(piano music)

(electronic music)

I hope to peak your curiosesity with a vision to the future

of how we might enhance brain function as we know it

and possibly change our sense of self.

If you imagine the brain as this city,

up till now it's been as if we've been looking

at the city from space.

We really haven't had the tools to do anything

beyond seeing what whole city blocks are doing,

so you can see what happens if there's a blackout,

and you lose a whole part of the city.

What you actually want to know is

what the individual components of the city,

what the people are doing, and what's the information

that's being transported from one part of the city

to the other?

Optogenetics is the ability

to manipulate individual neuronal circuits

refining our vision of the function of individual circuits,

and how they relate to different aspects

of our behavior and of our personality.

I'm gonna give you a few examples of what's been done

with this technology so far.

The basal ganglia is a part of your brain

that is damaged in Parkinson's disease.

This part of the brain contains many kinds

of neurons and they're all intermingled.

If you activate a certain subset of them with optogenetics,

you can make a rat freeze up and have difficulty walking.

If you activate a different subset,

the rats start moving faster.

They take light sensitive proteins from very humble species

such as algae that you find in a pond, and can put them

into another animal such as a rat or a mouse.

This gives you the ability to control the activity

of your brain cells just by shining light on them.

Imagine if we could use optogenetics or a similar technology

to get the input from an artificial sensor into our brain.

In principle we could not only restore function,

we could enhance our current functions.

We could give ourselves ultraviolet light detectors,

for example, the way mantis shrimps have,

or we could take an example from fruit flies

and give ourselves carbon dioxide detectors,

and then we could automatically sense our air quality.

When things go wrong with the brain

it's just so devastating.

I think one of the hopes for optogenetics is

that if it can work in humans,

that it might be used as a tool

for restoring brain function.

There's a lot of ethical issues

about enhancing your function and making yourself better.

This is what actually the whole discussion

after my Ideas Lab morphed into.

Which was not about optogenetics, or not what we might do,

but whether we should do it.

That's a really great point.

Would there be a side effect

to increasing your capacity by 20%?

It's really, really fun to fantasize about the future.

In ten years time we might all be enhanced with implants.

That's the future, and it's a future

that should be very carefully considered,

and I think what we have right now,

which is just the possibility of learning,

is actually exciting enough on its own.

(upbeat violin music)