Journey

Today we have Dr. Charles Morgan to talk to us about neuroscience, psychology, and a whole gamut of things. Right now, he is a professor of National Security studies at the University of New Haven. His focus is teaching national security studies, domestic and international intelligence analysis, and issues in deception. Dr. Morgan is developing a concentration in the human aspects, intelligence analysis, and psychological operations arenas that are relevant to today’s intelligence. He has a pretty robust background with military folks doing research at survival school, helping with selection processes for special operation forces done for Bragg. etc. etc.

Thank you. It’s nice to be here. Actually it was the Navy, it wasn’t the Army, but I’ve done more work with the army than I think over all these years than I ever did with the Navy, so I would like to talk to you a little bit about today is something I was asked to do in 2010 and 2011. I was getting ready to leave the CIA, where I’d worked for a number of years, and the Intelligence Science Board said, “Could you give us a brief outline of what’s in store for us in the future?”

I was like, I don’t know, predicting the future is really hard. So I told my boss at the time, I said, “Well, I think the best I’ll do is make an estimate of what I think is going to happen in the next five years given certain technologies that were being developed at the time,” and this is a bit of an extension of that-I presented it to the SSG and I think it’s good for people to be aware of what’s going on out there.

The one thing that makes predicting a little bit of the future easier when you look at biomedical science, is that labs are working fairly systematically with overtly stated goals. So if you think about it science is not really done in a haphazard way it takes time preparation you have to test multiple hypotheses develop techniques so it is not really rocket science to look at a lab and say this is where they’re going and here are probably two of the Achilles heel points in the design but if they surmount those they will probably achieve what they say they want do so that’s a little bit of what this is about.

I was going to give you my thoughts on mind, body and beyond, gene-slicing, Dr. Venter, DNA encryption and something about memory that the past is not what it used to be.

What I’d like you to consider for a minute is that one of the things that most people have a hard time understanding is that there is a difference between our mind and our body your personal experience is usually of an integrated operating system since the time you were little.

However, there has been a plan in many labs to figure out how to help people whose bodies don’t work in the way that they want them to do who have neurologic defects.

Could you start the first video.

So as a way of surmounting that, people are experimenting five or six years ago with whether or not you can do a brain robotic interface. I don’t know if there’s a volume for that with our monkeys as they go through and try to learn how to use this robot. So they’re using brain signals. So signals from their motor cortex that we pull out of wires into our systems, and our computers then decode what it is that that the monkey is intending to do, and drive the end point of this arm forward and backward and around through space. The monkeys have brain control over this robotic arm to move it forward and grab a piece of fruit as is presented and then bring it back to their mouth to feed them self.

Incredible as it may seem, these monkeys learn to feed themselves with a robot arm that was being directly controlled by their brains as if it were simply part of them.

This is a biofeedback closed-loop kind of experiment and that there’s an automatic almost automatic learning that’s going on where we’re communicating with them. So essentially when you’re little and you’re growing up and you’re learning how to work your appendages you are making good motor neuron connections and inhibitory connections and what they’re able to do back in with a primate is have it learn through trial and error that by thinking it can move a robotic arm and feed itself it didn’t take too long for the neural interface issues to be resolved once people figured out you could implant electrodes on brain tissue and then take a biological signal and turn it into an electrical signal and amplify it it took a little while for the monkeys to figure out how to do it early on they would give it a little joystick so it was like playing a video game and pretty soon the monkeys actually there’s a chimp that’s stunted as well she figured out she just didn’t need to use the little joystick and could just think about it and then the arm would move and the monkey would began to experiment and would think about where it wanted the arm to go so it’s learning.

I have a new appendage the same is true in people you can see just four years later we see it being done in humans and start that for me please with people who have neurologic injury and can’t use their limbs I don’t know if it’ll play um yeah try and hover over the screen I think here we go drag it down there you go perfect yeah it’s right my life has changed dramatically since the accident as of right now there’s nothing to cure paralysis besides maybe a miracle the first thing I’ll do if I get my arms back I would hug my daughter be really nice to scoop something up on a spoon and feed myself yeah this is gonna go beyond spinal cord if this works this is gonna go ms this has gotta go stroke this is huge this is millions and millions and millions of people I’m pretty much broken from the neck down.

I guess you could say the only thing that I have left that is untouched is my brain and obviously I’m able to use it very well. I’ll be able to do this and do that you know no memory loss no nothing so I opted for an experimental surgery to go at the one thing that I still have what we try to do is put a a grid in place that’s capable of recording signals from the brain so when you think when you think I want to move there’s actually electrical impulses in the brain we want to be able to record those electrical impulses and then decode what what the electrical impulses mean and use that to control an object or an arm people have thought for a long time that we might be able to tap into the brain but it’s only recently that we’ve gotten closer and closer.

There’s some great work going on here at the University of Pittsburgh by a gentleman named Andy Schwartz and Andy has shown that he can get a monkey to control a robotic arm with an amazing degree of freedom by thoughts.

We’ve developed technology where we can implant an array of micro-electrodes in the cerebral cortex of monkeys and we can record activity from many neurons in the brain simultaneously, and from that signal we can extract the monkey’s intention to move its arm. Now that we have that, we can intercept that signal and use it instead of moving the monkey’s own arm to move a prosthetic on what it takes two people is a large team, so we’ve basically been somewhat isolated in our laboratory working on monkeys proving the technology, just making discoveries, validating the technology, developing new ways of doing this, and what we’ve been able to do recently is pass a lot of this knowledge that we’ve gained to clinical colleagues.

They came to the laboratory, learned a lot of what we’re doing and then took it back to the clinic and developed the technology is appropriate for humans. Two days after surgery, we put me in and started to basically train my brain to train the computer to my brain the way I’m thinking.

The computer doesn’t know up-down, left-right, it just knows the signals that I’m thinking for a first couple days it was just what’s up what’s down how I do it is I look at the ball at the top and through my peripheral vision I see the ball that’s moving so I’m focusing on the target and almost with my peripheral, if I want to go up, I’m with my mental eyes or whatever you want to call it lifting up trying to get that ball to go up or trying to get it to go down, so I’m focusing on the target while watching the moving ball with my bro reel it’s like a one player video game I’m trying to be my own score because there is a score you know there’s a certain percentage it’s at a sixth you know each time I do it it’s out of bawls if you want to say and a wonder that number it’s I want the I want the and so it’s just a challenge to myself one thing I found out that if I focus too hard it doesn’t work right it has to be very natural that’s pretty good yeah not too bad we’re making such ground on this every single day every other day we’re just going leaps and bounds and knowing that we’re doing that if I had another week or two weeks or month where would we be that we’d be blunt mean we’ve already done the stuff that’s unprecedented you know I’ve been I’ve been doing stuff I’ve been told that with the d cursor which what people have been doing it for a year two years that they haven’t got the type of control and percentages that I’ve gotten in a day the highway was minutes ago I got to use the robotic arm for the first time and we got to reach out touch some over the first time in seven years so what you see is people struggled with how to get the electrodes on the surface of the brain how to do the brain learning the computer algorithms have improved this is by trial and errors it begins to recognize what the subjects brain is doing but after that if you look at that as a scientific development in medicine you can quickly see the possibilities that emerge.

They’re playing with motor function and linking it to thought. So the next step really, when you think about it, was to simultaneously try it with another non-human animal and find out if she could run a robot on the other side of the planet. The essence of this experiment is at first she had to walk on the treadmill to keep the robot walking so she could observe it on a computer screen, and then she just stopped walking and it would run the robot in Japan. So you can have a brain here in the United States plugged in running a robotic device a mechanical device via the internet somewhere else in the world.

So that was pretty cool. I also has some funny implications if you see where you imagine this going when you think of it as an offensive or defensive opportunity with respect to the intelligence community. The natural segue then would be if I can send motor functions from a brain to a mechanical arm is it possible to send motor functions from one human to another human, so I call it the possession experiment. One just hovers there for our weekly tech report. Do you know the phrase brain power? Well, it turns out that scientists at the University of Washington are trying to hone that power and transmit it to another brain. Researchers call it direct brain to brain communication and they do it by passing a signal from one mind to the next using the Internet nonetheless so does it sound a little sci-fi Star Trek mind-meld Jedi mind-trick inception s to you well it did to me too so I brought one of the researchers onto the show to tell me how it works.

Dr. Andrea Stokoe is an assistant research professor at the University of Washington, and he told me why this concept is not as weird as it sounds, and it’s not science fiction. We use currently resistant technologies to read the brain patterns in a person and to transmit them to a different person, and we can only do it with very simple impulses right now, like motor commands to control the hand, for instance, so it’s not that science fiction. He was telling me possible years ago that we were the first to try it, so can you go into a little bit more detail about how specifically it works, what you need from the person, and also what you need from wireless internet to make it come together? Yes, well, that’s like this: a person is sitting on a chair and we call this person the first brain or the sender and is connected to an EEG cap. The AG cap detects electrical activity all around the brain and he’s capable of recognizing when the brain patterns are doors that a person produces when he’s trying to move the right hand.

I was thinking about moving the right hand these very bodies are interpreted by a computer that controls a second computer is connected over the Internet and the second computer action controls stimulating call the producer magnetic field and is the magnetic field that is eventually directed over the head in such a way as to reproduce the particular command in a selected part of the brain in this case the part of the brain that controls their I can the wireless connection enters only in their communication between the two computers the two computers can be in the same room and connected physically or they can be in any part of the world and talking to each other to the internet so I won’t you can watch the video but essentially what’s happening is when one person is playing the video game they’re not using their hands they’re simply looking at targets what’s going on in the other room is a transcranial magnetic stimulation device that creates a magnetic field that excites neurons and it’s the other man’s hand begins to move and hits the targets so you’ve co-opted the portion of a body of another human and then their hand can behave in the way that you wanted to do his goal you’ll see later if you download the video is he would like to have a cap that you could put on and have a surgeon direct your hands to do battlefield surgery or something somewhere else in the world where they don’t have a doctor who has the technical skills you can put on the cap and your hands become an extension of that experts body they find motor skill manipulation at that point in time was not great but the person on the receiving end described the sensation as a rather odd said I didn’t know anything until I saw my hand beginning to move and felt that it was something other and it’s hand was moving hand could punch in a code hand could do a number of things but the really fun part was that you’re taking over somebody else’s physical body with the mind of another human so what do you think would be the next step you follow medical research you say you can make a robot move you can make a human hand move What would you do next? You say, “Wow, they’re getting brains connected to run things and I have to begin to think either like doctors or like you know, security and intelligence people right, can you actually send and receive sensory information like the matrix?”

I’ll show you a little bit of this experiment the short answer is yes [Music] we were able to transmit brain-derived information from one rat to another and basically got this pair of venomous collaborating to solve tactile and motor tasks you know there’s a behavior box where the first animal is located and this animals called the encoder because he’s the one who does all the work he is basically using his forepaws or his whiskers to perform either a model or a tactile discrimination task and while he’s doing that we are monitoring its behavior in recording the brain activity that is being produced by this animals brain and transmitting in real time all these electrical signals to a second animal that is called the decoder while this animal has the lucky job of not having to do anything for getting a reward the only thing it has to do is to receive this brain activity into its own brain and then decode the pattern of information that the encoder has generated and indicate to us as through behavior what it is that the first animal has discovered out there in the environment so if the decoder gets a rate both animals get a nice juicy reward and that’s what they want and that’s how they collaborate to actually get this job done.

Here you see in the next slide encoder animal waiting for a light stimulus that tells the animal which of two levers he has to press to get a little bit of a water set and the light cells either pressed left or the right lever so when the animal gets the light and is about to press the lever we record the activity electrical activity from lots of cells in the motor cortex of this animal and instantaneously transmit this information through the brain of a second animal that is in another box and cannot see the light and cannot see what the first enemy is doing this is the decoder and he’s receiving this information through their tiny little pulses of electrical activity that are delivered to the amount of this part of the brain that the encoder is using to solve the task.

So as the decoder gets this information and basically decodes the brain pattern that originated in the encoder’s brain, it responds to us behaviorally by pressing one or the other lever to tell us that he got it right or not. It took some learning trials but not many took between them to achieve an accuracy rate of over percent in just training their rats for a little while in the cages, but this is a milestone because it was not simply using the motor cortex to run a device; this is actually having one animal learn something and seeing and recording that activity and putting it into the sensory cortex of a second animal, and that animal acquires the knowledge. It is able to act on the knowledge from experience to do something it has never done before, which is really fun when you think about it.

Would this facilitate language learning with this let you upload information when you don’t know how to operate a device does it serve well for covert communication this is done between two rats what we do know is that DARPA did get permission for operations to do deep brain electrode implants haven’t published anything yet but my guess is what you’re looking at is human thought transference and certainly in the open science world that was published last month actually the brain to brain transfer of sensory information into humans they achieved a success rate of being right % of the time so you can attach one human brain to a device you can attach the human brain to another human brain you can direct motor activity or you can send communication and information what we know from the training trial data so far is that it probably requires it’ll probably require training trial between people as well and we don’t know from an encryption and encoding standpoint whether everybody’s communication would follow the same patterns or not it may be that two people have to train and then it’s unique and then you have a yeah decryption problem for someone if they decide they can intercept the signal that would be but you could plug in somewhere else in the world and learn something or see something or have somebody acquire the information that you have and you wouldn’t have to carry a different device so that’s what people are doing there’s a whole world out there of biohacking I don’t know if you’re aware of it but you should be so normally at the University we are well regulated by the federal laws about studying and experimenting on humans there’s a biohacking community that it’s not part of the official science community that is busy trying to attach hardware to humans and they do it in their basements they study up on how to do the surgeries how to connect devices, how to put motherboards in people, and they may use it for some purposes like Phishing using RFID signals in their hands to take information from you, but there are some other interesting developments when you start thinking about the fluidity of what you can do with the brain they’re experimenting with Chlorin e6 (Ce6) and giving people with eye drops night vision for several hours a person receiving the night jobs can see over 160 feet in the dark.

So it’s a lot easier to look through your own eyes than it is to put on nods and it will be a short time before you get a better solution than we get from the bio hacking community, but it could also be readily available to almost anybody on the planet. It’d be hard, it’s going to be harder to keep this under control than it is to keep the special lenses and night vision technology, so I think it’s really important that people pay attention to doing this kind of thing because that can give humans the natural ability for a while to see in the dark.

The other new possibility coming along is that seeing in the dark is something you don’t really naturally do that well, but with animals who’ve been able to achieve a number of other things one of which is giving them an extra sensory ability if you will show you a short clip people decided they wanted to know if they could give the rat an ability to do something it does not naturally have.

Recently, researchers have given wraps to an implant which allows the animal to obtain, as they call it, a sixth sense. The laboratory subjects were able to search for and detect infrared lights, which is an exceptional accomplishment given that rats can normally see infrared lights. A team at Duke University placed infrared detectors, which were wired up to tiny electrodes, into the parts of their brains that process tangible information in a source involved in the experiment.

Eric Thompson states, “This is the first paper in which I know a prosthetic device was used to augment function, literally enabling a normal animal to acquire a sixth sense.” Researchers claimed that the device could also help humans regain sight if placed in the appropriate part of the brain last year researchers used a computer chip ridden prosthetic system to help transmit light signals in the brains of mice the minds behind the study hope to move on to human trials using the retinal device to restore sight to those who had lost their vision so people are playing with chemicals to enhance the human capacity they’re also experimenting now with how do you add a device to the mammalian brain to give it an extra sensory ability you may not want to detect infrared you might want to have a room temperature detector of radiation depending on what your job is in life so when you think about it the possibility now is there to develop different kinds of devices they could be perhaps used either by intelligence people or by people in the military to have an extra ability to be able to see through walls to see heartbeats we used to play with the gigahertz microwave detectors where we could pick up heartbeats through anything but solid steel and water but that could easily be a human who can see a unique heartbeat that’s behind the wall over there that’s thermal insensitive so it doesn’t have to be IR it can be a number of things anything that you can co-opt is theoretically now possible to adapt to human brain functioning all you’d have to learn is the code you’d have to train with it it might not be natural at first you might not understand the signal you’re getting but you can add to human brain function also use it to intercept signals the experiment that was just released this last month as I said demonstrated that people could transfer knowledge from one human to another and I commented to a couple of my colleagues and I said I think right now the most direct application of that is going to be either covert communication or running drones.

The set of experiments I didn’t have videos to show you, but there have been a series that have shown you can connect the human brain to a rat and control its motor movement and its tail, so you can have non-human animal drones, you can have the human brain probably run a regular drone at this point, but running a non-human drone – something like a cockroach or a rat would be awesome, and now the way if you were watching the Olympics and you see the coordinated maze of drones, the software is now really readily available where you could you could have hordes of little creatures that can gain access to facilities or move around in different places all run by a person sitting in a booth. It wouldn’t be – it’s no more technically challenging once you do that then figuring out the logistics of how you’re going to send your signal somewhere else in the world, and how to protect that signal but that’s that’s now – that’s not in the future, so as you begin to think what’s in five years, the interfaces are going to become more delicate, more refined, and as transcranial magnetic stimulation it’s a rather crude instrument right now, it creates a feel that excites just hoards of neurons, but as they as they refine the technology so you can get a better point specificity to the neurons you actually want to activate, you should be able to do this without penetrating the skull.

Either someone could wear a cap and in fact that’s how the latest brain to brain communication in humans was done it was done without surgery and actually signalling via some stimulation to the retina and the brain decoding it although the person consciously didn’t know what the code was the brain did so that I would recommend people becoming aware of that from the human drone technology standpoint the second field that people may or may not be aware of in I always tell my students I said it wasn’t around when they developed atomic weapons but Dr. Venter’s work is my my view the equivalent of the development of nuclear weapons when you realize that he created life in a cell back in I don’t know if people are familiar with his work but this technology paired with something called CRISPR which is like an editing software for genes makes a number of things immediately available what he did is he programmed yeast cells to produce anything he wanted they can produce perfume they can produce petroleum they can produce any peptide anything we program the DNA to do and it’s in the living cell right so in medicine the goal in medicine now is to be able to do designer medicine and therapy if we can design a cell to get into your body and release the right product for you you won’t be losing half the drugs you take through your liver when you swallow a pill and it gets digested these can be inserted into you through the hypo spray needles almost like Dr. McCoy on Star Trek getting a hyper spray, it just blasts no plasmids into your squamous cells but Venter was able to do that and has the patent on the technology but you can engineer anything – you can engineer a unique thing that would only kill one person in the world.

How it’s done you put in a specific gene slicing you program what you like you put it in the cell and it can reproduce and make as much as you like, those of you who don’t know your DNA is usually all wrapped up in tight little coils and so what you were doing was when to create plasmids and put them into cells it sends a signal and tells which portion of the DNA should unwrap, unfold and produce a product. This is the future of Medicine. When you look at this technology in medicine and say this is going to be done to help people right we want to be able to give them medicine so we actually want to correct for genetic deficits if a kid’s born with a genetic anomaly, with the CRISPR technology the feeling is we can create the portion of the gene they’re missing and go have it spliced back in, and that may help a child either if it’s in utero development or once they’re older to have the missing substance actively produced.

What would you do with this if you were in security and intelligence? Well, you can do a number of things. You could decide if you make this gene we know that certain people in the world who function that very high altitudes very very well do it because they had a special mutation in their genome that we don’t have because we didn’t grow up in the Himalayas, but they can function at very high altitudes. Could you give this to people who are going to have to do war fighting in high altitudes and they don’t require extra support? Their body makes them much more efficient use and can work under conditions of lower oxygen than the rest of us. You start letting your mind wander. Can it also produce a substance that lets you function longer underwater without oxygen? So these are run by certain mutations in genes and with CRISPR we have the ability to actually make these and see what happens when we give them to animals non-human or human animals that don’t have it naturally.

You have the Forrest Gump Gene. There’s a gene that just makes you stronger. I would say that most of this technology is probably going to be employed by a state and not non-state actors because it’s quite technical but I say that with a caveat when we study the Aum Shinrikyo – if people remember, they had both uranium mines and regular laboratories where they experimented on both animals, and had a whole series of laboratory experiments to develop the different kinds of gases that they wanted. Their goal was to actually mine uranium and probably come up with their own version of a nuclear weapon but they recruited scientists, PhD level folks, and their goal was to be their rightful people running country of Japan, but we can’t assume that just because they’re non-state actors they will not make use of some technology around this.

Related to this is an idea called dreads these are designer receptors that can be remotely controlled.

So think about it for a moment. You can create a designer receptor, you can create a cell you can put it somewhere in the body, and you can remotely activate it when the brain is exposed to the right signal. Using this technology people have been able to transfer memories from one fruit fly to another by signaling through a light stimulus into the retina. Right now in in animals it’s done by putting a substance into their body that will actually activate the neuron in the way that you want it.

So you have the capacity to create any product as long as you know the DNA sequence, you can insert it into a living system, and you can remotely control it.

So in medicine we think about how we do that to help people, how we do to repair deficits. Other people are going to think about how to leader to expand possibilities. Now one of the challenges that we have is that when you create a cell and you put it in somebody’s body you have to figure out where you want it what if you want it in their brain? Right? If you want it in their brain and you can’t figure out you don’t want to do surgery to plant it in their brain – if I want a product produced in your brain that may affect the way you think, the way you act, one route to that is through stem cells.

A quick brush up on your biology stem cells or cells there call them god cells they can turn into anything they hold the potential unlike other cells in your body to become anything you want them to become and they can go find their home in the body and park there, and do the work that you’d like them to do.

You can infuse them and they will find their way into the brain.

So once you know that the technology is there to edit, splice and program a cell, and the technology currently exists to administer to somebody and have it go park anywhere you program it to go park, proliferate, and do its function you can have things activated in other people’s brains.

So you take these three key points hopefully you can see it opens up a number of both alarming and exciting possibilities.

You can have the time to release of information on demand.

Hopefully when they mentioned the word CRISPR and word editing and creating molecules with CRISPR out of data and playing with DNA some of you thought encryption and encoding. So DNA encryption there were I think eight articles published by China in the course of three years in the last three years and it’s quite important the coding system, the DNA steganography…

I’ll just say short the short story on this is people have figured out how to hide imagery in the DNA of bacteria and when you “???” the bacteria you can discover the information or you can have the those are just to remind me…

… you can have the information reproduced in a string format as a form of a protein.

Dr. Professor George Church over at Harvard has shown quite well that you can store a lot of information in one gram of DNA. It’s essentially yeah that many that many iPads in one gram at room temperature, no super cooling required DNA is highly stable, it’s been around on the planet a very long time so between CRISPR, the storage capacity, and programming cells, the new way to hide information is going to be in DNA.

The commercial application is going to be a bit like on Star Trek years ago. Why would you have a digital system when you can have a DNA system and store all the information you’d ever need? Records, photos, anything. It’s simply another way of storing information it had just been so slow up until five years ago it wouldn’t be thought to be practical, but it is this is the first experiment showing what imagery you can hide in bacteria.

This is the latest – it’s a gif file it was actually programmed into the DNA of bacteria last year the bacteria reproduced and the offspring from the reproduction cycle would still produce this movie.

Pretty cool. You can hide information in bacteria and when the bacteria multiply they can go into a spore form and last for a very long time, no one can scan you and find a bacteria.

We don’t have anything that can detect that. So if you want to be able to encode information take pictures of information create something in DNA and don’t want it in your own body it can be bacteria on some portion of your body right all they have to do is scrape it let it grow in the petri dish and unpack the information. This is all available now this isn’t science fiction but you can encode movies.

Well this is what the Chinese are doing with DNA. So in your own neck of the woods you can begin inquiry, we are doing things with DNA as well, but the Chinese are fairly convinced that DNA encryption encoding would be one tremendous challenge even for quantum computing.

So this is where the race is right now, trying to merge quantum computing with what you call a wet hard drive with DNA – merging DNA systems with quantum computing will be really quite an amazing and both lethal threat for that.

The next thing I wanted to mention to you is memory you play listen really hopefully you’ll recognize this.

Hey whoever you guys are you gonna have to show me some id…

So what to do with memory in medicine we think of memory as a potentially harmful thing when people present with post-traumatic stress disorder they can’t stop thinking about the thing that’s creating emotional distress. It’s a very active development in the field to figure out can we erase memory, can we modify memory, can we change memory? Short answer is yes.

Several years ago with the PM zeta data out of Duke University this was the first time that anyone had ever demonstrated that if you wash an area of the brain called the hippocampus – it’s an area of our brain that’s crucial for forming short memories, spatial memories, and then facilitating the transfer from a short-term memory it’s just something that’s more permanent and stable over time, that he could train the mice to run the maze, document the number of trials and errors, and then flood their hippocampus or expose it to this, and the memory would be completely gone.

Meaning when the rats or the mice had to learn it over again it was the same number of learning trials.

Now there was no trace of the memory left.

Now the good news for us when we study rats mice is we put electrodes and cannulae into their brain and can directly affect that area of the brain if you wanted to poke your own hippocampus you’d have to stick your finger through your eye and go right back in there sounds impossible to get to. Not if you program a cell to go there.

So if you decide you wanted to program something that was selectively release PKM zeta after your meeting with someone they probably would have no memory of it that’s what’s happening in the rats alright so the technical challenge right now is how do we get a cell in there to do that in human I can assure you they’re working on that in non-human primates right now how many what’s the point specificity can we get it in there close enough to the hippocampus.

Will those cells start reproducing in the next day make enough of that stuff to wipe out a memory?

Related to this…

Once you start thinking about memory, are chemicals that not only wipe out memory, but chemicals that enhance it. So if you want a better human camera a better an individual who can just go see and remember everything that’s the direction that the research in this lane is taking to help people with Alzheimer’s – how to give them memory back.

So what’s being actively studied are the few people on the planet who have hypermnesia – those that remember everything that’s ever happened to them we’re actively trying to understand how to unlock that and unpack that and figure out why it is their memory does seem to record and they retain everything they’ve seen. They don’t find it pleasant and medicine would like to people in medicine want to try and understand that so they can turn it into something beneficial for people who are losing memory.

From a security and intelligence standpoint, it is a really unique opportunity to begin to discover if you can administer a drug that enhances human memory for a certain number of hours. Does it have to be permanent? So rather than carrying technical toys somewhere to try and record and collect information, your brain just remembers it-which doesn’t give anybody anything really to detect. That’s one potential use for it, and that’s one lane of research that’s going on. ^{(03) He Draws New York’s Skyline From Memory | The Daily 360 https://youtu.be/JL6NAIVpl54}

That was just my picture to remind me.

“The man who knew too much” if you remember the old Hitchcock film. ^{(04) Alfred Hitchcock – The Man Who Knew Too Much (1934) / full movie https://youtu.be/vX2RTB2Fgf4}

Essentially, that’s what he’d done; he’d remembered and memorized all the steps on how to make a bomb, he’d remembered the codes, he remembered everything. That research on hyper memory has gone more slowly than I thought in 2010. I thought by about 2015 there would be some progress-there hasn’t been much yet in expanding memory very much. It seems to be a harder nut to crack than erasing a memory. Erasing memory seems to be far easier.

The last topic I wanted to review with you is memory. I don’t know if you recognize any of the imagery up there, but I’ll walk you through it. In the last five years, what’s been demonstrated is that you can train a fruit fly around an aversive experience, and you can transfer that memory to the brain of another fruit fly by manipulating the rods. It gives it a memory for something that it’s never had before, and then it reacts to the stimulus in the same way as the animal who did have the aversive learning experience.

It’s been done in mice—I’ll talk a little bit about what Beth Loftus and I have done to men and women going through survival school and changing memory, and I put the last slide up because this is in flatworms, and this came out two years ago, that memory really is something beyond what we typically understand in flatworms. You can cut their heads off and their bodies will still remember stuff. So they’re just beginning to decode where and how memory is stored in the body of this little creature, so we can translate that into memory in animals that look different than that little creature. It’s evolved for a very interesting reason.

So this is in 2009. You can transfer light. they’ve transferred the transferred memory you can turn things on and off using light in animals to activate the hippocampus turn memory on and off and so where are we with humans in creating false memories giving the memories that they’ve never had?

We’ve come a long way. This is my colleague is Beth Loftus and this was her early work – it was called “Lost in a mall” and what she did is she ask a person to be in the study you could be in her study if you had a sibling that was at least five years older than you and she’d say we’re interested in your memory from when you were a kid.

I’ve asked your older sibling, your older brother or sister to give me four stories about you, and I want to know how much you remember. What they didn’t know is that there were four different stories. One of them was fake and she wanted to see how long it would take for them to adopt a false memory. The quick answer is after two interview sessions. % of the subjects believed that they remembered the person who’d found them when they were lost at a mall and actually argued with the researcher about whether or not the memory was true or not, and that’s how I met her.

We decided to get together and run up to Brunswick to see her school and try a memory experiment this is our design if you’re not familiar with sere there’s a classroom phase there’s an experiential phase we were interested in sampling people when they were in isolation when they’re returning their gear and at the end and we tried a couple of different techniques group one there’s no misinformation we simply want to sample accuracy of human memory for their experience and we told them at the beginning is here we want you to be the best little human collector possible we are going to quiz you about your memory don’t let us trick you we want to know what you remember group two we told them the same thing but we lied when they took their questionnaire at the end we incorporated several techniques from false memory techniques which are a little bit of leading questions to see whether or not we could create false memories.

In the third group, we exposed them to an erroneous photograph of their interrogator, and in Group 3 we used Group Four. We used a video. So here’s what we did. By exposing them to a photograph after they had been interrogated and placed in isolation stress, it could change them from this guy to this guy hours later on who they were identifying in the lineup. Their level of confidence was based on the fact that that was the person they had met. We found that we could make them believe that there were guns, that there were knives, and that there were caches of weapons, simply by altering the phrasing of a question or inserting something into a video.

I’ll give you an example. if we said, “Did your interrogator wear a weapon? If so, please describe it.” We only got about a % endorsement of the presence of a weapon in the interrogation phase.

If we said when you were being interrogated by your interrogator and the guy with the weapon in the interrogation, what did they argue about? We didn’t care what the answer was, we’d ask another question. They described the weapon worn by your interrogator. It jumped to % would tell us the type of firearm that they had seen in the interrogation booth there’s a security violation right there there weren’t any we’ve got to record them but with one question we could do that when you sample with a few more you can actually increase the sample so when we increase the stress that’s here we found that instead of a % rate overall we could create false memories in nearly everyone that was in people yeah so Beth and I were talking about that we said well you can change memory we know that it’s a way of understanding maybe why and how people have recovered memories of abuse that never happened that’s what her work has mainly been about so she decided to do a study called licked by Pluto she just said she couldn’t make Mickey Mouse a sex offender but in her lab they thought Pluto was fair game the short story is people got to they were exposed to some misinformation about a man who addressed in the Pluto outfit at Disney and he’d been inappropriately rubbing his large fabric tongue on children pleasurably and not pleasurably there were two different conditions then there was a neutral condition if people adopted the false memory and their memory was for something negative they did not want to buy the Pluto toy all right when they went down their list what they would not buy she’s done it with food that was from her series with Alan Alda she gave him a false memory that he’d been sick one time eating devilled eggs and here they offer him one at the picnic on film and you get the classic disgust wrinkle and he said now I got sick one time eating them it’s not a true memory it was planted she’s done it now with strawberries and ice cream also done it with pickles and has done it with alcohol study last year was that if you give college students the false memory that they were terribly hungover they had a wicked hangover from drinking too much tequila then when they’re given free range options at the bar like a week later they decline it at twice the rate of everybody else they got them now got sick doing that so think about it if you change the past, you change human behaviour. We are case-based reasoning animals. When we think about what we’re going to do, we think about the last time we did something, or what we heard about, or what we think it would have done to change human motivation. You don’t have to persuade people, you can just change their memory.

Think about the defensive and offensive capabilities of that. If you think about this from a defensive standpoint, you have the ability to change the memory of a person who has been debriefed in a safe house about the identities of who they met and the layout. As we’ve looked at altering memory for plans for faces, for timing, if they’re wrapped up by their intelligence service, they don’t have anything to lie about or what they remember is actually genuine, but it’s wrong. That might be a defensive way of applying the technique in medicine. People are arguing about whether or not you can use false memories to help people. Can I give you a false memory that leads you to stop smoking, or is it unethical because I can’t tell you I gave you a false memory? I’d have to do it without your permission for your good.

Most of the things probably unethical in this society than we think you probably should be an informed consumer but it’s a possibility that you can do and when I think about this I think about its relevance in this day and age when you start wondering what information is real and what information is trustworthy and you start running into people and debriefing them and you have sources who claim things when you can learn how to create false memories a person can be genuine and the information they remember is it is a little dangle idea you can put information out that it’s simply not true but in the current social media age the ability to actually manage people’s memories and change them it’s just enhanced compared to what it used to be now you can you can fix the videos and pictures and expose people to audio and visual information and we know that even if they know that’s a possibility people don’t recognize when they adopt a false memory so it’s a bit of a Trojan horse effect you don’t know that it’s happened to you if you’re smart and you have a good memory you believe that happens to other people but not you because your memory is true so it bypasses some critical reasoning on our part and I think it’s particularly it’s particularly effective that’s where the state of the art is right now for creating false memories in humans is doing that verbally or by these manipulations with either what we say what we show them what we expose them to but the chemical implanting of memories has now occurred in monkeys so in trying to restore memory there is probably I would say in the next two years we should see the science experiment come out that says a memory has actually been transferred or created and planted back into a human brain that wasn’t done by a classic false memory technique but I would anticipate that that’s the direction the research is going how do you rebuild memories and people have had a TBI active research is going on about that on nanite reconstruction of brain brain cells and and brain networks and the idea in the mental health community is people lost part of their brain we want to restore memory and brain function can we put the memories back in so it’s it’s probably only science fiction for another two years given given the state of the art and the progress around that and then and the last thing I’ll say I didn’t have any videos for it.

I really wanted to show you one but the French have published a very interesting paper and it is this well people were sleeping they were able to train them and sample their knowledge and what they trained him in while they were asleep and while they were later awake and didn’t know that they’d learned the information so I’ll say it again in people who were asleep they were able to tell what people knew around word recognition lists without ever waking the person up they were also able to train new memory and information outside the person’s awareness while they were asleep where that technology can go is some very interesting places it would really raise since I was in the lane of DMT and we talked about deception and everybody is arguing about how to interrogate people it raises an immediate question about whether or not you can sample information in people’s brains outside of their awareness the problem with a cat scan and the PET scan any technologies you have to have a willing subject they do need to sit still if people are asleep and you can begin to sample what their brain recognizes it offers a number of opportunities that looking at guilty knowledge brain recognition waveforms and sampling some kinds of information.

I don’t know how soon it would be when you can link someone’s brain to somebody else’s while they’re asleep but I would imagine that that can’t be far off I’d probably ballpark it and say probably five years if they have to do the brain implants we’ll know sooner because I I can’t see any other reason why DARPA got approval for five hundred deeply deep brain implants I think the next step is going to be a hive a hive brain that’s already been done in rats you can link multiple brains and as a hive they solve problems much faster than the individual rat so that technology’s here I’m assuming the link people who they’ve given permission who’ve given permission to link their brains to have a productive life live in virtual reality move robotic things, and solve some problems. So I think in the next few years that’s what we’ll see is to brain linking for problem solving but to see if it makes it more efficient but those are a couple of technologies that one make you aware of and then you can run away and think about their more direct applications I tend to think of things from a medical perspective and from an intelligence and information perspective, but it’s no longer really science fiction and most of these fields have moved faster than I actually thought. The only one has been expanding memory that hasn’t moved as fast as I thought.

That’s all I had to say thank you for your time yeah.

[Applause]

All right Thank You Dr. Morgan we’re pretty much out of time but we’ll be hanging out up here for a little bit so if anybody has questions feel free to come up and thank you for coming out