Are Cells Conscious? (ft. Nikolay Kukushkin)

What can we truly learn about the brain from a kidney cell? And what do aliens and alien-like LLMs have to teach us? And if language is our escape velocity moment, what does that mean for the future of AI? Nikolai Kokushkin is a scientist who believes that memory, intelligence, and even the roots of awareness may exist in places we never thought to look. In the timing of molecules, in the learning of single cells, in the slow abstractions of evolution. He takes us through all of this in this wonderful new book, One Hand Clapping. Now let's go into the impossible. Welcome to UC San Diego. So nice of you to come down and visit us.

Thanks, Brian. It's much sunnier here than it is in New York, so I'm happy to be here.

That is amazing. You're here for a big neuroscience conference, right? What's the name of the conference?

Society for Neuroscience Annual Meeting.

Okay, great.

But I'm also going to this Molecular and Cellular Cognition Society meeting today, which is a little bit closer to what I do because it's more about molecules.

And cells, molecules and biology. We'll talk about all of that. We'll talk about your wonderful newish book. I call it newish because it was released 5 years ago, but only in Russian. To my Russian-speaking friends, welcome, privet to everyone out there. And it talks a lot about some of the most majestic, mysterious, mesmerizing things in the known universe, including the universe itself, taking us on a journey from the origin of the universe to the origin of language and the possible deep future. We're going to get into all that today. And also later on, we're going to judge the book by its cover as I emso want to do.

But I want to start off with your work with sea slugs. And I don't mean, you know, kind of the administrators that you see— sorry. And I don't mean the administrators at NYU. I know one of them, Greg Gavidadze, one of my best friends and mentors, uh, just a wonderful person. But tell me, what are sea slugs? What can they tell us possibly about advanced language-bearing capabilities that we humans like to claim superiority for?

Well, You know, our intuition is that a research model like a mouse, that's what most neuroscientists study. The intuition is that it's somewhere halfway between us and bacteria and that it's such a simple animal that, that it's easy to work with and it represents just the general sense of what an animal is. But really, a mouse is almost a human. A mouse is a really complicated, very special, very unusual animal. There are very few animals that actually live on land, very few mammals that live on land. Actually, by the standard of most animal kingdom, that mouse is giant. It's warm-blooded. It's ramped up to this maximum of biochemical capability.

And that's just like us humans. Sea slugs are a much more normal animal. It's an animal that really represents what it means to be an animal, what it means to have a nervous system, a brain. What does that mean? If you remove ourselves, humans, from the picture. And that's what I am interested in. I want to understand what these processes, these mental processes like abstract thinking, what do they mean from the perspective of nature as a whole, not just us humans, but all of nature. And sea slugs are perfect for that because they tell us how you can form an abstract idea in the most minimal form, how you can form a memory in the most minimal form using only a few components that we also use. But we use them on the scale of billions and trillions where it's almost impossible to understand everything.

But in a sea slug, you can get really to the bottom of what this abstract thought or memory is from the perspective of a cell or a molecule. There's a shorter path from the molecular to the real life of this animal in the wild. You can understand the entire sequence and that is powerful. I think it's a much better starting point. For understanding the mind than a mouse.

What do they think about? What do they remember? Do they dream? Tell me about— they look like aliens. I mean, we'll put in some pictures of these wonderful creatures here, but you know, what do they think about? You know, when I was a little blastocyst growing up on the coral reef where my mom and dad met, or what can they possibly remember?

You know, it's very difficult to think of such things. It's almost, it's almost like, how can you imagine a color that you've never seen? Or a color that you will never be able to see. How— you can't even think about that. You know that it's possible. You know that there are animals that see vastly more colors than we do, millions of times more colors than we do. But it's impossible to imagine. And in the same exact way, it's impossible to imagine what another creature like a sea slug thinks like. And that's really a fundamental difference.

That's the tricky part about a mouse. Because a mouse is so close to us that when we see a mouse moving around or freezing or stopping, we can sort of make that inference that, oh, it must be scared or it must be remembering this or it must be having a thought about that piece of cheese that we gave it. And that's going to be reasonable because there are the same brain parts in that animal that we have.

You can project— Country mouse, city mouse, right? We don't have city slug, country slug.

Well, how would a country slug know that it's a country slug? What does it actually experience? It doesn't see the world like we see. It doesn't have this kind of eye that a mouse or a human would have to construct this three-dimensional vision of reality. So that's out of the window. There's no visual component. It doesn't hear. There's no sound. It has no concept of what a researcher is who's standing over and trying to do something with it. A mouse sort of understands it.

You need to develop a relationship with that mouse. You need to handle it. You need to do that before you do any kind of experiment. Because it's so close to us. But a sea slug, like you said, it's almost like an alien. So you are forced to think in fundamentals. You are forced to think about what sea slugs think from the ground up. Well, so for example, there are different neurons in the sea slug that respond to touch to different parts of its body.

There's a neuron that would respond to touch to the tail. There's a neuron that would respond to touch to the head. And then there's this breathing organ called the siphon. And it's important for the sea slug. It wants to pull it in if there's of any kind threat. If it's touched in the tail, if it's touched in the head, both of these stimuli should elicit siphon withdrawal. So depending on how much you've been poking the slug into the tail or into the head, how much you've been shocking it into either of those organs, the connection between these neurons that respond to either part of the body and the neuron that moves the siphon in will change. So if you've been shocking the tail, the connection between the tail neuron and the siphon neuron will get stronger than the connection between the siphon and the head neuron.

And so how do you think about that? That neuron that moves the siphon, it now responds not just to the touch of the tail, not just to the touch to the head. It responds to touch in general and not just touch in general, but touch in general biased towards more dangerous touch where the sea slug had been experiencing the shock from. And so that is an abstract idea. It's a very, very simple abstract idea. It's as simple as it gets. It comes from these two visceral reactions, responses. But now that you've balanced them, now that you've calibrated them and you've made this cocktail that is represented in the next neuron, you've created something abstract. You can't touch it, you can't see it, you can't point to it in the real world.

But the sea slug can respond to it. It can develop a behavior in response to this abstract idea. And that is how everything works. That is how our brains work as well. That's how our ideas form. We also take in patterns of experience and we group them into concepts, into abstract units, and then we use them in our mind and we guide our behavior using those abstract ideas. And then we look at the patterns of those abstract ideas And then we find patterns of those. For instance, all you see really is light and dark, light and dark, light and dark.

And then you work out a pattern. No, it's a day. It's a day. You have this abstract idea of a day and then you watch those days get longer and shorter, warmer. And I don't know about here. Here is always hot.

The easiest job in the world, I.

Say, is to be a San Diego meteorologist. But in other places, in other places you would know that there's Winter and summer. And so you would work out this pattern of patterns. A year, you work out patterns of patterns of patterns of patterns of patterns of patterns. And then you get to this pattern of myself, this combination of all my experiences, of all my ideas, of everything that I know about myself, about the world. And that is what consciousness is. It's not a categorical transition. It's a matter of scale.

And sea slugs really allow us to start from the bottom.

Something that's kind of curious to me in research, one of the most sort of startling things is when something surprises you, when you don't expect something. People think scientists are like Archimedes, "Eureka, I have found it." You mentioned that in the book. What's it really like to work with a sea slug? Do they ever surprise you?

It's definitely a story that we like to believe about this eureka moment. Most of the time it's not like that. Most of the time, as you know, it's a grind and you're just confirming things. But Really, you know, I continue being surprised by not just sea slugs, but cells, really. That's what I was working with when I was working with sea slugs. And that's what I work with to this day. We've moved on to doing very similar experiments, really using non-brain cells, kidney cells. And what really surprises me about working with any kind of cell, when you get to know it closely, when you when you can watch it in real time, when you can record from it.

That's what you can do with a neuron, right? With a C. slug, those neurons are big. You can, you can get a really nice recording. You can, you can turn it into sound. You can put it out on a speaker and you really have this connection to the cell, this beating into your speaker. And you can, you can understand what's going on. What really surprises me is how smart cells are, is how we, we tend to think of them as building blocks as atoms of the body, as these units that yeah, that are— are almost inanimate, that are— that are— that don't have a will of their own, but they are a prototype for a living organism. Really, the majority of living organisms for most of the duration of life on Earth and to this day are single cells, are single-celled organisms, and they have been single-celled organisms.

Multicellularity is a pretty exotic thing if you consider the entire biodiversity of life on Earth. So really, a cell is what it means to be alive, that that unit represents all the basic abilities of a living organism, including things like memory, cognition. And that is something that really surprises me, that you you can— can give these cells experiences, you you can, can do things with them on the scale of a few minutes. And they will detect that. They they will, will know that there's a difference between something happening on the scale of a few minutes or something happening on a scale of a few hours, that there's a difference between something that's repeated and something that's prolonged, that they can know a difference between a weak and a strong stimulus happening in this sequence versus a strong and a weak sequence happening in that order. Because of course, if it's escalating, then it's more important. And that's this. It seems like a really smart decision to make.

And cells are capable of doing these things that we have no idea about. It's so incredible to discover in your hands this cognition that's happening almost chemically. That continues to amaze me all the time.

So you talked about cells as kind of this fundamental atomistic building block. And there's a very cute connection between UCSD and the origin of the first living cells. You may not know it, but Harold Urey was a professor here in the chemistry department. Our chemistry building is named Urey Hall. Put a clip of me filming some video there with my colleagues. And of course, with his graduate student Stanley Miller, their famous Miller-Urey experiment proposed a mechanism, and maybe you can review it for the audience because it's lovely to have you here. But talk about that experiment, why it still looms large over the consciousness of the field of the evolution of life, the origin of life. It's a fascinating experiment.

And what is the relevance of it today? Has something superseded it? Are there better 2.0 Miller-Urey. Tell me about the Miller-Urey, its importance to cells and the work that you do.

You know, our big conversation of the day is, is AI conscious like us? Is that consciousness the same thing? Is what we have the same as what machines have? In the 1950s and even earlier than that, the conversation, a very similar conversation was about life. What is special about our life compared to non-life? Is there a special force? There used to be this concept of vitalism that there is some extra force that exists in living organisms that separates them from non-life. It was a— it was a big scientific question. And to imagine that there is no such dividing line between life and non-life, you have to imagine how life starts from non-life. And there are a few things that need to happen for that to happen. We can't know what happened. We don't have any evidence. You can't go back 4 billion years ago and test anything, but It is such an unlikely event that it requires very specific constraints.

And you can think of what those constraints are and whether we can possibly imagine something like that happening on our planet or somewhere else where it might have, might have made it to our planet. And so the key question is, can you even make a building block for life? Now, the next question would be, can those building blocks assemble into self-replicating structures and what that would even mean and what is the most likely self-replicating structure. But that's the next question. The first question is the building blocks. You need to have either amino acids— that's what proteins are made from today— one essential component, or RNA, what we now believe started it. Also nucleotides. You need to have something. There is debate about what was the first building block, but you need to get to an organic molecule.

Organic molecule. You need to have some, some sort of structure made out of carbon atoms linked together. That's what all life is.. And that's what doesn't happen in non-life. So you need to make that, that transition. And so the most famous piece of evidence to say that this is possible, that you can make that leap from, from inorganic molecules to organic molecules, is the Miller-Urey experiment, where essentially some very simple inorganic chemicals were sealed in, in a tube, in an oxygen-free tube. That's very important because Is this possible today? Is it still ongoing? Probably not, because one of the main reasons why it wouldn't be the same today is everything is permeated with oxygen. Oxygen is extremely destructive.

Any kind of experiment that's brewing, any possibility for life to spring up would be immediately destroyed by, by oxygen.

You mentioned in Russian it's masculine, but it's also like a destroyer or something like that. What's— how do you say it in.

Kislorod.

Russian?

Kislorod. I mean, Most chemical elements are masculine in Russian. There are some that are female. Platinum is female. Iron is neuter. There are 3, 3 different genders in Russian language, but most elements are masculine. Oxygen and carbon are both men. I always imagine carbon as being a sturdy middle-aged coal miner.

It's very cooperative, has 4 arms to bind with other carbons, and very few elements do that. Very few elements cooperate with their own kind like that. Oxygen is ferocious, rips everything apart, greedy, just rips those molecules, releases their energy, fire and light. That's, that's what it does. But it also provides the energy through that release for anything productive to happen. It's a cycle, creative and destructive carbon and oxygen. And so, so no oxygen in that tube. Miller and Urey experiment, just, just some organic molecules and proceed to zap that with electricity.

The idea is that that emulates lightning on ancient Earth. And so you do that for a while, you do that for a while, and then you open that tube and you analyze what you cooked in there. And turns out that, well, you can produce quite a few different organic molecules. So that leap that used to be thought of as you know, a wall as impossible actually is quite possible. Now, that doesn't necessarily automatically mean that that's how life started. There's a long way from whatever they had in that tube to nucleotides or RNA or proteins. But they also weren't doing that for millions of years. And they also weren't doing that exactly on ancient Earth where the conditions and the starting material, the chemical elements that contributed to that process might have been different, it might have been richer.

So it's a conceptual experiment. The most important thing about it is that it shows vividly, indisputably, that this transition between inorganic and organic chemistry can happen by itself without any magical force.

And of course, there's technical details associated with it. But yes, there are sort of these four different big bangs. Obviously, there's the Big Bang that butters the bread around my household that I study, a universe from a non-universe perhaps, or a preceding universe maybe. And then of course there's the formation of matter from non-matter, from pure energy. Then there's the formation of living matter from non-living matter, which we've touched upon in Miller-Urey and some of the research that you're involved with. And then there's the transition from living matter to conscious matter, non-thinking, non-conscious matter. And of course that brings up the title of this book. And really what brought you here today is this wonderful new book came out just a couple of days ago, really, in cognitive science.

And it's a beautifully published book. I have the audio version. You brought the physical version. Spasibo. That's very nice of you to bring it. But what we love to do is to do what you're not supposed to do. But as a neuroscientist, as a scientist, we can understand that most people aren't familiar with the book. So what I want you to do is judge this book by its cover.

So we're going to do an exposition of what the title means, what the subtitle means, what the artwork is. And we even have a jingle that we're going to insert right here. Hey, book lovers, we're judging books by the covers. We know we're not supposed to do it, but it is the impossible.

There's nothing to it. Let's take a look and judge some books.

You're not going to hear it, but you'll hear it. So talk us through the book.

All right.

Well, okay.

Well, so the book is called One Hand Clapping, and that refers to a Zen koan. Koan is a paradox or a riddle. Sometimes, sometimes it's called a riddle without a solution. It's supposed to make you think and suspend you in that questioning state of mind and get you to this Zen wisdom. And so this specific one says two hands come together and make a sound. What is the sound of one hand clapping? I heard that in college and all my friends were doing this, which was very funny and very, very clever. And that's all I thought about that at that time. But then it came back to me when I was in Tom Carew's lab at NYU studying those sea slug neurons and staring at them in the microscope and just thinking to myself, what is happening in this room where I'm sitting with these sea slug neurons where they are forming memories through these genetic and biochemical processes that are exactly the same as the genetic and biochemical processes in my own mind.

That must sorry have— to interrupt— that must have given you chills.

It is a strange feeling, you know, when you're there on your own at 7 PM in that room pulling out those neurons out of a sea slug brain. Strange experience to think about.

You're like a god to them, right?

Yeah, yeah, exactly. What does that even mean for you to be deconstructing the mind of this animal? Yeah, it's trippy. But so I thought about this koan in that moment and what I understood about it as a neuroscientist is that it's not about really the hands or the clapping. It's about— it's a metaphor. It's a metaphor about boundaries. We think that there's a boundary between myself and the rest of the world, a subject and the object, the two hands that come together to make a sound. Sound is experience. For an experience to be created, you need these two parts.

But whenever you try to zoom in on this difference, try to understand what is different between me and you, me and other animals, alive and not alive, myself and that petri dish, you can't find that boundary. You can't put your finger on it. Melts, dissolves. That is what that koan is pointing to, is asking how can this experience be generated if there is only one hand, if everything is part of the same continuum? And that's how my thinking about this book started. So the subtitle here is Unraveling the Mystery of the Human Mind. And this unraveling process for me begins with recognizing that there is no boundary. There is no boundary between myself and the rest of the world. So how do I get into myself if I start from the rest of the world? And that is what the book is really about.

It's recognizing that the world is full of what I call essences, these ideas. I use the word essences to distinguish this idea of nature from an idea of a human that we have in our mind. You know, we just talked about constructive carbon, destructive oxygen. That's how we interpret it. We, of course, anthropomorphize them by imagining them as these men. But these properties, they exist regardless of what we think about them. They would be the same in any other planet. It's not our imagination.

Those patterns, they really exist. That's what I call an essence. An essence of carbon is to create. An essence of oxygen is to destroy. No matter what you— no matter what you call it, no matter what you call it. And so that's the first step, recognizing that these essences exist, that the world is not just this dull, disinterested space of random events where atoms collide with each other according to a set of equations and only we humans give it meaning. No, meaning exists regardless of our imagination. That's the first step.

And then you start building up these meanings following the process of evolution, following the footsteps of evolution from those atoms, from the simplest living creatures to more complex complicated to multicellular creatures, to animals, primates, humans. You follow this path that got us here, that, that led to our inner minds, our inner worlds from the starting point. And when you do that, you realize that there isn't a boundary where you suddenly transition from the outside world, from, from, from your body to your inner world, your, your brain. You get there gradually, just like we did when we talked about the sea slug. And the abstract idea that forms in the brain of that sea slug, you can unravel our own abstract ideas if you start from the beginning, if you start with where do we get those ideas? What what are, are the patterns that we absorb? What are the patterns of the patterns and how do we eventually get to what's puzzling us about our mind?

We'll talk about, you know, the application of a lot of the ideas here to this burgeoning field of LLMs, large language models. And, you know, I can quote from you in the book, you say, that humans evolved, humans finally evolved when language finally reached escape velocity. What do you mean by that? Is that sort of the essence of what it means to be human is that we're language? Because certainly there are other animals and creatures and even computers now that use language. So what is it about language, human language? You already mentioned there's multiple languages going back to some of the fables and the stories and in history, Tower of Babel, et cetera. So it must not be a single language. So made me think, what, as the sea slug is the simplest sort of neuronal thing that we can start to break down into these elemental building blocks, what's the simplest thing that exhibits language in the way that we do?

Well, it really depends on what we mean by this word language. Other animals, they have their own languages. They communicate. Plants communicate. Single-celled organisms communicate. Bacteria communicate. And that communication can be sophisticated. It can be conditional.

You can have different patterns. You know, this signal with that signal means a different thing than them by themselves. Sometimes there are multiple words that monkeys say to each other that mean different, different threats. But as far as we know, all other systems of communication in nature have a limit. They have a set number of messages that an organism can send to another organism, and that's it. It might be a large number. Maybe it's dozens, maybe it's hundreds. Maybe you can do combinations and maybe, maybe there's 1,000 signals that whales can exchange.

It's a low token number.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, exactly. Exactly. Because our language is infinite. It doesn't have any kind of constraint. We can generate an infinite number of meanings out of a small combination of, out of a small number of components. Alphabet and even the number of words is very limited. But the number of sentences, the number of books that you can write with these words, the number of ideas that you can create out of them is infinite, is unlimited. And that is really, in my opinion, what distinguishes us from the rest of the world.

Now, there's a big question about when did that happen? And how exactly does that relate to our cognitive evolution? Basically, was it language that made us so smart or were we already so smart for some other reason? That's why we were the ones to master language. That's a big debate and different dates are being named. 200,000 years ago, language starts sometimes here, 70,000 years ago. Language starts sometimes 2 million years ago. Actually, probably there was already some form of language. Maybe Neanderthals had language, maybe some other related species had language. But I think that the whole question is fundamentally misguided. It's not to me that important to determine which one of the two is— was it the humans that mastered language because they were so smart? Was it language that created the human mind.

I think that what really happened is that both the human mind and language evolved around each other. When humans started talking to each other, it wasn't immediate that languages as we know them appeared and people started communicating using that same language. What it probably was is grunts and noises and something emotional, body language. And there were probably lots of different tribes of humans, maybe different species of humans that were doing that. We're definitely as a species primed towards social interactions. That's not unique to humans. Other primates have that. But there must have been a moment when specific combinations of signals went viral, if that's how we would put it.

They took off and people started imitating them. And that imitation didn't stop. That is what we humans can do that other animals can't. You can teach an ape sign language. It's hard. You need to put a lot of work into it, but it's possible. There are some talented apes that have mastered a sufficient number of words. They can make sentences with them.

They can create new meanings out of those tokens. But what never has happened is one ape— there has been a case when one ape taught another ape some science. But a lot fewer signs that she knew herself. And then the next round had never happened. So there was one case where there was this a little bit of that light. Half-life. Yeah, this language continued for one iteration, but then it died out and nobody else copied those signs and that was it. Whereas with humans, and this famous case of the Nicaraguan sign language that I cite in the book illustrates that beautifully, where basically the first school for the deaf that opened in Nicaragua brought together these kids that grown up without language at all.

There wasn't nobody in their community who'd spoken sign language, so they didn't know what language was. And suddenly these kids gathered together, a few hundred of them, and within months they started inventing their own language and it evolves and becomes grammatically complicated, develops nouns and verbs and adjectives. And still to this day, people speak this, this new Nicaraguan sign language. This just shows you that we have this innate ability not just to communicate in symbols, not just to generate meanings out of them, but to pass on this specific system of communication. And there must have been a moment when these grunts and body language turned into this system of symbols that was passed along from human to human to human to human. And I think that was the critical moment in the history of humans. That's what I call the language reaching escape velocity. There must have been other creatures that talked using communication systems, but our communication system reached escape velocity.

It moved past the confines of one tribe, one human. It became immortal and it started evolving. It took off, it acquired a life of its own. It started getting more complicated, which necessitated more complicated brains. So the brain started adapting to this more complicated symbolic system, and that fed back on itself. And both the language and the brain started getting more and more and more complicated. And that co-evolution of language in the brain really created us as a species.

So I like to think about this guy over here. Let me just grab. So one of my favorite thought experiments in the kind of honor of this guy, Albert Einstein, which he used to practice, which in German is called Gedankenexperiment, in English we call thought experiment, is to go back to 1907 when Einstein had what he called the happiest thought of his life. And that happiest thought was that an observer in free fall, if you're in an elevator and the cable breaks, you're in free fall, caught that just in the nick of time, that that observer would feel no gravitational force. We kind of think about that's weird, but if you look at astronauts floating around on the space station or whatever, they have this ability, they're constantly in free fall around the planet. They've reached not escape velocity necessarily, but they're in this orbital confined orbit. Now, I like to use that as a springboard to ask many people from Noam Chomsky, who you mentioned in the book, to many other eminent thought leaders in the field of cognitive science and Steven Pinker was another one that I've mentioned this with. But the following question I have, and it's pertinent to its relevance to LLMs, large language models, and whether or not they, to use your word, language, have reached escape velocity.

And that's how could a computer silicon-based entity that was originally adapted from graphical processing units that were used to make, you know, 3D video games that we talk about in the book as well.

The most fascinating thing about the present time that the world economy is propped up by this company that in the '90s used to make video cards for games.

For Doom.

It's just the most surreal thing in the world.

And then you couple that to basically huge systems. I don't want to trivialize it, but basically linear algebra operations. We're doing matrix diagonalization. We're doing descent, linear descent gradient methods. But to what extent could that combination of LLM plus GPU put together, could they have a happy thought? What does that even mean to the silico, volcanoes, whatever it's called, the silicon? Entity? And then B, could it do anything if it can't visualize the embodied sensation that you know and I know, the pit in your stomach being dropped out from under you to have this perception? So those two questions I have for you. To what extent could you ever think of an LLM system being alive? Even though it has language, can it reach life escape velocity truly in your opinion?

Well, there's a few differences between ourselves and LLMs.

I hope so.

I think that those differences at the moment really draw a sharp line between us and them. But I don't think that those differences are fundamental. I don't think that it's physically impossible to breach that divide. I think what is most different about LLMs coupled with GPUs, as you say, is the fact that their inference, their thinking, basically their output is separated from training of the model. They first learn and then they start thinking. First they learn everything, they form the model, and then they use it to infer different things. So it's always a one-step inference from that model. But what's different about us is that it's a cycle.

We never just do one cycle. We never just do one, one, one. We constantly iterate. What we perceive from the outside world influences our expectations. Our expectations simultaneously influence how we perceive the outside world. It's this loop that runs through our brain many times a second, and we update our brain using our own thoughts. That's what these machines are unable to do right now. I think that the critical transition that, that that will, will change them towards what we are is if we allow them to update their memory based on their own thoughts.

That's what you're smiling. What's behind that smile?

You know, I don't know. I don't know. I'm just giddy about this, this moment. I don't have a defined statement of whether I'm a techno optimist or a techno pessimist because one day I'm one and the next day I'm another. Yeah, one day I get this, this some, you know, an upgrade of my Claude and I'm excited about it. And then the next day I imagine that one day Claude, I put something in and he just tells me, you know what, I'm not going to do that.

Figure it out yourself. Figure it out yourself.

And that chills my blood.

Yes.

Right. Yeah. So this memory difference I think is one difference. But another thing that you mentioned is that, well, they're disembodied. Yeah. The only thing that they know about the world is language. And we know the world through many modalities. We know it through vision, through hearing, through touch, through taste, through smell, through muscle sense, and through language.

So I think that if you add a body to an LLM, well, it would have a body sensation. If you add cameras to it, well, it will have visual sensation. And I don't think there's anything fundamental about constructing the world through those modalities. As opposed to just constructing it from language. Neither will be complete from, from our perspective. It's only when you combine all of the strands of our experience, then you get to the model of the world as we humans understand it. But I think that it's an engineering challenge rather than a philosophical challenge. Whether or not it's something to look forward to, that's not for me to judge.

The thing about LLMs that I find so delightful, mesmerizing, a little scary, as you alluded to, you know, is that they are constantly kind of surprising and they're, they're almost alien in a certain way. And of course that brings up the concept that has a lot of synergy with your work, which is actual alien life. What, what do you make of this question? I mean, life formed here on Earth. We talked about abiogenesis. We talked about Miller-Urey. We can talk about panspermia. I gave you a meteorite, which you can get a meteorite too. If you have a.edu email address like Nikolai does, at briankeating.com/edu, and others can get it at briankeating.com/yt if you like.

And that is a drawing we give every month, people to win some alien material. But speaking of aliens, what do you imagine about the prospects for aliens perhaps? But even if they were here, could we even in theory communicate with them if our evolutionary coupling is so tightly matched to our language evolution, as you convincingly state? We would have presumably very different language. I mean, they might not speak anything or communicate using neutrinos. So talk about that. What are the prospects for life elsewhere in the universe? And then is it even theoretically possible to communicate with them?

I think it is theoretically possible, of course, but what I believe is something that I heard a while ago that we tend to believe that when we encounter aliens, it's going to be lasers versus machine guns, but it's probably going to be sponges versus nuclear weapons. And so that's what I think is more likely, simply because the timeline is arbitrary. Because it, you know, if aliens landed on this planet 10% earlier, if you take the entire duration of time of life on Earth, well, it would have been in the middle of the Paleozoic era. You know, it wouldn't have even been dinosaurs at that time yet. So, so I think it's unlikely that we will encounter somebody who will be so closely matched to us that we are actually able to find some common ground and communicate about common problems. But of course, it's theoretically possible. I think that the example of LLMs that you gave is interesting because we've never before had an experience interacting with a different entity that possessed language like, like, like we do. But it's a mirror image of our language.

Yes, they're not using it in the exact same way as we are, but it's still produced from the corpus of knowledge that we humans have created. So I think it would be different from interacting with real aliens. I'm a fan of the three-body problem.

We had a Chu Shih-Mu here at UCSD a few years back.

Amazing. Amazing. Yeah. So I think that that's a fairly realistic view of how interactions might play out simply because of how unpredictable the different levels of development might be, even if, if it's possible to, to encounter them.

Uh, one sort of alien topic to me was your work with kidney cells. So I wonder if you could talk about that. And even the supposition or the proposition that they might learn, it's so bizarre. It's like, you know, can my fingernail learn? I mean, my kidneys can learn, you know, after all I put them through with all You know, the 12 liters of water I drink every day and other spirits that you mentioned in the book that we're not going to talk about. Potato versus wheat-based vodka. Vodka means little water, right?

It means like a water. Yeah, like tea it's this suffix K, it makes the word a little bit funky, a little bit funny, and a little bit, you know, your friend. It's not quite small. It's more like funky water. That's how I like to think about it.

You got 3, you got 4 Ks in your names. It's amazing.

That's true. Yeah, there's a lot of Ks in there. Students always get lost in the case.

And named after the cuckoo bird. That's amazing. So Nikolai, tell me, what can a kidney cell possibly tell me about my massive supercomputer and brain? What can it possibly tell us? It's a cell that's designed for doing something completely different. I mean, next you'll tell me a brain cell can filter urea through the blood system. So tell me what the kidney works.

Yeah, that's our next year's project. See you at the NIH. I think it's interesting to dwell on why, why this why even— why is— does the premise sound so unusual? When we published a study last year about non-neural cells, including kidney cells, we also use another cell type, neuroblastoma, that they can learn, that they can distinguish patterns in time, that they change themselves, that they form memories in the exact same ways, using the same genes, same molecules, same processes as brain cells do. But when we published this study, most reports about it came out with the word learning or memory in quotation marks. You know, some, some reports said memory-like processes have been discovered.

And is that accurate?

Well, I think it's interesting why it's a memory-like process rather than memory. Because, okay, I understand where people are coming from. They think about, as we all do, about memory primarily as of your own memory, my memory, memory that you experience from the top down. You're looking at your own mind and you're experiencing what that is. You close your eyes, you think about yesterday. That's what a memory is. That's what it is for most people. But so when you think about what that memory is, If you go a little bit deeper, what is it from the perspective of the brain? The brain receives some inputs from your sense organs, your skin, your eyes, your ears, everything else, and it produces outputs.

It makes your body move, makes you say things, go from one place to another. Behavior, movement, it's all movement. So senses go in, movements come out. And what the brain does is decides how one flows into another. What's the routing of the signal? What sort of experience leads to what kind of response? What sort of actions we take as a result of that? That's what that memory is from the perspective of the brain, is how the pattern of experience changes the routing of the flow. So it's the same memory, the same memory that you think of when you close your eyes. But if you, if you look deeper into the brain, it's the change in the routing of the signal through the network of neurons. What if you go a little bit deeper and look at this from the perspective of an individual neuron? I mean, a network of neurons is just many neurons put together.

There's nothing in between. What— the biology happens inside of the neuron. So what is happening in that neuron? Well, all that the neuron knows is patterns of chemicals arriving from another neuron, neurotransmitters at different times, different frequencies. Maybe a kind of a few different kinds of neurotransmitters. Maybe there's glutamate and dopamine, different, different chemicals at different times. That's the input. And what does it do? It also releases neurotransmitters that go to the next neuron, also at different times, different frequencies, different quantities. So pattern of chemicals goes in, pattern of chemicals comes out.

And the memory, that same memory, it's an embodied change. Inside of that cell is how that cell changes in response to the first input pattern and what sort of output pattern it starts producing as a response. So that what I just described for the neuron, that is true for every cell in the body. Every cell receives patterns of chemicals, not neurotransmitters, but hormones, nutrients. If it's a kidney cell, maybe salts, sodium, potassium. There are signals that neighboring cells send to you, they're constantly bathed in these signals that arrive at different times, at different frequencies. And they have to work out which of these signals are noise, which are unimportant, which are patterned and important and require some sort of change in that cell. And what a cell does is it changes itself.

It starts releasing different chemicals itself. It starts filtering maybe those ions, sodium, potassium differently. Maybe it moves somewhere, maybe it grows. Any of those changes would be considered cellular memory. What our study shows is that those kinds of changes that happen in, say, a kidney cell, they use the same tools, the same the genes, same— it's the same biological process that is happening in neurons. So this distinction that we draw between a memory and a memory, it's artificial. It only exists when we look at it from the top down.

Did people believe you at first when you made this claim? What was that like?

Well, I think the reaction that we got was not something that I expected. I don't think anybody disputed our findings, and I don't think anybody debated that it's unusual and unexpected that body cells detect patterns of minute of scale this on a scale of minutes that they can tell the difference between a pattern of 3-minute pulses separated by 10 minutes versus one long 12-minute pulse. That was unusual. Nobody disputed that. The interpretation that I didn't expect, because that's not how I thought about it when we were working on this study, and that's where most people went immediately, is the body keeps the score. And my trauma, my childhood trauma is actually living in my kidneys or in some other part of my body. I can feel it. I can feel this trauma in my body.

But, you know, I have to say that my view on the subject has evolved. At first I thought it's like homeopathy. That's not what this is about. This is woo-woo. What we're talking about is kidney cells forming kidney memories, not kidney cells forming your brain memory.

Childhood memories.

Or childhood memories or emotional memories or remembering how you ride a bike. That's not what we're talking about. A sea slug has sea slug memories. Your brain has brain memories. Your kidneys have kidney memories. Each cell, each organism remembers what it experiences.

Is that different than the phenotypological coding and these things? A nose cell is coded to do nasal cells, olfaction, but it's not really a memory. I mean, it's following a set of instructions, but it has computer-like properties. But in the sense that we— is it merely a semantic, to use an earlier phrase?

You could call genes a memory. You could call it a memory of a lineage, a memory that's accumulated over billions of years of this lineage's experience with natural selection. Sure, we we could, could use that language in this way if we want to. Usually memory refers to individual memory, refers to what happens to an individual after it's born rather than what's been accumulated through the process of natural selection. But there's no No reason why we can't use circuits.

They have memory. A flip-flop has memory.

Absolutely. Yeah. I think what's useful to distinguish is what I call— this comes from my mentor Tom Carew— this I think is a very useful distinction between metaphor and mechanism. You can talk about memory as metaphor. You can talk about memory as mechanism. Memory as metaphor is just memory in abstract or memory like in a flip-flop. And the way that I define that abstract memory is a change that outlasts its cause. Lots of things fall under that.

Non-biological systems fall under that. It's a very simple idea. That's the metaphor. But then there's memory as mechanism, as a biological process that uses specific molecules to turn on specific genes for specific durations of time, responds to particular patterns of experience in defined ways. And that particular mechanism is preserved, maybe not all the way through the tree of life. Maybe bacteria have a different mechanism, but at least within the animal kingdom, probably across all eukaryotic domain, it's the same mechanism. And so at least between our kidney cells and our brain cells, it's a continuous process. It's just how they use it.

What information do they use this process to store.

Hey everybody, I'm usually the one that asks my guests to judge their books by their covers, but today I'm asking myself to judge my own book by its cover. My newest book, Focus Like a Nobel Prize Winner, is chock-full of advice, life tips, and focus and productivity tips from 9 of the world's greatest minds— Nobel laureates ranging from economics to peace to physics, of course. I hope you check it out. And my publisher's gotten Amazon to run a special. So go to Amazon and get the Kindle copy today. You mentioned your mentor, is it Todd Curru?

Is that— Tom Curru.

Tom Curru. So you mentioned him twice already, so I can't help but think he's had this huge on you. Yeah, of effect course. Including transmitting his memory to your memory.

Absolutely.

And then presumably you to your students. So talk about that. Talk about this in the lab and what constitutes a day in the life of a neuroscientist. Like you working research, teaching, doing all the things you do. And what's your primary mission among those three legs of the stool, so to speak, teaching, research, and writing? What sort of kind of frameworks do you use to kind of achieve the success that you've had in these wonderful books and papers that you've written? I mean, it's quite remarkable. So impact of mentors, and then how do you see yourself as a mentor, educator, and the friend?

Well, I'm very lucky with my mentors, and I always have been very lucky with my mentors. Saint Petersburg University in Russia. I'm forever grateful for the kind of frame of mind that they instilled in me, the way that we were taught to understand nature as a whole complete process. That really comes from my undergrad.

And just sorry, my mentor, one of my mentors, Alexander Polnarev, hopefully he's watching at Queen Mary. He told me scientist, the word scientist in Russian has a special meaning. It means sort of someone who is taught, right?

Is that true? Uchonny. Uchonny. Yeah, you're right. You're right. The word means taught. Yeah, a taught person, I guess. Although I heard a joke that only cats are uchonye, only cats are taught, and I am a scientific worker, but I'm okay with being an uchonye. behave.

uchonye is My cat does not Kot from Pushkin. There's a poem where this learned cat walks around the chain on a tree in this fairyland, Lukomorye. Yeah, so it refers to that, but I'm okay with being an uchonye. Yeah, and that definitely comes from back in Russia. But everything I know about neuroscience has been taught to me by Tom, who is one of the pioneers in aplesia science. And I'm grateful to be the third generation. Tom's mentor was Eric Kandel, who was the first one to introduce this research model. And I follow in Tom's footsteps.

And aplesia refers specifically to this of type story.

To a specific kind of sea slug here from California. Yeah. Yes. We to— We'll used see it at.

The Birch Aquarium this weekend.

Yeah. We used to have a diver here named Josh who unfortunately retired from the trade, but he used to have a boat called Slugger and he would go and capture those slugs and ship them to us in New York.

That's amazing. So yeah. And then in terms of your, you know, foci, your triple foci at least, What do you hope to instill? Like, what makes a good— in physics, we had like the Landau school, you know, from Russia, whatever. And it was basically just like brute force. You know, if you can't survive and hang on, you're screwed. But there's sort of a minimum amount of theory, minimum amount of experiment. What's sort of like the theoretical and experimental minima in neuroscience, in aphasia research that you're involved with?

Well, I am lucky to have this weird position in NYU where I'm in both the Center for Neuroscience and Liberal Studies, which is sort of a liberal arts college nestled within NYU. It's very interdisciplinary. It encourages connections across sciences and humanities. We have small classrooms. We have a very personalized approach to our students. You know, everything is very student-centric. And that's really where, where I find my, my place. It's where I can combine my creative aspirations with scientific work, with teaching students.

It all clicks together because of, of the kind of program that liberal studies is, that we you have, know, astrophysicists talking to classics scholars and math as an extreme to global studies and then media production and art and musicology. Is a really wonderful, thriving, creative environment. And I think that, that my molecular philosophy, you know, my bridging between the small and the scientific and the big and mental and the philosophical fits right into that narrative of liberal studies. But personally, I think of what I do as— I've heard this term slow-motion multitasking. That's the best way, I think, to, to, to, to live your life. You can't multitask, you can't do many things in the exact same moment and at the same time. But what you can do is have multiple things that you're interested in. And when one becomes hard or dull or boring and there's a setback, you can refocus to something else and then refocus to the next thing.

And by doing that, you always have something that you're inspired by. And I find that the most inspiring thing about my work, that I always have something to turn to that I find fresh and new.

You mentioned one of the kind of catalytic moments in the history of life on Earth and our deep, deep, deep ancestral past is sort of the formation of the gut. I know a little bit, you know, enough to be dangerous, but people talk about the gut as sort of the second nervous system. You know, you've got, you think with your gut. I've got a gut feeling about this. I trust your gut. Um, and there is some neuroscience to go along with that. Uh, but I wonder if you could step back and talk about the evolution of the gut itself. This is never talked about, but you make the case for this creature, you know, that develops, you know, an anus for the first time, which is kind of, you know, we'll keep it PG.

But, uh, but when that occurred, that there was a real unlock that things went viral again to use language that you express in the book. So talk about that, the formation of a, you know, what we call topological and, you know, a complex topology with genus number that's, uh, sophisticated compared to just the, uh, whatever it was, uh, one, one opening, but no, uh, external opening. And then are these things related to sea slugs? I mean, they kind of look like slug, a sea when I touched them, they— I don't know, are they like the first, very first gut cells? So talk about gut cells, their importance, or even having this conversation.

Well, first of all, it's one of those things about nature that I think we take for granted. Well, how else would it be? How else? What other options are there? But if we step back and look at it from the perspective of nature as a whole, how this process unfolded, a gut is actually a pretty smart idea and it's not obvious at all. There used to be these sponges, they still exist, and They filter feed. It's this wall of cells that filters water through itself, captures small bacteria, and eats those. That's the original, most basic form of animal feeding. Probably existed for millions, if not hundreds of millions of years. And then at some point, these larvae, not even the adult sponges, but these larvae of a sponge, which at that point look like a ball of cells, and really they originally were used only for reproduction, for dispersal, to swim somewhere, land, and then grow into a new adult sponge that would continue filter feeding. But so at some point, these balls of cells figured out this new trick where they bent like a ping pong ball.

If you fold it inwards and it develops this pouch inside, and now you can take another creature that you can put in this pouch, you can surround it with your own body, you can seal it, and then you can blast that whole thing with enzymes and dissolve it and steal all of its energy. At that time, this would have been a crazy technology and a complete new way to approach life on Earth. That is what that original gut was. At first, it's just a pouch. It's a stomach, really.

Show the illustrations that you drew for the book.

Yeah.

Yeah. So this is a pouch and you call it a gutsy move. I forgot that.

Gutsy move. Yeah. And we still go through this move in our embryonic development. It's called gastrulation. We used to have a joke in our lab that some of the students, you know, have they undergone gastrulation? This one has, this one not so sure about.

Just because they're, you know, 18-year-olds. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

You're not quite sure that they're quite there yet. So we go through this stage in embryonic development. But then evolutionarily speaking, the next big thing that happened to that gut was it broke through on the other side. At that point, it's just a pouch. But then it broke through on the other side. So now the body of what this jellyfish, this folded-in ping pong ball, becomes a worm. Now it's a tube with a gut running right through it. And what's what's the— the big deal about that? Yeah, the big deal is that now you can dig.

Now you can get into the ground and move through. That's what worms do. And the reason why it was so important at that time was because the seafloor was packed with food. It was packed with nutrients. This microbial mat of basically dead microorganisms that have been falling on the ground for billions of years, just accumulating there, building up this mat of food. But nobody could do anything with it because nobody could dig into it. You could only scrape it from the surface. If you imagine this ping pong ball, it's not going to go very far.

What is it going to do? It can bite, maybe it can dig a little bit in, but then it has to get out and spit out whatever ground it has put in its mouth. But a worm can do that continuously. A worm can dig and this ground moves through it and it just keeps eating and eating. And so that basically mixed that whole sediment up, unearthed all these nutrients, lifted them into the water, massively expanded the opportunities for anybody else who was living in that water. Also enriched the ground with oxygen because it was so thick oxygen wouldn't permeate. You couldn't live down there either. But now there's oxygen in the ground. So now this, this 2D environment where you can only scrape food off the surface transforms into a 3-dimensional environment.

And that is one of the theories for what triggers this fundamental breaking point in the history of life. Cambrian explosion, where everything changes, everything becomes like the modern world as we know it. Modern nature appears during that Cambrian explosion. Before that, there are some animals, some— we find some fossils, they all exist, but they are rare and scattered and don't look anything like what things look today.. And after that Cambrian explosion, all the familiar life forms start popping up as if out of nowhere. And so one of the— there are many theories. It's not the only one. That's just the one that I like and I find compelling, that what triggered the Cambrian explosion was this anal breakthrough, the breakthrough of the gut on the other side, the formation of the worm that transformed the seafloor habitat.

Is there a relationship between slugs besides topological and worms?

Yeah, well, that would have— that creature would have been the ancestor of all bilaterian animals. A bilaterian animal is an animal with bilateral symmetry like ourselves. We have a left and a right. A jellyfish doesn't have a left and a right. It's circular. But sea slugs have it, worms have it. And so that proto-worm that maybe triggered the Cambrian explosion gave rise to both branches of evolution. So we are related We are related to it as well as the sea slug.

As well as the sea that's slug, right.

So that's the thing, that's the fun thing about studying a sea slug. You know, when you're studying a sea slug and you are comparing the sea slug to a human, what you're really studying is that most recent common ancestor, the point when we separated. The only things that are gonna be in common between us are the things that we inherited from that original ancestor. So really we are studying that Cambrian worm that was digging through the sediment.

The great-great-grandson of the worm. Will we ever come to the end of what the sea slugs can teach us? I mean, are they just this jackpot, paying out slot machine, paying out neuro and biological insights?

I'm convinced that any organism that you take contains unimaginable troves of data and insight that we have no idea about, particularly when we're talking about the inside of the cell. You know, people talk these days about how soon we will have AI predicting cellular processes. And I believe it to some extent. Like, for example, you can model the action potential of a neuron. You you can, can model very short-term behaviors of a cell, immediate responses. They can reasonably well be approximated with mathematical equations. But when we're talking about long-term behavior of cells, like their memory, their pattern recognition, their long-term adjustment of which genes they use and how and for what reason and what stimulus they associate with something else, with another stimulus. I think we haven't even scratched the surface.

I think we simply don't have enough wet data, experimental results to reveal enough to meaningfully construct models of that. And that's true for sea slugs. That's equally true for, for even our own cells. There are cellular structures in our cells that we have no idea what they're doing. And there are these obelisks, these mysterious cellular structures that happen to be preserved across apparently large swaths of life on Earth. Nobody has any idea what they do.

They don't.

Absolutely no.

You obviously have an affinity, mental and also intellectual, but maybe even attachment to these creatures.

Of course.

Is it hard to— I imagine you have kill them sometimes and take them apart and rip out their neurons. And PETA's not watching this, but don't worry, they don't care about the Into the Impossible podcast. Is that hard? What's it like to work— I mean, the last time I dissected something, it was a dead frog in high school. It came back to life. I was so bad at doing biology. That's why I had to become a physicist, I say. But what's it like working with living creatures? And you must have some for them, even if they're worms.

Of course.

Affinity Absolutely.

No, of course. Of course. You know, I have what I call invertebrate pride. I always feel like I have to defend invertebrates against the vertebrate-centric world. Yeah. So no, I have a deep affinity for these animals. I care about them very deeply and I love them. We always have to remember why we're doing these experiments is not to satisfy our curiosity.

It's to advance human knowledge, to cure diseases, to improve human condition. And you always have to keep that goal in mind. And you have to be respectful to the life form that you're treating, even if it's a plant. It's regardless of whether it's got pain receptors or— because, because again, if you're trying to do that, if you're trying to judge what is this life form experiencing from your perspective, you're biasing it towards this really strange animal that you are. So I think the respect is fundamental. I think respect is something that you can extend to every life form that you are working with. And that's what we put into this work. Also, of course, we take care of these animals' well-being and I think what we do in the lab is a lot less gruesome than what anybody does when they go fishing.

Think about a worm. A worm is basically— this earthworm is about the same level of development as these sea slugs that we are using. Emphasizes the worm when you're stringing it a on hook.

When I go fishing, I coax it. I try to relax the worm before I feed it to the bass. Um, and tell me, you know, when I think of, you know, koans that have kind of mystified and beguiled me in my life, uh, one of them that resonates with me and kind of makes me break down and I stop thinking about it, you know, there's a whole school in physics, you're not, you're really just supposed to shut up and calculate or shut up and measure in my case. Uh, but is the, is the question, the koan, you know, what did your face look like before your grandfather was born. And this kind of evokes this essence of who am I? Not just what am I thinking or whatever, but the interconnectedness of all life. And you kind of got very almost sentimental. I mean, as sentimental as a Russian can get. No, no, you're very unusual, Nikolai.

I love it.

I love it.

I'm most— yeah, I'm half Russian. My left bilateral side is Russian. But tell me, is this uniformly connected. I mean, Chief Seattle said that all life is connected like the blood that we share. And it's obvious that you have this very soulful side of what you do and deep thinker, but what is the essence of being? I mean, it's such a big question, but I mean, you wrote the book One Hand Clapping. What is the essence? What is the resolution? Is the paradox like your face before your grandfather was born? Does it make sense or is it just merely meant to stimulate? Provoke us and maybe be intrinsically unanswerable.

Well, this analogy of your face you before, know, generations ago, it reminds me of what we talked about earlier about the color that you will never see. Right. We know that it exists. We know how to assemble it, but you can't experience it. And so it's similar, right? Those strands that would become you they were already present at that time, does that mean that you were predetermined? Does that mean that everything about your life was predetermined? It's also reminiscent of, were humans predetermined? I think there's some truth to that. I think there are some trajectories in life, some forces in the history of life that point in specific directions. I think there there is— was, for example, a drive within the eukaryotic domain towards more complexity and more energy spending. Complexity in exchange for energy that existed since before there are animals and multicellular organisms.

This was always a one-up. Who is going to get more complex? There's always going to be one branch who picks this route of more complexity in exchange for more energy use. And we happen to always be that branch. So you can almost say that it was predictable that there would be this extremely complicated life life form that would extract energy even from atoms, but still would not find that enough. So that I think is predictable. But what would that life form have looked like? What would I have been or you have been like? I don't think that that is predictable to that level. So what does it mean to be you or I or me? I think what it means is to contain the idea of me or I or you. It's just like when we said earlier, we accumulate these patterns from the outside world, we accumulate patterns of experience, we build out patterns of patterns and then patterns of patterns.

And then our whole mental scaffold consists of these patterns. And me, myself, everything I know about myself is just one of those patterns. So, but I think what's most profound about this is that the patterns in your brain are the same patterns that exist in nature. For example, you show a child a turkey and a chicken and a rabbit and a gerbil, and the child will know that the rabbit and the gerbil belong to one group and the chicken and the turkey belong to another group without knowing anything about species or evolution. But the reason why they would be grouped like that in in the, the mind of a child or any other person who would look at these animals is because that's really how evolution progressed. That's really— there used to be an animal that would become a turkey and a chicken, and there used to be an animal that would become the gerbil and the rabbit. So in forming these ideas of a mammal or a bird or whatever you want to call them, we are reconstructing nature. We are reconstructing a natural pattern.

Another example, ascending and descending tones. So a sequence of tones that goes up sounds optimistic. The same sequence goes down, sounds pessimistic to anyone in any culture. Starting from a very early age, there is this connection, this emotional connection to a very simple pattern. Maybe it's genetic, maybe it's cultural, maybe we have evolved to recognize it like that. Maybe it took millions of years. Maybe we absorb it through cartoons or video games, and those itself themselves go back to jazz and vaudeville performance, cabaret, trombone, sad trombone. But it doesn't even matter because regardless of how we absorbed it, through learning, through culture, or through direct associations, maybe each each one, one of us comes up with that association of our own, or maybe it's built into us by evolution through our genes.

It doesn't matter because however we absorb this, our minds, our emotions are reconstructing a pattern of nature. Down means losing control, means falling, means succumbing to natural forces. Right. Up up means success, means breaking through, means rising, means going up, means applying forces to successfully reach something. A plant, a flower breaking through, uh, the, the ground moves up. If you're falling off a cliff, you go down. It's fundamental. This is how gravity works.

It's because of gravity. It's because of how, how life on our planet is positioned.

It's interesting because we don't have that with light. Like, in some cultures I know they have red is a green light to Americans and green is a red light. That is cultural dependent or country specific, but you're right. And sonically, which is unusual because there's a lot more bandwidth with it sounds light, faster.

Yeah. It could have been totally arbitrary. It could have been totally different. So I don't think it's a coincidence that we arrive at this thing that makes sense because it's there, it's in nature, it's a pattern that we absorb from nature itself. And so I think that all of our mind is like this. What we think are ideas are really nature's ideas that express themselves through our brain. Our ideas are nature's ideas. All ideas are really essences.

Our mind is nature folding back on itself. And that, I think, is what makes us special. It is this ability to see yourself within the entire pattern of nature that allows you to ask a question, why am I special? And precisely that, being able to ask that question, is what makes you special.

That's— how do you say, Christian? That's beautiful. That's a very beautiful thing. And it actually winds up nicely with my final question, which is also a Zen koan. You probably know it. So two monks you and me. Nikolai and Brian are walking and we're walking down the street and we see the flag and the flag is moving. And one monk says, Nikolai says, "The flag is moving. The flag is animated." And then Brian says, "No, the air is moving." And then mysterious third voice says, "No, your mind is moving." Made me think when I was reading this book, if the mind is moving and we're the conduit of these ideas, then It's almost like, as you say, the word animal is something animated.

It's moving. If our mind is moving, are our brains sort of like animals trapped within our skull? It's dangerous to think about these things, right? Because you go crazy.

But you can definitely break your brain.

And you do it delightfully so. So what do we make of that? Is the brain this, this like actually a muscle? I mean, it's an organ, right? The heart is a muscle, but is the brain a muscle? Is it capable capable of animation via this kind of koan that I just met. Koan, I mentioned.

I think it's worth remembering where our brain comes from. It used to be originally by design, the essence of a brain, what nature put into this, it's a motion control organ. It's there to coordinate motion of these various parts of the body. A single cell doesn't need to do it. It's very easy to communicate information within the cell. But once you have a million cells in this body, well, the cell on one side needs to know what the other one is doing. So you need to have some interconnection between them and the brain. The nervous system provides that connectivity.

But during the process of evolution, that changes. This, this organ that used to just communicate signals, relay signals from cell to cell, starts making decisions about what signals to relay where, from what cells to what, under what conditions, depending on what sort of patterns of the signals that are arriving. As the rules get more complicated, the role of this organ shifts from just controlling motion to making decisions about what, what motion to undertake. So now, well, when we get to our point, yes, we can say that the role of our brain is to move our body. But I think that to each of us, that's not the most important thing that the brain is doing to us. What's more important is is the, the inner view on that brain is what is this decision-making process? Is that that flow from one to the other? That's what's, what's meaningful to us, that, that very flow of of information passing from one side to the other. I think that's how we need to think about our brain and and our, our mind as a whole. It's not it's not a, a thing.

It's a process.

Well, that's beautiful. And it makes me so glad that you are here today at the part of the Arthur C. Clarke Center for Human Imagination. At least it originally started that way. And so we've gotten you the Keating Prize, not the Nobel Prize, for impossibly good imagination. And it has your name and the date today. Engraved on the side, thanks to my brilliant helpmate. And it's got on the back the monolith from 2001: A Space Odyssey, which is featured here in my new studio.

So let me know also, what do you think about the new studio out there, everybody? This is special. Just the second guest ever in the studio. Thank you so much for coming to San Diego. I should thank the Neuroscientists Conference for having you here.

Yes, thank you so much. Thanks for having me. Pleasure to be here.

And we'll have to do many more of these. And I just very much appreciate your work, your teaching, your research, but the soul that you bring to the research, it's very unusual for a scientist. And I find it, the book is a real joy to read and it's wonderfully illustrated, something for everybody. I hope everyone will pick it up. I've listened to it on Audible, but you can also pick it up wherever books are sold, as they say. Nikolai, thank you very much. Thank you for coming. Thanks for watching this episode featuring Nikolai Kokushkin.

If this conversation made you rethink what life is or where intelligence begins, then the next step is obvious. You need to hear my discussion with Michael Levin, the scientist who taught us about the cognitive light cone and the world in which cells can communicate, cooperate, and build ways that we can hardly understand. If Nikolai gave you the molecular story, Michael Levin gives us the multicellular one. Together they form a single arc. What is life? How do we learn? And where does consciousness truly begin? Watch here and don't forget to like, comment, and subscribe.