and greetings from New York City.  So I'm going to try to convince you that understanding how the brain works is one of the most fundamental challenges in science and in our history for three reasons. The brain and particularly the cerebral cortex, which is the great matter of the brain, which forms like a rind around the center of the brain. And it's composed of very complicated neural circuits that are built with neurons such as these ones. We have astronomical numbers of neurons, approximately 80 billion neurons inside our brain. And the reason that the brain is important, there are three reasons. The first one is because all of our cognitive and mental abilities are built, are generated by the brain, by these networks of neurons, these circuits of neurons that have been actually called by one of the pioneers in brain science as the impenetrable jungles where many investigators have lost themselves. So out of the firing of these jungles of neurons through these complicated connections, the human mind emerges. Everything that we are in terms of our mental lives, our perception, our thoughts, our memories, our imagination, our emotions, our decision-making, all of that is the result of the firing of the neurons in the brain. And we know this both because of clinical evidence from patients that have lesions in particular parts of the brain and they lose particular type of mental ability. And we also know this from studies in animals, from lesion studies in animals or stimulation studies in animals. So we don't understand how the brain works today but we will at some point and at that point we will understand ourselves as human beings from the insights scientifically for the first time. So for this reason understanding how the brain works is the ultimate humanism because it will provide an understanding of our minds which is what makes us human. The second reason why it's most important that we understand how the brain works has to do with the patients. I'm pretty sure that every one of you has family members or friends that suffer from mental or neurological diseases. I'm talking about diseases like Alzheimer's, Parkinson's, schizophrenia, mental retardation, stroke, anxiety, depression.  And the reason for that is that we don't understand how the brain works. So it's very difficult to fix the broken machine if you don't understand how the machine works. So for that reason it's imperative that we put resources in understanding the brain because only with that scientific understanding the doctors will be able to understand what we call the pathophysiology which is where the physiology or the function of an organ goes wrong. And finally, the third reason of why it's critically important to understand how the brain works has to do with the economy. And the reason for that is that brains not just of humans but of any animal are computing very complicated problems with very little energy power. So just to give you an example, our brain, it's a typical human brain, consumes about 20 watts of power, okay? So this is the equivalent of low power light bulb. And with that, we process information in real time and generate computations that the fastest supercomputers have not been able to manage. So by understanding how the brain works, by understanding how these neural circuits build these mathematical algorithms that enable these fantastic computations, I'm sure we will revolutionize the computer industry and our current technology. For these three reasons, it's critical to figure out how the brain works. And neuroscientists have been trying to do this now for a hundred years, so you could argue. So what's wrong with neuroscientists? Why haven't we figured this out? And the reason is that we don't have the right methods. And this was the idea behind the US Brain Initiative that we proposed to President Obama and which he launched in 2013. The Brain Initiative is a large-scale scientific project to develop new methods for neuroscience. These new methods are called Neuro-Technology and there are essentially two types of Neuro-Technology, Neuro-Technology to read information from the brain. And in our original proposal, this is actually one of the slides that we used in the White House. That was a goal, our first goal is to develop tools to measure every action potential. The action potential is the firing of neurons, of every neuron in a brain circuit, to be able to actually see what's going on.  So you can imagine what we're trying to do is to read and write information into the brain. And this was the second goal of the Brain Initiative to develop methods. And these methods could be optical, electrical, magnetic, molecular, chemical, computational to be able to not just read, but to change the activity of these neurons because we're not gonna be able to help the patients. If we can beautifully describe the activity of the schizophrenic brain, if we cannot go in there and fix it, we need to be able to change things. So the Brain Initiative also pushed for the development of mathematical methods, computational methods to build these models of how the brain works. So in my mind, we don't have that model yet, but it will be some sort of mathematical model of the brain. The Brain Initiative, it's now in six year, it's related to last 15, with an estimated total budget of $6 billion. And it currently employs approximately 550 labs around the country and also around the world. So this is a massive scientific undertaking and that we're starting to see the fruits of these new tools that have been applied first in small animals like worms and eventually with bigger animals like flies, fish, mouse, until we get to the human brain. The US Brain Initiative has been copied by other countries and similar initiatives were launched after the US won in China, in Japan, in Korea, in Australia, in Canada, in Israel, and also in the European Union.  Here in this picture, you see representatives of all these international brain initiatives that were assigning a document to work together as a team. So this US Brain Initiative is not alone. There are similar programs throughout the world and the private sector has also jumped in. And as of last year, at least in the US, private companies are outspending federal investments in your technology by a factor of six. So when we did the numbers in 2020, the US Brain Initiative invested $500 million and there was approximately $3 billion invested, the same year by private companies. And the private companies, most of them are tech companies from Silicon Valley, are interested in this economic benefit of new technology because of the perception that the next revolution in technology is going to be, instead of, it's going to supersede the iPhone and it will become some sort of device that you will wear in your head, a brain computer interface that will enable you to connect directly with the net. So let's examine how we are as of today. The plan for the Brain Initiative over 15 years was to start with developing tools to map circuits of small animals, small number of neurons and eventually graduate to larger and larger animals. So let me show you an example of the success of these types of projects in an animal which is called Hydra. And these are the animals that have the simplest brains in evolution. Hydra are neitherians, just like jellyfishes, like sea anemone or corals. These are freshwater polyps that are small in the order of a few millimeters tall. And they have a nervous system that is distributed across the entire body of the animal with very few hundred neurons. In this movie on the right, I'm showing you the complete activity of the entire brain of a Hydra. So we've used optical methods and we've developed this neuro technology that enabled us to see when the neurons are firing. So these little points of white are the neurons that are spread out through the body of the animal. And whenever they flash is because they're becoming active. So this is the first animal where someone can actually watch the entire nervous system that works. That's the good news. The bad news that we still don't understand in spite of this data, we're still having figured out exactly how it generates a lot of its behavior. But work similar to this is going on in parallel in many other animal models in many laboratories around the country and the world. Let me show you an example also from our own group of our use of neuro technology in mice. So mice have a cerebral cortex as good mammals just like we do. In fact, we think that by understanding how the cerebral cortex of the mouse works, we will be able to understand how the human cerebral cortex works because our cortex is just the scaled up version of the cortex of the mouse. So in this experiment, we've trained the mouse to watch a video monitor where we're showing the animal these stripes of bars of black and white bars, these moving bars. And we train the animal to leak from the spout whenever he sees these vertical bars of light. You see the vertical bars of light and the animal is now leaking. And we also train the animal not to leak when he sees these horizontal bars of light that are moving and in this case, the animal does not leak. So by leaking or not leaking, the animal is telling us what he saw, whether he saw vertical or horizontal bars of light. Simultaneously, we're using the same neural technology that I showed you with Hydra to measure the activity of its brain circuits in its visual cortex, the part of the brain that's processing visual information. So the experiment is actually the following. We first show the mouse the vertical bars of light so that the animal leaks, this is what we call the ghost stimulus, the visual stimulus, and we measure a group of neurons that is activated by these vertical bars of light. Then using the same method, calcium imaging with a microscope, we map the neurons, in this case in green, that are activated when we show the animal a horizontal bar of light, which is the no ghost stimulus. In this case, the animal does not leak. And now comes the experiment. We turn off the visual stimulation, the video screen, and we turn on a second laser, okay? And using a holographic device, we stimulate precisely the neurons that were activated by the ghost stimulus, by the vertical bars of light that triggered the leak behavior. And when we do this, when we activate these neurons in the brain of the mouse, the mouse leaks. In fact, he leaks exactly the same way as if he were seeing the ghost stimulus, the vertical bars of light. There's no difference in the number of times that he leaks in the speed of the leaking and in the delay between the presentation of the stimulus and the leaking. In other words, the animal is behaving as if he is seeing this image that we're introducing into its brain with neuro technology. We're manipulating his perception to the point that we're essentially turning him into a puppet in which he leaks or doesn't leak according to whether we activate this blue group of neurons or this green group of neurons. This is all in animals, but what's possible in animals today, in mice today will be possible in humans tomorrow. So I'm showing you that from animal research, we can, using optical neuro technology, we can measure, monitor, and manipulate neuronal circuits to the point that we can manipulate the behavior of an animal. Again, this is, we're still at sort of the beginning of the brain initiative in the US and in all the other countries, and that this is likely to be much more potent in the future. So let's turn our attention now to humans and let's discuss how is this neuro technology been developed for human beings and what's the status of it? So first of all, the fact that you can read and decode brain activity, like we're doing with mice and manipulated, has not escaped the press. And these are examples of some prominent publications that are starting to highlight the possibility that neuro technology will enable to decode the minds of people.   So this is the work of my colleague, Jack Allan Berkley and he uses fMRI machine. So these are magnet scanners that are hospital grade and he puts a volunteer in the scanner and he builds maps of the activity of the brain, in this case the cerebral cortex when he shows the volunteer one image. This, what you're seeing in front of you are the two hemispheres of the cerebral cortex that are not crumbled inside our heads and we flatten them out or he has flattened them out. So this is the left hemisphere and this is the right hemisphere, okay. So this way we can see in color the areas of the cortex that light up when the person is looking at a particular image. So imagine that the person is looking at an image of a dog and you scan his brain and this is the map of the brain, the activity of the brain in response to the image of a dog. And now imagine that we show the person a different image, an image of a cat and you get, you scan the brain and you get a different map that looks different from this one that represents the image of the cat. And you do this with a hundred different images and then comes the experiment. You ask the person to think of one of the images that he has seen. The person thinks, let's say, of the dog, you scan his brain and said, hey, you're thinking about the dog, correct. And then comes the more intriguing experiment. They ask the person, think of an image that we have not shown you, something that we have not displayed in our screen. And the person thinks of an image, for instance, the front door of his house, they scan the brain and using this collection of maps of brain scans in response to different stimuli, they can triangulate a little bit like it shows here and they get close to what the person is thinking, what the person is imagining to be more precise. So they cannot yet completely nail it, but they start to get pretty close. So they can say, well, you're thinking of a building or you're thinking of a square or rectangular object. So they cannot tell you that you're thinking of the door of your house, but there's time to be able to decode the images that people have in their heads. Let me show you an example of this brain decoder at works. So on the right, you can see a movie, a video clip that we're showing to the patient, to the volunteer, okay. And on the left, these words are the output of the brain decoder that is taking this brain scanning of the person while the person is watching this movie and deciphering these brain scanner, these brain maps with these maps of existing images. So for example, you can see a beach with buildings and palm trees people walking and the brain decoding is saying, is the coding sky walking buildings, body of water, road, tree, people. So now suddenly there's some young women that appear in the talking to a man and look what the brain decoder is decoding. Women's talking to a man, face, room, et cetera. So I would say that this is pretty impressive. These are using hospital grade fMRI machines. And this work that I'm showing you was already done a few years ago. Now, because of the push to build new technology by the private industry, we now have some portable brain scanners. And let me show you one that was just recently released, which I tried on myself. It's actually, I think it's a pretty good brain scanner. It's portable. You can wear it at home. You can wear it while you walk. It's called Kernel Flow. It's built by this company called Kernel in LA. And these are examples of responses of these brain maps to the presentation of a particular stimulus to the person that's wearing it. So you can imagine that these types of brain scanners that are now starting to be released into the market are going to generate brain maps that could be in principle decoded. They don't have the spatial or temporal resolution of these big hospital magnets, but they will get their new technologies advancing very quickly. So we have to be prepared for the possibility of systematic decoding of brain activity using brain scanners such as this. I told you about the using of brain scanners to decode images. Let me now talk to you about the invasive new technology. So this is neuro technology that's implanted in the brain. And here we have a patient that's paralyzed, the tetraplegic, and she has an electrode inserted into her brain, into her frontal cortex, and this electrode is connected to a computer that's operating this robotic arm. This is a brain computer interface. And by thinking during a period of training and an algorithm that uses artificial intelligence, the person can train the robotic arm to move by her will. And in this case, this is a successful trial in which the patient is thinking and by her thoughts moving the robotic arm to the point that she's giving herself a drink by her own volition for the first time in 20 years. This is an impressive use of neuro technology to help paralyze patients. This is incidentally all technology pre-brain initiative. Look how happy she is now that she's been able to drink by herself. And again, this was only with one electrode. I love when she smiles here at the end. So now imagine what's going on with the brain initiative. This is now a chip that's been built under a DARPA program, which instead of one electrode has one million electrodes. This is an implantable flexible chip that is wireless. So the idea is that you can insert it under the skull and position it on top of the cortex. And with this chip, you can do recording of brain activity and stimulation of brain activity wirelessly from the outside. So this chip has been developed by my colleague Ken Sheper at Columbia. And the idea of this DARPA program is to develop this chip for as a prosthesis for the blind to put this chip on the visual cortex of people that have peripheral blindness. So you could literally make them see by connecting this chip to a camera, video camera that would pipe in that information wirelessly into the brain of a person. But this chip could also be put in a different part of the brain and instead of connecting the person to a camera, you could in principle connect the person to the net and use these brain computer interfaces to both decode or activate brain circuits, brain activity. So this raises a lot of ethical and societal issues. Again, this all has to do with the fact that the brain is not just another organ. It's not like the heart or the liver. It happens to be the organ that generates the human mind. And that's what makes us human. So any technology that interfaces directly with the brain in terms of recording or stimulated brain activity opens a possibility at decoding or changing or activating mental processes. So a group of us, we call ourselves the Morningside Group got together in 2017 here at Columbia in this building and this is the building where I'm talking to you from in fact, from this window here. And we got together in a conference room that we have here and this is a group of 25 that represented the brain initiatives from all over the world. Also from some representatives from Silicon Valley and experts in neuro technology like myself, experts in neurosurgery, clinicians, neurologists, experts in bioethics in the law. And we came to the conclusion that neuro technology needs to be regulated before it's developed and used by the population. And we propose the idea that this is a human rights issue. Incidentally, we met, this building is right across from this old brick building, which is in the National Registry of Historic Places because in the basement of this building, Pupin Hall, this is the physics department. In its basement, they built the first atomic reactor in the world. And in the 1940s, the same group of physicists who built the first atomic reactor launched the Manhattan Project, which built the first atomic bomb. In fact, they call it Manhattan Project because it started here in Manhattan before they took it out to Los Alamos in New Mexico, not because they were worried about radiation safety, but because they were worried about securing Manhattan from German spies. So this is an example of a group of scientists that have developed a technology that could be existential importance for humanity. And the same scientists developed this technology with the first ones interested in pushing, advocating for the regulation of atomic energy. And as a consequence of that, the United Nations created the Atomic Energy Commission in the 1950s, which has been regulating the use and deployment of atomic energy and nuclear weapons since that time. Fingers crossed without any mistakes yet. So inspired by this, we propose a set of ethical priorities and ethical issues that we think belong to the human rights arena because the human rights define better than any document in the world, what it means to be human. What are the properties and the characteristics of a human being? So we propose new human rights that we call them neuro rights as brain rights that will help deal with potential misuses of neuro technology. Our position is that neuro technology, it's not only good, it's absolutely urgent and necessary for the reasons that I gave you earlier, particularly from the, it's urgent from the point of view of the patients who are looking at us every day on the eye and said, can you help me? But at the same time, we have to provide guardrails, ethical and societal guidelines so that these technologies are applied for the good of humanity. So we're proposing these five new human rights that should be added to the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, which you can see here in this wall, this is the entry to the Museum of Historical Memory in Santiago, Chile, which is one of the best museums in the world devoted to human rights. And in the wall, they've written the 30 some articles of the Universal Declaration. So we want to add five new articles to this wall of Chile. The first one is the right to our mental privacy so that the contents of our brain activity are not decoded without our consent. And this is a much more worrisome concern that the usual privacy concerns that you're dealing with that we're dealing with in terms of privacy of our electronic communications and our data, because one thing is for people to decode or read your email and I think it's for people to decode and read your thoughts. This is even more important because most of brain activity is not even conscious, but you can decode everything that's in there, whether it's conscious or not. So it's technically possible, it will be possible to decode certain aspects of the personality of a person that the person is not aware of. We think this is a basic human right and we need to define very clearly the boundaries of protection for our brain data. The second one has to do with the new technologies to change brain activity and this is to protect our identity, our self. Just like I've shown you with mice, you can essentially turn animals into puppets by activating or inactivating particular brain areas. And we think that we should be entitled as a basic human right to our own self. In fact, that should be the first human right because if you don't have the right to the self, what are the rest of the rights good for? Related to this is the right to our own agency. So our own free will, the ability to make decisions. Again, as I illustrated in the mouse example, when we make a decision, it should be based on our own brain activity without any interference from the outside. And this is particularly important for neuro technology because people have always been trying to influence other people's decisions as long as the world has been around. But with new technologies, the first time that this influence is so insidious because once it's inside the brain, it becomes part of you. As I told you, these mice behave exactly the same. If we're putting these images, these hallucinations inside their heads as if they're seeing these patterns with their own eyes. So we think the free will or agency should be protected as a basic human right. Finally, there's two human rights that we think are needed. And this relates to the societal use of neuro technology. I've shown you some examples of brain computer interfaces and with these BCIs, as we call them, you can connect the person to the net. And sooner or later, this is going to lead to mental and cognitive augmentation. In fact, some neuro technology companies like Neuralink started by Elon Musk, their declared mission is to mentally augment humans with neuro technology. And the chip that I showed you, the wireless chip, you can imagine using it, putting it in the person and connecting that to an infrared camera on x-ray camera so that this person will literally have infrared or x-ray vision. This is an example of sensory augmentation, but you can imagine access to data sets, all kinds of essentially everything that we do as humans could be augmented by the use of technology. So this creates a possibility of a fracture in our society with two types of human beings, some that are hybrid that have been augmented and others that have not. Because of that, we think that the access to augmenting technology, neuro technology that's used for mental or cognitive augmentation should be based on the universal principle of justice and should be guaranteed, it's a basic human right, fair access to cognitive augmentation to prevent precisely the situation, this breaking in our humanity with two types of humans. And the final has to do with the ethical issue of protecting the user of neuro technology from bias and discrimination of the algorithms that are used in neuro tech. So I described how neuro tech are devices, but they have of course a software and AI algorithms associated with it. And again, this protection from bias is particularly insidious because as I showed you for the mouse, the neuro tech will implant this information directly inside the brain. So people will essentially conclude that this is their own beliefs. This is not something that comes from the outside.  But if it comes straight into your brain, you will identify that as your own, as yourself, as your beliefs. So this is our agenda and we've been essentially pushing for advocating for neuro rights with different countries, with different internationalizations and also with the private industry. And we have some success in the case of Chile, the Senate of the Republic of Chile has adopted this agenda and they approved unanimously a constitutional amendment that makes mental integrity a basic human right. And it defines it as non-manipulable. In addition, the Senate of Chile, led by Senator Girardi, which is here, and also with the support of President Piñera, of President of the country, have endorsed a neuro rights bill, a bill of law which specifies the conditions in which neuro technology should be used and developed in Chile. And the most important aspect of this bill, which has a lot of detail, is that it defines all neuro technology as medical devices. In other words, it makes neuro technology whether it's invasive or not, whether it's a chip that is implanted into your brain or a wearable that you can wear like I'm wearing these headsets today. It makes it all the purview of the Chilean equivalent of the FDA. The Institute of Public Health, which registers all medical devices and approves and regulates the conditions for their use. So this is a medical model, and this is a model that we think could be applied to many countries, including maybe the US. And this would of course, would require a broader definition of the purview of regulatory bodies such as an FDA that would start to include into their devices also consumer electronics that have neuro technology capabilities like these non-invasive wearables like these portable brain scanners or this cerebral iPhone that's in the future. So let me just finish. We've created an initiative at Columbia, the NeuroRights Initiative, which has a network, a grassroots network of activists throughout the world, and we just turn ourselves into a foundation. So now, as of this month, we are the NeuroRights Foundation. And our foundation is nonprofit foundation and its goals is to advocate for neuro rights also to disseminate information and perform outreach so that we can provide this information about this revolution that's going on in neuro technology to the public and also to seek partnership with interested organizations that may feel also that it is time for the regulation or provision of guidelines for the development of neuro technology and its use in society. I wanted to finish some of you maybe a little worried about the pearls of the unregulated use of neuro technology but I just wanted to finish on a positive note. I think we're at the brink of a new renaissance. Thanks to neuro technology. So why do I say that? In the renaissance after the dark middle ages, humanity understood that the body is not sacred, that humans are not the center of the universe and this led to the birth of modern science and to the idea of an interdisciplinary renaissance man that trigger revolution in arts and essentially generated a humanism as we understand it today, the types of beliefs and thoughts about the role of humans in the world. With neuro technology, we will access and understand the organ that makes us human. So this is going to be understanding ourselves from the inside. This will lead to a revolution in brain diseases as I discussed understanding our own mind and it could actually lead to very critical insights into the roots of human conflict, for example. Why do humans engage in war? So at the end of the day, there are particular brain areas in particular, leaders in particular segments of the population that are activated in particular ways that lead to conflict. Understanding how this is happening in the human brain would surely help strategies to prevent conflict and essentially, and prevent war, which I view as an example of our needs in terms of more humanistic approaches to our society. Knowing about the brain will generate also revolution in the law. I'm sure that many of the people that we have in prisons today are not criminals but patients because they have particular brain circuits that are misfiring or that they're abnormal. And it would also lead to a revolution in education since if we understand how the brain learns, we'll be able to build educational activities that actually profit from these brain mechanisms. It would also inspire a new type of technology, neuro-inspired technology that I think will have revolutionary effects in the economy and just ending with the idea that we will get to understand ourselves better and decide what it means to be human. And this is a decision that we have to take together. And I think or we think the group that I represent thinks that this would be the purview of the universal declaration of human rights. No, and we should decide in a democratic fashion what it means to be human and inscribe it in the universal declaration of human rights and respect it and make people respect it. And with that, I finished and we have time for some questions. Thank you.


I'm just thinking when I was a parent so many years ago coming without knowing language, the English language or anything, what would I give to have such a program and be involved in it? Where it was more the cultural shock and so now we have so many ELL kids that not to say that they need to learn academics, but they need to learn what our culture is and what we expect in school because in some countries when you give a child to a teacher, he or she is your job. Where here they learn it's not really a parent involvement is important. Definitely does put all families on the same page where it is like this is what is expected in kindergarten and with ELL families it's huge for them to see what are the expectations in kindergarten and education is very important but they don't know how to help their kids. They're struggling, they came from different cultures struggle with language and then to know what is expected in our schools it's a huge thing. The parent gets the same knowledge what we need to do for the kids before going to kindergarten and what are the things we need to be prepared for the kids. When I first brought my child here, I mean this is my first son that is going to school so I had no idea of what I should expect. So you know being through the readiness for kindergarten it taught me a lot of things you know how I should you know prepare them for school the things that they need to know before they get to kindergarten and so also kind of guided me in the kind of things I need to teach them back at home before they get to school. So I think it is important my knowledge about school, about school for the year for my child. Like this program helps a lot because at first they be scared of saying we need to go to school, they start crying but as soon as he spent the first second weeks now as soon as Monday came they said this is my time to go to school today is the Monday, time to go to school is happy. This class can improve the skills to go to the kindergarten. It was amazing to see the changes from the first two sessions to the third. We have this gearing up for kindergarten which is great and it got him ready for the kindergarten round up and after that the light bulb has just been turned on and he is singing his ABCs and counting without being prompted and he is so ready now and I think this program has helped a lot just to get us there. The biggest change is that now that she's been in the classroom she's been in the environment they've practiced lining up quietly in the halls and washing hands and kind of gone through that and now she's very, very comfortable with the idea and actually is asking when do I get to start kindergarten do we have kindergarten class again tonight and runs in here and is excited. As much as it is academically, social emotionally and getting them ready with the routines like I noticed at the beginning the first session they would come a little shy holding their parents hand and then by the third session they were confident coming in, taking their name tags, signing their name. Most of the time my kid won't interact with elders but you know coming in for the kindergarten has made him learn how to interact with other children. He stays at home with me so he's never been in the daycare or preschool environment so this is the really first time for him to be with the kids and he's excited every week he tells about the school we call it school already and he's very excited every week. He knows that he's getting prepared for kindergarten he knows that kindergarten is exciting like it's something that him and all of the kids are doing together right now to get him ready for next year so I think it's just kind of fun for him that we'll all go pick him up and he'll say mom Paxton is here he's in gearing up for kindergarten too and I think he's developing lots of friendships and they're going through this process together and they're getting ready for kindergarten together and I think that's pretty exciting for him.