VICE (2013) s06e22 Episode Script

1 SHANE SMITH: This week on Vice: hacking the human brain.
DOCTOR: Can you count down from ten? - Ten, nine - (CLICKS) Oh yeah, wait.
Seven MORTON: In order to make the brain work better, first you have to look under the hood and learn how the brain works in the first place.
SMITH: And then, violence is on the rise again in Rio.
ANDERSON: This lamppost alone has taken at least 30 bullets.
That's a hell of a fight, in the middle of an area where dozens of families are living.
(PEDRO PILHA SPEAKING) (THEME MUSIC PLAYING) (CROWD SHOUTING) They're saying that right now, it's time for change.
(SHOUTS INDISTINCTLY) As our understanding of neurology advances, scientists are working to directly implant electronic devices into our brains that promise to help overcome disabilities, rehabilitate injuries, and even enhance mental performance.
Thomas Morton met with some of the field's leading neuroscientists to see what just might be the next evolutionary step for humankind.
(MONITORS CRACKLING) (DRILL WHIRS) (INDISTINCT CHATTER) LIVIA UMEDA: My seizures occur every 14 days or so.
I don't actually know what the seizure itself feels like since I'm unconscious, but prior to having a seizure, it was almost like a hallucination, in which I heard a man's voice saying, "I'm gonna come get you.
" MORTON: Livia Umeda suffers from epilepsy, an electrical disorder in the brain that causes seizures and has afflicted people from Roman emperor Caligula, all the way to Danny Glover.
Livia, however, is about to fight electricity with electricity as her neurosurgeon implants 14 electrodes deep into her brain in order to investigate the part where the seizures originate.
- All right, let's drive to the first site.
- (DRILL WHIRS) MORTON: Her brain surgeon is Stanford neuroscientist Casey Halpern.
In terms of the overall complexity of the brain, how much does neuroscience know? Do you have an estimate the way like astronomers are like, "Oh yeah, there's, like, 98 percent of the galaxy that we don't we just don't know.
" I think it's a reasonable analogy.
- (DRILL WHIRRING) - There's so much we don't know, but what we do know, we know quite well.
You do have to think about brain function as being due to where one part of the brain is connected to the other.
- It's all a big circuit.
- It's all a big circuit.
MORTON: And Livia's brain is now even more of a circuit, which allows Dr.
Halpern's team to map the brain's functions by trying out the different connections.
What we're trying to do now, primarily, is to figure out brain function by inactivating a specific area of the brain by passing electricity through it.
MORTON: By passing an electrical current between two of the electrodes, the doctors can hopefully figure out what the part in-between does or doesn't.
GRABER: All right, RPOA1, two at three.
Did you feel anything unusual with that one? I feel like I was lifted a little bit.
Huh.
Five and six.
When we did that one, it made me feel a little bit nervous.
- GRABER: Really? Okay.
- Uh-huh.
GRABER: I want you to stare right at the dot.
Tell me if anything changes, okay? - Uh-huh.
- What's happening? A rainbow dot showed up in the upper left-hand corner.
Great.
Let's go RPOI67.
Now the sparkles are more just right to the left of the dot.
GRABER: Can you count down from ten? Go.
Ten, nine (SWITCH CLICKS) Oh yeah, wait.
(LAUGHING) Seven, six, five, four GRABER: What happened? - Were you trying to talk? - Uh-huh.
At least, I think I was still trying to go down the numbers.
So, you knew what you wanted to say - Uh-huh.
- but you just couldn't do it? - Uh-huh.
- Okay.
Cyborg.
(CHUCKLES) MORTON: In order to make the brain work better, first you have to look under the hood, and learn how the brain works in the first place.
Unfortunately, human beings are a little squeamish, historically, when it comes to, you know, cracking open your cranial cavity.
So, it's been left to neuroscientists to do their brain research on subjects who are a little more willing.
They're less willing than unable to get away.
Due to some similarities between their brains and humans', Dr.
Halpern and his team have been using mice as their research subjects, trying to map out the neural networks responsible for different sorts of behavior.
We can inform larger leaps in science or translations to medical care, changing the way we treat patients and brain disorders.
At least in the context of an area of interest of mine, which is in trying to control impulses.
MORTON: This experiment's target impulse is binge eating.
HALPERN: We tried to provoke their binge by giving them a high-fat pellet.
- It tastes like butter.
- I swear to God, I thought he was wearing a tiny Burger King crown for a second.
Well, that is the pin on the top of the electrode that we connect the wires to - Yeah.
- so that we can actually stimulate the area of the brain that we know can lead to attenuation of binge eating.
MORTON: Just like plugging in a pair of speakers.
HALPERN: If a mouse or a human is anticipating a food reward, we know that right before that patient gets the food reward, the nucleus accumbens will light up.
You can liken that to alcoholism, about to take a swig.
You can liken that to meeting up with your drug dealer, right before you pay the drug dealer.
And so, if we can target that activity, maybe we can alter that decision by blocking the impulse.
- Go ahead.
- So, need to put it in.
And HALPERN: And then, remotely, we can monitor the brain waves and actually intervene in real time.
MORTON: He's smelling it.
Physically, what's the therapy? It's just a minor shock or - It is definitely not a shock - Sorry.
though I would understand why you would think that.
It is a low-dose delivery of electrical stimulation.
MORTON: He's still eating.
TECH: And the stimulation just got triggered.
MORTON: Whoa.
Okay, yeah.
MORTON: So now, he doesn't wanna eat it.
The binge gets interrupted, so he'll stop binge eating.
But it won't start behaving in a strange, adverse way.
- It doesn't make the mouse freeze or anything like that.
- Or seize, yeah.
It just seems to make the mouse - a little less interested in binge eating.
- Okay.
We have all these episodic conditions, impulses that drive behavior that can be dangerous.
An impulse to binge eat or commit suicide or take advantage of a coworker sexually.
These are impulses that we don't need.
If we can actually control these problems, perhaps, in the most severe of cases, with surgery, um we should be able to have a major impact on our society.
MORTON: While Dr.
Halpern works to reprogram the way mice think in hopes of changing impulsive people's behavior, in Pittsburgh, another team of neuroscientists, led by Dr.
Aaron Batista, has hooked a different animal's brain directly into a computer, using a brain-computer interface, or BCI.
BCI is basically a bunch of electrodes that are surgically implanted into the brain, and then plugged into an outside device.
It's like an adapter for neural to digital information.
BATISTA: So, this is the multi-electrode array.
This little part is what's implanted in the brain.
This has 100 electrodes on it, and this is the part that tunnels out of the skull, onto this connector, and then that's the side that allows us to connect to the neurons.
Yeah.
It's really an amazing technology.
Can you explain the experiment to me? The main focus of the lab is to understand basic sensory-motor control and cognition, because if we're gonna build systems that can restore that, we need to know what the target is.
So, in that spirit, we use a brain-computer interface system to do our basic science research in normal, healthy, intact monkeys.
MORTON: Today's monkey is Earl, one of the six nonhuman primates taking part in Dr.
Batista's experiment.
How similar to human brains are rhesus monkey brains? In terms of rudimentary sensory-motor coordination, the type of stuff we need to understand, they've got what we've got.
(CRACKLING) (MORTON SPEAKS) (BATISTA SPEAKS) (CRACKLING CONTINUES) MORTON: The electrode array in Earl's BCI has been wired to a group of neurons associated with the motor function of his right arm.
All right, everyone ready? (MACHINE CLICKS) MORTON: Earl's limbs have been gently restrained for the course of the experiment, so it's purely his thoughts moving the dot to its target.
(MACHINE CLICKS) MORTON: How do you teach him not to go outside the lines? - BATISTA: Everything we use is positive reinforcement.
- Uh-huh.
So, when he does the test correctly, he'll get a reward.
MORTON: What is his reward? Is it just the clicking sound or ? No, he's getting a liquid reward.
(MACHINE CLICKS) BATISTA: For the monkeys, they have a lot of dexterity, but you're limited by their cognitive understanding - of what we need them to do.
- Right.
So, we're never gonna get a monkey to type out a text message.
However, there's a lot that can be developed here that can facilitate how those devices perform in people.
MORTON: While Earl can't use his BCI to text, back at Stanford, Dr.
Jaimie Henderson has been working with a subject who can not only text with his BCI, he can buy things on Amazon, and leave a review because he is a human being.
HENDERSON: The entire purpose of the type of work that we're doing in the brain-computer interface is to try to get intention out of the brain in order to use it to do something useful in the outside world.
DENNIS DEGRAY: I was a mechanical engineer.
I spent most of my life building machinery.
And, it's always been a joke I love machinery so much, that some day, I would become one.
So, right now, I am just typing with thoughts.
(CLICKING) MORTON: Before he could type with his mind, Dennis DeGray was a volunteer firefighter who became quadriplegic in 2007, after taking a nasty spill.
Dr.
Henderson implanted Dennis' BCI in 2016, and he's been experimenting with it ever since.
Dumb question of all dumb questions: What does it do? It acts, more or less, as a hearing aid, listening to the very basic activities of my brain.
MORTON: Are you thinking of moving the cursor itself, or are you thinking of using a mouse? The visualization I found most comfortable for me - was imagining a pool ball on a table - Mm-hmm.
with my hand on top of the pool ball.
You roll away, it goes up.
You pull back, it goes down.
- Left right, accordingly.
- Like a trackball? DEGRAY: Like the old tabletop video games.
Yeah.
How do you think "click"? Is that, does it - I imagine snapping the fingers on my left hand.
- Okay.
And so, it's a nice, abrupt movement, and the system can pick it up out of the rest of the background noise, very clearly, though.
MORTON: How do you separate what you're making the computer do from thinking about things you're hearing? Thinking and typing would be equivalent to you riding your bicycle - and thinking about what you're gonna do at the office today.
- Right.
I mean, the two don't really cancel each other out.
They're just, you know, not necessarily connected.
What I'm doing now is beyond my wildest dreams from when I started.
Sometimes, I'm surprised.
Sometimes, I'm overwhelmed.
I'm frequently frustrated.
But this is still research, and we are still learning.
I believe, every week, we are making significant scientific breakthroughs.
MORTON: While the medical world is blurring the lines between mind and machine in order to help restore their patients' abilities, military researchers are using similar technology for, unsurprisingly, military purposes.
(RADIO CHATTER) I'm at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base, having an electrode attached to my head and arm, so that I can accentuate my focus by electricity.
Low-level electricity.
Wright-Patterson houses the Air Force Research Labs Applied Neuroscience Branch.
Instead of working on technology that enhances an airplane, or the computational systems that the airmen use, we're taking a different approach in that, we're seeing what we can do to actually enhance the airmen themselves.
MORTON: While this approach is nothing new to the Air Force, instead of giving pilots extremely strong stimulants, Dr.
McKinley's team is using transcranial direct current stimulation, which is simply where you put electrodes on either side of the brain, and run a current from one to the other to amplify the parts of the brain it's zapping through.
The distractions are much less, and I can kinda zone in on each individual category, instead of being overwhelmed.
Whenever you're ready, just hit start experiment.
- (COMPUTER BELL RINGS) - (CLICKING) Oh, shoot.
Not great at this.
(CLICKING) (COMPUTER PLAYS TRIUMPHANT MUSIC) Mm.
Not amazing.
MCKINLEY: So, once we turn it on, the typical sensations are a tingly sensation.
- Okay.
- (CLICKS) So, basically, you're gonna do the same thing again, and then we'll see what happens.
Go ahead.
I feel a lot more - (COMPUTER BELL RINGS) - into this.
(CLICKING) (TRIUMPHANT MUSIC PLAYS) - All right.
- Yeah.
MCKINLEY: Your score's down here.
That's first time.
- That's second time.
- I cleaned up Yeah.
Yeah, it sort of feels like I kind of bypassed the drinking of coffee and put it just straight up into my noodle.
And while the Air Force is stimulating the brains of what they call their war fighters, the highly secretive Defense Advanced Research Project Agency, or DARPA, is developing tools to read the brain on a level 10,000 times more detailed than current technology allows.
How hard is the military angle, or the military application, as far as a rule for DARPA projects? It's required.
That's what DARPA's about, right? And so, we're about the war fighter, and making sure that we don't have any sort of military surprise.
EMONDI: So, we're out there looking at some of the most revolutionary technologies to make sure that we understand what they are, how they're going to work, what would be military relevance.
And having folks in labs in the United States that are well-versed in building these technologies is all good for the military.
MORTON: Do you foresee a manner in which the work you're doing could be used to enhance human thought, or, I guess, more of a supplement than a medicine? Enhancement is not necessarily a bad thing if we could improve behavior.
But we certainly don't want these kinds of interventions to be abused.
However, if it can be abused that means - it's effective.
- Right.
So, that's a problem I'm happy to help fight when it presents itself.
To me, the BCI opportunities for the future are huge.
I really see it as a disruptive technology.
But we need to do it very ethically, right, legally, and make sure we understand the social implications of this.
- 'Cause you can do lot of damage in there.
- Absolutely.
(CRACKLING) In 2012, we covered the pacification of Rio, or the Brazilian government's effort to provide security to the famous city before the World Cup and the Olympics.
But those events are now over.
Brazil is in recession, while simultaneously in the midst of one of the largest corruption scandals in the country's history.
And violence is on the rise.
In 2017 alone, a staggering 62,000 people were killed.
That's more than were killed in war-torn Syria in the same year.
So, we sent Ben Anderson back to Rio, to find out what happened to the promised security reforms.
ANDERSON: After 10 years of steady decline, the violence in Rio has spiked over the last two years.
Armed groups, many of them drug traffickers, operate freely in most of the city's thousand favelas.
Jesus.
So, there's a body on the floor with his head just smashed open.
Almost nothing left inside, it's all spread out on the pavement.
I can't even guess what could've done that or how that could've been done.
I know you haven't been here long, but do you know, roughly, what's happened here? So, it could be four different people with four different guns, all fired bullets into his head, and that's why injuries are so bad.
Have you seen injuries as bad as this before? I mean, this This is an area where drug traffickers and militias are competing.
What's an average 24-hour shift for you now? How many homicides are you being called to see now? ANDERSON: The promise of the World Cup and Olympics was for the opposite of this.
It was called pacification.
The prosperity and security of Rio's predominantly white neighborhoods, home to its famous beaches, was supposed to spread to the predominantly black poorer areas, too.
One favela, called Rocinha, was heralded as a success story, visited by tourists.
But even that is now controlled by the Red Command, or Comando Vermelho, the biggest drug trafficking gang in Rio.
We joined MC Galo, the voice of Rocinha.
This is official electricity or unofficial? (GALO SPEAKING FOREIGN LANGUAGE) So, in the buildup to the World Cup and the Olympics, did anything improve in Rocinha? So, the traffickers fought the police, and the police left, and then the traffickers fought each other for control of this favela? More bullet holes.
That's a heavy caliber as well.
So, one, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight.
The lamppost and the wall you can see dozens of bullet holes.
That's the fire coming from the BOPE? So, the BOPE, the Police Special Forces, walked up the hill this way, and the traffickers came down this way, and this is the point where they met.
And this lamppost alone has taken at least 30 bullets.
That's a hell of a fight in the middle of an area where dozens of families are living within 25, 30 feet.
So now, when they come in, it's an operation.
They're not just patrolling Arthur Trindade is the Rio analyst for the Public Security Forum, one of the most respected NGOs tracking law enforcement and violence in Brazil.
We spoke to a family in Rocinha, whose grandson had been killed by the police, and they said, actually, they prefer to live under the traffickers.
Is that common? Going into a favela and killing anybody? Or killing just traffickers? So, doesn't that also explain why pacification didn't work? If you view the entire community as the enemy.
ANDERSON: There are areas that were barely touched by the pacification.
In one, on the outskirts of the city, armed kids sell crack, coke, and weed openly on the streets of the favela they control.
So, there's two kids in the far corner who are 10 years old, or less, selling.
Someone described this as the end of the world.
(CHATTERING) It's right on the outskirts of Rio.
When was the last time the government controlled here? (SPEAKING FOREIGN LANGUAGE) How did you take it from the government? ANDERSON: When a militia or drug traffickers control a favela, do they do it by avoiding the police, or forcing the police to stay out of a area, or do they do it in collusion with the police? Always? But always? This isn't isolated cases, this is And do you think that's justified? ANDERSON: While not all police are corrupt, low public faith in them means that operations in favelas are difficult.
We joined the civil police as they launched a dawn raid to try and arrest a kidnap-and-ransom gang.
(SPEAKING FOREIGN LANGUAGE) (DOGS BARKING) We're with the homicide division and the special forces of the civil police, and they're trying to arrest 18 members of a gang who lure people into this favela.
Then they kidnap them and then just get as much money as they can out of them, or kill them.
Another team have gone looking for a body that they've been told is not far away.
- (DOG BARKING) - (KNOCKING) (SPEAKING FOREIGN LANGUAGE) (WOMAN SPEAKS) So, this house was the first target, but the guy they were looking for isn't here.
They think the old lady is his grandmother, and she's blind and they're saying she's desperate.
(SOBS) ANDERSON: After a few hours of entering and searching houses, they left empty-handed.
(INDISTINCT CHATTER) The crisis has become so severe in Rio, and trust in the police is so low, many of the police are notoriously corrupt, that the president called in the national army, who now conduct operations in the favelas, and have an impossible mandate to monitor and reform the police.
And suddenly now, as they've entered this area, it's become a lot more serious, as they pass each little alleyway.
They've got one guy covering and everyone else running past, so they really are thinking there's a good chance they're gonna get shot at today.
And all of this is less than a mile away from the world-famous Copacabana Beach.
Yeah.
Yeah, yeah.
Yeah.
ANDERSON: In another favela, within sight of some of Rio's most famous landmarks, we saw another drug trafficking gang receive over 100 kilos of coke, which they said they'd be able to sell in just a few days.
(CHATTERING) (SPEAKING FOREIGN LANGUAGE) So, that is about four kilos of coke mixed with baking powder, roughly 50-50.
And they're gonna do the entire 100 kilos tonight, so it's actually quite a lot of work.
What are the chances that the police will come in here? And how long have you been doing this? How old were you when you started? And did you think you had any other options? ANDERSON: We've just seen you accept the delivery of 100 kilos of coke and mix it up, and now it's gonna be sent out to be sold.
Do you have any fear that the police or the national army will stop you and catch you at any point? (SPEAKING FOREIGN LANGUAGE WITH VOICE DISTORTION) Combined? Europe, America, Asia? And why do you think that is? ANDERSON: Can you just explain why you chose to do this? So, despite shockingly high numbers, 62,000 homicides in one year, you think people think, "It's over there.
"It's away from me and my family, my neighborhood, so who cares?" ANDERSON: How do you think this ends?