Super Interesting Brain "Stuff"

Super interesting podcast.  Two fascinating interviews.

"Brain Dust"

The Big Picture Science (Science radio show & podcast of the SETI Institute), Dec 5/2016

• Know your brain?  Think again.  Driven by a hidden agenda, powered by an indecipherable web of neurons, and influenced by other brains, your grey matter is a black box. 
  
• To "know thyself" may be a challenge, and free will nonexistent, but maybe more technology can shed light on the goings on in your noggin, and the rest of your body.
  
• Find out how tiny implanted sensors called “brain dust” may reveal what really going on.
  
• Plus, the day when your brain is uploaded into a computer as ones and zeros.  Will you still be you?

    Guests:

    David Eagleman – Neuroscientist, Stanford University, author of "The Brain: the Story of You".

    Michel Maharbiz – Electrical engineer, University of California, Berkeley.

http://bigpicturescience.org/episodes/brain-dust

Some pointers per David Eagleman:

• The brain is a cantaloupe sized hunk of alien computational material.
  
• The best imaging technology is fMRI but it's a crude technology, e.g. gives a time delayed view of the activity in the brain, has "okay" spatial resolution but doesn't image at the level needed.
  
• There's no way to see what a neuron is doing.
  
• The brain is made up of 100 billion neurons and every one of those neurons is as complicated as the city of San Francisco, constantly trafficking millions of proteins around.
  
• Each neuron is also connected to 10,000 other neurons, making for a thousand trillion connections constantly taking place in the brain.
  
• The brain is constantly rewiring and reconfiguring itself depending on what we're doing.
  
• There's as much variation in each person's brain as there is in our faces.
  
• Listening to one neuron is akin to an alien lowering a probe to eavesdrop on a single person's conversation and then making conclusions about all of society.
  
• Science is still at the foot of the mountain trying to figure out completely alien/foreign computations happening in the brain.
  

Great stuff!  Try to catch the interview with Robert Sapolsky, Standford Neuroscientist, one the leading Neuroscientists and Primatologists on the planet.  Among other things, he believes that none of us really has free will.  You may think you logged onto Benzo Buddies today because you made an independent decision to do so.  Maybe not! 

http://bigpicturescience.org/episodes/perpetual-emotion-machine

Sapolsky starts 18 minutes into the podcast.