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A few years ago, around the time of Twitter's I Po, I noticed what I thought was an odd coincidence. It's chief engineer had studied birds. Specifically, he studied the auditory cortex of zebra finches. I thought that was pretty funny for an engineer, especially because Twitter's mascot is that little Bluebird. I forgot about it until a couple of years ago, when I noticed another birdbrain scholar in the top echelons of tech. This'll Person had been hired by Elon Musk, the entrepreneur behind Tesla and Space six, to join his new company, Neural Link. Neural Link is a very secretive, futuristic company, which is trying to supercharge the human brain. That's all sounds

pretty obscure. You think studying bird brains wouldn't be too relevant to studying human brains or figuring out social

media right? That's why I remembered it. It just felt so random. But now here were two. So one day when I was a little bored, I just tried typing Sieber Finch in the names of several big tech companies into Google.

And what did you find?

I found quite a few employees who knew a lot about zebra finches. That was that Companies like Intel and Apple and Google, too. I was surprised.

Okay, hang on, Sarah. I'm Googling this the zebra finches, the most common a stroll did Finch, of Central Australia and rages over most of the continent, avoiding only the cool, moist south and tropical far north zebra finches, air loud and boisterous singers. So what's the connection here? Well, that's where I jumped into the reporting process or goes to figure out why tech companies are hiring birdbrain experts in this little quest has taken us to college campuses around the country. We visited several university labs. Some smell better than others. We heard a lot of birdsong. This is our guy, and so they're very light but super active. How big would you say that thing is like? So there are about 15 grams of total weight. They're mostly feathers.

That's Tim Machi, a neuroscientist and assistant professor at Boston University, showing us a zebra finch in his bird lab and telling us about his research on bird brains. He's running some pretty extraordinary experiments.

Oh, no, but the the implant s So this is actually just the lens, okay? And so if you look at the top, so you see that little black thing that's taking up, so that's a lens. If you look down it, you couldn't see the brain that there's not probably not enough like getting down there, that you could actually see it. And it turns out with Tim's learning about the brains of these tiny birds is a great interest to the world's largest tech companies. I'm bradstone

and Sarah MK bread,

and I'm Ashlee Vance, and you're listening to decrypt it. So guys tell me a little bit more about Tim ACI and his I'm sure, wonderfully smelling lab out in Boston. Yeah, well, Tim's Lab was one of the key stops on our trip. Tim took over a Boston University lab from Tim Gardner, the guy who left to work for Elon Musk interlink.

Tim Machi is a 40 year old guy with black frame glasses who throws in plenty of references. Portlandia and other TV shows. When he checked chats on his office wall, he's got a print of voltage traces called Five Seconds of Donkey Kong.

Now we're talking about something I'm familiar with. So what? What's the connection here? It turns out that that old eighties video game became the subject of a famous neuroscience research paper. There's one other thing you should know about Tim. He has a giant zebra Finch tattoo on his right forearm. Brad, how familiar are you with zebrafish? Well, Ashley, other than my very brief Wikipedia search just now other than small birds that sing a lot, I would say, not very familiar. They are very cute little birds, indeed. There, about four inches long,

the males have orange cheeks and black and white striped feathers across their chests. Hence the name. They're super easy to breed, and they chirp a lot. Here's Tim's interpretation. So how did Tim get into studying bird brains?

He took a circuitous route into neuroscience. One thing I found interesting is he started as an engineer, working at a company that helped factories to automate his job was teaching robots how to sort stuff everything from car parts to gives most for circuit boards.

It was just astounding to me how difficult it was to get things to do this, and these were tasks that, you know Children do it really put in my mind the idea that, uh, you know, a lot of the things that Children can do almost effortlessly and without almost any training, are incredibly impossible to get artificial systems or taken enormous amount of thought. Okay, so

I think I understand.

Tim was curious about why a certain task is so easy for a child, but so difficult for a robot. Yeah, that's exactly it. So, after a detour to Tim ended up studying neuroscience at Harvard, and that's where he discovered zebra finches. Now he's teaching at BU in doing his own research. One thing Tim focuses on is how zebra finches learnt to sing.

Tim described his study of zebra finches is more of a means to an end.

I don't really think of myself or care too much about, you know, songbird neuroscience. Specifically, I take it as a za way to investigate general principles and mechanisms in neuroscience and how brains function generally. So Tim is saying that he studies these teeny tiny zebra finch brains because he thinks it will give us insight into the way human brains function. That's right. Researchers study all different kinds of animals for all different kinds of purposes, but in this case, they're trying to learn more about the human brain. Seeing how birds learn to sing, for example, can provide insights into how we learn things. So I think that, you know, the songbird is one of those systems that we probably understand the best in terms of the different brain regions that are involved in terms of the roles of those different brain regions. And so I think that we can ask very,

very precise questions in the songbird about the interaction between brain activity and behavior. Sarah, you started out by saying that studying the brains of zebra finches, or somehow interesting for tech companies. So if Tim studies the birds because their connections between bird brains and human brains are there also connections between bird brains and computers?

Absolutely. But to understand it, I need to explain a little bit more about Tim's research. When we met him in Boston before we went into the room with the real life zebra finches, he played us one of his best songbird clips.

And so that's what the song sounds like. Okay, so that's one. Yeah. So that's what that's what this is this particular zebra finch sings All of them have slightly different

songs that sound like a cartoon.

Yeah. Yeah, it's a little like Woody Woodpecker, right? But that is actually, uh, that is actually what it sounds like. Yeah, well, listen to these all day long,

Tim told us while male and female zebra finches can chirp on Lee male zebra finches sing Even if their song is so short. It doesn't sound like much of a song. Tow us. Tim studies the brains of the baby birds as they learn. Here's a baby zebra finch trying to imitate his dad's song. He makes an early effort and then a better one a month later.

So this is the father? Well, ok, then we could do the middle one. Where is not quite got it. Right. Okay. And I'm Mrs Wandering mimicked here. E So, actually, I'm kind of praying that in these experiments, he's not hurting these beautiful, teeny tiny birds. Every basically what he does is they take these birds that have been injected with a benign virus. The virus makes their brains produce a type of protein that causes individual neurons to light up. When they fire, they glow green and red to see them in action.

Tim in the grad students in his lab performed very delicate surgery on the zebra finches to implant tiny, tiny microscopes in their brain. Tim showed us one bird who had gone through This procedure fails prevention. So I believe his these gods one of these windows that I was telling you about. So this guy has already been through the procedure in which we inject the virus is into the brain, and then we put a a window or a lens on top so that we can actually image through it, and it's gonna get and make. This is that he will eventually get a microscope attached. Sara, that sounds completely crazy. Give it. Give us a better sense for what this looks like.

So there are all these little birds happing around with a tiny bit of their skull missing, and instead they have a maker scope there and a little hole where you can look in and see what's going on in their brain.

And the microscope sits there for days, weeks, months at a time, looking at their neurons, fire in real time, and the birds are in their little cages. And then when you go into their lab, it's actually it's pretty cool. There's all these wires going off these cages straight into like a data center, where they store all of this information. And so, basically, you just get just get to watch this bird's brain, behave in real time and then go back and look through all the information. So, Sarah, should we feel sorry for these birds?

I didn't. They seemed really happy. They were hopping around. They were chirping. They were acting normal. A CE faras they could tell based on the ones they saw without microscopes in their head. They're really didn't seem to be too much

difference. Okay, so how is all this useful for the neuroscientists?

They look deep inside each bird's brain, and they look to see which neurons are firing and for how long When, say the bird is learning to sing, and they could make hypotheses on the relationship between different neurons. So that's actually a technique use pretty widely in science now on all kinds of animals. While we were visiting Tim in Boston, we also stopped by a mouse lab that does something similar and official ab

in each of the labs, the neuroscientists air studying other things as well, like how animals move what happens in their brains when they make decisions. For example, at the Rolling Institute in Cambridge, we saw a couple of video games that mice play using tiny joysticks size for a mouse. Pa. Wow. So how did they know the mice get the quarters in the video game machine? They're highly trained, I see. And and the video games tells us what it tells us, how they're making decisions. Exactly. So the mice are a lot like the birds they have. Bits of their skull have been removed, and we're watching their brains in real time again.

And so you watch him play these video games and you see how they adapt. Sometimes they get different rules and you see how the the mouse learns the rules of the game, and they move this joy stick around in one of them to find the edges of a box. And if the mouse is successful, it gets a little bit of sugar, water. And and all this time the scientists are sitting there, seeing which parts of the brain light up on dhe. How the mouse reacts to these different situations. So what is it about this research that tech companies find so interesting?

One reason is that the scientists are working with tons and tons of data, and that's something that every tech company needs to dio. And also it's to do with artificial intelligence, the field that has computer systems mastering tasks that require human traits like visual perception or decision making. Maybe how to identify it. Cat. That sounds simple, but it's actually way more nuanced than a traditional computer task and very hard for a computer to master.

So there's this one school of thought that a I moving forward should loosely be modeled after the human brain. They eye systems we have today are still basically number crunching systems. They're doing tons of statistical calculations, and if we want to get to this future that Sarah's talking about, where you actually have decision making and much more sophisticated thought, the the ideas that we could borrow from the human brain. And maybe I have something that's way more flexible than what a computer could do. And so, presumably, since we can't cut open human skulls and make people play video games against their will, the Zebra Finch brands Air

First Step. Yeah, exactly. Human brains are a little too big and complicated to study in the kind of detail we can get from animals. Right now, they're smaller, easier to study and obviously, the ethics of studying a living human brain very tricky.

So I'm so curious about why zebra finches have become the bird to study and what exactly tech companies air doing with all this? Let's get to that After the break. Investing can be confusing, especially with ticker symbols and charts flying back and forth like it's the runway at L. A X, where the urine experienced investor or new to the game. The motley fool wants to help you find great stocks. They give you straight talk without the fancy jargon and noise. Their flagship service, stock advisor, provides two brand new stock recommendations every month, with daily analysis and coverage sent directly to your inbox. Go to full dot com slash five stocks, toe learn, Maur and claim an exclusive discount on Lee. For listeners that's full dot com slash the number five stocks. Okay,

Sarah nationally. So before the break, you explain how neuroscience is starting to inform the way tech companies design A I systems. So I guess this means it's a very good time to be a neuroscientist. Yes, sir, these people that used to be in academia or working at universities for their whole career are now finding tons of job opportunities In Silicon Valley. Companies like Google and Apple and Amazon are all snatching them up, including a lot of these zebrafish experts that we've been talking about it tell the company that probably makes the chips in your laptop won't say exactly how many people it has working in a I, but it's a lot, and many of them have this expertise.

Intel helps its customers soup up machines to get them to behave smarter and more human like ways. That could mean maybe working with a self driving car maker and that car maker needs its vehicles to make lightning fast decisions on the road, and they have to be good decisions. Promising way to do that is to build computer systems that imitate how the human brain works in a human brain. The systems air called synapses and pathways in a machine they're called neural networks. We talked to a mere cost. Russia, he the chief technology officer for Intel's aye aye products division,

using only architectures have been wildly successful sense around 2011. While I know why. Vision, navigation, reinforcement, learning things that are related to neuroscience because there's also task humans do pretty well.

Amir's the computational neuroscientist by training. He got his PhD at UC Berkeley, and he ended up hiring another Berkeley PhD grad, Tyler Lee Toe work at Intel on helping virtual assistance Understand human speech.

Tyler spends a lot of time thinking about how speech works in different environments like cars, knowing context, simple things like if the speakers, the driver or the passenger makes it a lot easier to understand what they're saying. For example, the drivers more likely to ask about directions some of the work on context he does actually reminds him a lot of his PhD work. Studying you guessed it Zebra finches. Bird has to recognize what type of call is being being emitted by by by the one it's hearing on then, then it can go and recognize who that bird is. Is that Is that a family member of mate? You know, Is it another zero Klinger? A different type of bird. Should I be concerned? The vocal identification is one thing where it's gets contact specific and recognizing the context would let you better understand the vocal

signature. Mostly, Tyler says, his studies help him with big picture stuff. Neuroscience teaches you

how to think about complex problems of signal processing, where I take some something from the world that comes

in. It's an image. It's it's sound and it's it's noisy and it's high, very, very high dimensional. And I have to like break it down into

into features that I can then use Thio like do something with solve a task with what the brain does all the time, and that's sort of the abstract

level. Tyler's boss, Amir, says he's no zebra finch show veniste. He's got people on his team have studied flies, rats, locus, even worms.

These very simple organisms exhibit really complex behaviors that are still a challenge for us, too, to simulate in silicon, using our neural networks in machine learning. So even a simple, warm inform. It's a really complicated robotic machine that's really a miraculous. So wait look for inspiration from simple to humans. So I guess Intel on all these other companies must be developing products which incorporate a I developed with the help of the Zebra Finch experts, besides commands to self driving cars, is there any area where knowing a lot about sound itself is helpful? And I guess when when do all these years of studying zebra finches finally pay off? You could think about features on your phone or computer that let you unlock the device with your voice or stuff, like noise reduction and phone calls and on video calls. I can't wait till I can sing a little Zebra Finch song and my phone unlocks. But anything beyond gadgets? Yeah,

absolutely. Animal neuroscience connects to a lot of fields, especially health somewhere. It could be relevant for Parkinson's research because animals help researchers figure out how to stop tremors. They also help in areas like howto handle prosthetic limbs outside of medicine. The work might grow even more futuristic thing. This is where we get into dystopian scenarios. I suspect. What

else, exactly? Like neural link. I mentioned that company earlier because Ellen must have hired a Zebra Finch scholar, and it's one of the companies that we believe it's working on very futuristic technology. Ellen must keeps dropping hints on Twitter that the company's about to announce a big breakthrough. Nobody knows exactly what, but it's going to have something to do with brain machine

interfaces. So I'm trying hard not to think about some Star Trek episodes on this topic, which all ended quite badly. But help me understand Ashley. What a brain machine interfaces about it at its most basic level is his idea that you have a two way interplay between humans and computers, where you could actually funnel information back and forth. We already have examples of stuff like this with implants that help people here or stop Parkinson's tremors. In this case, I think people are looking at much more futuristic applications where you might even have, like a mesh that's attached to your brain and you could full on download your brain to a machine or learn Japanese and five seconds.

There's another company called Colonel that's in the same field. And, like neural Link, it's also very mysterious. And in some ways that's kind of the best part. When we don't know exactly what they're doing, we can imagine all kinds of crazy stuff

going back toe Elon Musk. He's been talking about where nearly could go, maybe allowing people to have this kind of super human cognition where you could you could think on par with the machine or certainly much better than we do today. That means basically, stuff like you could download an entire foreign language directly into your brain or maybe instantly grab an encyclopedia. People like Tim ACI have been thinking about exactly these scenarios for years and can really nerd out on the possibilities. Trick trivia would be over. Yeah, jeopardy would not be a thing anymore. Alex Trebek would be out of a job. He has some more serious thoughts on the topic, too. I find the idea that we could, you know, pretend one day in the maybe distant future in a really right information directly into the brain that we could actually have. Ah, high bandwith way to get really scifi about it.

Kind of Ah, Mei Trixie. Like, I think that would be amazing. We're nowhere near knowing anything about how to get there. We can barely even scratch the surface of what that would be like. But, you know, in terms of fantasy, what would I like to do one day? I would love to be able to contribute even a small way to figuring out how we can have this sort of bidirectional interface with the brain. Oh, my God. So, yeah, this is while the evocation of the Matrix does not make me feel more comfortable about this, what if the sceptics say about

about it all? Well, there are plenty of skeptics out there. I checked in with one scholar at the University of Chicago, Denmark, Goalie Ash. The idea that we're going to reverse engineer the not reverse engineer forward, engineer the human brain so we can download tons of material into it very rapidly. And I don't know what pick up a language overnight or something. I it's It's the way people make progress is to dream. And so I'm a scientist. I'm 100% for that. But that's really sounds more fantastical than realistic. Okay, it ignores it ignores, uh, the remarkable ways we learn. And it ignores our evolutionary history. So I would I would, uh it'll be interesting to see what progress they make for sure. So,

guys, uh, the possibility of super human cognition sounds appealing. You know, if it were up to you to and and somebody was offering toe to put a chip or an apparatus and in the year brains like they're doing to the to the poor little zebra Finch, would you do it? You know, it's substance. We're already doing this stuff today if you have an implant to help you here or things to stop Parkinson's tremors. Yeah, If I had one of those conditions, I would absolutely get one of these implants in supercharged myself. When you start going into this next wave of stuff, it gets far more philosophical and complicated because you're talking about changing humans from what they are some sort of weird next step of evolution where we're kind of half man, half machine, you know, in some ways.

There's people I talked to, like the guy's a colonel who argue that this is the only way humans will be able to keep up with machines. And we always hear about losing jobs, start official intelligence and seeing what humans can do going away. And so, you know, if you're half in half, you can you could keep up, but maybe keep some of your humanness as well. Sarah, What about cyborgs? Sarah McBride will be every way ever see

that? I already hate my cell phone, so I doubt it. But, um,

what about this idea of keeping up with robots? And,

yeah, there are people who think that way I could help us solve problems like climate change. I think that's too optimistic.

The funny part about doing a story for me was that that in the A I camp you tend to have. I feel like people who think the technology is really far along. If you're talking about specifically computer scientists in the Silicon Valley kind of crew, they're very impressed what they've come up with over the last few years. When we went to talk to all these brain researchers, the ones who were down in the box, down at the neurons. They seemed on the whole to me, much more skeptical about when we would see huge breakthroughs. They seem to think that a lot of this stuff was years and years away. And I felt like they had this sense of how complicated the brain really isn't that unlocking its secrets is gonna take along. But given the fact that they're taking the first steps to what will ultimately be very transformative and challenging controversial technology Sarah, did you get the sense that they were wrestling with the ethical complications

of their work? You know, a lot of them actually turned out to have studied philosophy at some point and their careers, which I thought was pretty interesting. And, yeah, they talk about the decisions that a car maker might have to make. Is it more important to preserve the life of a passenger or a pedestrian stuff like that? So, yeah, they're thinking about these big problems. That doesn't mean they know how to answer them, though any more than we would. But they say that it means the's systems will be very human one day.

Do they understand that they have now found themselves right at the center of this next wave in computing immediately due to a degree, that definitely excited Ivory just in very crass terms. A lot of these people get much better job offers than they would have in the past. You know, there used to be far less neuroscience graduates. It wasn't that appealing of a field. We didn't know much about the brain. All these promised breakthroughs weren't happening at all in. Now you can go to a university, do this amazing work. Or if you kind of get tired of that, or you wantto poke around somewhere else, you can go work for one of these tech companies and get paid. I don't know, like, 10 times what you make at one of these labs. Well,

to bring this all the way back to the beginning. Sarah, is it too early when I talked to Alexa or Siri or Google Voice to think the little zebra Finch. Can we Can we see any of the zebra finch in that research in today's? Aye. Aye.

We see some of it already and things like voice recognition and making better audio quality. But I think some of the biggest stuff is, uh, yet to come, and we can always check in with Hamachi.

That's it for this week's episode of Decrypted. Thanks

for listening. We always like to know what you think of the show. You can write to us at decrypted at Bloomberg dot net or I'm on Twitter at McBride

SG my map bradstone and I'm at Valley Hack. And please help us spread the word about our show by leaving us a rating for review in your favorite podcast.

This episode was produced by Pia Get Curry and Lindsay crowd. Oh, our story editor was AKI Ito. Thank you. Also to end Vander May and Emily Buse. Oh, Francesca Levi is head of Bloomberg Podcasts. We'll see you next week.