- Hello, YouTube-iverse.
Coming up, a new episode of Star Talk,
Cosmic Queries edition.
This time, neuroscience.
(lively music)
This is Star Talk.
I'm your host, Neil deGrasse Tyson,
your personal astrophysicist,
and this episode of Star Talk,
a Cosmic Queries edition,
is focusing on neuroscience.
And we go to our go-to person for that,
and that would be none
other than Heather Berlin.
Heather, welcome back to Star
Talk for the millionth time.
- Thanks, I always love being here.
- Excellent, thank you, thank you.
And you are a neuroscientist
at Mount Sinai,
is that correct, is that
the way to say that?
- Yes, yeah, mm-hm.
- And you focus on what
people are thinking
when they don't know they're thinking?
- Sort of.
(both laugh)
I've never heard it described that way.
But no, I study brains and how they relate
to human thoughts, behaviors,
whether they're conscious
or unconscious, emotions.
- Okay, that's scary, actually.
And we have a first-timer
here, my cohost Jackie Hoffman,
Jackie, welcome.
- Thank you, Neil.
- [Neil] You're a comedian?
- I am an actress/comedienne.
- [Neil] In that order?
- Uh, well, yes.
- [Neil] Okay.
(laughs)
- Right now I'm doing more
acting than comedian-ing.
- [Neil] Okay.
- And I had a hysterectomy at Mount Sinai.
- Oh, congratulations.
(laughs)
- That's a TMI, is that a TMI?
(laughs)
- I hope they did a good job.
Not that I represent--
- Uterus Awareness Week.
(Heather laughs)
- Uterus, okay.
- So let me join you then,
and say I was born in Mount Sinai.
- Really?
- Oh.
- Yes, yeah.
- And both my children
were born at Mount Sinai.
- Okay, but I never had
a hysterectomy there, no.
(Neil and Heather laugh)
- You never know.
- Roll you into the wrong room.
So Jackie, you said
you're also an actress.
You had a role in Legally Blonde 2.
- Yes, Neil remembered my joke, my line.
- What was it?
- It was one line, "Your dogs are gay."
(Neil and Heather laugh)
- That was your one
line in the movie, okay.
- It changed the world.
- I would have given
you more lines than that
if I were a producer of Legally Blonde 2.
- Thank you.
- Okay. (laughs)
So also you are in a
all-Yiddish production of
Fiddler On The Roof,
off-Broadway, right now.
- That is correct.
- That's crazy.
- With English subtitles, don't panic.
- Okay, Yiddish has got to be like
that's how it would have been,
they would have been speaking Yiddish.
- That is correct, yes.
- Singing and dancing Yiddish.
And your character is?
- Yente the matchmaker.
- Yes.
- Yente, Yente.
You can't get more Yente than being Yente.
(Neil and Heather laugh)
- Or Shadchan as we say in Yiddish.
- So basically you're
playing my grandmother
is basically what you're playing, yeah.
(laughs with Neil)
- Very cool, so since
this is Cosmic Queries,
we solicited from our fan base
questions for this episode
on neuroscience.
- Great.
- And what a topic that
has become, Heather.
There's a word no one knew 20 years ago,
and now everybody's into it.
- I mean, I knew about
it, but I mean, there's--
(both laugh)
- Oh, excuse me.
Yeah, okay, not that nobody knew.
- Okay.
- Nobody else knew.
- Right, right, yeah.
- So Jackie, you have the
questions, I haven't seen them,
neither has Heather.
- Hm-mm.
- And these are questions,
just bring it on,
let's see what we've got.
- Okay, our first comes from John Emerson
from Patreon, I don't know what that is.
- Oh, Patreon, they're a support website
that help fund our operation.
- Oh, nice, I thought it was a tequila.
(Neil and Heather laugh)
- So that's why you're
reading their question first.
- I see.
- That's one of the perks
of the many perks you get
being a Patreon supporter.
- Thank you, the patrons at Patreon.
- Patreon.
- Patreon, thank you.
Okay, I've heard that men are from Mars
and women are from Venus.
Well, that a little
bit involves you, Neil.
(Heather and Neil laugh)
- Yeah, that's my expertise,
Mars and Venus, all right.
- I've heard that men are from Mars
and women are from Venus,
but are there any neurological differences
between these two planetary species?
- Ooh.
- Yeah.
- That's a good question for
Yente the matchmaker, too.
(Heather laughs)
- It's actually, it's been
controversial in the past
'cause often it's not been PC to say
that there are differences
between men and women's brains,
but there are, there are.
There are both anatomical differences,
neurochemical differences, hormones
that affect brain chemistry like oxytocin,
things like testosterone and estrogen
affect how the brain works.
So we know that, for example, on average,
and these are all, again, on average,
women have slightly larger hippocampi
which is the part of the brain
that has to do with memory.
They tend to store emotional
memories better than men.
They tend to ruminate on things
a little bit more than men,
as we might know anecdotally.
And in terms of the way
their brains are wired up
it's slightly different.
- They is female.
- Female, female, yeah.
Language, which tends to be lateralized,
meaning that it's more
localized on the left side.
- Lateralized would mean it's
featured more, for anything,
would mean it's more on
one side than the other.
- Exactly.
- Lateralized.
- Lateralized, so it tends
to be more laterlized in men,
meaning that more of their
language is just on the left side
whereas women tend to have language
in both hemispheres, parts of the brain
that are dedicated to language processing.
They tend to use more
words, just behaviorally,
during the day than men.
So there are certain
aspects of women's brain
both anatomically and physiologically
that differ from men, and
they express themselves
in different ways
behaviorally, emotionally,
in terms of cognition.
- So, has this gotten
resistance from society
to even have that conversation?
- There's some, because
then the idea is like, well,
then there's this myth like okay, well,
a bigger brain must be better.
Men, on average, have a
physically larger brain,
but that's not true in
terms of intelligence,
in terms of cognitive function.
It's about how it's wired
up, it's not about the size.
But people did get scared away from this
because the idea like, famously,
I think it was Larry Summers
at Harvard who said--
- Then president of Harvard.
- Yes, exactly.
Women tend to not do as
well in math and tech
and that kind of thing, and
those things are just not true.
They tend to work in different ways,
but there's no differences
in terms of intelligence
correlated to brain size and the rest.
So, I think it's okay to
say there are differences,
and it's neither good or
bad, it's just different.
- So I thought his argument was
the averages are all the same,
but men show up wider on the distribution.
So if you try to find the
highest performing man,
it comes way out on the
high performing side.
You also have a much lower
man on the other side.
- [Heather] Right.
- Lower than you find the lowest woman.
- They tend to be more on the extremes.
- Extremes with it, yeah.
- Right, right.
But again, that's on
average, so that means
that there are women who are
at these extremes as well.
On average tend to be more
men more at the extremes
in terms of that bell curve of IQ.
But if you look at it overall.
- The bell curve of anything, right?
- Yeah, yeah.
- Isn't the shortest person ever a man?
- Is that true?
- Tom Thumb, I thought was pretty small.
- Oh, yeah.
(laughs)
But I don't know if that
means that on average.
- I don't know, yeah, yeah.
- I mean, that's very, an N of one.
But women tend to live longer than men,
so in that sense we are at the extreme.
- But you also look at personality,
like for example charisma, right?
There's some very
charismatic men out there,
and at the other extreme
you have completely,
complete sociopaths as men.
- Right.
- Men do the most heinous
social things ever, right?
So again, we have these extremes
that the men are overpopulating.
- Right, or they just might
express them in different ways.
Like one idea, just to go off
a little bit on a tangent,
but people who are sociopaths,
men mostly, more diagnosed in men,
have these kinds of impulsive behaviors
or they act out aggressively in others
and then they're categorized as that.
But women also can tend to
have those extreme behaviors,
but they're more likely to be introverted
and act it out on themselves,
like self-harming behavior.
- [Neil] Oh, oh, okay.
- So there are similar expressions of,
let's say impulsive behavior,
but they're expressed different ways
and then they get categorized
into different disorders.
- So Jackie, are you from
Mars or Venus, which are you?
- Saturn.
- Saturn, me too.
(Heather and Jackie laugh)
Me, too, thank you, excellent.
- Put a ring on it.
(Neil and Heather laugh)
- Thank you, Beyonce.
Okay Jackie, you've got another question?
- Yes I do, here's one close to my heart,
from Herbalvores on Instagram.
How do psychedelics work
and what is the effect on the brain?
And for personal reasons, I'd
like to extend that question
to marijuana as well.
- Okay.
- Wait, did you just add
that to the question?
- I did, am I allowed to
do that? (Heather laughs)
- You control the questions.
If you want to slap in your own question.
- I showed up.
(Neil and Heather laugh)
- That's a pretty broad question.
There is a whole variety
of different types
of psychedelic drugs, and
they all affect the brain
in different ways, so it's not like.
- Let's just go LSD.
- Okay, let's just go LSD.
Okay, that's the good one.
- LSD, nice, clean, and famous, yeah.
- Nice good one, okay.
So what LSD does, in
general, is that it lowers
activation in certain
parts of the frontal lobe
which have to do with sensory
information coming in,
and the frontal lobe is
kind of making meaning
out of that information,
it makes sense of it all.
When you have decreased activation
in that part of the brain,
the meaning-maker part of the brain,
you're having a whole bunch
of sensory information
coming in without a filter, let's say.
So it's being experienced
in a different way.
You also have increased activation in
the limbic areas of the brain,
these subcortical areas of the brain.
So more information is coming from within,
it's not being sort of
organized in a logical way.
- Is limbic, is that the reptilian thing?
- Like emotional,
reptilian brain, exactly.
- Ooh.
- So it is almost like
being in a dream state,
'cause during dreams we
see a similar pattern
of activation, you have
decreased prefrontal cortex,
increased limbic, so you're
having emotions and thoughts
that don't necessarily make sense,
that don't have a clear narrative.
But you're also getting
the sensory information that's unfiltered.
The other thing that's
really interesting is
that when you look at the
way the brain is kind of
sending information back and forth,
usually you have certain pathways
that the brain sends information,
but when they're on LSD there is much more
distributed network of information.
So it's kind of like you'd
see a lot of straight lines
and paths, and now they're
crossing larger distances
within the brain, the information.
So it's just a whole different
pattern of activation.
- Mm-mm.
- Mm-mm.
So that makes you feel
weird and trippy, yeah.
- Well when we have time later
I'll ask you about all my prescriptions
and their effect,
(Heather and Neil laugh)
their effect on what's left of my brain.
- What you're on right now,
that's what we want to know.
- The point, though, I think
that's the most interesting
is that we all are kind of
hallucinating all the time.
- Wow!
- Yeah, because our brain
is making up a story
based on these signals that are coming in,
and then we often say that
when we all agree upon it,
we call it reality.
- Yes, yes.
This is a fascinating and important point,
because if you have your
own understanding of reality
and no one else can corroborate it,
we declare that as going on in your head.
We don't declare that you
have some special insight
into a reality that none
of the rest of us have.
- Right.
- Is that fair to say,
as from a brain person's perspective?
- We all are making up
our reality in our mind.
But again, if nobody else is agreeing on
what you're experiencing, then it's likely
just being generated internally.
- And scientifically
we have to assume that,
otherwise--
- What do we base reality on?
- What do we base reality on?
- Yeah, yeah.
- If a tree falls in a
forest and nobody hears it,
(Heather laughs)
does it make a noise?
- Is this why you asked
about the marijuana?
(Neil and Heather laugh)
- That's a perfect segue
to this next question.
- Wait, I don't know
if I'm done with this,
wait a minute.
- all right.
- So, what do you say to
people who would argue
that when their brain has been altered
by whatever, peyote,
artificial chemicals, whatever.
- Ayahuasca.
- Whatever.
That they're claiming insight
into the universe.
What do you say to them?
(Heather sighs)
- I've had these discussions with people.
So let's say they claim
they see a spirit God
and they get insight into
the workings of the universe.
I think it's important to understand
that we are, our brains
are a physical mechanism,
and a lot of things,
just like dream states,
are it's creating its own internal world.
So, often when we're in a
fully-awake non-psychedelic state
where there's a certain part of our brain
that tells us whether information is being
internally generated or
coming from external again.
People with schizophrenia, for example,
they don't have that
proper check-in place.
So they think they're hearing voices
that are coming externally in,
because their brain isn't
telling them no, it's you,
internally, being generated.
So when you're on these drugs,
it's similar to a schizophrenic.
Things are being generated
internally from your mind,
but you're misinterpreting them as
coming from someplace else,
like from a spirit God
or somewhere else, or
maybe you're getting some
great insight that's
coming from somewhere.
- So the people talking to
themselves on the street
who are not on a cellphone.
- Mm-hm.
- They're really talking to themselves.
(Neil and Heather laugh)
- Yes.
- They're not talking
to some other entity.
- But they experience it as
if it's another entity, yeah.
But, I mean look, this is not to say
that there isn't some great answer
that's coming through in different ways.
But it is curious that
people who get these messages
when they're in these psychedelic states
are usually related to
their underlying personal
or religious belief systems
that they have in place already.
- It folds in together
with it, yeah, yeah.
- Yeah, yes, which leads me to believe
that it's internally
generated, not externally.
- Very good data on that.
- Thank you very much.
(Heather laughs)
- Jackie, what you got next?
- Well, I've got this real trippy one
from Kevin Kalakimaka on Instagram.
- Okay.
- Is everything we experience
a figment of our imagination?
- Pretty much.
- I think that dovetails right in.
- Yeah, yeah, that's pretty much it.
I mean, I wouldn't say
everything we experience
is a figment of our imagination.
- Wait, if I pinch you,
is that imagination?
- No, no, the way I experience
it is created by my brain.
Actually, I'd have to say
no, because imagination--
- All right, so it's yes or no, come on.
Make up your mind.
(Heather laughs)
- What am I, Michael Cohen?
- Moving on.
(Heather and Neil laugh)
- The Senate hearings?
- Wait, wait, wait.
- Okay.
- Kevin, what are you thinking?
- No, no, in the movie The Matrix.
- [Heather] Yes.
- Everything is happening
inside their brains.
- [Heather] Yes.
- Their sense of pain
and joy and love and hate
and hunger, and all of
that is inside the brain.
- Yes.
- Okay.
- That is true, so
everything you experience is,
pain, every sensation
you have is happening
inside of your brain, right, yes, but.
- So therefore, to the question,
so the answer to that is yes,
everything is a brain
experience in your life,
and you couldn't have had a plausible plot
in the movie The Matrix
unless that was true.
- Yeah, but when you say,
this is the differentiation I'm making.
Imagination, in the sense of
not correlating to something
that's external to your brain.
So you have a creation of
an experience in your brain
of what you're perceiving
that could either be created internally,
which I would call imagination,
or that's coming externally
from your senses in.
So yes, they're both
creations of your brain,
but one is based on external data
and the other coming from within.
- And the externality is
where we all rally around
to say that's the reality.
- Yeah, but the truth be told,
we could create a whole
sort of matrix world
just based on sensory inputs
that aren't really there.
- And what's that other
movie, Total Recall?
You want to go on a vacation to Acapulco,
sit in this chair and I will
implant the memories of it
in you, and now you wake up and you say,
"Wow, I had a good time in Acapulco."
- Yeah, I mean it is just as good.
It could give you, it
could be just as good.
(Neil laughs)
- Or better.
- We are beginning to blur the line,
or better, probably better.
- Or better, probably better,
if you can know how to do it.
- 'Cause you can skip
all the boring parts,
like the taxi ride and stuff.
(Neil laughs)
- Waiting for your luggage.
- Exactly, yep.
- Right.
- Fast forwarding.
- Mm-hm?
(Heather and Neil laugh)
- But with your brain.
- Yes.
- Time for one more for this segment,
what do you have, Jackie?
- Ooh, that's a tough choice,
but I think I've got one.
Brianside on Instagram,
if sight is the process of
the brain creating an image of reality
after it interprets the
signal from the eyes
sent when they interact with
the electromagnetic field,
can a blind person create an
image based on the signals
sent from the other senses to the brain?
In other words, can a
blind person see something?
- Yeah, yeah, so it depends
on, okay, so our brain--
- Wait, you know something?
- What?
- That's a really good question.
- Should I wait till after the break?
- Yeah, I want to wait
till after the break--
- All right, let's do it.
- For the answer to that question.
- Mm-mm, cliffhanger.
- And since the word electromagnetic
was mentioned in there,
I would just say that's the word we use
to describe the entire spectrum of light,
not only the visible light, ROY G BIV,
red, orange, yellow, green,
blue, indigo, violet,
but the infrared, ultraviolet,
X-rays, gamma rays,
microwaves, radio waves,
all of that is the
electromagnetic spectrum.
Only a tiny slice of it are
we sensitive to with our eyes.
So, what's interesting is we have
this mechanism called our eyeballs
that takes that and
turns it into an image,
and it's all neurological at that level.
Well, once your people get
good at neurological stimulus,
I don't see why you can't
take any external stimulus
and turn it into an image in a brain
even of someone who is blind.
When we come back on Star Talk,
we're gonna find out
how can the blind see?
Heather has the answer to that,
(Neil and Heather laugh)
when we return.
We're back on Star Talk,
Cosmic Queries, neuroscience edition,
and we went to our go-to
neuroscience person,
Heather Berlin, Heather, very nice.
- Yes.
- I've got Jackie Hoffman, a first-timer,
as my cohost.
- Yes.
- Plus you tweet @JackieHoffman16.
- I do.
- What is the 16?
- I don't know, my manager picked it
'cause there was another Jackie Hoffman.
(Heather laughs)
That's your query cosmic answer.
- Wow.
- Cosmic with a K.
- That is the lamest
answer I've ever heard.
- I know, it's the truth.
- Ever.
Heather, you're tweeting--
- I'm honored to have the
lamest answer ever on this show.
(Neil and Heather laugh)
- Heather, you tweet @HeatherBerlin?
- Heather underscore Berlin.
- Excuse me, underscore.
- Oh.
- Because the same reason.
(laughs)
- I don't like the underscore,
it's so ugly.
- What?
- 'Cause you have to keep
changing your keyboard,
it's too much work.
- 'Cause sometimes you can't see it,
I prefer the dash.
- Ooh, wow.
- Yeah, I've never been an underscore guy.
- Well now it's a little bit too late.
You could have told me that before.
(Neil laughs)
- She's worth it though.
She's still worth the extra keys.
I'm worth the underscore.
Thank you, Jackie, for the endorsement.
- So, we last left off with
a question about can you,
I'm gonna slightly rephrase the question.
Knowing that we have multiple
senses into the brain,
can you take one sense
and turn it into another
to possibly grant the sense of sight
back to a blind person?
But maybe the sense of smell or touch?
And isn't there this brain,
we call it a disorder,
called synesthesia?
- Synesthesia, yeah.
- And does that relate to this answer?
- There's a lot here, so let me just say
that it depends on when
the blindness occurred.
So when you're born, in many ways,
the gray matter, it's like a blank slate.
Then it starts to differentiate
based on the inputs it's getting.
So the visual cortex in
your brain gets inputs
from the retina, via the
optic nerve sends information,
and then over time it
keeps getting inundated
with that visual information,
so it starts to become
the visual cortex where you
experience visual imagery.
Now, there are experiments,
let's say, with weasels,
where they take them
early on and they redirect
that visual information to what's normally
the auditory cortex.
- Oh.
- And over time, they start to see
with their auditory cortex, okay?
- Whoa.
- So, depending on how you
change the inputs to the brain,
you can kind of change what
sensory processes occur.
- So there's a malleability
if it happens early?
- Early, right.
Now if you take an adult blind person
who's already kind of formed their
sensory parts of their brain,
what you might experience
is that if they were born
blind and now they're an adult,
what we do see in people is
that they have a more
well-developed auditory cortex
because they're getting
much more auditory input.
- [Neil] So they're relying on it more.
- They're relying on it more.
And it kind of recruits
other parts of the brain,
and some can sort of have a
weird sense of seeing via sound.
So they experience it in different ways.
The other part of this is that
there are programs now,
like neural implants,
where they can get information
from the real world,
like through a camera,
you implant it directly
into the visual cortex,
and it'll stimulate the visual cortex
as if it's information
coming from the eyes,
and people can begin to sort
of start to see strange images.
Not like seeing the way you and I do, but.
- Anything's better than seeing nothing.
- Exactly, exactly.
And as you perfect this
technology over time,
we might be able to really stimulate
the parts of the visual
cortex so the person can see.
- We already do that now
auditorily, with the--
- Cochlear, cochlear.
- Cochlear device.
- [Heather] Yes.
- A NASA invention, I might add.
- [Heather] Ah, all good
things come from NASA.
- Yes, yes.
And there's a famous talk show host
who got that NASA implant,
and it's Rush Limbaugh.
He was going deaf.
- Wow, oh?
- I only learned this recently.
- Interesting.
- He went almost
completely deaf, and then
he got the operation.
So it actually hears for
you and converts external
sound waves into impulses
that your ear canal would
have otherwise done.
I don't think you hear the
sound as you normally would,
but you can hear differences in sounds
that you retrain to learn what a word is
when you hear those impulses.
- And can I say one
thing about synesthesia,
'cause it's really cool?
- Yeah sure, sure.
- So synesthesia is
where people sort of have
a crossing of sensory areas in the brain.
So for example, they'll
see colors in sounds or something.
They'll hear things in written text.
So this one study was really interesting
where they found that
certain people always saw
letters as certain colors, like an A,
they'd be like A is obviously red.
- It's obvious, or course.
- B is blue,
C is green, whatever it was.
What they did is, they did a large study
across all these synesthetes
who had that particular--
- Synesthetes?
- Yes.
- That's a thing?
- Synesthetes, that's a thing.
- Synesthetes.
- There's a whole
community of synesthetes.
They did a survey, and
they all saw A as red
and B as blue, and it
was a strange sort of
coincidence, we thought.
Then they all happened to
be born around the same time
when this particular Fisher-Price,
you know those magnets
that you would put on the
refrigerator and it would be--
- Whoa.
- The letters and numbers?
- The letters and numbers,
yeah, and their synesthesia
directly correlated
with that Fisher-Price set
that came out when they were kids.
So basically, when their brain was in
the early stages of development
and they were exposed to it,
they learned an association
between those colors and letters
which remained into adulthood.
So it had to do with a
cross-wiring in the brain.
- Wow.
- Yeah.
- Maybe that's why I associate
every letter with food,
because they were on the refrigerator.
(Neil and Heather laugh)
- Because they were on the refrigerator.
- A is obviously a pickle.
- I am an amblyopete, I have
amblyopia in my right eye.
So what I understand
is now my brain is not
telling my eye to look at things.
It sits there like a useless hulk
and my whole life is on my left side,
I have no vision out of the right eye.
When I cover the left eye,
it can look at things,
but my brain is not talking to it.
- Oh, you were born with this?
- I was born with it.
- Amblytopia?
(laughs)
- Amblyopia.
- Amblyopia.
- I just called myself an
amblyopete just to keep up.
(Heather laughs)
- Just so you can hang.
You just want to hang
with the other petes.
- There's a whole community.
- I'm an amblyopete.
(Heather laughs)
- Everybody tweet at
you who's an amblyopete.
You can build a community.
But no, it's interesting
you can only see out of it
when you cover the other eye,
is that what you're saying?
- Yes, that's correct.
- But it probably is getting
visual information in.
- Right.
- But the other eye is dominant.
- Yes, the doctor said if, God forbid,
anything happens to the good eye,
the bad eye will grow and learn.
- Exactly, exactly, it's almost like,
it's basically like a lazy eye.
Because the other eye is so dominant,
you kind of, over time, don't utilize
the information coming from that eye
and the other one becomes stronger,
the other one becomes weaker.
- When I was a child, they
covered it with patches,
the good eye, to try to
strengthen, and it was pointless.
I just kept walking into furniture,
(Heather laughs)
which would explain a lot.
(Heather and Neil laugh)
- We can talk about head
injury in the next segment.
- Next, what do you have?
- Okay, from Serena Rockauer on Instagram.
What will it take to bring
mental health awareness
into the mainstream, why
is it still such a stigma?
What is it about intelligence
in unconventional ways
that makes it so taboo?
- Mm-mm, um, okay.
- I don't understand
the second half of that.
What's it have to do with intelligence?
- [Jackie] I fear it all.
- I think that's probably more of like why
some people say that
people with mental illness
are just intelligent in different ways.
- Oh, mm-hm.
- I think that's probably related to that.
- Tell me about the
stigma of mental illness,
the history of that.
- Because it's sort of an
invisible disorder in a sense.
Like if you break an arm it's very clear,
it's a physical problem, or
the heart is having problems,
you can look at the physicality.
The brain is so complex,
and there's so much going on
in terms of neurochemicals
and neurophysiology
that when things go wrong in the brain,
they're hard to just look
at and see, physically.
And they express themselves
in these subjective states.
A person, you never can really
tell if they're depressed.
They tell you, I feel depressed.
- Right, yeah, they read
a scale of one to 10,
what are you?
- Exactly, exactly.
So it's all subjective, and
because of that subjectivity,
people have questioned the validity of it
because you can't take
a microscope and see it.
So now, as a cognitive neuroscientist
who works in psychiatry,
part of what we do is
to say look, these psychiatric illnesses,
this is the underlying brain dysfunction.
And we need to get away from the stigma
like it's all just in your mind,
like it's not a real
physical thing, and say no,
the brain is a physical organ.
Just like you would
fix a bone with a cast,
if the brain is improperly working
you can take this particular medication
that's gonna, say, affect
your serotonin receptors.
It's just another physical problem.
But because it expresses
itself in the subjective way,
there's a stigma behind it.
So I think we're starting to
get away from that stigma.
- I would think so, too, and
you know what I base that on?
How candidly people just say,
"Oh yeah, my therapist
told me the other day,"
when growing up you
would never tell anyone
that you had a therapist for any reason.
And now people, they're just out with it.
People you just meet, right?
And so, for me that's one measure of
an acceptance factor
that's going on in society.
- It can also manifest
itself in embarrassing ways,
too, mental illness.
You know, someone on the street--
(yells)
- Right.
- I do that for a living.
(Heather laughs)
- Yeah, yeah, you bark at
people, that's what you do.
(laughs)
- Yeah, I do bark at people for a living.
But you know, I think that
creates such a stigma,
and it's frightening.
It's frightening that could be me,
and it's just, what is that?
It's very alarming.
- You can't predict
the next moment of their behavior.
- People use those extreme cases,
like I worked with
psychiatric patients in the ER
at Belleview at one point,
and these were really severe.
These were people you know, who are like
those are the ones you pull off the street
and you bring them in the psych ER
and they're really out there.
- [Neil] They strap them down, yeah.
- Or you give them
something to calm them down.
So people look at those extremes and say
wait, am I the same as that
paranoid schizophrenic?
And to be honest, I've worked
with paranoid schizophrenics
who were not at that
extreme, who are really nice,
decent people and they just happen
to be having these strange delusions.
And we can change it with
drugs, which is amazing.
You can give them a drug
and they no longer have
these sort of crazy ideas.
- Better living through chemistry.
(group laughs)
- Yes.
Not that I'm a huge proponent of drugs,
but I think, you know, if it's broken
you have to find ways to fix it.
- Excellent, Jackie,
what else you got for us?
- Okay, loving this, Monica
Stewart from Facebook.
I had a brain tumor, a
meningioma the size of a baseball
removed through a craniotomy last year.
How could it get so big before
affecting my motor function,
speech, memory, et cetera?
What do we know about
brain tumors in general?
Y'all are my heroes,
sending love from Texas.
(Heather laughs)
- Texas, Texas in the house.
- That's a good question.
- So Heather, yeah.
- Of course in Texas they
grow their tumors bigger.
(Neil and Heather laugh)
- Of course, everything's bigger.
- Everything's bigger in Texas.
- You got a baseball-size tumor,
and everybody else has got a--
- Golf ball.
- Golf ball-size tumor.
Yeah, so, it's not just in the brain,
tumors in other parts of people's body,
they don't even know until they go.
And then it's always analogized to a fruit
or an athletic ball.
So what's going on there?
- It depends on where the tumor is.
What did she say she had, a meningioma?
- Yes.
- Yeah.
So that grows in the meninges of the brain
which is basically like--
- I could have guessed that.
(laughs)
- Yeah, you could have got that one,
that was an easy one.
- I couldn't.
- On a multiple choice test.
- You would have got that one.
- I would have gotten that
one right, the meninges.
- The meninges are
basically like the sort of
membrane covers around the brain,
and you can get these growths.
So it's not directly in the brain tissue,
but what happens is
they can get really big
and the problem is, it starts
putting pressure on the brain.
So depending on where it's located,
if it was located right next to where
let's say the language area was,
and it started pressing and pressure,
you might start having
problems with your language.
But depending, it could be in an area
where it's relatively benign
in that you won't get
these immediate problems
or memory problems, because
those are subcortical areas.
- You're saying it was
putting pressure on an
unimportant part of her brain.
(laughs)
- Well, I mean they're all important,
but sometimes they don't--
(laughs)
- That's what you just
said, you just said,
Jackie, didn't she just say that?
- Uh.
- Well, a less verbal part of the brain.
- I was listening with my eyes.
(Neil and Heather laugh)
- Which one, which eye?
- Which eye?
- The good one.
(Neil and Heather laugh)
- Yeah, so it depends on where it is
that it will express itself in
ways that are obvious to you.
Like it might express
itself in other ways,
and it might be that the pressure,
over time you'll start
having other symptoms
like headaches, but not
necessarily the ones
like motor problems.
But the different types of
tumors, so there's some tumors
like glioblastoma which is very deadly,
which is growing inside the brain tissue.
- That's in the glioblast
part of the brain.
(Neil laughs)
- Well, exactly,
oh, good job, Neil.
(Neil and Heather laugh)
- Damn.
- But that's more insidious,
and it gets kind of
the nooks and crannies
in the actual cortex,
and that's why when we go in to remove it
you can never really get all of it
'cause it has these tiny little tentacles
that get in.
- Ooh.
- So they always grow
back, they grow back,
and that's why people
don't usually tend to live
longer than a year after that.
And with the meningiomas,
like 90% of them are benign,
which is also good, so you can remove it
and usually it won't grow back.
So there are a whole
variety of different tumors
that have different effects on the brain.
- Interesting, cool, and kind of
you ideally want one to affect you
at the smallest stage it can
so that you can get to it sooner.
- [Heather] Yeah, that's a whole thing.
- That's a thing, right.
Yeah, so maybe a smaller
tumor would have given her
motor problems or speech problems,
if something's wrong, oh,
the tumor is a golf ball
rather than a baseball.
- But sometimes they don't
even go in and remove.
If it's benign, they might wait a while
to go in and remove it anyway,
even when they find it,
'cause there's some risk with surgery,
and depending on where it's located.
- There's risk opening up your skull
and poking around in your brain, really?
- Just a little, a little.
- Okay.
(both laugh)
- Not too much.
- All right Jackie, what else you got?
- My uterine one was 22
centimeters, by the way.
- Oh, wow, that's a doozy, okay.
(laughs)
- Oh, this is from And
That's The End Of My Story
on Instagram, why does
the brain create images
in the form of dreams when we sleep?
Do dreams have meaning or a function,
or are they just a random
collection of images?
What are the physiological
advantages of dreaming?
Thank you, from Nicki Hush.
- Nicki, good question.
You gotta do that fast, or--
- Okay.
- Or give me part of the
answer, and then we save
the rest of the answer
for the third segment.
- [Jackie] Should I give
you part of a question?
- How about this?
Let me give the shorter
answer, and you give the long.
- [Heather] Okay, you're
gonna give the short answer?
(Heather laughs)
- No, no, no.
Let me give a short
version of that question,
we can answer that before the break,
and then you give the--
- The long answer.
- The long answer to the longer question.
- [Heather] Okay.
- So, people want to believe
that their dreams give them
insight into some future events.
The dreamers.
My sense of that is the answer is no,
but people feel like they
have access to the future
through their dreams, why?
- After the break.
(group laughs)
- Damn, Heather, okay.
We're gonna take our break,
and when we come back
we continue with our special edition of
Cosmic Queries, neuroscience edition.
Star Talk, we're back, neuroscience.
Our go-to person, Heather Berlin.
- Wow.
(Neil laughs)
I'm a go-to person now, I like it.
- [Neil] Go-to, go-to.
And Jackie Hoffman,
comedienne extraordinaire.
- Hello, your go-away-from person.
(Heather and Neil laugh)
- So, we left off, someone asked--
- About dreams?
- About dreams.
And all I can think of is
Sigmund Freud's book on the
interpretation of dreams.
Where have we come since then?
- Yeah, so I think Freud
was right in certain things
and not in others.
He was certainly on point
with his whole theories of
repression and dissociation
and suppression.
I think his interpretation--
- Also subconscious, right?
- Oh yeah, of course, id,
ego, superego, unconscious.
That was good, the whole
theory of consciousness
and unconscious processes.
However, his whole
interpretation of dreams
was kind of fringy.
- I tried reading it, and it
was like this is all bullshit.
- Yeah, it is, it is, I'm sorry guys.
But there's a lot of
theories about why we dream.
The shortest answer is that
it's random neural firing.
You only dream during
REM sleep, by the way.
You go through different stages of sleep.
- REM, rapid eye movement.
- Exactly, yeah.
- Or the rock group.
(Heather laughs)
- R.E.M., that's true.
I never thought of them that way, anyway.
- That's why they named themselves that.
- Yeah, that's why R.E.M., yeah, oh, okay.
- You're a neuroscientist
and you didn't know that?
- I didn't know that, I didn't know that.
- I just schooled you on R.E.M.?
(Heather laughs)
- I know, yes, okay.
But there are different stages
of sleep, like deep sleep,
but when it's in this dream state,
it's almost like a waking state.
So your brain, in a way, is
conscious of what's going on.
Not always, sometimes you dream,
you don't remember you dreamt,
but usually you're dreaming in that state.
And it's random firing in the
brain, it doesn't make sense.
- Wait, wait, if you dreamed
and don't remember your dream
then how do you know you dreamed?
- Well, you can look at, you don't know.
- I'm just getting full topical.
- It's like the tree, is
this the tree question
but in dream form?
- You say you dream
but you don't remember,
then how do you know you dreamed?
- Well, you don't know, but we assume.
- It's of your electrodes again,
they say they're dreaming.
- There's an interesting
case, just a side note,
there's the case of people
who don't remember things,
they only have a short memory,
and so they feel like
they're just waking up
and being conscious for the
first time every minute,
'cause they keep refreshing,
refreshing, refreshing.
But, I mean, you can have
a conscious experience
and not remember it, but
still you had that experience
in the moment.
But the point is that these dreams,
a lot of it is a cleaning out.
So you've taken in a lot of information,
a lot of stimulation during the day,
and then the brain has to
decide what's important
enough to reinstantiate,
to keep and to reinforce,
and to kind of throw away, get rid of it.
- Reinstantiate?
- Or reinforce.
- That's a word?
- Yeah, I don't know, did I make it up?
I might have made that up.
- Reinstantiate.
- Or just instantiate?
(Heather laughs)
- It's all new.
Every syllable in that word was new to me.
- I'm gonna have to Google this.
I might have made up a
word, I do that sometimes.
- No that's fine, I like made up words.
- But you get what I'm saying.
- After you instantiate
the first time, Neil.
(Neil laughs)
- You reinstantiate.
- Reinstantiate, thank you.
- Thank you very much,
thank you very much, I
bet you it's a real word.
So what it does is, it reinforces
the important information
and consolidates, that's a better word,
it consolidates the information.
Then it gets rid of other
stuff that's sort of junky.
So in that whole process,
your brain is firing,
there's neurons firing,
and if you're in one of those
brain states during sleep
where you're sort of conscious,
that information is gonna manifest itself
in a kind of a dream state.
It's gonna be based on
things you've been exposed to
in your life, it's
gonna based on memories,
information your brain has taken in
over the course of your life
or over the course of the day,
so you'll place meaning
on it when you wake up.
You'll try to make sense of it,
because that's when the
prefrontal cortex is re-engaged,
remember, that meaning
maker part of the brain.
But in the actual dream,
it's more like a flow state,
or like what we see in
people who are in flow states
or meditative states or psychedelic drugs.
- Whoa.
- So, I hope that answers the question.
There's a lot, I mean,
you could have a whole series on dreams.
- Okay, so suppose there
are people who don't dream
or don't remember any of their dreams,
are they less mentally with it?
In other words, are dreams
good to remember or bad,
does it even matter?
- Well, one theory is that
it's a threat rehearsal
so that you can actually work out things
in your dream states that
help you in real life.
- For survival?
- Yes, for survival.
So there is some aspect of it
that might be important to
help people for survival,
in the sense that it's a
good thing to remember them.
- [Neil] And some people
have recurring dreams.
- Right, right, and then Freud might have
had it right there where
there are some issues
that are being suppressed that
they might want to work out.
- So is it false that
we do dream every night,
we just don't always remember it, or?
- I mean, the theory is
that we dream every night.
- Oh.
- Again, it's very hard
to prove, but we don't always remember it.
And there is some
validity, I don't want to
throw Freud completely under the bus,
that in the waking state
certain suppressed memories
and thoughts that when the
prefrontal cortex is on,
it can keep things at bay
like emotions and memories,
and when it's releasing that inhibition
those things can come to the surface
and they can come out in dreams,
like things that you
normally are not aware of
in your waking state.
So it is a way to access the unconscious,
but not to predict the future.
- I have actor's nightmares constantly.
- Oh, really?
- Like anxiety dreams that actor's have,
and it's a real thing.
- Like you're on stage
and you forget your lines?
- You don't remember your lines,
you don't know why you're there,
you don't know what you're in.
My last one was a I sang something wrong
and the composer and
lyricist were right in
my one good eye line.
- [Neil] Ooh.
- So that's just your
normal, like your anxieties
and fears manifesting themselves.
- Do you have those dreams in Yiddish?
- [Jackie] Like I don't express
that enough during the day.
- 'Cause your character is Yiddish.
- I dream in color, but not in Yiddish.
- Not in Yiddish, okay.
(laughs with Heather)
- I dream from right to left.
- Okay, for those just joining us,
Jackie is Yente in Fiddler On The Roof
in an all-Yiddish version.
- With English subtitles.
- English subtitles, okay.
(Neil and Heather laugh)
- Don't panic.
- All right, give me another one.
- Okay, here's a quickie, this is good
from Arik Subramanyam on Instagram.
Do you need a brain to
feel pain as we know it?
Do jellyfish, for instance, feel pain?
- Good question.
- I like that, I like that.
So, you don't need a brain.
- Or a lobster, 'cause
people eat lobsters.
- They scream when you put them in water.
- Yeah, but you know that
actually it's illegal now
in the EU to cook lobsters alive
because we claim they're conscious,
there's enough evidence
that they experience pain
and that they have
consciousness, so the answer is--
- So instead of putting
them in the boiling water,
you kill them some other way.
(laughs)
- First, yeah,
and then you can, more compassion.
Also, octopus, I think
that's what it is as well,
you can't also kill an octopus in a way,
because we know that they're
very smart and very conscious.
- So is there is neurological primitivity
where you would say they're
not really feeling this pain
in some animal out there?
- Okay, so the answer is
you don't need a brain.
You do need some sort of nervous system.
- Of course, you can have a
nervous system without a brain.
- Without a brain, and so
like a jellyfish has that
in its tentacles, it kind
of has like a neural net.
So if you give it some noxious stimuli
or you poke its tentacle,
it will move away,
it will retract, if it's feeling pain.
- Therefore, it feels it.
Earthworms will move away from pain.
- Right, so that's how we
kind of have to measure it
behaviorally, because even with a human,
the pain, again, it's a subjectivity.
When you go to the
hospital, something's wrong,
and they say okay on a scale of one to 10,
how painful is it?
- No, now they have a
smiley face or a sad face.
(laughs)
- Oh yeah, that's right, yeah.
- And numbers, the numbers.
- 'Cause people, they
couldn't handle the numbers.
- Nope, the numbers, let's just do--
- It's too much, too much, gotta simplify.
So we don't know, but
we can tell okay, look,
you retract as if you're feeling pain.
I was at a home meeting
where we were talking about
animal consciousness and
how low down the food chain
does it go, and we had a
whole discussion about fish.
And fish, can they feel?
And the answer is yes.
Again, they have a noxious
stimuli, they'll retract from it.
They record a memory so they'll
avoid that stimuli again.
So it's as if they're
experiencing something.
- So how do they kill the lobster
before you cook it?
- I don't know.
- Lethal injection.
- Lethal injection.
(Heather laughs)
By the way, by the way,
we had on Star Talk,
I interviewed the founder of PETA.
- [Heather] Oh.
- And many people associate
PETA with just being
all veggie, no killing of animals.
To hear her speak, the
philosophy was very different.
It was not that she's
against killing animals,
she's against the infliction
of pain on animals.
- [Heather] Mm-hm.
- And I said, well what about lobster?
She said she has people working on
some kind of anesthetizing
first pass at the lobster
before you then put it
in the boiling water.
- Yeah.
- Just to show you the purity
of that mission statement.
So I bet you if there was package of that
sold next to the lobsters
people would buy it, of course.
- Yeah.
- Of course, I think people would do that.
If you're rich enough to buy the lobster,
you've got enough money to
buy the lobster anesthetizer.
- Yes.
- Before you cook it.
- And just, wait, minor correction,
I think it's the illegality in the EU is
for octopus, or octopi, I never know.
- [Neil] Octopoid.
- Octopoid.
- Yes.
- Not lobsters, I just remembered that
in the recesses of my mind.
So you can still horribly damage a lobster
when you boil it alive.
However, I think that the real issues is
about how animals are treated,
and if they are killed in a
way that doesn't cause them
drama, or trauma or stress.
- Drama. (laughs)
- Drama.
We don't want drama, either.
(laughs)
- The drama queen.
- I do.
- Exactly.
Or you know, like Temple Grandin.
- We have an actor here who wants drama.
(Heather laughs)
Oh, can I tell you my
drama, my bit of drama?
- Mm-hm.
- I know it's lame, but I still do it.
Any time I cook a lobster,
before I put it in the water
I remove the rubber bands from the claws.
- [Heather] Aw, you free it?
- So that it can try to bite me
as its one last act of survival.
- That is like, really sadistic, I think.
(Heather and Neil laugh)
- You went deep into that lobster mind.
- I'm saying, if I'm cooking it alive,
at least give it a chance to fight back.
- Aw.
- So I take off the rubber
bands and then they pop open,
the claws pop open.
- Oh, God.
- And then it can try to bite me,
and I have to then triumph over it.
Of course I do.
- Wow, wow.
- 'Cause I'm smarter than a lobster.
- So you give him one fighting chance?
(Heather laughs)
- One last chance,
It's my own--
- So he can die with dignity?
- Dignity, thank you,
thank you, thank you.
- Oh my God.
- Okay, so tell me about Temple Grandin.
- I was just gonna say, Temple Grandin.
- Who, by the way, has
been a guest on Star Talk.
- Oh, she's great.
- One of my favorite shows.
- Oh, so interesting.
- Temple Grandin.
- So she has autism, and
she was very much aware of,
she can sort of empathize with
how the animals were feeling,
and she created this whole system of
when they go to slaughter,
that they would gently be,
so it wasn't stressful for
them or anxiety-provoking.
They would get guided
through this sort of,
they were kind of like tunnels
into the slaughterhouse
in a way that was so they couldn't see
what was happening in front of them.
And it was like this really humane way
to bring them there without
just throwing them in
and giving them all the anxiety of stress
like they're about to die.
- Corralling them, and then in there.
- Yeah, and so I thought
that was really humane.
- Plus, there are people
in the vegetarian movement
that hate her for that,
because she made it
that much more humane to kill an animal
that the vegetarians didn't
want killed in the first place.
- Yes, yes, so we can go deeper into that.
But the answer is you don't need a brain,
but you need, I think, a nervous system.
- Okay, cool.
All right, we've got to go
lightning round, Jackie.
- Lightning.
- Let me try to.
(bell dings)
- Oh, this is scary.
- There we go.
- So we just have to do quick?
- Yes, sound bites, work
on your sound bites.
Okay, here we go, Jackie, give it to me.
- From San Pangoso on Facebook,
how are memories physically
stored in the brain?
Also, can we implant fabricated
memories in some way?
- [Neil] Ooh.
- Yes.
(laughs)
In the brain via long term
potentiation, which is a physical process
that connects neurons to each other,
or makes them what fires
together wires together,
that's the quickest, Hebbian
synapse, it's called.
- Cool, so the more they fire together
the more they will remain connected?
- Yes, yes.
- In such a way that they form a memory?
- Yes.
- Next one, quick.
- I've Always Been Your
Sancho on Instagram,
what does it mean to focus on something,
how does it work?
- Ooh, good one, attention span.
- That means attention, it's attention,
and what it is, is
there's part of your brain
called the dorsolateral prefrontal
cortex that's activated.
- That's way too many syllables,
you all gotta work on that.
- The DFLPC.
(Neil laughs)
- No, DLFPC, anyway, so you can engage
certain parts of your prefrontal cortex
that filter out extraneous information,
and your mental energy is focused on
a particular bit of information.
- So part of the focus
is taking away things
that would distract.
- Yes, yes, and that's why people who have
problems with their attention is
that they're too easily distracted,
they're not good at focusing
in because of the distractions.
- Cool.
(bell dings)
Got it.
- What?
I'm sorry, I wasn't listening.
- Give me one more.
(Neil and Heather laugh)
- Jack Perry Eight on Instagram,
will a brain transplant
or full-body transplant
every become a reality?
- That's what I want to know,
because you have the Lou
Gehrig's Disease folks
where their body decays, what is it?
- [Heather] ALS.
- ALS, and then you have
the Alzheimer's folks
where their brain goes away.
- [Heather] Yes.
- And I'm thinking, in the future
you get the brain of the ALH person
and put it in the body of
the Alzheimer's person.
- [Heather] Oh, that would be great.
- And you get one whole human there.
- Yeah, if only we could
reconnect and regrow neural.
- [Neil] Is that gonna come?
- I don't think we're close to it, okay?
So I'm gonna have to say no,
but maybe in the next hundreds
of years, 200 years maybe?
But if we could figure
out how to regenerate.
- We can put a man on the moon,
we can do a brain transplant?
- I'm really, I highly doubt
it, yeah, I'm gonna say no.
That's a no.
- That's a no.
(both laugh)
- You wanted lightning, you got it.
- You heard it here first.
There's a lot of reasons
why, we'll get into it later.
- Well, Dr. Frankenstein
did a brain transplant.
- Yeah.
- He got the Abby Normal.
- That's true.
- They did one on Star Trek,
too, with Spock's brain.
- Oh, I remember that.
- We can probably replace
a brain with silicon
at some point.
- Silicon-based.
- And have a silicon-based brain,
but I don't know about taking
a biological human brain
and putting it on another body.
- You don't mean silicon, the
element on the Periodic Table,
you mean a computer brain.
- A computer brain, yeah.
- That's what you mean.
- So the idea is if you
can replace one neuron
with a silicon chip that does
exactly the same function
on and off, and then another
and another and another,
at some point you can.
- In principle.
- In principle you can
replace the whole brain.
- And create a brain.
- Yeah, and inside a body.
- But would it dream?
- Oh.
- Ooh.
(bell dings)
(Heather laughs)
We have run out of time for the special
neuroscience edition of
Star Talk Cosmic Queries.
Heather, as always thanks for being
such a friend of Star Talk,
and you're one of our Star Talk all-stars,
and it's always great to have you back.
- Thank you.
- We don't see enough of you.
- Aw.
- So we should do every
episode on the brain,
don't you think, guys?
- Everything involves the brain.
Come on, let's do it.
(Neil and Heather laugh)
- Jackie Hoffman, great,
I'm gonna try to get tickets
to your Yiddish production,
English subtitles,
(Heather laughs)
of Fiddler On The Roof,
particularly with you playing Yente,
that's gotta be hilarious.
- I like to think so,
(Neil laughs)
with my brain.
Boy, this was exhausting,
and I was the stupid one.
(Neil and Heather laugh)
- You've been listening
to, possibly even watching,
this episode of Star Talk.
I've been your host, Neil deGrasse Tyson,
your personal astrophysicist.
As always, I bid you to keep looking up.
(lively music)
