But that's only half the battle. The other part of this disconnect is that when deaf parents are not in the same room as their children, they don't know what mood they are in. And the best baby monitors on the market say, yes, there is sound; no, there is no sound.

But that doesn't really tell me what I care about. It doesn't tell me: Is my child happy and content? Or are they hungry? They are crying? Is there something going on that I need to be present for and address? Instead, I constantly ask myself: Sound? Without sound? I don't know. So what we're doing with Chatter Baby is putting together the world's largest database of infant sounds and then using sophisticated math to take that sound and predict what the child's moods are. Then he is very hungry. (Applause) And the idea is that we can use neuroplasticity to make a real difference in the way deaf parents communicate with their children.

And I've already talked to you about how to treat depression, addiction, and sensory deficits using neuroplasticity, but that's really just the beginning. We're starting to address diseases that you wouldn't expect to be treated with something like this, like Alzheimer's, Parkinson's, and stroke. And that's really just the beginning of what I've been calling

neurohacking

. And I don't mean

neurohacking

in the sense that they haven't been thoroughly researched - they are very well thought out ideas and there is a lot of literature supporting why they work. But in the sense that we are not directly trying to fix the practical aspects of all these problems;

We are not trying to change every biochemical cascade that occurs in the brain, which is essentially the root of the problem. But there are a hundred trillion connections in your brain, and each one of them is like a city with a thousand chemical waterfalls going on. It's such a difficult problem. So instead, what I think is one of the biggest advances in neuroscience and everything we're doing is going to tap into this incredible quality of your brain that is uniquely yours to rewire and remap based on what you need. And if we step away from neuroscience for a moment, the question I have for you today is: Where in your life do you wait to understand every detail of a problem, every nuance, before you decide to solve it and make a decision? change?

If you're trying to make social change in Los Angeles with six million people, there are probably a couple million who don't want to hear your story and won't be helpful. But instead of focusing on what's broken and what doesn't work, maybe take a lesson from neurohacking and use what still works to get the results you want. Thank you. (Applause)