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Nov. 8, 2021 - The Unexplained - Howard Hughes

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Edition 588 - Professor Rafael Yuste

This time Neuroscientist Professor Rafael Yuste on the prospects for , and worries about, cutting-edge brain technology...

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	Across the UK, across continental North America and around the world on the internet by webcast and by podcast, my name is Howard Hughes and this is The Unexplained.
	Hope that everything is going well for you.
	It is now very nearly November.
	It might be November by the time you hear this.
	And the year is sailing towards its inevitable conclusion.
	And let's hope that there are more things that we can do and put into 2022 than we did and put into 2021.
	That's a broad generalization.
	Your year might have been packed with things.
	Mine certainly hasn't been, but that's a whole other story.
	As they say, for a whole other time.
	My thanks to Adam, my webmaster, for his continuing work on this show.
	Thanks, Adam, for getting it out to you and also for making sure that the website, theunexplained.tv, ticks over in a hunky-dory kind of fashion.
	Now, the guest on this edition of The Unexplained is a scientist, somebody who deals in what may be the ultimate mystery, the human brain.
	We're not entirely sure how it works.
	We have great understandings these days of the cosmos.
	We can analyze signals that appear from space and maybe find out their origins.
	And we know that signals are transmitted within the brain, billions of them.
	But we don't totally understand the full mechanism of it.
	It is a miracle.
	You know, a ball of meat, if you'll pardon the expression, grey matter in your head, can apparently do and be so much.
	But these days there are challenges to it and also prospects for it.
	There is the move towards neurotechnology that you will have been reading more about lately.
	That can be an enormous boon.
	It can help people who maybe have conditions and problems, might be able to make you an even more able person than you are now in many ways.
	But there are threats with that.
	There are difficulties with that.
	And very few people at the moment are talking about them.
	One of the people who is an expert in this field is Raphael Just, professor of biological sciences and neurosciences, co-director of the Cavley Institute of Brain Science and director of the Neurotechnology Center at Columbia University.
	He is one of the people behind a new campaign in this area.
	So we're going to talk a bit about his work and also about the challenges that he believes lie ahead in that mysterious zone that lies just behind your eyes and just between your ears, the human brain.
	Thank you very much for all of your emails.
	By the way, please keep those emails coming.
	Go to the website, theunexplained.tv, follow the links, send your emails from there.
	And if you want to check out my Facebook page, it is the official, the one with the logo, the official Facebook page of The Unexplained with Howard Hughes.
	Let's get to the United States now.
	Professor Raphael Just is there.
	And Professor Raphael Just, thank you very much for coming on the show.
	I'm delighted to be here with you.
	Greetings from New York City.
	How is New York at the moment, Raphael?
	We're hearing all sorts of things.
	I think you've got a mayoral contest coming up, haven't you?
	Well, among other things, but right now, actually, this is a come before the storm because we're going to be hit with the first nor'eastern of this season.
	So this is a big storm that comes our way thanks to the jet stream.
	So yeah, we have lovely weather right now, but as of tonight, everyone should be boarded up inside.
	And as you say, this is the first of them.
	So we'll watch for the news reports and I hope everything will be okay.
	Okay.
	Neuroscience.
	In 2021, how do we define neuroscience?
	What is it?
	So neuroscience is the part of science, the part of biology that studies the nervous system.
	Essentially, it studies the brain.
	The brain is the largest part of the nervous system in humans, in mammals, actually.
	And the reason we are studying it is because we may be parochial, but we think it's the most interesting piece of matter in the universe, because the brain has hundreds of millions of neurons, and they're connected in very complicated ways that we don't understand.
	And they are active in groups of neurons.
	They're turning on and off.
	And out of that mess comes the human mind.
	Everything that we are, all of our mental and cognitive abilities, so our thoughts, our memories, our perception, our emotions, our imagination, our planning, all of that is somehow created out of the firing of these vast networks of neurons.
	So neuroscience tries to decipher this.
	And I would say the key question in neuroscience is the relation between the activity of these neurons and the human mind and our thinking.
	How does that emerge out of that complex interaction between all these cells?
	And if I may say so, you gave a beautiful definition of the difference between brain and mind.
	A lot of people, a lot of lay people, I'm not a scientist, frequently interchange those terms, but the brain is the actual device itself.
	And the mind is what arises from the interaction between the connections within that device.
	Exactly, exactly.
	Humans, since we don't understand how the brain works, we tend to think of mind-related activities and abilities, and we label them with words.
	So this is our intelligence, our thoughts, our creativity, our imagination, our emotions.
	But in reality, all these things don't come out of thin air.
	They're actually the results of the work of an organ.
	In this case, it's the brain.
	Just like circulation is the result of the work of the heart.
	So as scientists and as clinicians, just like we figure out how the heart works and we figure out how the lungs work and the kidney, we will figure out how the brain works.
	And this is something that will happen in the next decades, I hope.
	And it will be revolutionary because, again, as I said, the brain is not just another organ.
	It happens to generate the human mind.
	So by understanding how the brain does it, we'll understand ourselves for the first time as humans.
	We'll understand the roots of our humanity, what makes us human.
	But of course, when we understand, and we'll talk about this in a moment, but just to flag this up now, when we understand how a thing works, then we can start to modify it.
	It's rather like when you understand you're learning how a car engine works.
	You want to start making some changes, maybe improve something here or there.
	And we're also, I think, at that stage, and that's going to be a big part of our conversation, that we're getting this increased knowledge, but with knowledge comes power.
	Absolutely.
	I think, in fact, so I'm a scientist, but I was trained as a clinician, as a semedic.
	And scientists, in order to figure out how things work, you have to manipulate them.
	Now, imagine you're trying to figure out how a clock works.
	You open it up and you start moving all the pieces and see how quickly you break it and try to put it back together.
	This is the same thing we do in our day-to-day experiments with biological tissues and biological organs.
	And because we need to find out, as you very clearly said, how the machine works.
	But for clinicians, that part is critical because we need to fix it.
	So we need to be able to develop tools, not just to figure out how the brain works, but to be able to manipulate it so that we can go into the brain of patients that suffer from brain diseases and help them out.
	And this is something that's urgent, as everyone in the audience knows from personal experience or from family members of friends, mental and neurological diseases and neurodegenerative diseases are the dark corner of medicine.
	They affect a large portion of the population of the world.
	In fact, a proportion that's increasing as the population is aging.
	And essentially, there's nothing we can do for these patients, for most of the mental patients or neurological patients, in spite of the brave efforts of psychiatrists and neurologists, heroic efforts, because they're fighting these battles with their hands tied behind their back.
	So that's why we need to both figure out how the brain works and manipulate it to help these patients.
	And if there is, and I can't believe that there is anybody who hasn't had even peripheral experience of somebody with, for example, Alzheimer's, the degeneration of the brain, the function, the cognitive functions, it is the saddest process of all because it robs the person of their humanity to a large extent.
	They cease to be quite the person they were.
	And then as it progresses, as I've seen a couple of times in my own family, it gets to a stage where you don't recognize that person anymore.
	The essential essence of themselves, which is contained within the brain, has been diluted to the point where there's somebody else by then.
	This is exactly what's happening to my mother right now.
	So it cannot be more urgent for people like us to figure out how the brain works so that we can actually get on with the program and help all these patients immediately.
	But it's a formidable task because, as I said, it's a very complicated organ and we don't even have a general theory of what it's supposed to be doing.
	So just like with the heart, you sort of know that it has to do with circulation and the lungs has to do with respiration with the brain.
	It's not so obvious because people say, well, brain generates behavior.
	Well, guess what?
	But the brain is very active in the absence of any behavior.
	So in fact, it's always active.
	So what the hell is going on?
	What are all these circuits doing?
	And indeed, you can lose parts of your functionality there.
	People do sustain brain injuries, and miraculously, they're able to rewire their own brains in a lot of cases and regain some, most, maybe all of their functionality in ways that I'm guessing.
	But again, I'm not an expert.
	You are.
	We don't fully understand yet.
	Well, so it depends.
	So the plasticity of the brain is enormous when we're children.
	And that's how kids learn language, for example, and not just language.
	They learn how to walk, how to talk, how to see, how to read.
	And all of that enormous plasticity essentially closes down.
	This is what we term the critical period of brain development, where you're critically attuned to the environment and you change your brain as you're taught or as you are embedded in a particular society.
	All of that sort of closes just about around puberty and adolescence.
	And after that, we still have some plasticity in the brain, but it is relatively small compared to what we had as children.
	And this is one of the biggest mysteries in neuroscience.
	Why does nature closes down the critical period so that our plasticity as adults is much smaller than it used to be when plasticity of the brain is obviously something that should be beneficial?
	And many of my colleagues are trying to understand the basic research on the critical period by studying it in animal models, for example, in mice, with the goal of being able to reopen it in humans and particularly humans,
	as you mentioned, that suffer stroke or have a deficit, brain injury, so that we can actually recover their functionality, if not fully, at least to the point where they can regain a lot of their lost functions.
	Raphael, you said to me that we're making very fast progress and soon we will understand how the brain works.
	And yet you've also said to me, as I heard you say on a video of a conference that you attended a little while ago, you know, this is the big mystery.
	It's the ultimate mystery.
	It's possibly as big as the mysteries out in space that we're exploring.
	How can it be that you're confident that we're going to master this soon, but you're also aware that it's the biggest mystery of all and there are many, many unanswered questions?
	Yes.
	Well, so I don't have a crystal ball.
	So this is just my intuition is that we're going to be able to understand the brain relatively soon because of the great progress that we're making in terms of technologies to study the brain.
	And this is what you can call neurotechnology, which are methods that could be electrical or optical or magnetic or chemical or molecular or computational to read the activity of the brain and decode it and to change the activity of the brain.
	So essentially methods to read and write activity into the brain.
	And these methods are progressing tremendously.
	So because of that, my hunch is that the solution to the big mystery of the brain, which I bet you once we get to that point, it's going to look very simple and everyone's going to say, oh my God, I cannot believe it didn't occur to me.
	It was so simple.
	So we'll get to that point soon.
	What I can guarantee you is that the brain is indeed another organ.
	And based on the track record of success of science and medicine that have been building up essentially a program of progress century after century, organ after organ, and we will get to the brain and conquer it.
	That I think, I don't have any doubt that that will happen.
	But the question is when, whether this is going to happen soon or later.
	I think my hunch is that this will happen soon.
	Probably within a decade or so, we could have the heart of a general theory of other brain works.
	And this could be a moment in neuroscience similar to what happened in molecular biology when Watson and Crick proposed the double helix model of DNA.
	By the way, using stolen data from Rosalind Franklin.
	But at that point, a lot of a very complex part of science, which was genetics, sort of crystallized in a very simple set of core principles.
	So that's the moment that I'm living for neuroscience.
	And it's going to be a transformational moment for science and also for humanity because it could enable us to finally understand ourselves.
	Now, that's a great thing.
	But as we said, let's wind back to that point that we made 10 minutes ago, that with understanding comes power.
	So once you understand how a thing works, then you can start to get into it.
	You can start to modify it.
	You can start to make changes with it.
	Now, some of those things will be for therapy, therapeutic reasons.
	Some of those things will be for other reasons.
	And that's something that you're very concerned about.
	And that's why you've, I believe you were the founder, weren't you, of the Neuro Rights Foundation?
	Yes.
	So technologies are neutral.
	You can use them for good or for bad.
	And this goes all the way back to the fire.
	So just imagine the person that invents the fire.
	It's like, oh my God, I can warm up our cave during the winter and we survive.
	Or the same technology can be used to set fire to the cave of the neighboring tribe and wipe them out.
	And this has always been the case.
	In fact, if we were actually videoing today, you would see that right behind me at Columbia University, there's a building, a brick building, which is a national monument.
	It's the physics lab, the pupin hole.
	And the reason it's a national monument is because in the basement, they build the first atomic reactor of the world.
	And that group of physicists who built the reactor were the same ones who built the atomic bomb.
	And that's why it was called the Manhattan Project, because it started right here in the island of Manhattan.
	So there we have a perfect example.
	Yes, but what you should know is that the same physicists that built the atomic bomb were the ones who advocated for regulation of atomic energy.
	And through their lobbying, the UN became involved and created the Atomic Energy Commission, which is based in Vienna and has controlled and regulated atomic energy, well, since the 1950s without any mistakes, crossing fingers.
	So now let's fast forward to today.
	We are developing neurotechnology.
	We, meaning as a group, the branch of science that I represent, scientists, engineers, both working in academia, research labs, and in the industry.
	We're developing transformational technology that will enable us to get to the heart of who we are, to the heart of our brains and decipher it.
	And of course, we're doing it both for scientific reasons and for medical reasons, as we've discussed.
	But you could imagine that this could be used for other reasons that are not so altruistic.
	And that's why we help coordinate a group of 25 experts coming from academia, from the clinic, from the industry, from Silicon Valley, from bioethics, and also representing all the brain initiatives from all over the world, from the US, Europe, China, Japan, Australia, Korea, Canada, and Israel.
	And we propose new human rights that we call neurorights or brain rights That protects the brain of citizens from unwanted intrusions by neurotechnology.
	Right.
	So you're concerned about control.
	Yeah, actually, we're concerned about two things.
	So I told you earlier that neurotechnology is essentially, there's two types of neurotechnology: neurotechnology to read brain activity and to write brain activity.
	And we think there are human rights abuses associated to both types of technology.
	In the reading side, if you record brain data from a person, sooner or later you'll be able to decipher that.
	And then not only you'll have access to the mental processes and cognition of the person, but you may even have access to the subconscious, to the parts of the person's process, brain processing, which the person is not even aware of.
	And why do I say that?
	Well, again, this is not magic.
	The brain is doing that.
	And those thoughts and the subconscious are generated by brain circuits.
	So if you can access that information and decipher it, then you're in.
	So that would be an affront to our mental privacy.
	And this is one of the human rights that we think should be protected, our right to mental privacy.
	And that's about decoding.
	But then the other technology, the writing technology, has the potential of changing brain activity.
	And by changing brain activity, it can change behavior, it can change decision making, it could even change identity of the person.
	And by the way, this is not science fiction.
	With laboratory animals, for example, with mice, we and many other people are routinely doing these types of experiments of decoding and manipulating brain activity.
	And we can decode and manipulate animal behavior.
	So what you can do in mice today, you will be able to do in humans tomorrow.
	So that's why we need to be prepared for the day with this new technology will be widely applicable to the human population and set up a human rights protection, not just for mental privacy, but also for our own decision-making, for our own identity, so that these things are essentially our mental integrity remains sacred.
	And this is a real situation.
	This is reality.
	And we've only got to remember that I think it was a year or just a little more than a year ago, Elon Musk's Neuralink Corporation worked on implanting little threads into the brains of lab rats that enabled them to begin the process of reading what they were thinking, essentially.
	As I said, with animals, so we've been doing this now for a while.
	Just to give you an example, our group published a paper a couple of years ago.
	We're actually interested in understanding perception, visual perception in mice.
	And this is because we study the cerebral cortex, which is the largest part of the brain.
	And the cortex is really where it's at in terms of cognitive and mental processing of information.
	It's all in the cortex.
	Anyway, the bottom line, we're studying these mice and using optical neurotechnology, using fancy infrared lasers, we can decode the activity of their visual cortex while they're looking at an image.
	And then when they're not looking at that image, we can actually put it back into their brains with another laser by essentially activating the groups of neurons that are responsible for that perception.
	So when we do that, and we did that, it's been replicated now in other labs around the world, including in England.
	So what happens is that these mice behave exactly the same as if they were looking at this image.
	In other words, we've essentially implanted a hallucination into their heads, and they behave as puppets, as if they're seeing this thing.
	So again, this is not science fiction.
	This is work that has been done already.
	And we've solved those technical problems, how to do these experiments in animal experiments.
	And that's why we're so concerned for the human case, people like myself, who does this for a living, and we know the power of neurotechnology.
	And we're pushing for it.
	Again, I have to keep reminding the audience that we're pushing this because we need to help these patients.
	No, we need to help Alzheimer patients, schizophrenic patients, depressive mental retardation, stroke.
	And I would guess, I had one thought while you were talking, that I presume if you had somebody who was in your custody who was a serial killer or a very vicious or violent person with awful tendencies, then I guess it's a very dangerous road that you go down, but I guess you could make some changes in somebody like that, could you?
	Absolutely.
	You're raising a very important question, which is what is normal and what is pathological.
	So as medics, we help treat patients and patients are defined by because the function of one of their organs, it's not normal.
	Now, in the case of the brain, the brain generates all of human behavior and serial killers obviously are doing that because their brains are actually in a particular state.
	So now with neurotechnology, we'll be able to decipher that state and be able to correct it.
	And I think, I mean, I partly went into neuroscience because when I was in medical school, I rotated in the psychiatry wards and they shipped me to a special hospital where they keep the most dangerous patients, the paranoid schizophrenics.
	And these are schizophrenics that are super smart.
	In fact, my suspicion is that Sherlock Holmes is a classical clinical case of a paranoid schizophrenic.
	They can make all kinds of deductions.
	They fly above most people.
	But we had to interview them with bodyguards because they would threaten us.
	And I remember interviewing one of this patients who announced that he figured out where I live because of my accent.
	He could track down which neighborhood in Madrid I grew up in, and he was going to come to my neighborhood, find my home, and kill my father.
	So these people have an amazing brain, super powerful.
	And they must have some sort of switch that's all.
	So instead of using their great mental abilities for the benefit of society and humanity, they turn it against themselves and against the people they live with, causing all these horrors.
	So if you could divert the flow of that river, sorry to jump in, if you could divert the flow of that river in the brain, you would be helping them.
	But I guess there are, even in a case like that, there are a ton of ethical issues.
	Yes.
	My position is that I would be duty bound to help them and to help society by correcting the miswiring of their brains or the flow of electrical activity, which is going into a particularly aggressive circuit as opposed to another.
	Yeah, but then comes the decision.
	Well, so that's a slippery slope.
	So if you fix up the brain of these people, which obviously need help, well, how about people that are more borderline?
	What do you do?
	That's not my decision.
	I think this is something that society needs to come to terms with now, with neurotechnology.
	And in fact, this is one of the human rights that we advocate for, is the right for equal access to neural augmentation.
	So what am I talking about with neural augmentation?
	So with neurotechnology, again, boils down to methods to read and write information into the brain.
	And you can connect the brains of people to a computer or to the net or to an outside machine.
	And this is what's called a brain-computer interface.
	So brain-computer interfaces have been developed now for about 20 years and they're becoming increasingly more powerful.
	And this enables patients that are paralyzed, for example, to move robotic limbs so that they can start to have a more normal, acceptable life.
	But the same technology can be used to connect people to databases or to avatars or to provide extra sensorial perception.
	And these are things that have been done with animals already.
	So then the question comes, okay, so we will be able to use neurotechnology to augment ourselves mentally and cognitively.
	And this is already starting to happen with these devices called iPhones that we carry in our pockets that really enhance our abilities.
	You can use translate and translate foreign language and you can use the GPS and figure out how to navigate a city where you've never been to.
	So just imagine doing that all mentally from the brain directly connected to the outside.
	So we could become our own walking, talking, and again, I'm sorry for jumping in because a small bit of digital delay here.
	Again, we could become our own walking, talking quantum computer.
	Yes, we could actually, we will become a hybrid species in which part of our cognitive processing is done by our biological hardware and part of it could be done outside by external algorithms, external computational devices.
	And so this is science fiction.
	It hasn't happened yet, but it's on our future.
	I'm pretty sure it will happen.
	Humans have always augmented themselves with technology.
	Again, from the fire to the wheel to domestication of the horse, all the way until more than digital computers.
	We've enhanced our abilities to do things, flying in airplanes, going underwater.
	So space travel.
	So this will be brain travel.
	The same thing will happen.
	So we want to ensure that we have clear guidelines as how these technologies will be deployed in the population and that they should be deployed under the universal principle of justice.
	So fair access to this technology should be a basic human right.
	And it doesn't correspond to us to decide who should be accessing neuro augmentation technology and who shouldn't.
	This is a decision that the society has to take in an open and democratic fashion, including not just experts that know about these technologies like ourselves and clinicians that implant them into patients, but also representatives of the citizenship, because this can change the concept of what it means to be human.
	Right.
	Now, when you're talking about equal access, you're getting almost into political arenas here.
	Equal access means that if, I don't know, the boss of some huge organization or the prime minister of the United Kingdom or the president of the USA or whoever jumps the queue to get augmentation so that that person suddenly becomes faster, brighter, better than everybody else, then you've got a problem.
	You've got a master class if you're not very careful.
	This is exactly what we're trying to prevent by calling for this basic new human right of fair access to neuro augmentation.
	And our model, so one way, one solution to this problem, if you think about it, this is a huge problem.
	How can you have technologies that change our intelligence, our basic cognition, being developed and not wreak havoc in society, which already has enough problems.
	So one solution Is what we call the medical model.
	And the idea is to take a page from medicine, the lesson from the history of medicine, which you can think of medicine also just another technology that you can use it for good or for bad.
	The same knowledge that the doctor has to cure a patient of a heart disease is the knowledge that someone could use to kill a person with a heart device or a heart poison.
	So the knowledge is neutral.
	But medicine has an impeccable record of using medical knowledge and scientific knowledge to help people.
	And this goes back more than 2,000 years to the Hippocratic oath.
	As you know, every medic all over the world throughout history swears allegiance, his personal pledge of ethical behavior.
	And this all the way till today runs through the veins of medicine.
	And because of that, medicine has always been on the right side of the track, so to speak.
	So imagine using the same model for augmentation.
	So imagine that to get a device for mental augmentation, it would be equivalent to getting like a transplant of an organ and look at how organ transplantation and donation is being regulated today.
	So even if the president of the U.S. wants a kidney, it's not his decision.
	And it doesn't matter how much money he has.
	It has to go through a medical panel that will look at the kidneys that are available, the patients that need them, and allocate those resources to the people that need them the most, regardless of their race, their economic status, their power, or their sex, the gender.
	So this is a little bit how we think through this issue of mental augmentation.
	Having a panel that could be a little bit like these medical panels based on ethics, based on the Hippocratic oath, the medical values, the ontology, and that will distribute these technologies across the population in a way, just like medical technologies are being distributed right now, that it's approximate, so tries to be as fair as possible.
	Problem is when you have a technology, part of the human condition is technology tends to get abused.
	When we invented guns, then people, when they needed to do such things, used them for hunting food.
	But they also found that you could kill people with a gun.
	And so they used them to wage war and to rob banks and all sorts of things like that.
	I mean, you're going to have to have a pretty thoroughgoing set of rules, and you've got to have legislators on side backing those up, I would think, around the world.
	Otherwise, this stuff is going to be misused.
	There's going to be a masterclass, people who are enhanced way beyond the rest of us.
	And then there's also the possibility of, I presume, using the technology to make a population, a group of people, however small or large, more compliant by altering their view of reality.
	Let's put it that way.
	So there are all kinds of issues, it seems to me.
	That's right.
	So this is a gigantic problem.
	And that's why we are focusing on the human rights, because the human rights are the ethical beacon that runs humanity.
	They're at the core of the UN.
	They were promulgated in 1948 and adopted by 130 countries.
	Not everyone in the world believes in human rights, but it's the piece of paper that most people of the world believed in, the most translated document in history.
	And I think this is an issue that corresponds to the UN.
	That's why we're advocating for these new human rights.
	We want the UN to take charge.
	And there are examples of how the UN has made a difference.
	I just mentioned the atomic energy is one example.
	But there are more recent examples, the Convention Against Torture, the Convention Against the Disappeared.
	And then if you go back in history, the international treaties against biological weapons and chemical weapons.
	So these are all technologies that could have wiped out humanity already 100 years ago.
	And didn't.
	Why not?
	Because there was a strict control by an international agreement.
	So we think new technology is also an existential technology.
	It has a potential to alter the heart of what it means to be human.
	I should have said the brain of what it means to be human.
	And this needs to be carefully thought of, particularly now before it hits us.
	Because the last thing that we can do is to wait for things to happen.
	I think in this case, we need to make things happen.
	Has this been debated by the United Nations?
	And if it hasn't, why do you think it hasn't?
	So let me tell you, the UN, we've engaged the Secretary General of the UN.
	I met with him in person and by Zoom three times to press onto him the necessity for the UN to take charge.
	And together with my colleague Jared Genser, who's an international rights lawyer, he's actually a world-class lawyer.
	He just got an award for global leadership for extricating political prisoners from around the world.
	And with our colleague Stephanie Herman, who's a young lawyer also working on human rights, we wrote a paper in the magazine Horizons outlining what the next step should be for the UN.
	It will be at the beginning of a UN agenda for neural rights.
	And the Secretary General convened a meeting that happened in July where it was a close meeting with a group of experts coming from neurotechnology, bioethics, human rights, and with representatives of the UN to study this issue.
	And they told us they would get back to us.
	And the last thing we know is about a month ago, the Secretary General, who was elected for another six-year term, just announced his agenda for the next six years.
	It's a document called A Common Agenda.
	It's on the web.
	And in one of the chapters of this agenda for next year, he talks about human rights and the necessity to update the Universal Declaration to the world that we live in, particularly with respect to what he calls our frontier issues.
	And he specifically mentions neurotechnology.
	So I think the Secretary General is on this case.
	And I hope this will lead to an international convention.
	But besides the UN, there's other organizations that are interested.
	In fact, I just got a call from the G7, which happens to be meeting this year in the UK, organizing a future forum in London in November, December, sorry, and they're interested in discussing neural augmentation as one of the topics.
	So I know they're looking into this.
	And I should also mention the brave example of the Republic of Chile, who has passed just recently, unanimously, a constitutional amendment to the Article 19 of their Constitution, making cerebral integrity a basic human right.
	Right.
	So that's going to be a phrase that we will hear more of then.
	Cerebral integrity.
	Exactly.
	I think Chile leads the way.
	So the Chileans are, if you know any of them, they're brave and they also, particularly with respect to human rights, given their tragic recent history, they're very advanced in terms of human right protection legally at the legislation, constitutional level.
	And they've brought in this amendment to the Constitution.
	And they're now, the Senate of Chile and the Chamber of Deputies are debating a neural rights bill of law that will essentially institute a medical model, as I was saying earlier, applying existing medical regulations to all of neurotechnology, whether it's invasive or not.
	But of course, you can never stop nations that play fast and loose with human rights.
	And we can think of examples.
	We don't have to name them, but they readily spring to mind.
	They will be difficult to regulate, won't they?
	They will.
	The world is complicated, and there is not a universally agreed set of values, except maybe for this Universal Declaration of Human Rights, which not everyone respects them.
	But there are international ways and methods to enforce them.
	And again, I gave you some examples of the atomic energy, biological weapons, chemical weapons, convention against the disappeared, against torture.
	So if countries decide not to play the game and not to respect these conventions or these international treaties, then there are some serious consequences for them economically and politically.
	So I think I can imagine how neurotechnology fits right there with these types of threats.
	And if there are countries who are not going to be following the set of international rules, there could be consequences against these countries.
	And I should also mention, by the way, that essentially all of the neurotechnology that matters right now, it's actually built by the West.
	In fact, I would say most of it is in the US right now.
	So, I mean, we have to be also attuned to these possibilities of rock countries, but this is not going to be anything different than what we've already seen with atomic energy and biological and chemical weapons.
	So we have to make a start.
	And it seems to me from everything that you've said, and thank you for alerting me to this.
	I was aware of the issue, but I didn't know the detail, and now I do.
	You know, we are facing, it seems to me, from what you said, as a planet, as a species, as the human race, we are facing the dual challenge of some wonderful technology with great prospects, side by side with the misuse of that technology, rather like nuclear power can be used or abused.
	But we're having to come up with a set of rules for it and realize that there's a problem much faster, it seems to me, than anything else that we've ever had to look at.
	So, you know, the time scale on this is quite alarming, isn't it?
	It's coming quickly.
	So, yes and no.
	I think for, again, there's two aspects of this technology, reading and writing.
	For the reading, you're completely right.
	This is urgent because neurotechnology to decode brain activity is starting to get generated and sold.
	And the decoding that's being done right now today on the commercial consumer neurotechnology, it's relatively low grade.
	And it's not super threatening, but things can change very quickly.
	So this is something that concerned me.
	Mental privacy in particular should be rapidly become a new human right and be protected by legislation, both at the international level and also by individual countries.
	But the other technology, that's much more transformative.
	That's the technology to write and to program in a way to reformat and re-engineer neural circuits of the brain of people.
	And that will transform us into a different species.
	And that's, I would still, although we can do some of these experiments already with mice, that's at least 10, 15, 20 years away for this to be a serious problem with humans.
	At the same time, it goes to the heart of what defines us as human beings.
	So I think we have the duty now to start this debate and decide what type of human being we want to be.
	We decide together democratically, internationally.
	We put this in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, and that becomes the guidelines for the development of this new technology so that the car doesn't get out of the road, so to speak.
	If we don't do that, to use on my part, probably a bad metaphor, it would rather be like a train arriving at the station.
	But we have no ticket machines or no barriers.
	The whole thing is incomplete.
	It's got to be brought into balance.
	What a fascinating conversation.
	Thank you for enlightening me, Raphael.
	It's good of you to give for your time.
	And I think we've all got to look at that conference that is happening in London in December and hope that some news in the mainstream media comes out about it because it needs to.
	Yes, I would also encourage your readers, your audience that is interested in these topics to just look up Neural Rights in the web.
	We've built a foundation, the Neural Rights Foundation, and the goal of the foundation is to do research, advocacy, and outreach and education on neural rights.
	So we put out a lot of information and this is a way also for anyone in the world who feels passionate about these topics to be in touch with us and forming like a network throughout the world of grassroots activism.
	Raphael Just, thank you for giving me your time.
	I know your time is limited, so I'm very pleased to have been able to get so much of it.
	And I'm sure my listener will be very thankful for being given a steer on this very important issue.
	Thank you for your time.
	Thank you.
	Delighted to be here with you.
	Fascinating, chilling, worrying in some ways, exciting in other ways.
	Professor Raphael Just, I do apologize for the small amount of rebuffering that we had during that.
	I was able to follow the conversation, didn't really want to stop it or start again.
	That was the best connection we could get.
	And Raphael Just is one of the world's leading neuroscientists.
	This is a very important issue.
	And I was very pleased that he could give me his time today for this.
	It is an issue I think we need to be putting on the agenda along, sadly, with all of the other things that we need to be thinking of at the moment.
	And we know what they are.
	Thank you very much for being part of my show.
	If you have a guest suggestion or comment about the show, you can always go to the website theunexplained.tv and you can send it to me from there.
	More great guests in the pipeline here at the home of the unexplained, so until next we meet, my name is Howard Hughes.
	This has been The Unexplained Online.
	And please, whatever you do, stay safe, stay calm, and above all, please stay in touch.
	Thank you very much.
	Take care.

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