“If the human brain were so simple that we could understand it, we would be so simple that we couldn’t.”

— physicist Emerson M. Pugh

Today, we introduce Mark’s daughter, and our guest, Lizzie Pratt. Together, we explore brain science, focusing on the advancements by Elon Musk’s Neuralink in connecting the brain to computers. We recruited Lizzie, a biopsychology student, as our “expert” on the subject, and she shared insights into the interplay between biology and psychology and the significance of the brain in understanding behavior. We touch on neuroplasticity, brain injuries, and the potential implications of brain-machine interfaces, especially considering the theological and ethical concerns. We hope you enjoy this part 1 of our conversation and will tune in next week for part 2! Be sure to check out the podcast page for the show notes where we’ll provide links to the resources mentioned in this episode.

Show Notes

• Part 2 of this episode
• Lizzie on Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/lizziepratters/
• https://waitbutwhy.com/2017/04/neuralink.html
  • TLDR: Tim Urban (author of Wait But Why) talking about Brain Machine Interfaces: https://www.instagram.com/tv/Cd4l_3Rg3Zk/
• The Huberman Lab podcast episode discussed: https://hubermanlab.com/dr-matthew-macdougall-neuralink-and-technologies-to-enhance-human-brains/

Transcript

All right. Would you like to introduce our special guest? Sure. I know you as Elizabeth and Lizzie.

How do you want us to refer to you this morning? I’ll go by Lizzie. I know you like to introduce me as Elizabeth, but my friends call me Lizzie, and I consider everybody out there my friend so they can call me Lizzie.

There you go, everybody. You’re Lizzie’s friend. You get to call her Lizzie.

Yeah, that’s right. Yeah. It’s interesting that what I’ll call an evolution, if you will, of a name.

You name a child early on, and we went with Elizabeth because it had such a diversity of what it could evolve into. Nicknames, right. Nicknames and so forth, how it derives.

So it’s just interesting, we didn’t necessarily always refer to Lizzie as Lizzie in our family, but now that when I interact with her and her friends and they refer to her as Lizzie, or even when she did her presentation, she had Lizzie. So it’s just kind of a neat thing as she’s grown into who she is. And it’s nice to have our daughter, I’ll say, Chris, is my daughter Lizzie Pratt with us? I’m going to have to work on that.

I think it’s okay if you call her Elizabeth. Well, it probably is, but I try to defer when I can. That’s right.

Yeah. Well, we’re happy to have you, Elizabeth. Glad to be here.

So why do we have Elizzi today, Mark? Well, that’s a great question. I’ll be honest with you, Justin. This wasn’t necessarily one of the topics that I would have necessarily chose.

Okay. But as I listened, as I got further into it, it was just a good topic as far and honestly, you know, old hymn, How Great Thou Art, that was kind of my theme as I started to research or look into our topic for the day. And it was just interesting that you invited Lizzie based on the fact that she has a neurobiological background or a desire to head in that direction.

And so, like you say, it makes her the professional in the room, as far as I’m concerned about about our brain and neurobiological connections and pathways. And actually, a lot of what we’ve been looking into is, what the part? Based on the research from neuralink, where they’re actually hooking the brain up to a chip, basically, or transmitters inserting transmitters into the brain to be able to interface with computers and other things, to be able to help people. Translate the electricity that floats through our brain and put it into another interface to be able to help quadriplegics and ultimately what that could be on down the road for people with spinal cord injury and stuff like that.

So what was really kind of what I thought was research by Neuralink became for me, it became a progression in, wow, we are fearfully and wonderfully made. And there was a lot of reminders for me in that. So long story short, that’s brains.

Brains that I was trying to get from Mark. Thank you, Mark. Liz you’re welcome.

Could you share with us a little bit about your schooling and kind of your idea of why this stuff is cool or just some background? Absolutely, yes. So I’m currently a junior in college. Well, just finished my junior year, actually, in college.

There’s applause for that, too. No, you don’t want me to try that again. I did it too good the last time.

And I’m studying biopsychology with hopes of eventually coming with PA and started off in the more like general applied health track, but switched pretty quickly to biopsychology just because I really love the psych side of things, specifically with the brain. And maybe the more holistic side of your brain is such an integral part of the rest of your body. And how do we kind of with the background of dad being a therapist and knowing that was important, even going into school, kind of wanting to learn more about that.

And so definitely taken the neuroscience classes and really cool class called Biological Basis of Behavior and Sensation and Perception and all these different classes that are really cool, incorporating kind of just the mind and the body. And, yeah, definitely not an expert, but also definitely a learner, which is really cool because a lot of things that we talk about, Mark and I, we’re just totally winging it, our depth of understanding. And a lot of these stuff, well, some of the brain ones, some of that, like neuroplasticity, some of those things.

Obviously Mark has a better background in that and has some studying, but our depth of knowledge is, I guess I would say shallow in a lot of things we talk about, but it’s from how we see it. So we have a license to do that, right? That’s right. But the cool thing is, obviously you’re currently studying a lot of this stuff, so I thought it’d be really cool to kind of get a perspective.

If someone is currently studying this stuff, correct us as you have done in the past. I don’t even stop and think about that. And like I say, just from when I received my education, I think about how the past ten years research and the things that we know, I feel very antiquated in my knowledge of the brain based on what I studied, based on what we currently know.

And that’s why I was excited to have Lizzie, because there’s a lot of times when I dare say it’s a passion we share. So, like I say, a lot of times there’s conversations about what she’s learning. It’s like, oh, well, that ties in with something I’ve learned years ago.

And it’s always kind of an interesting conversation to be able to do that because you both kind of come to the conversation from two different angles. You’re antiquated knowledge. I’m analog digital, but also more applied because he’s actually seen it in a therapy room and that kind of thing.

Sure. So biological, what do you call it? Biopsychology. Biopsychology.

What does that mean exactly? Because obviously there’s like neuroscience, neuroscientists, there’s biology. This seems like maybe in the middle or something. Yeah, there’s a lot of words for how they kind of intersect there.

But basically I just tell people that it’s a mix of biology and psychology and that I take a lot of biology classes, take a lot of psychology classes and then there’s a good few mix in between there, which are like the neuroscience classes. But yeah, it’s basically learning how they interplay and how they interact. And I think it’s really cool because we’ve traditionally seen psychology as one of the more like soft sciences.

And I would still say that it is a little bit, but it is cool because it is getting that more like, oh, this is really important. And this does have an everyday impact on even the more biology side of who someone is. Sure, that’s really cool.

And it definitely ties into the neuralink stuff too, because I would say bioscience in the sense that sure, yeah, but you were going to say something. No, I was kind of agreeing with Lizzie and I think that’s where exactly what you were saying. And I think our awareness of traumatic brain injuries, TBIs, and that connection with our ability to have that injury and what it does to us after that is a psychological thing.

You can’t have such a change and lose function of some parts of your body or something. You were able to once do so efficiently and now not be able to do that and think it would have no effect. So I think much of this learning from my perspective comes at the cost of many of our military individuals because I think that’s a large part of that awareness, where that comes from.

Not that other people don’t car accidents and things like that produce them as well. But I think it’s good that we are creating more and more awareness about the psychological effects of these injuries and how people are affected and still trying to work with individuals who experience a brain injury and ways that we might be able to learn how to decode, if you will, that electrical concert that goes on in the brain that makes the rest of our body work. And I think that’s just been really kind of neat to think about with this podcast.

Yeah, it’s interesting too, because the brains there are big portions, or big, not big as in geography big, but like important parts of the brain where if it gets an injury or whatever, it causes dramatic or significant damage to the point where someone can’t behave the way they used to. And I know when we talk about neuroplasticity, you talked about the guy who had a pipe or something go through his brain. Rod.

Rod. And it kind of changed everything about him or changed a significant part of what he was able to do. And then in an episode that I was listening to, that I sent you guys, he talked about this guy who had some sort of brain injury to the front part of his brain, I think you say, where it caused him to lose impulse control.

To where he had an awkward incident with the 80 year old nurse. That kind of thing. Where he couldn’t control his impulses.

And yet they also talked about like you can take large chunks out of the I forget cortex, I think they were saying there’s so many parts of the brain I kind of gave up on trying to understand the differences and it didn’t seem to matter. Like people would take these s and they would act the same, give the same answers, and then you do have to really hear stories. And I even know some people who have had TBI traumatic brain injuries to where it’s like I wouldn’t have a clue except that they’ve shared that information.

To me, it’s like they’re just as smart, smarter than a lot of people I know. I guess that to me is fascinating how there’s kind of just so much in the brain that neuroplasticity can go to a certain degree to where it can kind of compensate for failures of certain parts of the brain, but then there are certain parts of the brain where it’s like, no, that part is pretty crucial. And if you want to share Lizzie, I think the biological part of even what outside of TBIs, what tumors can do in certain parts of the brain, if you’d like to share some of yeah, it was one of the things we talked about after the neuroscience podcast.

And I was sharing with data. There’s a couple of different instances I’ve talked about in some of my classes where there’s a pretty popular one from the 70s. There was a guy that did a shooting at UT in Texas and basically asked he committed suicide during it and then gave a suicide note asking for an autopsy and later was found that he had this tumor in his amygdala.

And similar story there’s. More recently, we talked about one of my classes, about this high school teacher in I believe it was like, 2000, who was this great guy and then suddenly became kind of more of like a pedophile, essentially and was committed and just through a fluke was committed to the hospital for something else and then similarly found a tumor. And the tumor was removed and then it kind of get put back into normal life and then the tumor grew back.

And it was just a whole story of like, this is really important and really interesting how this just one small tumor. They were like super small, but that had this huge impact on someone’s life and to the point of even causing someone to commit suicide or that kind of thing or change their behavior to that degree. Impulse control.

Exactly. It’s crazy. Yeah.

So the podcast we’re referencing is one from the Huberman Labs, which is an awesome podcast that I really like. And he had a guest on the guest was like one of the I should have Neuralink, this number or this name, but this scientist at Neuralink. And they basically talked about Neuralink for a while, which is really cool because my previous understanding about Neuralink came from a Wait But Why blog post, which is Why is a cool blog that he talks about really crazy science stuff from a layperson perspective.

There are some choice words in there, so if you go there, don’t blame me for what you read. But he talked about neuralink. I want to say he wrote that post maybe six to eight years ago, and that was when Neuralink was kind of getting started.

And he basically talked about the lofty goals. And what’s cool about listening to that podcast is like the stuff they’re doing right now. It’s just barely scratching the surface of what I understood of what they were going to do.

The whole idea was this brain machine interfaces where you connect a machine to your brain and it augments your brain so you can do awesome things. Right? So there’s the scary side and the cool side, right? Like the cool side being I can talk to Mark without talking to him. I have some feelings about that.

I forget what’s that term when you can interface telepathy? It’s kind of like that idea, but obviously with limitations. Just like Mark doesn’t have to answer his phone or doesn’t have to look at his phone, you have abilities to turn those inputs off or whatever. But that idea is like be able to communicate.

And not just communicate, but augment what you know instantly with information from the Internet. And those are just limited understandings from the paradigm of the world that we know right now. And then you take into account what’s possible when this stuff is possible, and it becomes pretty interesting.

Another example is like being able to jump into any vehicle and just operate it because of this augmented state. Just out of curiosity, I’m recognizing I’m sitting in a room with two different generations, practically from a technological standpoint. Does that interface the desire to speak something and basically think something and have somebody else know it, does that have any appeal to you? Both of you? I’m just curious.

Let Lizzie go first. I would say not personally, but I would see people, I think, for sure it would for other people. Got you.

Yeah. What about you, Justin? So we haven’t got there yet, but obviously there’s some theological concerns that kind of comes into play when you start talking about machine stuff interfacing with your body. Obviously there’s some moral concerns, some ethical concerns, some theological concerns.

When it comes. Like the Bible. Revelation talks about Mark of the beast.

Sure. And so I know when I was younger, we grew up in a church that was very focused on end times theology. Their primary topic was end times theology.

And so I just remember hearing about the Mark of the Beast. It’s going to be terrible. Everyone’s going to need to have one.

That’s how you’re going to pay for your stuff. And if you took it, you were done vor, you weren’t going to heaven and all. So obviously, that’s always in my mind when I’m reading these things.

I wonder how this could potentially tie into that, play into that. Sure. If it does that kind of thing.

So I’m going to set that to the side and say with that to the side, I’m very for the idea because the less technology gets in the way, the more efficient, the more effective I can be. So right now I have to go find my phone. I have to pick it up, unlock it.

I have to go to the app. Yeah. I have to type words with my fingers in order just to say, hey, Mark, I’ll be out in a couple of minutes.

I hear you. You go to the same word, it’s much easier to just open the door and say, hey, Mark, I’ll be out in a couple of minutes, or whatever. Sure.

And now if I can do that and you’re still at home and I don’t have to pick up my phone, I just can go. I should let Mark know. And boom, I let Mark know.

Sure. To me, that gets stuff out of the way. Or I think about Lizzie writing papers.

Just think about all the disconnect from the stuff up here and then the stuff on your screen. And you have to somehow bring that stuff together through this physical interface and keyboard and all that kind of stuff, where if you could just start to bring that down and just think it into existence, how much more efficient you would be. And so for me, I get excited about that kind of stuff.

Or being like I said, right now, we already have limited versions of this. And this is one of the things I loved about this podcast, is they would talk about these kind of magical things and you say, we kind of already do this, right? He would say they were talking about this idea of conversating through our brains. He’s like, that’s a crazy idea.

He’s like, we kind of already do this, but we do it with an assistance device, which is our phone. We beam these ideas from my head to your head. And before that, it was through this flapping meat, right, is what he described it.

Our mouth, our tongue is how I would move an idea from my brain to yours. Right. So you’re saying it’s not that far out to get to where we’re going.

And so one of the things that excites me is learning new things and being able to learn how. Like, for instance, I just did a bunch of work in our edition, so there are some new things that I was trying to learn. So I’d google it.

I’d watch a YouTube video, maybe a couple, and then knowledge downloaded to my brain, and I move forward. And I did the thing, right? Sure. Now, if I could short circuit that whole process, right, and somehow make that happen quicker, or not have to get my phone or pause what I’m doing on the thing, and then just in my brain, replay the part of the YouTube thing where he showed that thing.

Okay, got it. Yeah. Do it.

To me, those kinds of things are very appealing. That’s why I asked the question. I’ll be honest, it has no appeal to me whatsoever.

I would expect no less. And I’m thinking about it. Granted, face to face is how I see relationships operating best.

You follow me? Yeah. And I think about it when I think about it in my own aspect, it’s like putting it through my fingers. Seeing it actually helps me formulate my thoughts.

Because I’ll be the first to admit I don’t think my initial thoughts, if I could communicate them, would translate well. And granted, I’m recognizing some of this may come down to the interface, but if I’m just being able to think something, sometimes it’s the matter of being able to rethink it. Or I put it on a screen and then I can see because there you go.

And in communication, I think of how much communication we do. How much of the communication we do is also tone and body language. And if that’s not able to be conveyed, I don’t see it as being that much more advantageous from my perspective.

But I understand, and even that I think about it in that context of efficiency. And I’m someone who struggles with trying to be efficient, but also not just letting efficiency rule my life in such a way that it’s always about striving and productivity and those kind of things. Lizzie’s kind of smirking and nodding.

Takes about ten minutes to send a text. Maybe the people that maybe don’t want this might need it. The most valid point.

Yes, valid point. Definitely my thinking as well. Yeah.

In the sense that how annoying it is for you to get your phone and communicate a thing. I think your understanding of it currently is maybe a simplistic understanding. And the idea that, sure it is.

I just thought it and it leaked out and they know. I think it would be no different than viewing it on a screen on your phone. Do I want to say that? Do I want to hit send or not? It’d be the same thing, except instead of having your phone in your hand, it would just be you thinking it or whatever.

Yeah, that’s the part that scares and being able to review your thing in your brain and be able to say okay, yeah, send or whatever. And also I don’t think anyone has this idea of replacing relationship, it’s this idea of because a lot of the listening, learning, reading stuff I’ve done about science things and AI and robots and neuralink all this kind of stuff is what’s the point? The point is to give freedom back to humans so they don’t have to do some of the stuff they do now so they can do other cool stuff. Sure.

Again, that’s the idea. So you’re free now because you have that much more efficiency to create the world’s best art or have the best conversations with your spouse or whatever. It frees us up to have some of the time.

Now, obviously, again, we can come back from a theological perspective and recognize the Bible is pretty clear about we are made to work. And that’s a big part of who we are. And so if you take that away, because this ties into universal basic income too, this idea that once robots are doing work for us, then we just start getting divvied up certain amounts of dollars that we can use.

Again, there’s a lot of interesting facets to the future and all of these things that to me I look at as more exciting than fearful in the same way that I recognize how far we’ve come sure. And how efficient it’s made us to this degree. Like I was saying about the YouTube example and being able to download information to our brains but anyway, yeah, neuralink is again their lofty goals are kind of these crazy stuff.

What they’re doing now is way simpler version of that to the degree where what they are trying to do right now, from my understanding is be able to get someone who can’t move their arms and legs to be able to control a mouse on a screen with their brain. And even the host of the podcast kept getting it confused like wow, that’s amazing. You’re going to be able to get them to move their hand to move a mouse.

No, we’re skipping all of the meat part and we’re going right from the brain to the computer to move a mouse based on how these synapses are firing in your brain. Sure. And it was just such almost like disappointing to be like oh, that’s where you’re at.

But also pretty cool, I mean amazing for people and that was their thing. Like these are people who have really terrible situations so we can improve their quality of life a little bit right. Because now they can communicate with their family by typing on a keyboard through their brain kind of thing.

Yeah. So what do you think about that? Where they’re at and all that kind of yeah, honestly my first thought was like wow, this is not as much as I thought it was kind of thing. It’s like, whoa, okay, we’re not really at the telephony part yet, which is interesting because, yes, a lot of the big what you hear about is like all this crazy mind control type stuff when really he was very humble in there sharing what they know because it’s still not a lot.

And it was interesting just to hear like, yeah, these are people that are really struggling and really have special circumstances and they’re going to be really helped by this. One conversation that we’ve had in our house recently is just how interesting it is to think about these really big topics of, oh yeah, we are researching how to have people read minds, or AI can do this kind of stuff. And I’m like, we’re just like, dang, how is there still cancer in the world? This is the kind of research we’re doing.

How are we this far advanced? And then we still have people that are dying from the crazy small illnesses in third world countries. So that was actually one of my other thoughts, the two thoughts. First being this is not as crazy far out as I thought.

And then also if there are things that are crazy far out, how are we still dealing with these seemingly smaller advances that we’ve been working on for decades? Well, that gets involved the money and following the money because there’s not enough money to fix some of those problems where someone like Elon Musk is like, I really care about brains and augmenting my brain to be more efficient, so I’m going to support this whole thing. It’s like, well, what about cancer? Well, if Elon Musk gets cancer, maybe then and you know what? You bring up a great point because I think so often when we think about topics like this, it’s out there by God’s grace. I don’t necessarily have someone who has suddenly become a quadriplegic in my sphere of influence at this moment and being able to recognize how when something becomes personal, things like this take on a whole different perspective.

And I think that’s part of it for me. I don’t necessarily personally have that desire to have that interface in myself, but I really was kind of moved by that part because there was another part where they talked about the lady that had hearing issues and she had an interface and she loved things bird. And when she was actually able to hear pigeons, cooing that kind of thing, it just added to her life experience.

And I think about that in a way that’s just reception, let alone to be able to transmit, because that was another part for me. Individuals who have a perfectly healthy brain who have somehow been injured to where now the ability to basically transmit electricity through the rest of my body has been impacted. So I have there’s no doubt that that person would have all the thoughts that they would have all of the feeling that goes with emotion in their brain and just not be able to communicate that.

Yeah, that’s huge for that person to be able to do so even as we look at it and say, well, this isn’t as far along as I thought it was, it’s crazy to me, more so just how exponential even the opportunities are. We don’t even probably even completely know the potential implications, which I think is super cool. Yes, first glance, it can be a little bit scary and a little bit like, I don’t know how I feel about this.

But then you think more and more about, okay, how this is really going to impact humankind essentially. And it is really like thinking about human advancement and it’s really just like exponential from here, if you think about that. Yeah.

And then you get into, again, all these conversations tie together. So AI is another part of this conversation where if you get AI involved to where it can using machine learning, start to figure out where to put those nodes on your brain. Because neuralink is essentially putting wires attached to certain parts of your brain, listening for electrical signals and then saying, oh, that signal means move, cursor left, that kind of thing.

Right. And so if you can bring AI to get involved, to say, okay, but sometimes it means this, not that, and it starts to learn. And then it starts to know, okay, we should put a note over here, note over here, and it learns back and forth with you as you learn.

It starts to become pretty interesting too. Again, it’s exponential in the sense that AI is pretty powerful. And it’s also interesting too, because of what they’re doing.

There’s significant advances in, I think, robotic assistance in brain surgery. So he was saying humans literally can’t do what this robot can do because basically the host was asking him, how is this possible and how do you get away with it? He’s basically saying, well, there’s no way we can do it, we can’t hold still enough. And all that’s kind of too many limitations where a robot can be very precise, which I thought that was cool because they’re also developing stuff that I think will impact the broader surgery field.

And you were referencing the bird lady, I think her, if I remember correctly, she couldn’t hear, is that correct? She had a device that depending on the sounds of birds we were making, would vibrate differently. And so she could tell, yeah, that was kind of cool. And that is an example of an augmentation.

Sure, right. And that’s kind of like we said, we’re augmented in so many ways, but everything so far is on the outside and so it’s not that foreign to us. And he also talked about a blind person with their stick.

And basically that stick is just an augmentation device that allows them to have. A sense that they don’t right. Where they can use their stick.

And he said, and then we’ve advanced to the point where we attach a whole nother nervous system to that person and let that nervous system see for them. And that’s what a seeing eye dog is. Right.

He’s like, we’ve gotten to that point where we do that as well. Again, it was cool to kind of hear him put some of these reframe. Again, to be like, this isn’t that foreign in the steps? And so it makes you go, oh, I can see how they could get to that sooner.

It almost feels more reachable because of yeah, it’s just an extension of this or making that a little more efficient again. Right. I don’t know.

Yeah. The other thing that I understood about neuralink from the weight, but why? Blog post. Because, again, his was really far reaching was this idea of what is consciousness? And he’s not a white but y guy.

He’s not a Christian, he’s not a believer, he’s not theological. He’s an atheist. So this idea of what makes you you, and can we transfer that to something else? And when this meat sack degrades and falls away, what’s to say we can’t take this thing that makes us us and put it into another thing that makes us us, or save it somewhere in a hard drive right.

And then attach it to someone who, I don’t know, has a brain injury. They have to take that brain out. So they whatever.

I don’t know. So he had a lot of thought experiments in terms of what makes us us and can we save that for the future and do different things and basically store it in a hard drive till we have the technology in 100 years to put it on a new even if it’s a robot. Right.

But that’s me. I just have a new body. It happens to be a robot or whatever, which to me was again, it’s so interesting to think about.

It’s very Sci-Fi, but again, this is where it ties back into some theological things and ethical things. I’d love to hear from Mark a little bit, because I know that whole idea probably just he’s squirming in his I’ll be honest, none of it made me squirm. Okay.

In the context of here again, I think it comes for me, it comes back to science and being able to recognize, yeah, there’s a lot that can be learned. And I also was able to bring it back from the aspect of being able to say, okay, this makes sense. If I’m not willing might not be the right word, but if I’m not willing to recognize there’s a God and my identity is given by him from that perspective and being able to say, okay, something about when my life ends, I don’t cease to exist.

You follow me? So part of what goes on is no longer available here and that is who I am. So when you think about identity, I think it’s far more and from my perspective, I think there is this part of us that is very spiritual. And here again, not judging the context of the conversation from a biological neurological standpoint, I respect all those the individuals there, and yet that spiritual component wasn’t something that was able to be addressed.

And I’m not sure if we were being honest because he was talking a lot about the neocortex, the outside. And that was another part, just seeing that coral, many coral look the same as our neocortex in our brain. It just made me think about, okay, that’s cool because we have the same creator that said the brain is shaped this way, and I can even make coral look like that just because that’s who I am and that’s what I do.

And there was just those similarities even between the research they do with pigs and how similar that is. And I’ve heard that before with here again, burn victims and stuff like that. They’ll do research on pigs.

But I was thinking about how some of this was devoid of that spiritual of the spiritual part that I’m aware of based on who God is and who he’s created me to be. And I think that’s my concern at times, that we elevate technology to a God level. And if you just free yourself of this God image, you can be a more enlightened individual as we’re able to enhance, I think was the word they use sometimes, your abilities.

That’s the stuff that goes through my mind, but it never made me squirm just because it makes sense, if that’s the way I think about life. Yeah, some of those challenges you’re describing are no different than we have right now in the sense that technology becoming a god. And I think about it in that context.

I think they had even mentioned video games being advantageous possibly for surgeons to dexterity, which I completely understand makes perfect sense. But does that mean that those have a certain addiction to them as well? And it’s like finding that balance that is able to say, yes, there’s advantages and disadvantages to some of this. And I think it’s the same with the information.

And when I think about it from the ability of someone who has been injured and granted, they’re a long ways away from being able to have the brain connect with the body in such a way that my limbs are able to move. I think he typically referred to that kind of stuff as years away a while. Yeah, exactly.

It was still inspiring for me. And I think about how I take for granted so many of my eyes and my ears, how an organ can translate light energy into electrical energy through my eye and my ears can take that sound and it’s translated into electrical that my brain can. It’s just really awe inspiring when I think about how many interfaces we have to be able to do that and, you know yeah.