Breakthrough (2015) s01e02 Episode Script
More Than Human
1 PAUL GIAMATTI: As an actor, I'm really interested in and spent a lot of time studying human beings, human nature, human behavior, even the human body.
And when I look at the world around me, I wonder What is this technology we have? What are we doing with it? What is it doing to us? Is it changing us? Where is humanity heading with this stuff? As our technology has gotten more and more sophisticated, it seems like it's come to dominate every part of our lives.
About the only place it has yet to fully invade is our actual bodies.
But maybe that's all about to change.
I'm told that there are scientists out there developing cyborgs.
A cyborg is a kind of hybrid of man and machine.
It's supposed to be an enhanced human being.
A better, stronger, improved version of us.
More than human.
Now, when I was asked to participate in a documentary about cyborgs, I was intrigued.
I couldn't say no.
It's very cool stuff, but it also scares me.
I confess, at bottom, I have a pessimistic, dystopian view of this kind of thing.
Won't it completely dehumanize us? This view is shaped by all the science fiction I read growing up.
I read a lot of it.
I still read it.
So I'm visiting my local science fiction bookstore to do some research.
Well, okay, that's a little tongue and cheek.
I'm not a total dummy, but there is a little science in science fiction, and why not start with what you know when you're about to find out a whole lot about what you don't know? Cici James, the owner of the bookstore, helped me in my search for books on cyborgs.
CICI JAMES: By the 23rd century, humans are extinct, but their self-aware robots carry on building a vast civilization.
Designed as an empathetic sex slave, human-sized Freya is a free woman, but that doesn't stop her smaller high-ranking cousins.
PAUL: This sounds great.
CICI: It's actually really good.
PAUL: Is it? Okay.
Is this guy good? CICI: There's a lot of sex.
PAUL: Awesome.
CICI: Yeah, he's great.
And this is actually based on a book by Robert Heinlein called 'Friday.
' PAUL: Ahh.
Yeah, I remember that book.
CICI: About kind of like a semi-cyborg sex assassin.
PAUL: Yeah, wait a minute.
That's one.
CICI: That's great.
I'll find that.
PAUL: Cyborg sex assassin.
That's what we should retitle, that's what we should retitle this show.
In fact that's gonna be, that's gonna be my memoir title.
CICI: That's on my business card.
PAUL: Oh, is it? CICI: There are things that early adapter body modification people are interested in, where they're actually implanting PAUL: Wait, what [stuttering.]
Early adapter body modification people? CICI: Yes.
PAUL: So these are people who have, like, I'm gonna put, like, uh CICI: They're doing weird things to themselves.
PAUL: Have horns and stuff like that? CICI: Right now.
Like that.
But they're actually, um, they're people who are putting magnets in the tips of their fingers so that they can feel electromagnetic fields around them, uh, or PAUL: For the purposes of, like, extra-sensory perception.
CICI: Exactly.
PAUL: It always seemed so easy and seamless making cyborgs in science fiction books.
You just add metal arms and metal legs and infrared eyes and voilà ! But all this stuff is really quite challenging in reality.
The idea of trying to find mechanical ways to enhance ourselves is nothing new.
This film I came across from the 1960s shows one idea that was way ahead of its time.
ANNOUNCER: The story of science, changing man's way of life in our time.
At the General Electric Company's research and development center near Schenectady, New York, where anything that man or child might imagine is not considered impossible, one may witness a scientific endeavor to convert a man's legs into those of a giant.
Inside this mechanical skeleton, a human being endows it with the intelligence of his own brain.
PAUL: The exoskeleton in this GE film may have given us a look into the future.
I heard about a new device that sounds just like it.
So I flew down to Perry, Georgia, to see it in action.
It all went down at a place called the Guardian Center.
A huge installation where they train first responders for earthquakes, terrorist situations.
They even have their own subway tunnel with an exploded train.
It's the perfect place to see the FORTIS exoskeleton.
Designed by a team of engineers at Lockheed Martin, FORTIS is an aluminum and carbon fiber frame exoskeleton with two mechanical arms designed to give tools a zero-gravity, weightless feel, and lets workers in a variety of industries wield heavy tools for hours on end.
The lady wielding this tool is Trish Aelker.
She is the head of the FORTIS design team.
TRISH AELKER: It's very lightweight.
It's very easy to put on.
It's very adjustable to adjust from Keith's body type to my body size.
PAUL: Right, so it's one size will generally fit all.
After the Guardian guys get our test vehicle positioned, they'll deliver a tailor-made emergency situation.
Very exciting.
Have we taken bets on what's going to get destroyed besides the car? TRISH: Here we go.
PAUL: Oh! PAUL: Oh! This will be the first time the FORTIS is being used in a first-responder situation.
It's also the first time it's being used with the Jaws of Life, a 35-pound tool used to pry open the doors of crashed cars.
PAUL: Awesome! TRISH: Let's step back.
PAUL: Holy cow! Awesome.
Nicely done, Keith.
KEITH: That's how they work.
PAUL: It may look simple, but making an exoskeleton that's a help and not a hindrance is a deceptively difficult engineering task.
That it's designed to adjust and fit any sized person only makes it more so.
TRISH: Anthropometry is the measurements of the human body.
Everybody's anthropometry is different.
Your knee may be higher or shorter than mine, you know.
Your thigh is longer or shorter.
PAUL: Everything is going to be unique.
TRISH: No two people are the same.
And so that's why this system has to be so adjustable.
It has to be able to accommodate all those different anthropometries.
PAUL: I guess creating an interface between man and machine is what cyborgs are all about.
And I'm beginning to understand that it may be the hardest problem in turning us into next generation humans.
I heard about a somewhat different exoskeleton in São Paulo, Brazil, that not only interfaces with the body, but also with the user's brain.
That sounds like something I need to see.
I'm on my way to meet a brilliant gentleman, neuroscientist Miguel Nicolelis.
In an experiment with a rhesus monkey named Aurora, Miguel created one of the earliest direct interfaces between a machine and a brain.
MIGUEL NICOLELIS: Aurora was playing a game with a joystick, and she had to move a cursor on the computer screen to put the cursor inside of a target to get a drop of juice, fruit juice.
PAUL: It's like being an actor, by the way.
It sounds a lot like [laughing.]
MIGUEL: She was doing this, and we were recording the brain activity, and we started in two dimensions, and then we did 3D.
And we saw that we could read the electrical patterns, sent to the models and the output in digital form could be sent to the robotic arm that was in another room and the robotic arm was doing, reproducing the movements that Aurora was making.
PAUL: Miguel discovered how to read the motor commands from a monkey's brain and have them control the movement of a robotic arm.
This was one of the first brain-machine interfaces.
The experiment got even more amazing when Miguel took the joystick away from the monkey.
MIGUEL: To get the cursor to move to the target, she had to imagine the movement, but not perform them, because she had no joystick.
PAUL: Did she want to keep doing that for a while? MIGUEL: Oh, in the beginning she tried, she tried, but there was nothing.
And being a smart monkey, she realized, what in heavens I'm doing? Why I'm moving? There's no connection, there's no causal linkage.
PAUL: Yeah.
MIGUEL: So she stopped moving, in front of us, she just did this, she stopped moving and the cursor start going.
PAUL: She knew enough to guide it now just visually.
MIGUEL: Trial and error, she realized that there was no point in wasting energy moving her own body, she had a much better way to get the juice.
That was the first time that the brain had crossed the physical limits of the body to act on the world beyond, you know, the body.
PAUL: This body.
Yeah.
MIGUEL: By itself.
PAUL: So this kind of stuff leads to the exoskeleton that you built.
MIGUEL: It was at that moment that we realized that it could be done.
PAUL: Heading an international team of over 150 scientists, engineers and medical doctors, Miguel is developing an amazing exoskeleton that the user can control just using thoughts.
The brain-machine interface works through a non-invasive EEG skullcap.
MIGUEL: When the patients started using the exo, we noticed that in the beginning it's very difficult, because they have lost the representation of their legs.
So when I asked them, think about walking, they said, 'Okay, I'm trying.
' But we look at their brain activity, you see nothing.
PAUL: Right, because MIGUEL: Because after 13 years without moving PAUL: There's no MIGUEL: Your brain has forgotten that you one day had legs.
You dream about it, you may have feelings about it.
But the representation of your legs in your brain has shrunk.
PAUL: Solaiman Shokur, a senior research scientist at Miguel's lab, designed an ingenious virtual reality feedback system to help restore the experience of walking to the patients' brains.
SOLAIMAN SHOKUR: They are a very simple, actually, system, they are simple vibrators the same way that you have in your cell phone.
PAUL: Okay.
SOLAIMAN: And there's a trick that we can play by changing the frequency of these vibrators, and at some point you will not feel three vibrators anymore, but you feel one continuous touch.
PAUL: The vibrators he straps on my arms produce a sensation that are synchronized with the legs and footsteps of a virtual soccer player.
When Solaiman starts up the program, I start to feel the vibrators on my arm synchronized with each step of the avatar.
Definitely gives me this sense of forward motion, each step it's a move forward.
Miguel figured out a way to incorporate a similar feedback system into the exo-suit itself.
When the robotic suit starts to move and touches the ground, signals are transmitted from sensors on the feet to an electronic vibration device on the patient's arm.
MIGUEL: 15 years ago when we discovered that this could be done directly, we said okay.
Brain-machine interfaces will provide a new rehab tool to make you walk again, move your arms again, and that's it.
Well, what we realized now in all our patients is that there's a plateau above that, and that is they're recovering neurological function by doing that.
PAUL: You're kidding me.
MIGUEL: Just by practicing.
PAUL: So it's like it's literally regrowing those areas of the brain.
MIGUEL: The plasticity that we're inducing in the brain somehow is getting down, and the patients are now contracting groups of muscles below the level, that leads you to a point that one of them is actually moving the legs voluntarily now.
ladcovik, a former soccer player, who many years ago lost the use of his legs in an accident.
Eric is the first paraplegic to walk again with the help of the exo-suit.
MIGUEL: When he imagined he starting walking, he modulated his EG signal, the machine detected that and triggered the movement.
PAUL: That's amazing.
MIGUEL: And then when the feedback came, he had the feeling.
PAUL: You could feel it? MIGUEL: Yeah.
ERIC VLADCOVIK: Feedback.
PAUL: Yeah, right, yeah.
Feedback.
[speaking Portuguese.]
MIGUEL: When your sense of self expands to incorporate a device like this, that has feedback and everything, you are actually changing what the brain thinks is the body.
PAUL: Right.
MIGUEL: That's number one.
PAUL: Yeah.
MIGUEL: You're actually helping the patient to gain mobility, but you are changing, you're reorganizing the connectivity.
PAUL: It's the ultimate cybernetic thing in some degree, that you're, you're MIGUEL: You're creating a hybrid.
I came back to biking late in life.
In the beginning it was kind of strange, but in a few weeks I felt the feeling that you feel as a kid.
You know? The bike is part of you.
What is your body at that point? PAUL: Right.
MIGUEL: Where it ends, for me, at that point, my body ends at the surface of the tire touching the ground.
PAUL: Yeah.
So our brain incorporates the tools and technologies we use every day.
The things we ride on, the tools we work with.
All of the technology we use is almost literally an extension of us.
MIGUEL: So I have a very different concept of cyborg or hybrids or trans-human movement.
PAUL: Yes, yeah.
MIGUEL: We, of course, need to embrace technology like we embrace art, because it comes from our brain.
It's a manifestation of the inner works of our imagination.
PAUL: Yeah.
MIGUEL: Of our biology.
Yet I don't want to reduce human, the human condition to a piece of machinery, because it's not.
What would be of our existence if we remove all that is abstraction, intuition and creativity, and leave only the devices we built? PAUL: On my way out of Brazil, I was really thinking about my brain.
This idea that the brain incorporates the technologies we use and makes them a part of us is fascinating.
If it's true, then what's the difference between a person holding a hammer and a person with a hammer hand? That Miguel has figured out how to hardwire machines directly to our brains is amazing.
With that figured out, creating a man-machine seems utterly plausible.
So it excited me to learn about a scientist in Houston, Texas, who is working on a different way to connect our brains to technology.
I'm walking down this endless corridor at Baylor College of Medicine to eventually meet up with David Eagleman.
David is a neuroscientist noted for his work on time perception, synesthesia, and neuro law.
DAVID EAGLEMAN: For a long time I've been thinking about how flexible the brain is and how it takes in these different sensory streams and figures out just what to do with them.
And when I started looking across the Animal Kingdom, I thought there are really different sensors that get popped on to different animals.
Like the star-nosed mole has this nose with 22 little appendages, and it feels around and sort of makes, in these dark tunnels, it sort of makes a 3D view of its world.
PAUL: And they're like their fingers on its face.
DAVID: So the more and more I looked across the Animal Kingdom, I thought what if all these things are really just plug-and-play devices, and Mother Nature just had to come up with the principles of brain operation once, and then she was free to tinker around with what you plug in? PAUL: Mm-hmm.
DAVID: So I've called this the Potato Head theory.
And the idea is you can just plug stuff in just like the child's toy.
You plug in whatever you want.
And the brain will figure out what to do with it.
So I started taking that idea really seriously.
And I thought what could we start plugging in to the brain, and that's the origin of this VEST that we came up with.
The VEST stands for the Variable Extra Sensory Transducer.
And it's a vest.
PAUL: Works out perfectly.
[laughing.]
Perfect, it never happens like that with acronyms! Okay.
Yes.
DAVID: So you wear it underneath the clothing, and what we do is capture information on a cell phone, and we transmit via Bluetooth to the VEST.
We've got this remarkable sensory sheet that we're covered with.
Your skin is the largest organ in your body.
And we can feed any kind of information stream to the brain this way.
So it's like an adapter between the human brain and whatever we want to feed in.
PAUL: A smart phone converts sound to data and then transfers it to the VEST via Bluetooth.
40 little motors vibrate patterns into the wearer's back, creating a kind of soundtrack of the immediate surroundings.
With training, it allows the deaf person to feel sound.
Similar to the way that Braille converts the visual code of written text into a code of tactile sensation.
But that's all theory.
Will it really work? with one of his PhD students, Scott Novich.
When Scott conducts a training session with Jonathan Leech, I get to really see the VEST in action.
Jonathan has been profoundly deaf since birth.
SCOTT: Right, right.
To, to.
To.
Ear, ear.
Touch.
TRANSLATOR: It's almost like a localized area massage.
[laughs.]
PAUL: That's nice.
And, and it's kind of moving up and down the spine? TRANSLATOR: Well, it's like you have 10 phones on your back.
All located around the back, and you could feel the phone ringing, all the phones were ringing at the same time.
PAUL: Oh, really? TRANSLATOR: I can hear everything.
Whatever is going into that tablet, that microphone, it's getting.
If someone drops something, or if something's happening out in the environment, I can feel it.
PAUL: So what happens now? SCOTT: Well, now we can turn it on.
PAUL: Mm-hmm.
SCOTT: So PAUL: Whoa! PAUL: It's strong! SCOTT: It's pretty strong.
PAUL: What's it registering off of? Are you just, like, kind of or is it me speaking? SCOTT: It's you speaking.
PAUL: Oh, that's me talking that's doing this.
SCOTT: Yep.
Yep, so, um, I mean, the way this generally works is PAUL: Wow.
SCOTT: Sound is being picked up from the environment by the tablet's microphone.
The tablet's actually taking care of all the mathematical computation to get the signal into sort of a suitable shape such that that information will get through your touch receptors in your back.
PAUL: I thought it was gonna be lesskind of intense! Wow, that's wild.
SCOTT: If you have two people come up to you and say the same word, um, like cat.
PAUL: Yeah.
SCOTT: It will feel very similar, but it will still be distinctly different.
PAUL: It's, it's a bit more of that global sense rather than the, than the thing you were talking about before.
It's kind of like you're getting more of the gestalt of the word.
Can I use gestalt? SCOTT: I think so, you'll have to run that one by David, but I think you got it.
PAUL: But I mean, you're getting more of the kind of that round sense of the thing rather than this kind of And I can, you can feel that, actually.
It doesn't feel like Morse code, it doesn't, it didn't feel like the same thing every time.
DAVID: This way, we're starting by feeding in sound information that we capture on the fly, compress, send to the VEST, so that people can hear the world through patterns of vibration on their torso.
But that's just step one.
That's, that's sensory substitution.
But what really interests me is sensory addition.
PAUL: David is thinking of feeding all sorts of real-time information through the VES and into our brains.
Things like stock market data and weather data.
DAVID: One thing we've done just as a proof of principle is instead of the Spidey sense, I call it the Tweety sense, which is we collect thousands of tweets on some particular hashtag and then feed it into the VEST, a sentiment analysis, meaning we're just doing quick language processing on it to decide whether people are saying positive or negative things about it.
You can just walk around and feel how that's going.
[laughing.]
PAUL: Oh, man! Now I question whether this is going to be a pleasant experience for people.
DAVID: Well, the thing is it's probably, it probably wouldn't be for almost anybody, except for, you can imagine if you were, let's say, a presidential candidate doing a live speech, you might want to know how things are going over.
And Twitter is giving you that feedback immediately.
So you're plugged into the consciousness of thousands of people, maybe hundreds of thousands of people all at once hearing your speech, and you can say, ooh, that didn't go over so well.
PAUL: Holy cow! DAVID: You're feeling the Twittersphere.
PAUL: You must have to deal with a lot of people saying, but hang on, this is, like, crazy, you know, this is, you're gonna make us not human anymore.
This is, we don't need to be doing this.
Isn't there already, isn't it already bad enough with all the stuff we're getting through our phones, aren't we robotic? Aren't we cyborged enough? DAVID: Well, let's define what we mean by human.
I mean, what would it mean to be human? PAUL: In the first place.
DAVID: So we're already way past that, right? I mean, we are no longer a natural species, and we are, we're a species that's in this feedback loop.
We're a runaway brain.
You know, we're on a trajectory.
Actually, let me take that statement back.
Let me, let me cast it a different way.
PAUL: No, no, yeah.
DAVID: It's that this, this is our evolutionary trajectory.
This is all part of, of what's, what's happening.
PAUL: Yeah.
DAVID: And so what it means to be human is a rapidly changing definition.
PAUL: So there's this sense that it's It's not even just has to happen, it's just going to happen.
DAVID: Exactly.
PAUL: Yeah, and so DAVID: It's what's happening.
PAUL: It is, it is what's happening.
DAVID: Yeah.
PAUL: I wonder if our attachment to technology is hardwired into us in some way.
Are we just bound to turn ourselves into machines? Wow, maybe we aren't turning ourselves into machines.
Maybe we already are machines.
And if that's true then all these technological gadgets we produce are simply our offspring.
Heading for the airport, I can't stop thinking about the plasticity of our brains.
If they really are nothing more than a piece of electric meat in a black box, then replacing our entire body with plastic and metal parts shouldn't really change our nature.
Right? But what about the body? The particular physical form we're born with.
Doesn't it have something to do with who we are as human beings? I'm visiting Stockholm, Sweden.
I'm very excited to soon meet an imaginative young neuroscientist named Henrik Ehrsson at the Karolinska Institute.
Henrik is trying to understand how the brain decides where our bodies end and where the rest of the world begins.
His research is leading to new and improved ways to extend ourselves with technology.
HENRIK EHRSSON: Well, there's a lot of interest in the robotics community, how can we extend the human body, not only for the advanced prosthetic limbs for amputees, but maybe for exoskeletons.
And then of course the question is at what point do these external devices become part of your own body representation? At what point do you start to feel that this is really me? PAUL: Sitting in the lab with Henrik and Andreas, one of Henrik's post docs, I'm about to be put through the rubber hand experiment.
ANDREAS: And then put your arm here onto the table and inside this little box here.
PAUL: Okay.
ANDREAS: Cover your right side here.
PAUL: Okay.
ANDREAS: So what I will do now, I will touch your index finger with the brush here, and please look to the hand, to the index finger of the hand here.
PAUL: Okay.
And with my hand hidden from view, Andreas starts to stroke my index finger and the index finger of the rubber hand in almost perfect synchrony.
HENRIK: What do you experience? PAUL: I think it's generally beginning to become hard to tell whether ityeah.
I mean, it's beginning to feel like, yeah.
Yeah, I'm buying it that you're rubbing, that you're swiping that hand.
Part of my brain is telling me that it's not possible that that's happening, you know? And then when you're not touching it, I go, no, not happening, and then you touch it.
And I'm like, yeah, I'm feeling it there.
It's totally now, just, it doesn't even, there's no question that that's my hand, that that's what you're touching.
ANDREAS: Alright.
HENRIK: That's the first experiment.
PAUL: That's crazy.
That's super crazy.
And when they connect my finger with the rubber hand's finger and introduce movement to the experiment, well, now the illusion gets totally surreal.
Oh, my God.
That's mythat's crazy.
That's really weird.
Oh, man, that's nuts.
There was a real moment where it suddenly switched, I was like, no, this isn't working.
And then suddenly, now it's just, again, the more I'm doing it ANDREAS: That's the thing, now I'm not doing anything.
That was you doing this.
PAUL: That's crazy.
I'm doing this.
ANDREAS: You move it.
PAUL: That's crazy! And it only gets more so as it goes on.
HENRIK: New hand.
Artificial hand.
PAUL: That's amazing! ANDREAS: You can touch it.
PAUL: Wow, if they can add a rubber hand to my body that easily, I can only imagine what they could do with a little more effort and planning.
The idea of integrating into a prosthetic limb, what is going to give you that real sense of ownership of your arm, what kicks in then that does that? HENRIK: Well, in your experiment, where we stroke the finger PAUL: Yeah.
HENRIK: And then you saw the model hand moving or being stroked in the same place at the same time.
PAUL: Yeah.
HENRIK: And that was enough for the brain to sort of put together your vision information with the information from touch and proprioception, right? PAUL: Yeah.
HENRIK: And suddenly, your brain just accepted the model hand as being my hand.
PAUL: That was the most bizarre part of it was where it felt like it joined.
Literally the muscles and nerves and tendons and everything were joined.
HENRIK: One of the findings is really how the perception of our body, our physical self, can change just like that.
PAUL: Mm-hmm.
HENRIK: In a few seconds.
PAUL: Mm-hmm.
HENRIK: And really that it's really about how the brain interprets the information from the different sensory modalities and comes up with sort of a decision or conclusion, which can be quite different from the actual physical state of your body.
PAUL: After the hand experiment, I'm ushered back into Henrik's mad chamber of cyber-psychology.
There we do an even nuttier experiment, in which another suave European scientist named Bjorn straps me into a set of virtual reality goggles.
The goggles give me the view of the body of a small doll, lying on the bed next to me.
Stroking me and the doll in a precisely synchronous way, the weirdness begins.
Now, this is really odd.
This is super weird.
[chuckles.]
BJORN: What do you feel? PAUL: It's very peculiar.
It's like, it's really being a child.
It's like a baby.
It's really strange.
HENRIK: Hello, how are we doing in there, Paul? PAUL: Yeah, very good, very good.
HENRIK: You're meeting a giant.
PAUL: Yeah.
Once I was in the doll's body, my perspective of the world changed.
Suddenly everything seems bigger.
How's that? HENRIK: It's about twice as big as PAUL: Really? HENRIK: Yeah.
PAUL: My brain is really fooled into thinking I'm a small doll.
The knife looks huge.
Ahh, oh! That was really disturbing.
How small a doll have you used? I mean, how tiny can you do it and it still sort of works? I mean, is there a point at which it's just too small? You can't just use some HENRIK: We don't think so, as long as the body is proportional, we would predict that the illusion works very well.
PAUL: Oh, that's interesting.
HENRIK: We tried with bodies that are like, you know, 20 centimeters, 30 centimeters.
PAUL: Uh-huh, and it's worked? HENRIK: It works very well.
PAUL: As long as it's proportional.
HENRIK: As long as the body's proportional.
PAUL: So you can't have some crazy thing with crazy clown feet.
HENRIK: No.
PAUL: That won't work.
HENRIK: That won't work.
If the body plan is completely different from a humanoid body shape, it will not work.
PAUL: Oh, it won't work.
HENRIK: There's some memory representation, there's some constraints.
The brain knows roughly what a human body should look like.
PAUL: Ahh.
HENRIK: It will not accept, like, a table, or a block of wood or a crazy lobster or something like that.
PAUL: It won't do that! So you can't put me into a but you could put me into a bipedal thing.
You couldn't put me in, like, ape legs.
HENRIK: We probably could put you in an ape.
We haven't tried the ape, the orangutan, you know.
PAUL: That could work.
Doing these experiments with Henrik really made me feel what I had learned intellectually with Miguel and David.
The idea of fully inhabiting an exoskeleton or even the body of a computer-generated avatar feels much more possible to me now.
PAUL: When I got back from Sweden, my head was really spinning with all these new ideas.
I needed to debrief for a second.
Maybe with a colleague, a buddy, not a scientist.
So I told my friend, the director David Cronenberg, what I'd been doing.
He was very excited and wanted to talk to me about this cyborg stuff.
I am going to meet him at a local diner in Toronto for a coffee.
In films like 'Videodrome,' 'The Fly,' and 'eXistenZ,' he deeply explores the merging of man and machine.
And not unlike the scientists I had been talking to, David has spent his career using his creativity and imagination to make new discoveries.
DAVID CRONENBERG: Okay, well, look.
We're both wearing glasses, right? PAUL: Uh-huh.
DAVID: This is a machine-human interface.
PAUL: Mm-hmm.
DAVID: I got hearing aids.
Look at this.
This is a little computer.
It has, has the computing power that is about a thousand times more than what the first moon shot had.
Believe it or not.
PAUL: Really? DAVID: Yes.
DAVID: Plus, my two hearing aids communicate through my head using Bluetooth.
So talk about machine interface.
I'm, I'm there.
I'm a bot.
You know, like, I'm bionic.
PAUL: All of this stuff is just compensating.
But all of this stuff is actually making us now extended beyond all this stuff.
DAVID: Well, it is.
I mean, I think the Internet has made us already more than human.
You know, I mean, I'm sure it has resulted in changes in the neurology of our brains, literally.
I think the unique thing about some of the stuff I came up with was that it was organic.
As in 'eXistenZ,' for example, you have these game pods, but they're fleshy.
And they look like livers or something.
And the cords are called 'umbi-cords,' and they're umbilical, and they plug into your spine.
That was my instinct, you know, that that was where technology should take us or would take us in terms of how we interface our bodies with these.
PAUL: They would become one thing.
DAVID: Yeah, but it would be organic, not mechanical.
If you look at what's going on in our bodies, all the time constantly, it's little machines.
Like, they're little things with little propellers, and they're little tubules and little things that are climbing up the tubules.
PAUL: Snipping things.
DAVID: And then they're snipping and repairing.
So the kind of machinery that interests me, in terms of enhancing us, is really on the cellular level.
We have a world of creatures that have evolved over millions of years.
For example, I was thinking about the electric eel where almost two-thirds of his body is a battery.
PAUL: Mm-hmm.
DAVID: We could have that.
Because, you know, the earth, nature, evolution has already evolved that, has shown us that you can have a totally organic device that stores electrical energy and can release it on demand.
There was a lot of sci-fi that said technology is inhuman, non-human, anti-human.
PAUL: Right.
DAVID: And I always said, that can't be.
It's totally human.
PAUL: Right.
DAVID: It comes from us.
PAUL: It's us.
DAVID: It's an expression of us.
So it mirrors exactly what we are, that is to say, great stuff, brilliant stuff, beautiful stuff, and hideous, hideous, destructive stuff as well.
PAUL: But you, in your movies a lot of the time, it seems, it's cool, because you seem very optimistic about it, whereas in your movies it's very pessimistic.
DAVID: My own personal view is quite positive.
PAUL: Yeah.
DAVID: Yeah, yeah, I mean, I think it's exciting.
I think it's it allows us to engage in the creative impulse of this Earth.
PAUL: Right.
It's a creative process, too.
I mean, and it's part of an evolutionary process which is kind of creative.
DAVID: Yeah.
And it seems to be what we do as human beings.
PAUL: Right.
DAVID: You know, we've never accepted the world as it was given to us.
PAUL: We've done everything else, and now it's going to be us that we have to actually alter.
DAVID: It has to be us.
PAUL: I have to say I was surprised by how positive David is about our relationship with technology.
It was nice to hear.
David's ideas about biology as technology got me thinking differently about the interface between humans and machines.
I mean, if we are machines, as David suggests, then won't our ultimate transformation come when we can retool our very bodies from deep inside at a biological kind of organic level? Now, is this even possible? about biology as technology, I'm going to visit George Church at the Harvard Medical School.
George was one of the key scientists involved in sequencing the human genome.
Now, he's making breakthroughs that will soon let us rewrite it.
GEORGE CHURCH: The New York World's Fair in '64-ish, they had a vision of the future that they completely instantiated, and you could walk through it, and they, you could, like, draw on a little pad a picture, and then it would print out a fabric that was a repeating motif of the picture.
PAUL: Really? Awesome! GEORGE: You could do that.
PAUL: Why don't we have that now? GEORGE: Exactly, and they had people with, like, rocket thrusters or something.
PAUL: Absolutely, jet packs.
GEORGE: And in fact, since the future didn't arrive, I had seen it, I always felt like it should have arrived.
And so I spent, you know, a fair amount of my enthusiasm trying to recreate the lost world, you know, of New York in '64.
And so my lab kind of pushes the envelope in trying to recreate the parts of science fiction we think we can tackle.
PAUL: George is among an elite group of scientists working with CRISPR, a breakthrough technology for editing our genetic code.
With CRISPR, these scientists may one day make it possible for us to radically transform ourselves biologically.
GEORGE: You might be able to change the brain in such a way that it interfaces better with, with other brains, with other backup devices, you know.
PAUL: So you could connect brain to brain, you're saying? GEORGE: Brain to brain.
Yeah.
PAUL: Brain to brain, and then have sort of five people connected brain-wise.
GEORGE: Or you might fit the entire Internet onto DNA and then put the DNA into your brain and have an input-output device.
So you're literally carrying around the whole Internet in your head.
I mean, this is very speculative PAUL: All of Shakespeare in my head, potentially.
GEORGE: All of everything in your head.
PAUL: I'm just talking about Shakespeare.
CRISPR is a naturally occurring enzyme that scientists can reprogram and inject into our cells.
It will find one of over 20,000 genes and cut it out.
It can also add a new one if you wanted to.
As George explained it to me, it's kind of like a microscopic, programmable, organic nano robot.
GEORGE: And so the CRISPR has the sensor, which is this little piece of RNA you programmed into it, that tries, keeps trying and trying until it gets a hit.
And then it has a computer that says, is that a good enough match? And then it has an actuator, which is a knife that comes down, you know, and machete the DNA.
So it really is a little robot.
PAUL: It is a little robot.
GEORGE: It's the three basic components-- a sensor, computing, and an actuator.
PAUL: Fascinating.
GEORGE: So that one's a naturally occurring robot, we hardly changed it, we've made it a little more precise.
PAUL: It's a naturally occurring robot, in other words GEORGE: So it's a machine that we got out of bacteria.
It was discovered in 1987 as just some kind of stuff in the genome that looked like junk.
And then as you study it more and more, you realize, this isn't junk, this is like, the greatest gift ever, you know? It's like, it's like a, you know, like, alien race dumped their lander in your backyard, and you just go in there, and you're kind of rooting around for cool stuff, and here's CRISPR.
PAUL: And we have these things, they're found elsewhere in nature, they're not found in us, are they? You're putting them in us? GEORGE: They are now! PAUL: Right, exactly, so that's the kind of cybernetic thing you're doing to us, you're putting but they're naturally occurring robots.
GEORGE: When we put a knife in our hands, that's augmentation, but it's blunt.
But if we can change every atom, and we get better and better at knowing how to do that intelligently, then that really starts becoming limitless.
PAUL: Limitless.
That sounds exciting, but it's also kind of scary.
Shouldn't we just let nature manage evolution like it always has? Did we reach a point where we can't really evolve anymore and this is what makes us evolve more? Or is it a part of, is it a part of the process of evolution? Is it just a part of, this is just on a continuum of what is to be a human being? GEORGE: There's no question we're still evolving.
Both our DNA is evolving and our culture is evolving, and now our culture is starting to affect our DNA.
So they're all intertwined.
PAUL: Right, yeah.
GEORGE: And you know, whether we're, you know, whether we're augmented because of our cell phones and our cars, whether those are more or less heritable than our DNA, you know, it's like the fact is each generation inherits all this physics baggage along with the biology baggage.
PAUL: Right, yeah.
GEORGE: And it just gets more complicated, more interconnected as we go forward, but I think evolution is alive and well.
PAUL: If you just left us alone, would we, like, develop wings and stuff like that eventually? I mean, if you just left us alone.
GEORGE: 'Us' is this cultural animal.
We are leaving.
We are being left alone as far as we know.
PAUL: Right.
Doing some research on my electronic digital brain extension, also known as the Internet, I discovered the term cyborg was coined in a 1960s scientific paper.
It describes changes to our bodies that will adapt us for living in outer space.
And whether it's a hardened shell-like skin to resist radioactivity, or new kinds of bones to survive in prolonged low-gravity, George thinks genetic engineering will finally allow us to realize these ideas from over 50 years ago.
In fact, George thinks the ultimate survival of our species may very well depend on it.
GEORGE: If we construct a Noah's Ark and get a bunch of us and other species out of the Earth, then that's the ultimate in Darwinian success.
PAUL: How so? GEORGE: If an asteroid hits the planet and completely vaporizes us, so not even a bacteria lives PAUL: Uh-huh.
GEORGE: That's a fail.
That's a Darwinian fail, okay? PAUL: Yeah, yeah.
GEORGE: And if one organism has his act together enough to escape that, that's a gigantic Darwinian success, because the real thing is being ready for the unexpected.
PAUL: I left George thinking a lot about evolution.
It seems we transform ourselves and everything around us in order to survive as a species.
That we've been extending and augmenting ourselves ever since we fashioned our first rudimentary tools.
We have evolved with technology and will continue to do so.
It's inseparable from us.
So we really are natural-born cyborgs.
We always have been and always will be.
Of course, I still believe that science and technology can be used in wrong ways and can lead to our dehumanization, but it can also be used in right ways to help us survive and prosper.
Now, the most comforting thing to have learned doing this show is that there are scientists like the ones I met with that will be playing such an important role in how we will evolve into the future.
They're not only brilliant scientists, they are imaginative, creative and deep-thinking people.
They seemed to think a lot about what it is that makes us human, and what will someday make us more than human.
And when I look at the world around me, I wonder What is this technology we have? What are we doing with it? What is it doing to us? Is it changing us? Where is humanity heading with this stuff? As our technology has gotten more and more sophisticated, it seems like it's come to dominate every part of our lives.
About the only place it has yet to fully invade is our actual bodies.
But maybe that's all about to change.
I'm told that there are scientists out there developing cyborgs.
A cyborg is a kind of hybrid of man and machine.
It's supposed to be an enhanced human being.
A better, stronger, improved version of us.
More than human.
Now, when I was asked to participate in a documentary about cyborgs, I was intrigued.
I couldn't say no.
It's very cool stuff, but it also scares me.
I confess, at bottom, I have a pessimistic, dystopian view of this kind of thing.
Won't it completely dehumanize us? This view is shaped by all the science fiction I read growing up.
I read a lot of it.
I still read it.
So I'm visiting my local science fiction bookstore to do some research.
Well, okay, that's a little tongue and cheek.
I'm not a total dummy, but there is a little science in science fiction, and why not start with what you know when you're about to find out a whole lot about what you don't know? Cici James, the owner of the bookstore, helped me in my search for books on cyborgs.
CICI JAMES: By the 23rd century, humans are extinct, but their self-aware robots carry on building a vast civilization.
Designed as an empathetic sex slave, human-sized Freya is a free woman, but that doesn't stop her smaller high-ranking cousins.
PAUL: This sounds great.
CICI: It's actually really good.
PAUL: Is it? Okay.
Is this guy good? CICI: There's a lot of sex.
PAUL: Awesome.
CICI: Yeah, he's great.
And this is actually based on a book by Robert Heinlein called 'Friday.
' PAUL: Ahh.
Yeah, I remember that book.
CICI: About kind of like a semi-cyborg sex assassin.
PAUL: Yeah, wait a minute.
That's one.
CICI: That's great.
I'll find that.
PAUL: Cyborg sex assassin.
That's what we should retitle, that's what we should retitle this show.
In fact that's gonna be, that's gonna be my memoir title.
CICI: That's on my business card.
PAUL: Oh, is it? CICI: There are things that early adapter body modification people are interested in, where they're actually implanting PAUL: Wait, what [stuttering.]
Early adapter body modification people? CICI: Yes.
PAUL: So these are people who have, like, I'm gonna put, like, uh CICI: They're doing weird things to themselves.
PAUL: Have horns and stuff like that? CICI: Right now.
Like that.
But they're actually, um, they're people who are putting magnets in the tips of their fingers so that they can feel electromagnetic fields around them, uh, or PAUL: For the purposes of, like, extra-sensory perception.
CICI: Exactly.
PAUL: It always seemed so easy and seamless making cyborgs in science fiction books.
You just add metal arms and metal legs and infrared eyes and voilà ! But all this stuff is really quite challenging in reality.
The idea of trying to find mechanical ways to enhance ourselves is nothing new.
This film I came across from the 1960s shows one idea that was way ahead of its time.
ANNOUNCER: The story of science, changing man's way of life in our time.
At the General Electric Company's research and development center near Schenectady, New York, where anything that man or child might imagine is not considered impossible, one may witness a scientific endeavor to convert a man's legs into those of a giant.
Inside this mechanical skeleton, a human being endows it with the intelligence of his own brain.
PAUL: The exoskeleton in this GE film may have given us a look into the future.
I heard about a new device that sounds just like it.
So I flew down to Perry, Georgia, to see it in action.
It all went down at a place called the Guardian Center.
A huge installation where they train first responders for earthquakes, terrorist situations.
They even have their own subway tunnel with an exploded train.
It's the perfect place to see the FORTIS exoskeleton.
Designed by a team of engineers at Lockheed Martin, FORTIS is an aluminum and carbon fiber frame exoskeleton with two mechanical arms designed to give tools a zero-gravity, weightless feel, and lets workers in a variety of industries wield heavy tools for hours on end.
The lady wielding this tool is Trish Aelker.
She is the head of the FORTIS design team.
TRISH AELKER: It's very lightweight.
It's very easy to put on.
It's very adjustable to adjust from Keith's body type to my body size.
PAUL: Right, so it's one size will generally fit all.
After the Guardian guys get our test vehicle positioned, they'll deliver a tailor-made emergency situation.
Very exciting.
Have we taken bets on what's going to get destroyed besides the car? TRISH: Here we go.
PAUL: Oh! PAUL: Oh! This will be the first time the FORTIS is being used in a first-responder situation.
It's also the first time it's being used with the Jaws of Life, a 35-pound tool used to pry open the doors of crashed cars.
PAUL: Awesome! TRISH: Let's step back.
PAUL: Holy cow! Awesome.
Nicely done, Keith.
KEITH: That's how they work.
PAUL: It may look simple, but making an exoskeleton that's a help and not a hindrance is a deceptively difficult engineering task.
That it's designed to adjust and fit any sized person only makes it more so.
TRISH: Anthropometry is the measurements of the human body.
Everybody's anthropometry is different.
Your knee may be higher or shorter than mine, you know.
Your thigh is longer or shorter.
PAUL: Everything is going to be unique.
TRISH: No two people are the same.
And so that's why this system has to be so adjustable.
It has to be able to accommodate all those different anthropometries.
PAUL: I guess creating an interface between man and machine is what cyborgs are all about.
And I'm beginning to understand that it may be the hardest problem in turning us into next generation humans.
I heard about a somewhat different exoskeleton in São Paulo, Brazil, that not only interfaces with the body, but also with the user's brain.
That sounds like something I need to see.
I'm on my way to meet a brilliant gentleman, neuroscientist Miguel Nicolelis.
In an experiment with a rhesus monkey named Aurora, Miguel created one of the earliest direct interfaces between a machine and a brain.
MIGUEL NICOLELIS: Aurora was playing a game with a joystick, and she had to move a cursor on the computer screen to put the cursor inside of a target to get a drop of juice, fruit juice.
PAUL: It's like being an actor, by the way.
It sounds a lot like [laughing.]
MIGUEL: She was doing this, and we were recording the brain activity, and we started in two dimensions, and then we did 3D.
And we saw that we could read the electrical patterns, sent to the models and the output in digital form could be sent to the robotic arm that was in another room and the robotic arm was doing, reproducing the movements that Aurora was making.
PAUL: Miguel discovered how to read the motor commands from a monkey's brain and have them control the movement of a robotic arm.
This was one of the first brain-machine interfaces.
The experiment got even more amazing when Miguel took the joystick away from the monkey.
MIGUEL: To get the cursor to move to the target, she had to imagine the movement, but not perform them, because she had no joystick.
PAUL: Did she want to keep doing that for a while? MIGUEL: Oh, in the beginning she tried, she tried, but there was nothing.
And being a smart monkey, she realized, what in heavens I'm doing? Why I'm moving? There's no connection, there's no causal linkage.
PAUL: Yeah.
MIGUEL: So she stopped moving, in front of us, she just did this, she stopped moving and the cursor start going.
PAUL: She knew enough to guide it now just visually.
MIGUEL: Trial and error, she realized that there was no point in wasting energy moving her own body, she had a much better way to get the juice.
That was the first time that the brain had crossed the physical limits of the body to act on the world beyond, you know, the body.
PAUL: This body.
Yeah.
MIGUEL: By itself.
PAUL: So this kind of stuff leads to the exoskeleton that you built.
MIGUEL: It was at that moment that we realized that it could be done.
PAUL: Heading an international team of over 150 scientists, engineers and medical doctors, Miguel is developing an amazing exoskeleton that the user can control just using thoughts.
The brain-machine interface works through a non-invasive EEG skullcap.
MIGUEL: When the patients started using the exo, we noticed that in the beginning it's very difficult, because they have lost the representation of their legs.
So when I asked them, think about walking, they said, 'Okay, I'm trying.
' But we look at their brain activity, you see nothing.
PAUL: Right, because MIGUEL: Because after 13 years without moving PAUL: There's no MIGUEL: Your brain has forgotten that you one day had legs.
You dream about it, you may have feelings about it.
But the representation of your legs in your brain has shrunk.
PAUL: Solaiman Shokur, a senior research scientist at Miguel's lab, designed an ingenious virtual reality feedback system to help restore the experience of walking to the patients' brains.
SOLAIMAN SHOKUR: They are a very simple, actually, system, they are simple vibrators the same way that you have in your cell phone.
PAUL: Okay.
SOLAIMAN: And there's a trick that we can play by changing the frequency of these vibrators, and at some point you will not feel three vibrators anymore, but you feel one continuous touch.
PAUL: The vibrators he straps on my arms produce a sensation that are synchronized with the legs and footsteps of a virtual soccer player.
When Solaiman starts up the program, I start to feel the vibrators on my arm synchronized with each step of the avatar.
Definitely gives me this sense of forward motion, each step it's a move forward.
Miguel figured out a way to incorporate a similar feedback system into the exo-suit itself.
When the robotic suit starts to move and touches the ground, signals are transmitted from sensors on the feet to an electronic vibration device on the patient's arm.
MIGUEL: 15 years ago when we discovered that this could be done directly, we said okay.
Brain-machine interfaces will provide a new rehab tool to make you walk again, move your arms again, and that's it.
Well, what we realized now in all our patients is that there's a plateau above that, and that is they're recovering neurological function by doing that.
PAUL: You're kidding me.
MIGUEL: Just by practicing.
PAUL: So it's like it's literally regrowing those areas of the brain.
MIGUEL: The plasticity that we're inducing in the brain somehow is getting down, and the patients are now contracting groups of muscles below the level, that leads you to a point that one of them is actually moving the legs voluntarily now.
ladcovik, a former soccer player, who many years ago lost the use of his legs in an accident.
Eric is the first paraplegic to walk again with the help of the exo-suit.
MIGUEL: When he imagined he starting walking, he modulated his EG signal, the machine detected that and triggered the movement.
PAUL: That's amazing.
MIGUEL: And then when the feedback came, he had the feeling.
PAUL: You could feel it? MIGUEL: Yeah.
ERIC VLADCOVIK: Feedback.
PAUL: Yeah, right, yeah.
Feedback.
[speaking Portuguese.]
MIGUEL: When your sense of self expands to incorporate a device like this, that has feedback and everything, you are actually changing what the brain thinks is the body.
PAUL: Right.
MIGUEL: That's number one.
PAUL: Yeah.
MIGUEL: You're actually helping the patient to gain mobility, but you are changing, you're reorganizing the connectivity.
PAUL: It's the ultimate cybernetic thing in some degree, that you're, you're MIGUEL: You're creating a hybrid.
I came back to biking late in life.
In the beginning it was kind of strange, but in a few weeks I felt the feeling that you feel as a kid.
You know? The bike is part of you.
What is your body at that point? PAUL: Right.
MIGUEL: Where it ends, for me, at that point, my body ends at the surface of the tire touching the ground.
PAUL: Yeah.
So our brain incorporates the tools and technologies we use every day.
The things we ride on, the tools we work with.
All of the technology we use is almost literally an extension of us.
MIGUEL: So I have a very different concept of cyborg or hybrids or trans-human movement.
PAUL: Yes, yeah.
MIGUEL: We, of course, need to embrace technology like we embrace art, because it comes from our brain.
It's a manifestation of the inner works of our imagination.
PAUL: Yeah.
MIGUEL: Of our biology.
Yet I don't want to reduce human, the human condition to a piece of machinery, because it's not.
What would be of our existence if we remove all that is abstraction, intuition and creativity, and leave only the devices we built? PAUL: On my way out of Brazil, I was really thinking about my brain.
This idea that the brain incorporates the technologies we use and makes them a part of us is fascinating.
If it's true, then what's the difference between a person holding a hammer and a person with a hammer hand? That Miguel has figured out how to hardwire machines directly to our brains is amazing.
With that figured out, creating a man-machine seems utterly plausible.
So it excited me to learn about a scientist in Houston, Texas, who is working on a different way to connect our brains to technology.
I'm walking down this endless corridor at Baylor College of Medicine to eventually meet up with David Eagleman.
David is a neuroscientist noted for his work on time perception, synesthesia, and neuro law.
DAVID EAGLEMAN: For a long time I've been thinking about how flexible the brain is and how it takes in these different sensory streams and figures out just what to do with them.
And when I started looking across the Animal Kingdom, I thought there are really different sensors that get popped on to different animals.
Like the star-nosed mole has this nose with 22 little appendages, and it feels around and sort of makes, in these dark tunnels, it sort of makes a 3D view of its world.
PAUL: And they're like their fingers on its face.
DAVID: So the more and more I looked across the Animal Kingdom, I thought what if all these things are really just plug-and-play devices, and Mother Nature just had to come up with the principles of brain operation once, and then she was free to tinker around with what you plug in? PAUL: Mm-hmm.
DAVID: So I've called this the Potato Head theory.
And the idea is you can just plug stuff in just like the child's toy.
You plug in whatever you want.
And the brain will figure out what to do with it.
So I started taking that idea really seriously.
And I thought what could we start plugging in to the brain, and that's the origin of this VEST that we came up with.
The VEST stands for the Variable Extra Sensory Transducer.
And it's a vest.
PAUL: Works out perfectly.
[laughing.]
Perfect, it never happens like that with acronyms! Okay.
Yes.
DAVID: So you wear it underneath the clothing, and what we do is capture information on a cell phone, and we transmit via Bluetooth to the VEST.
We've got this remarkable sensory sheet that we're covered with.
Your skin is the largest organ in your body.
And we can feed any kind of information stream to the brain this way.
So it's like an adapter between the human brain and whatever we want to feed in.
PAUL: A smart phone converts sound to data and then transfers it to the VEST via Bluetooth.
40 little motors vibrate patterns into the wearer's back, creating a kind of soundtrack of the immediate surroundings.
With training, it allows the deaf person to feel sound.
Similar to the way that Braille converts the visual code of written text into a code of tactile sensation.
But that's all theory.
Will it really work? with one of his PhD students, Scott Novich.
When Scott conducts a training session with Jonathan Leech, I get to really see the VEST in action.
Jonathan has been profoundly deaf since birth.
SCOTT: Right, right.
To, to.
To.
Ear, ear.
Touch.
TRANSLATOR: It's almost like a localized area massage.
[laughs.]
PAUL: That's nice.
And, and it's kind of moving up and down the spine? TRANSLATOR: Well, it's like you have 10 phones on your back.
All located around the back, and you could feel the phone ringing, all the phones were ringing at the same time.
PAUL: Oh, really? TRANSLATOR: I can hear everything.
Whatever is going into that tablet, that microphone, it's getting.
If someone drops something, or if something's happening out in the environment, I can feel it.
PAUL: So what happens now? SCOTT: Well, now we can turn it on.
PAUL: Mm-hmm.
SCOTT: So PAUL: Whoa! PAUL: It's strong! SCOTT: It's pretty strong.
PAUL: What's it registering off of? Are you just, like, kind of or is it me speaking? SCOTT: It's you speaking.
PAUL: Oh, that's me talking that's doing this.
SCOTT: Yep.
Yep, so, um, I mean, the way this generally works is PAUL: Wow.
SCOTT: Sound is being picked up from the environment by the tablet's microphone.
The tablet's actually taking care of all the mathematical computation to get the signal into sort of a suitable shape such that that information will get through your touch receptors in your back.
PAUL: I thought it was gonna be lesskind of intense! Wow, that's wild.
SCOTT: If you have two people come up to you and say the same word, um, like cat.
PAUL: Yeah.
SCOTT: It will feel very similar, but it will still be distinctly different.
PAUL: It's, it's a bit more of that global sense rather than the, than the thing you were talking about before.
It's kind of like you're getting more of the gestalt of the word.
Can I use gestalt? SCOTT: I think so, you'll have to run that one by David, but I think you got it.
PAUL: But I mean, you're getting more of the kind of that round sense of the thing rather than this kind of And I can, you can feel that, actually.
It doesn't feel like Morse code, it doesn't, it didn't feel like the same thing every time.
DAVID: This way, we're starting by feeding in sound information that we capture on the fly, compress, send to the VEST, so that people can hear the world through patterns of vibration on their torso.
But that's just step one.
That's, that's sensory substitution.
But what really interests me is sensory addition.
PAUL: David is thinking of feeding all sorts of real-time information through the VES and into our brains.
Things like stock market data and weather data.
DAVID: One thing we've done just as a proof of principle is instead of the Spidey sense, I call it the Tweety sense, which is we collect thousands of tweets on some particular hashtag and then feed it into the VEST, a sentiment analysis, meaning we're just doing quick language processing on it to decide whether people are saying positive or negative things about it.
You can just walk around and feel how that's going.
[laughing.]
PAUL: Oh, man! Now I question whether this is going to be a pleasant experience for people.
DAVID: Well, the thing is it's probably, it probably wouldn't be for almost anybody, except for, you can imagine if you were, let's say, a presidential candidate doing a live speech, you might want to know how things are going over.
And Twitter is giving you that feedback immediately.
So you're plugged into the consciousness of thousands of people, maybe hundreds of thousands of people all at once hearing your speech, and you can say, ooh, that didn't go over so well.
PAUL: Holy cow! DAVID: You're feeling the Twittersphere.
PAUL: You must have to deal with a lot of people saying, but hang on, this is, like, crazy, you know, this is, you're gonna make us not human anymore.
This is, we don't need to be doing this.
Isn't there already, isn't it already bad enough with all the stuff we're getting through our phones, aren't we robotic? Aren't we cyborged enough? DAVID: Well, let's define what we mean by human.
I mean, what would it mean to be human? PAUL: In the first place.
DAVID: So we're already way past that, right? I mean, we are no longer a natural species, and we are, we're a species that's in this feedback loop.
We're a runaway brain.
You know, we're on a trajectory.
Actually, let me take that statement back.
Let me, let me cast it a different way.
PAUL: No, no, yeah.
DAVID: It's that this, this is our evolutionary trajectory.
This is all part of, of what's, what's happening.
PAUL: Yeah.
DAVID: And so what it means to be human is a rapidly changing definition.
PAUL: So there's this sense that it's It's not even just has to happen, it's just going to happen.
DAVID: Exactly.
PAUL: Yeah, and so DAVID: It's what's happening.
PAUL: It is, it is what's happening.
DAVID: Yeah.
PAUL: I wonder if our attachment to technology is hardwired into us in some way.
Are we just bound to turn ourselves into machines? Wow, maybe we aren't turning ourselves into machines.
Maybe we already are machines.
And if that's true then all these technological gadgets we produce are simply our offspring.
Heading for the airport, I can't stop thinking about the plasticity of our brains.
If they really are nothing more than a piece of electric meat in a black box, then replacing our entire body with plastic and metal parts shouldn't really change our nature.
Right? But what about the body? The particular physical form we're born with.
Doesn't it have something to do with who we are as human beings? I'm visiting Stockholm, Sweden.
I'm very excited to soon meet an imaginative young neuroscientist named Henrik Ehrsson at the Karolinska Institute.
Henrik is trying to understand how the brain decides where our bodies end and where the rest of the world begins.
His research is leading to new and improved ways to extend ourselves with technology.
HENRIK EHRSSON: Well, there's a lot of interest in the robotics community, how can we extend the human body, not only for the advanced prosthetic limbs for amputees, but maybe for exoskeletons.
And then of course the question is at what point do these external devices become part of your own body representation? At what point do you start to feel that this is really me? PAUL: Sitting in the lab with Henrik and Andreas, one of Henrik's post docs, I'm about to be put through the rubber hand experiment.
ANDREAS: And then put your arm here onto the table and inside this little box here.
PAUL: Okay.
ANDREAS: Cover your right side here.
PAUL: Okay.
ANDREAS: So what I will do now, I will touch your index finger with the brush here, and please look to the hand, to the index finger of the hand here.
PAUL: Okay.
And with my hand hidden from view, Andreas starts to stroke my index finger and the index finger of the rubber hand in almost perfect synchrony.
HENRIK: What do you experience? PAUL: I think it's generally beginning to become hard to tell whether ityeah.
I mean, it's beginning to feel like, yeah.
Yeah, I'm buying it that you're rubbing, that you're swiping that hand.
Part of my brain is telling me that it's not possible that that's happening, you know? And then when you're not touching it, I go, no, not happening, and then you touch it.
And I'm like, yeah, I'm feeling it there.
It's totally now, just, it doesn't even, there's no question that that's my hand, that that's what you're touching.
ANDREAS: Alright.
HENRIK: That's the first experiment.
PAUL: That's crazy.
That's super crazy.
And when they connect my finger with the rubber hand's finger and introduce movement to the experiment, well, now the illusion gets totally surreal.
Oh, my God.
That's mythat's crazy.
That's really weird.
Oh, man, that's nuts.
There was a real moment where it suddenly switched, I was like, no, this isn't working.
And then suddenly, now it's just, again, the more I'm doing it ANDREAS: That's the thing, now I'm not doing anything.
That was you doing this.
PAUL: That's crazy.
I'm doing this.
ANDREAS: You move it.
PAUL: That's crazy! And it only gets more so as it goes on.
HENRIK: New hand.
Artificial hand.
PAUL: That's amazing! ANDREAS: You can touch it.
PAUL: Wow, if they can add a rubber hand to my body that easily, I can only imagine what they could do with a little more effort and planning.
The idea of integrating into a prosthetic limb, what is going to give you that real sense of ownership of your arm, what kicks in then that does that? HENRIK: Well, in your experiment, where we stroke the finger PAUL: Yeah.
HENRIK: And then you saw the model hand moving or being stroked in the same place at the same time.
PAUL: Yeah.
HENRIK: And that was enough for the brain to sort of put together your vision information with the information from touch and proprioception, right? PAUL: Yeah.
HENRIK: And suddenly, your brain just accepted the model hand as being my hand.
PAUL: That was the most bizarre part of it was where it felt like it joined.
Literally the muscles and nerves and tendons and everything were joined.
HENRIK: One of the findings is really how the perception of our body, our physical self, can change just like that.
PAUL: Mm-hmm.
HENRIK: In a few seconds.
PAUL: Mm-hmm.
HENRIK: And really that it's really about how the brain interprets the information from the different sensory modalities and comes up with sort of a decision or conclusion, which can be quite different from the actual physical state of your body.
PAUL: After the hand experiment, I'm ushered back into Henrik's mad chamber of cyber-psychology.
There we do an even nuttier experiment, in which another suave European scientist named Bjorn straps me into a set of virtual reality goggles.
The goggles give me the view of the body of a small doll, lying on the bed next to me.
Stroking me and the doll in a precisely synchronous way, the weirdness begins.
Now, this is really odd.
This is super weird.
[chuckles.]
BJORN: What do you feel? PAUL: It's very peculiar.
It's like, it's really being a child.
It's like a baby.
It's really strange.
HENRIK: Hello, how are we doing in there, Paul? PAUL: Yeah, very good, very good.
HENRIK: You're meeting a giant.
PAUL: Yeah.
Once I was in the doll's body, my perspective of the world changed.
Suddenly everything seems bigger.
How's that? HENRIK: It's about twice as big as PAUL: Really? HENRIK: Yeah.
PAUL: My brain is really fooled into thinking I'm a small doll.
The knife looks huge.
Ahh, oh! That was really disturbing.
How small a doll have you used? I mean, how tiny can you do it and it still sort of works? I mean, is there a point at which it's just too small? You can't just use some HENRIK: We don't think so, as long as the body is proportional, we would predict that the illusion works very well.
PAUL: Oh, that's interesting.
HENRIK: We tried with bodies that are like, you know, 20 centimeters, 30 centimeters.
PAUL: Uh-huh, and it's worked? HENRIK: It works very well.
PAUL: As long as it's proportional.
HENRIK: As long as the body's proportional.
PAUL: So you can't have some crazy thing with crazy clown feet.
HENRIK: No.
PAUL: That won't work.
HENRIK: That won't work.
If the body plan is completely different from a humanoid body shape, it will not work.
PAUL: Oh, it won't work.
HENRIK: There's some memory representation, there's some constraints.
The brain knows roughly what a human body should look like.
PAUL: Ahh.
HENRIK: It will not accept, like, a table, or a block of wood or a crazy lobster or something like that.
PAUL: It won't do that! So you can't put me into a but you could put me into a bipedal thing.
You couldn't put me in, like, ape legs.
HENRIK: We probably could put you in an ape.
We haven't tried the ape, the orangutan, you know.
PAUL: That could work.
Doing these experiments with Henrik really made me feel what I had learned intellectually with Miguel and David.
The idea of fully inhabiting an exoskeleton or even the body of a computer-generated avatar feels much more possible to me now.
PAUL: When I got back from Sweden, my head was really spinning with all these new ideas.
I needed to debrief for a second.
Maybe with a colleague, a buddy, not a scientist.
So I told my friend, the director David Cronenberg, what I'd been doing.
He was very excited and wanted to talk to me about this cyborg stuff.
I am going to meet him at a local diner in Toronto for a coffee.
In films like 'Videodrome,' 'The Fly,' and 'eXistenZ,' he deeply explores the merging of man and machine.
And not unlike the scientists I had been talking to, David has spent his career using his creativity and imagination to make new discoveries.
DAVID CRONENBERG: Okay, well, look.
We're both wearing glasses, right? PAUL: Uh-huh.
DAVID: This is a machine-human interface.
PAUL: Mm-hmm.
DAVID: I got hearing aids.
Look at this.
This is a little computer.
It has, has the computing power that is about a thousand times more than what the first moon shot had.
Believe it or not.
PAUL: Really? DAVID: Yes.
DAVID: Plus, my two hearing aids communicate through my head using Bluetooth.
So talk about machine interface.
I'm, I'm there.
I'm a bot.
You know, like, I'm bionic.
PAUL: All of this stuff is just compensating.
But all of this stuff is actually making us now extended beyond all this stuff.
DAVID: Well, it is.
I mean, I think the Internet has made us already more than human.
You know, I mean, I'm sure it has resulted in changes in the neurology of our brains, literally.
I think the unique thing about some of the stuff I came up with was that it was organic.
As in 'eXistenZ,' for example, you have these game pods, but they're fleshy.
And they look like livers or something.
And the cords are called 'umbi-cords,' and they're umbilical, and they plug into your spine.
That was my instinct, you know, that that was where technology should take us or would take us in terms of how we interface our bodies with these.
PAUL: They would become one thing.
DAVID: Yeah, but it would be organic, not mechanical.
If you look at what's going on in our bodies, all the time constantly, it's little machines.
Like, they're little things with little propellers, and they're little tubules and little things that are climbing up the tubules.
PAUL: Snipping things.
DAVID: And then they're snipping and repairing.
So the kind of machinery that interests me, in terms of enhancing us, is really on the cellular level.
We have a world of creatures that have evolved over millions of years.
For example, I was thinking about the electric eel where almost two-thirds of his body is a battery.
PAUL: Mm-hmm.
DAVID: We could have that.
Because, you know, the earth, nature, evolution has already evolved that, has shown us that you can have a totally organic device that stores electrical energy and can release it on demand.
There was a lot of sci-fi that said technology is inhuman, non-human, anti-human.
PAUL: Right.
DAVID: And I always said, that can't be.
It's totally human.
PAUL: Right.
DAVID: It comes from us.
PAUL: It's us.
DAVID: It's an expression of us.
So it mirrors exactly what we are, that is to say, great stuff, brilliant stuff, beautiful stuff, and hideous, hideous, destructive stuff as well.
PAUL: But you, in your movies a lot of the time, it seems, it's cool, because you seem very optimistic about it, whereas in your movies it's very pessimistic.
DAVID: My own personal view is quite positive.
PAUL: Yeah.
DAVID: Yeah, yeah, I mean, I think it's exciting.
I think it's it allows us to engage in the creative impulse of this Earth.
PAUL: Right.
It's a creative process, too.
I mean, and it's part of an evolutionary process which is kind of creative.
DAVID: Yeah.
And it seems to be what we do as human beings.
PAUL: Right.
DAVID: You know, we've never accepted the world as it was given to us.
PAUL: We've done everything else, and now it's going to be us that we have to actually alter.
DAVID: It has to be us.
PAUL: I have to say I was surprised by how positive David is about our relationship with technology.
It was nice to hear.
David's ideas about biology as technology got me thinking differently about the interface between humans and machines.
I mean, if we are machines, as David suggests, then won't our ultimate transformation come when we can retool our very bodies from deep inside at a biological kind of organic level? Now, is this even possible? about biology as technology, I'm going to visit George Church at the Harvard Medical School.
George was one of the key scientists involved in sequencing the human genome.
Now, he's making breakthroughs that will soon let us rewrite it.
GEORGE CHURCH: The New York World's Fair in '64-ish, they had a vision of the future that they completely instantiated, and you could walk through it, and they, you could, like, draw on a little pad a picture, and then it would print out a fabric that was a repeating motif of the picture.
PAUL: Really? Awesome! GEORGE: You could do that.
PAUL: Why don't we have that now? GEORGE: Exactly, and they had people with, like, rocket thrusters or something.
PAUL: Absolutely, jet packs.
GEORGE: And in fact, since the future didn't arrive, I had seen it, I always felt like it should have arrived.
And so I spent, you know, a fair amount of my enthusiasm trying to recreate the lost world, you know, of New York in '64.
And so my lab kind of pushes the envelope in trying to recreate the parts of science fiction we think we can tackle.
PAUL: George is among an elite group of scientists working with CRISPR, a breakthrough technology for editing our genetic code.
With CRISPR, these scientists may one day make it possible for us to radically transform ourselves biologically.
GEORGE: You might be able to change the brain in such a way that it interfaces better with, with other brains, with other backup devices, you know.
PAUL: So you could connect brain to brain, you're saying? GEORGE: Brain to brain.
Yeah.
PAUL: Brain to brain, and then have sort of five people connected brain-wise.
GEORGE: Or you might fit the entire Internet onto DNA and then put the DNA into your brain and have an input-output device.
So you're literally carrying around the whole Internet in your head.
I mean, this is very speculative PAUL: All of Shakespeare in my head, potentially.
GEORGE: All of everything in your head.
PAUL: I'm just talking about Shakespeare.
CRISPR is a naturally occurring enzyme that scientists can reprogram and inject into our cells.
It will find one of over 20,000 genes and cut it out.
It can also add a new one if you wanted to.
As George explained it to me, it's kind of like a microscopic, programmable, organic nano robot.
GEORGE: And so the CRISPR has the sensor, which is this little piece of RNA you programmed into it, that tries, keeps trying and trying until it gets a hit.
And then it has a computer that says, is that a good enough match? And then it has an actuator, which is a knife that comes down, you know, and machete the DNA.
So it really is a little robot.
PAUL: It is a little robot.
GEORGE: It's the three basic components-- a sensor, computing, and an actuator.
PAUL: Fascinating.
GEORGE: So that one's a naturally occurring robot, we hardly changed it, we've made it a little more precise.
PAUL: It's a naturally occurring robot, in other words GEORGE: So it's a machine that we got out of bacteria.
It was discovered in 1987 as just some kind of stuff in the genome that looked like junk.
And then as you study it more and more, you realize, this isn't junk, this is like, the greatest gift ever, you know? It's like, it's like a, you know, like, alien race dumped their lander in your backyard, and you just go in there, and you're kind of rooting around for cool stuff, and here's CRISPR.
PAUL: And we have these things, they're found elsewhere in nature, they're not found in us, are they? You're putting them in us? GEORGE: They are now! PAUL: Right, exactly, so that's the kind of cybernetic thing you're doing to us, you're putting but they're naturally occurring robots.
GEORGE: When we put a knife in our hands, that's augmentation, but it's blunt.
But if we can change every atom, and we get better and better at knowing how to do that intelligently, then that really starts becoming limitless.
PAUL: Limitless.
That sounds exciting, but it's also kind of scary.
Shouldn't we just let nature manage evolution like it always has? Did we reach a point where we can't really evolve anymore and this is what makes us evolve more? Or is it a part of, is it a part of the process of evolution? Is it just a part of, this is just on a continuum of what is to be a human being? GEORGE: There's no question we're still evolving.
Both our DNA is evolving and our culture is evolving, and now our culture is starting to affect our DNA.
So they're all intertwined.
PAUL: Right, yeah.
GEORGE: And you know, whether we're, you know, whether we're augmented because of our cell phones and our cars, whether those are more or less heritable than our DNA, you know, it's like the fact is each generation inherits all this physics baggage along with the biology baggage.
PAUL: Right, yeah.
GEORGE: And it just gets more complicated, more interconnected as we go forward, but I think evolution is alive and well.
PAUL: If you just left us alone, would we, like, develop wings and stuff like that eventually? I mean, if you just left us alone.
GEORGE: 'Us' is this cultural animal.
We are leaving.
We are being left alone as far as we know.
PAUL: Right.
Doing some research on my electronic digital brain extension, also known as the Internet, I discovered the term cyborg was coined in a 1960s scientific paper.
It describes changes to our bodies that will adapt us for living in outer space.
And whether it's a hardened shell-like skin to resist radioactivity, or new kinds of bones to survive in prolonged low-gravity, George thinks genetic engineering will finally allow us to realize these ideas from over 50 years ago.
In fact, George thinks the ultimate survival of our species may very well depend on it.
GEORGE: If we construct a Noah's Ark and get a bunch of us and other species out of the Earth, then that's the ultimate in Darwinian success.
PAUL: How so? GEORGE: If an asteroid hits the planet and completely vaporizes us, so not even a bacteria lives PAUL: Uh-huh.
GEORGE: That's a fail.
That's a Darwinian fail, okay? PAUL: Yeah, yeah.
GEORGE: And if one organism has his act together enough to escape that, that's a gigantic Darwinian success, because the real thing is being ready for the unexpected.
PAUL: I left George thinking a lot about evolution.
It seems we transform ourselves and everything around us in order to survive as a species.
That we've been extending and augmenting ourselves ever since we fashioned our first rudimentary tools.
We have evolved with technology and will continue to do so.
It's inseparable from us.
So we really are natural-born cyborgs.
We always have been and always will be.
Of course, I still believe that science and technology can be used in wrong ways and can lead to our dehumanization, but it can also be used in right ways to help us survive and prosper.
Now, the most comforting thing to have learned doing this show is that there are scientists like the ones I met with that will be playing such an important role in how we will evolve into the future.
They're not only brilliant scientists, they are imaginative, creative and deep-thinking people.
They seemed to think a lot about what it is that makes us human, and what will someday make us more than human.