Sci-Fi High

Published Jun 19, 2013, 4:55 PM

Will we ever be able to beam information directly to our brains? Is there something fundamental about learning a concept that tech can't replace? How will we learn in the future?

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Brought to you by Toyota. Let's go places. Welcome to Forward Thinking. Hey there, and welcome to Forward Thinking, the podcast that looks at the future and says we don't need no education. Yes we do. We just used a double negative. I'm Jonathan Strickland, I'm Lauren Vocal, I'm Joe McCormick. That was a good one, actually, thank you. Yeah. Once once in a while I pick one that's actually si appropriate for the podcast. Today we're gonna tell me appropriate at all for the podcast for anyway. So today we're gonna talk about science fiction and education, the future of what education might be. Uh. And the reason for this is because obviously we just did a video about what the future of education is all about, and uh, if you look to science fiction, there's some interesting concepts of what we could see as part of our educational uh experience in the future. The one that we often think of, at least here in the office, because uh, it made such a big splash when it first debuted, is the matrix, right, right, So in the concept of the matrix, you've got characters who have these these computer jacks that are built into them huge hole in the back of your head. Right right right at the top of your spine base of your skull, and you can plug in what looks to be a an inconveniently large plug into the back of your skull, and then that allows you to do a couple of things. One, it allows you to enter the matrix. This this virtual environment we plug into the the program. Yeah. See, it's so far in the future. I don't understand why they don't have wireless access to the matrix. Yeah, well, I mean clearly looks cooler. Yeah, I don't understand why they're using humans as opposed to cow I thought about it. Now. If you remember in the movie, they can kill you just by unplugging you while you're plugged in. If you had wireless access and then suddenly you had interference in the signal, I guess that would kill you. What's interfering though, it's just them, I don't know. Suddenly somebody moves a big lead sheet between you and the and the router and then you die, right right, Okay, you know what We're getting far away from what I'm trying to get at at this conversation already, and we haven't even gotten into it. The point being that in the context of the matrix. Uh. While you get plugged into this virtual environment, one of the other things that can happen is that using this connection to computers, this physical connection between the person and the computer, you can download information from a computer or have a computer upload information into you, and then use that information in a meaningful way within the context of the matrix, like piloting a ship or kung fu, yes, I know kung fu, or becoming an expert at at weapons systems, all this sort of stuff. And uh, at least within the context of the matrix, as far as I tell now, granted I have to in full disclosure, I only watched the first film, and then I tried to get through the second film twice. Second film. Yeah, that's pretty much how I am. Wouldn't it be nice if they made sequels? Yeah? At any rate, The point being that that it seemed to me that the knowledge you gained through that computer link up into your brain really was only um uh, something you could put to use within the matrix itself, right right for for most human beings. The way that it worked in the films was that you most people could could learn this thing that they would know within the confines of the matrix computer program, and then once you got back into reality, um, which was a sucky place to be, you wouldn't know it anymore, right, except they would occasionally the raves. That was the that was the one part that wasn't too sucky. That's actually not all that implausible when you think about it, because apart from the sort of like the instantaneous downloading part, it's possible to learn a virtual skill that has no correlation in the real world. Like you can be the best shot in the world at Halo, but that doesn't mean you can actually do combat and operate an assault rifle in real life. Well sure, I mean it's two different sets of skills in that case. It is just that it's at one set is mimicking something that happens in our real space, but it's not using the exact same approach. There there are correlations, though, I mean, for example, surgeons use video games these days to help train themselves to be better surgeons. Using that kind of a fine eye hand coordination training is very helpful. I guess what would be crucial in designing those kind of systems is making them as map as closely to real life as possible. Well, that and to make whatever the whatever your goal is, something that actually helps you refine whatever your skill set is. If you're talking about hand eye coordination, then it has to have lots of stuff that you can react to quickly and respond to in a in a way that makes sense within the context of the game. Now, the question is, could we get to a point where we could get that kind of skill uh through a connection direct connection to a computer automatic learning. It's called right right, this this concept of just beaming that information from a digital source into our brains and have it translate in a meaningful way. And to really understand how difficult this would be, we have to kind of look at how we learn and how we retain information within our own brains. Yeah, because in the matrix there's this it's just kind of glossed over. There's some easy transition between digital and and you know, the wet stuff in your head. They've got a hole you just plug the thing in and that that's taking care of. But in the real world, I have to imagine that our brains don't use binary data. No they do not. Yeah, No, our brains are not they don't. This is one of those things I think some futurists have trouble with and that I think some futurists believe that the human brain and computers share way more in common than they actually do. Now, there are commonalities, I mean, they're The computer is sort of our attempt to create a machine that can, in at least some contexts, reason its way through things. It has to have a very specific set of rules that has to follow in order to do that. But um, you know, it's kind of trying to mimic what we do when we're thinking about stuff using rules that we have created. But when you get down to the actual biology of the brain, it is really complex, so complex in fact, that we still don't fully understand how it works. We've got some theories or maybe we should say, some hypotheses about what is going on, but we're still learning a mystery to us. Yeah, yeah, we we can. Even with the sophisticated tools and the information that we have available to us today, we still don't fully understand the process. But I let me talk a little it about what we think is going on. Uh. And of course some of this we may find out later on is not completely correct or that it's it's right, but it's missing some key component. That's you know, that's part of the joy of discovering stuff. Really, it's something that I find exciting about all areas of science. So. Um, Really, there's three steps in the way that we store information. There's uh or the way we deal with information in our brains. There's encoding, there's storage, and there's retrieval. Now so far, that sounds a lot like computers. You know, you encode the information, you store it, and then you can retrieve it whenever you need to. Um. There are three different types basic types of memory. There's sensory memory. This is something that lasts maybe two seconds at most. This is what your brain is doing to to help you interpret the information that you're bringing in through your senses. Is it's sort of what we describe as the moment to moment ex perience of consciousness. Um. It's it's almost like when you first feel that blast of cold air and you think of it as cold. It's really the memory of cold that you're associate. It's kind of you get a little metaphysical when you can start talking. There's such a thing as the present, you know, right right, Yeah, that thing as cold and whether or not, Yeah, just just based on you know, the the idea that my green is different than your green because we've both experienced the color differently. Yeah. Uh. And then there's the lady who can experience millions of colors. You guys read about her, right, Yeah you haven't. This this is a sidebar, but it is an exciting thing. Uh. Some scientists have have identified a woman, I want to say, she's a doctor in the UK who they've identified as as being able to perceive something like one dred million different shades of color. So she's got supersensory ability when it comes to color differentiation. She cannot see outside the visible range. It's not like she suddenly has the ability to see infrared or ultra violet, but she can see incredibly subtle differences in color. Uh. The average person, it's more like one million shades. So she has one hundred times the sensitivity, which means that she must go bunkers when she's trying to pick out an outfit that matches, because things that to us would look like they match perfectly, she'd say, well, no, that's white, totally not white. That that's not the right color at all. It's like the color equivalent of how people don't like forty eight frames per second. It's just there's too much detail everything. The idea being that you could you could show someone like like me, I have terrible color recognition skills that I've taken those courses, those those those little those little tests where you're supposed to arrange the different shades from uh, you know, different the Roy G. BIV type stuff and uh, and I don't score very well at them at all. So you could show two colors to me that I might think look identical, and to her, she'd say, no, there's a world difference between them. All right, that's getting beyond the scope of this conversation, but it's cool, so I had to talk about it. So you've got sensory memory that last two seconds max. Then you have short term memory, This is more like something that lasts about thirty seconds. This is when you are trying to retain some information for just a brief moment, like someone's just told you their phone number and you're trying to put it into your phone or write it down if you still do that, and and so you just have to remember it long enough to be able to do that, and then you offload that need to remember, so your your mind doesn't have to retain that information. Um, then you have long term memory. A long term memory, of course, is when this is what we think of as when we say actual memories, like you're remembering something that happened to in your past. That's a long term memory. And the interesting thing I found was that short term memory what happens is when you encounter this new information that you're trying to remember. What is going on is that you have you have neurons in your brain, right, the neural cells, and then you have connections synapsis between the neurons. Uh. You've got about one billion neurons in your average brain, all right. Each of those neurons has about one thousand connections to other neurons, so that means that you have more than a trillion connections total in your brain. Now, a memory is actually the collection of connections between specific neurons in your brain at any given time. So, if Joe, you were to present to me some information that I was supposed to remember, uh, that first short term memory would form a connection between certain neurons and that would represent that memory, that specific uh combination of connections. If I were to make that a long term memory, it would actually be reconfiguring the those cells and those connections so that they were made a more permanent connection, and then every time I thought back on it, it would be essentially recreating what happened in that short term memory. It would it would like fire an electrical signal on a certain pattern across soup, if you could kind of it in a weird analogy. Let's say that we get a big group of people together to take a group photo and I tell everyone assume a silly pose and they all just do something spontaneous for a second, and I take a picture, and then every single day for the next month, I get everyone together, I'm like, all right, assume the same silly pose that you did before. They are trying to recreate that moment that they had before, and the more it's recreated, the stronger that memory becomes. However, just like in that analogy, you can make mistakes, right I You know, I might think, oh, yeah, I raised my left eyebrow really high in the scoofy photo, but really I raised my right eyebrow, and you're not allowed to look at the photo for reference, so you're just trying to remember this. Uh, your memory can actually be faulty, which we see all the time. Right, memory is not a completely reliable source. We think our memories are better than they are. Yeah, yeah, I mean I'm certainly that way of the conversations I have with my wife, our disagreements with who said what when, and uh, and clearly one of us has to be wrong. And I hope it's not always me, but it very well might be because my memories is not it's it's not infallible. So uh, I wish it were all right. So beyond that, we've got the these this information stored within these connections of neurons, and uh, we don't fully understand the mechanism that's going on here. We can get some we've got some general ideas. We also can't measure how big a memory is, like how much is being stored there. So for example, with with computers, you can see just by the file size, right, So, and it's it's based on you know, a number of letters of a number of characters that can be specifically break broken down into a number of ones and serious yeah yeah, essentially if you're talking about like a text file, that's exactly true. So you look at that and you say, all right, well that I know exactly how much space this is going to take in whatever recording medium I'm going to use, if it's going to be optical or magnetic or whatever. That's we can't say that with human memories. Uh. Memories are very very interesting and different things, and they change over time. Like I said, you might forget little details which could actually change quote unquote the file size of your memory. Uh. And then beyond that, you have things like association, where you can make associations between memories that don't have a direct connection with one another. So I might remember an instance I had with Lauren in an instance I had with Joe and draw connections between them even though they were too completely separate uh moments, perhaps both in time and space. So I might have run into Joe, uh, you know, in downtown Atlanta, and it might have been something that happened with me and Lauren in the office. And yet I'm able to associate things, you know, because my That's one of the cool ways that our brains work. Now, beyond all that, there's been a recent study that was was published in Nature Neuroscience where we discovered that rapid incoming data stuff that's happening very very quickly. Little second long moments of information that you're being confronted with can be stored in our brains in single neurons. Like a single neuron can actually hold a memory, but it's like a second long. And they think, the scientists think that perhaps the reason for this is so that it gives your brain a little bit of a little extra time to incorporate this and start to make a short term memory out of this blast of short information. Which is why if someone comes up and just gives you a quick list of of facts or figures, you might be able to recall a few, but you're not able to recall all of them. And some of that is because those little neurons are able to hold onto enough information for it to become meaningful to you. UH. And then there there was a team led by Professor John Gabrielli and UH he discovered that activity in a specific of the brain called the para hippocampal cortex or PHC, predicts how well people will remember a visual scene. So if using fm R I machines to to take a look at someone, um, if the activity were low, they were more likely to remember a visual scenes, so they could actually predict when people would remember more about the stuff they were going to be shown based upon their neural activity. Now, we can't do anything with that information yet other than know that this we can tell when someone is ready to learn, but we can't induce that right. So it's just one of those things where you take a look at the person's brain and you think now is when they would be most us most have to remember something visually. Now, beyond that, if we're talking about the type parts of the brain that are involved in memory, again, we don't know for sure all the different mechanisms here, but we suspect that the hippocampus and frontal cortex X work together to determine which sensory input is important to go into memory formation, so which bits of info are are vital and which are extraneous. So it may discard that you could be you could be bringing in way more information than you remember because you're parts of your brain are saying, well, that's not important, let's not record that. So you could be forgetting very important details because they just were never recorded within your memory. Um and these memories tend to be of spatial or declarative uh, types of memories. No, spatial memory is of course how things fit within a given space. Declarative are the type of memories where you can actually talk about it. You could express what you were thinking, such as, you know, when I was young, I had to walk to school uphill both ways and five ft of snow. That would be a declarative memory, as also be a lie. Uh. And then the amygdal plays a role in encoding emotionally stressful memories. And then anything that's procedural, which is learning a basic physical task or a set of steps, is probably governed by basil ganglia and the cerebellum. It's that motor memory. Uh, not just motor memory. Let's say that. Uh, let's say that Joe, you are are traveling from your home to the office. It's you learning that route to the point where you no longer really thinking about the route anymore as you drive from your home to the office. So it's it's that kind of procedure. You know, Now I take a right, Now I go two point three miles. Now I take a left. That kind of thing become so automatic people think they can do it while they're composing a long text message. Yeah, that don't do that. Uh, but anyway, that's that's the basic rundown of what we know about the human brain, and clearly there's a lot we still don't know. But when you think about that way, when you think that memories, which is really what we have to work on when we start talking about thinking and putting stuff together, um, thinking about them being not just neurons but connections makes it so much more complex that you can see. To to be able to induce information in someone is going to be challenging because it's not like you could just target a specific neuron and say it is your job to remember this fact. In fact, i'd have to imagine that most memories, um and feel free to correct me, But it seems like most would involve multiple types of memory formation at the same time. Like if I'm having a memory later today about us recording this podcast, first of all, I'm sorry, isn't it going to be composed of both? It's it's going to be images. I'm going to remember auditory cues. I'm going to remember what, you know, the paper felt like in my hands, about it? Remember how so the brain, how warm it is in this studio? Yeah, I could remember my simmering resentment of our fearless leader here. That's that's fair, Joe, I've earned that. Um yeah, you know, first of all, guys, we all really do like each other. I don't want I don't want to. I don't want that to actually be taken seriously. We would I would suspect. I would suspect that indeed, it would be several different memories all combining into one, and not just one uh over, like not just one mega memory that somehow engages all these things. But honestly, I don't know the answer, Like I couldn't tell you for sure. I would suspect it, But again that's because of what I've read already. Of course. Then again, maybe one way to think about it is that that a full experiential memory is maybe something kind of like a web page where you have like images, and you have text, and you might have music playing, and it's all different types of data, but it comes together for one when it could be very well, it could very well be when you remember something that you're leaving certain details out entirely, which would again kind of lead you to that thought of these are separate pieces to a puzzle, but you don't necessarily need the full puzzle. Okay, so what would it take to use technology to make knowledge in the brain, Like, is is it really possible? And and is there a role for technology to play in the future of education? Obviously, I would always argue that technology definitely has a role in an education. I don't I'm not one of those people who thinks that education that technology replaces the need for teachers. I'm the son of two teachers. I value teachers. I value librarians very highly. I think that they are incredibly important in the role of education. I think that technology can make their jobs easy year if it is used properly. And that's a big if, because just throwing technology at the problem is no guarantee that you're going to uh going to actually help out right, right, or maybe maybe not easier, but maybe I'm just different, more more enriched, but different. Well, one example I think we can look at right now of how technology is doing something in education that we normally can't do is stuff like personalized learning adaptive tutor software, where so imagine you have something like students are you know, elementary school students are trying to learn math alight, now they might have a really good math teacher. And I don't think that I can see anyway that technology could on the whole replace that teacher, but I can see it providing a really important individual attention that one teacher can't give a whole room of students. So you're saying like, you've got twenty five students, and as twenty five students all learn in slightly different ways and uh, and the teacher's approach might work really well for the majority of the class, but there might be other members of the class who are It's not that they're not bright, or not that they're not willing to learn, but they might absorb information better when they read it to versus or if they're watching a video about it, or they're listening to something about it rather than whatever the teacher do. You guys happen to. And there's the simple like human power issue like that the teacher does not have enough time to spend individually with each student. I can make sure that they're getting every bit of it right. I mean, if you have if you have one hour for math class and you have twenty five students, then you know, how how would you divide that up so that you would be the most effective teacher. Yeah, so imagine you have a program that that watches the students solve the problem. Like the student has a tablet or something and they're working out the problem on the tablet. This software is smart and it follows their progress, so it can see what kind of mistakes there make consistently, and it can focus attention, so like the teacher can even get feedback saying like, Okay, what you know little Johnny's having trouble with is he's forgetting to carry the one when he does an addition with multiple places or something like that. That actually I actually had more problem remembering positive and negative signs. That's actually true. Well, I mean, and it could probably figure that out too, right in a way that um that a teacher who has lots of students to deal with just probably wouldn't have time. And then the software, based on what it learns about the student, would give the student different problems or or focus its information in a different way in the future. Exactly. Yeah, it could adapt to what the student is learning and and a just expectations accordingly, which is a great idea. And of course we've seen different approaches to trying to to cater to different learning styles. You know, for example, do you guys happen to have a preference of how you learn stuff reading reading stuff? I'm definitely in the minority. I'm not very visual. I'm very auditory, So a lot of times I understand something a lot better if I hear somebody explain it to me than if I were to read the exact same words. Interesting, I'm very visual myself, so we've kind of got an interesting mix here. Um. Yeah, And and so the idea would be that this software would start to pick up on which learning methods seem to work the best with that particular student and and be able to concentrate more on catering to that knowing that these kind of learning approaches aren't always exactly the same across every subject, or even across every single day. So ideally the best kind of software would be dynamic, and that it could very in very subtle ways pick up on changes that the student is going through when they're learning and being able to to uh anticipate them and cater to those as well. Because you might learn one concept really easily one way, but you might need a different, slight different combination of ways for another concept. And so in a way you're talking about and artificially intelligent, uh proactive learning tool, which is still sort of science fictionary. I mean, we don't we haven't reached that level of sophistication with artificial intelligence, but it's within the realm of plausibility, right because we certainly have this kind of tutoring software, not exactly what Jonathan was just talking about, but we do have adaptive tutoring software right now in the real world, and it'll be interesting. I think it's early. It's still early enough days where it's hard to get a real grip on how effective it is. It's one of those things where I've definitely seen some conflicting stuff about you know, is there a measurable difference? Does it really help a student that much more than it would just going to class and paying attention to a teacher? But um, But then two things. One again, it's very early on in the technology, so we haven't had a lot of time to really examine it at work. And to being early on in the technology, it means it's not as sophisticated as it may one day be, So that's something to keep in mind. It's I think it's a promising approach to help supplement a student's education. Thinking you know, again the teachers really important here, and then this would be a great tool to help individualized where the teacher doesn't just doesn't have time right right, and allow the teacher and and also I mean even give the teacher that indication early on if a student is having problems, so that the teacher can be proactive and work with the student and say, all right, I can tell that you're not that something's not clicking here, can you. Let's let's talk about this and see if we can find a way where this makes sense to you and for them, where to help teachers refine their educational style and and cater more to what works you know, in the real world, in the real class for get that data back from the programs about where students attention is and what's really working for them and what's maybe not. Yeah, now we're looking at this from a very idealized way. If we have any teachers out there listening, first of all, we love you, and we do really appreciate the incredible work you do, especially considering that you know, some schools it can be a real challenge. Uh, so you know, it's definitely one of those things that we're thinking about as a future technology, not something like not that teachers just aren't doing their job. Nothing could be for them, absolutely not. UM, So I thought we should maybe move on to talk about what other possibilities technology could hold for the inception of knowledge and the technological supplementation. Supplementation. Sure, I'm just that word. I was just looking to make sure my top is still spinning and it is go on, okay of of knowledge and training. And I found this fascinating study about something called decoded neurofeedback. Say what decoded neurofeedback? So neurofeedback is um where data gathered about a person's brain is displayed back to the person in a certain way so the person can adapt in in some way control brain activity. Um. The uh, what I'm referring to actually is a study that is from two thousand eleven UM. It was published in Science. It's called Perceptual Learning Incepted by decoded fMRI I neurofeedback without stimulus presentation. Now, if you read about this study in lots of popular science blogs, blogs places like that, a lot of what the they touted it as like, you know, this is the matrix, right, This is where we're beaming information directly into someone's brain and they don't have to have any connection to it whatsoever, and then they're experts in it. Well, no, it's not it's not that, but it is really cool. Okay, okay, it's not beaming information into your brain. But it does represent a step in the direction of something kind of like automatic learning, like what you know, so that you can learn and practice a skill through through subtle or automatic means. And you're squinting, Did I just want to know more? Okay, I'm trying to work this out in my brain, but I need you to explain it to me. Okay, Well it started. The study started as part of this debate about um, the adult plasticity of the human brain. Sure, what what is that? What would that mean? Adult plasticity. Well, there's there's been a controversy about how certain regions of the brain can change past a certain age, and for a long time there was a belief that the visual cortex of the brain after a certain age, say maybe like a year old or something like that, just couldn't change much. It was not very plastic. This is similar to that idea that it's very easy for a child to learn another language, but it gets increasingly difficult for adults to do that. Yes, exactly, UM okay. So you've got that going on, and these people in this study decided to test, well, maybe we can cause changes in early visual areas of the brain. The early visual area is part of the visual cortex and it controls different visual processes in the brain. So one thing that people used to test this is what's called is visual perceptual learning UM, and that means like learning how to do a visual task better UM by repetition. So let's say you want to uh be able to look at um, something in a room at a fixed position and then look away and then look back. That's the example I read, UM, and be able to immediately move your eyes to where that object should um. Said that I was the one example I read. But yeah, it's stuff like that, UM okay. So the study went like this. They took some people and they put them in an fm R I machine and they had them look at a visual pattern which was it was a sort of a circle with a series of diagonal lines had different degrees of orientation. And all they did was they had the people lay in the f M r I, and it scanned the fm R I, of course scans the blood flow and your brain in real time, so it can map brain activity. And they scanned if our f m R I while people looked at these visual patterns. And then they took the people out of the machines and sent them home. Then they turned that data from the fm R I into a picture of brain activity. They said, okay, this is what it looks like when the brain is looking at these diagonal lines. All right. They brought the people back to the lab, didn't show them anything else. They said, here's a disk on a screen back in the fMRI machine. Of course, look at this disk and make it get bigger. In fact, I want to find the exact words. It's funny the quote in here is. Uh. They told them to quote somehow regulate activity in the posterior part of the brain to make the solid green disk that was presented six seconds later as large as possible. How would you do that? So imagine you're sitting there staring at a computer screen and they're telling you to look at something on the screen and make it bigger. Uh, well you have This is going to sound like that scene in Ghostbusters couple of lines UM. So the people had no idea how to do this well. It turned out there was a secret way of doing it, and the secret way was for them to reproduce the patterns in the early visual area of the brain that had existed when they were looking at the diagonal lines earlier. But they had no knowledge of this um and they were given incentives. They were given a monetary incentive too, is the bigger you can make the disc, the more more pay um. And it turned out over time training with this FMR neurofeedback, people got better at making the disc bigger. So they were essentially remembering they they were They were learning something without knowing they were learning it interesting. Interesting. The neurofeedback was teaching them to enlarge the disk by having a thought that they didn't realize was connected to the enlarging of the disk. And so one thing there was a good right up of what happened in this experiment and Discover magazine, and one thing that pointed out was that UM, so all that happened here was some diagonal lines. That was the queue, that was what generated the brain patterns that would enlarge the disk. But you could perform this same type of experiment with thing that was a lot more meaningful than diagonal lines. To say, what if the brain pattern you were looking for was associated with a task that required practice in order to like say, learning kung fu in the matrix, and you could induce mental training just by having somebody play this game with enlarging This are similar to wax on wax off. You don't know what you're doing, but you're actually learning skill. Instead of teaching muscle memory, you're teaching memory memory. Interesting. So the question here I have, and obviously this is this is very preliminary and it's not anything close to the matrix style yet. Uh. And that's you know, we don't even know that we'll ever get to a point where the matrix style will ever be at all realistic. But one other discussion I wanted to have was that this idea of it, this is something I think that that sometimes administrators and politicians kind of fallen to the trap they think about technology being the answer automatically, and they don't think about the actual application of that technology. This is why I think teachers and librarians are indispensable, really, because if you just throw assets at students, that doesn't necessarily mean that they will be meaningful or useful at all. So the example I gave was, let's say that we've even reached the point where we can just download Internet. Yeah, we can somehow impart information instantly from one source into your brain. So does that mean that you would actually quote unquote no stuff or would it just means that you have access to information now and at least, I mean, of course, without without this reality being around us. We can't say for sure because we can't actually test it, but I would suspect it would be very similar to having access to the internet. You know, on a computer or on a smartphone that I can look up the answer to any given question. But it doesn't mean that I know that answer right or you know, or being able to the difference between being able to um perform and intricate kung fu routine versus being able to say, well, in order to do that, you combine this move with this move, and this is what those moves look like. Yeah, well that's part of the first part of this is that I think knowledge is more complex than we give it credit for. Uh. And the example I was thinking about was, um, so imagine you are in the matrix world and you can just beam data directly into your brain. You could say, download a book into your brain. Say you download a Russian to English dictionary. You're an English speaker, Do you now speak Russian? I would say now. I think a simplistic understanding would say like, oh, yeah, okay, you can just download Russian to English dictionary. Bam, I know Russian. But I don't think it's that simple because I think to have fluency in Russian, there's also part of the brain that needs to have the experience of speaking it, not just to know what all the words mean right right, Well, there's there there's an element of knowing what the words mean, there's an element of knowing the syntax that the grammar, the structure of how to put those words into use, and then there's a yeah, you know, is there another dimension to it? Is there an actual practiceable thing that we could digitally reproduce or or not. I mean, and you know, we were talking about a little bit earlier, and I think that it's probably similar to the difference between UM taking a course in college, Like, for example, I took a couple of semesters of Japanese and UM so I I you know, learned the alphabets. I learned a bunch of vocabulary. I technically learned the syntax. If you asked me to speak anything, I I. The only thing I've retained from it is how to apologize for my terrible Japanese. What does that sound like? Go a nut that you don't touch my mustache? So yeah, I mean the point being that that knowledge is very complex, and then maybe if we ever do reach that point, we will be able to actually create those neural pathways, that that complex series of pathways that would allow us to not just know something, but to understand it, to comprehend it, and to be able to associate different ideas together. That's one of the amazing things I think there that we can say about the human brain is the fact that we can associate things that were not associated before and come up with new ideas and new information and innovation, things that didn't exist until we thought them up. And that you know, we can't create matter or energy, we can't destroy it either, but we can create ideas, which is kind of magical in a way. And I say magical only because we don't understand the form of science significantly advanced enough that it seems like, yeah, it's just biological science and not technology in this case, but it really is kind of amazing when you think about it. And uh, and so whether we'll ever be able to achieve the same thing technologically is another question. I think that if it is something we can do, it's pretty far off into the future because we don't understand enough about ourselves to be able to leverage it, even if the technology is sophisticate enough to do it. Uh. Although that being said, there are those who argue that if we ever reach a point where we can uh completely simulate a brain on on a meaningful scale at a meaningful time frame, it doesn't matter if we don't understand everything yet, because that thing may very well gain its own consciousness and self awareness. And the fact that we don't understand everything that's going on in our own heads doesn't mean that we won't be able to create it in some other form, which is an interesting point. But I think artificial intelligence is something we can say for another show, well what about it? Do you have anything else you want to add before we sign off? That's about all I got the overwhelming response from Joe as he just stares at me with his dead eyes tells me that it's time to conclude the episode. I was telepathically telling you that, oh got it, got it. See that's the problem is that I just was beaming the knowledge into your brain. See. The problem is outside the matrix, someone was moving a lead shield between us, and then it just bounced right off. Guys, thank you so much for listening. If you have any comments, questions, suggestions for future shows, please get in touch with us our email address. That's the word I was looking for, is FW thinking at Discovery dot com. We'll go to fw thinking dot com. That's where we have all the blogs, the podcasts, we've got the videos, and we have links to our social media so you can get in touch with us there. And until then, we say Sionara. For more on this topic and the future of technology. Is it forward thinking dot com brought to you by Toyota. Let's go places.

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