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The Electric Brain
Learning Stats
CEFR Level
Difficulty
Subtitles (748 segments)
The nervous system is fundamentally electric.
When we move our arm,
it moves because a signal
has been sent to the muscle
that controls it,
and that message is made of charged atoms
moving in and out of nerve cells.
It's electricity.
Now, because the brain is electric,
we could also use electricity to record
what the brain is doing
or bypass it entirely,
-and control a body. -[beep]
That means that we could use our minds
to move other people's bodies,
restore movement to people who are paralyzed,
feel through an artificial hand as if it was our own,
and even read people's minds.
Shocking!
[theme music playing]
Even though electricity
wasn't really understood
until the 1800s,
its ability to influence the body
had been known since at least
ancient Roman times,
when respected physician
Scribonius Largus
wrote about a man
who accidentally stepped
on an electric fish
and was suddenly relieved of gout pain.
Scribonius did some experiments
and found that you could put an electric fish
on your head and relieve headaches.
In 1804,
centuries later,
Italian physicist Giovanni Aldini
discovered he could make people's muscles move
with electricity.
He amazed the European world
by using electricity
to animate the corpse
of an executed criminal.
The corpse opened its eyes
and even seemed to sit up.
But Aldini wasn't just trying to shock people.
He was showing the world that neurons,
the cells that control both
our thoughts and our movements,
operate through electricity.
[buzzing]
Imagine bypassing a person's brain
so as to control their body.
Now normally when you move your body,
your brain sends electrical signals
through nerves.
But if we could use electrodes
to send those signals,
we could control a person's body
without needing their brain to be involved.
We could control them with a remote control,
and that's what we are about to do today
with cockroaches.
I'm here with Tim Marzullo from Backyard Brains,
and, Tim, you brought some cockroaches.
[Tim] Yes, Michael, cockroaches use their antenna
to sense their environment and move around,
and we're going to try to trick the cockroach
and control its movement
for a number of minutes.
Trick it, how do we trick it?
We are going to do a surgery on the cockroach
where we're going to hijack the nervous system
to send electrical impulses to their antenna.
[Michael] All right, well, let's get to it.
-[Tim] Let's do it. -[Michael] I've brought with me
today a state-of-the-art cockroach operating room.
Now, how do you do surgery on a cockroach?
We have a jar of ice water, and to induce anesthesia
we are going to put the cockroaches
in the ice water and their nervous system
will stop firing electrical impulses.
We'll notice after a minute or two they'll stop moving.
[Michael] Once the roaches were anesthetized,
they were ready for surgery.
[Tim] All right, so then now what we're gonna do
is attach the electrodes.
So here we have the little connector.
It has three wires. It has a ground wire,
and it has a wire for the left antenna
and the right antenna.
I'm going to put a little bead of Superglue
on the cockroach right here,
and then I'm just gonna stick the electrode
on the cockroach's head.
[Michael] Next, we inserted the ground wire
into the flight muscle of the wing.
-[Tim] There you go. -[Michael] Cool.
[Tim] I put the wire in the back.
[Michael] The remaining two wires
get inserted into the antenna.
[Tim] Now I'm just gonna snip the antenna
right there and we...
[Michael] And now because it's a hollow tube...
...we can stick the wire in.
[Tim] So now, what I'm gonna do
is I'm just gonna insert it into the antenna.
-All right? -[Michael] Got it, wow.
[Tim] And he's ready for the left antenna.
There we go. It went right in there.
I'll put the cockroach
right back in the ice water.
Now it's worth pointing out what this does to them
and to their quality of life.
[Tim] Yeah, after the surgery
I'm gonna take them back to their homes,
snip the wires, and these cockroaches
will then be retired.
[Michael] And the antenna will grow back?
[Tim] Yes, and I will return them to our reproducing colony,
and they'll live happy cockroach lives
after the show.
-[Michael] Fantastic. -[Tim] All right.
-So now we're ready to go. -[Michael] Wonderful.
Our cyber-roach was now neurologically wired
for external control.
[Michael] This is a state-of-the-art
roach racetrack.
Tim and I are about to take some robo-roaches
for a test drive.
But first, Tim,
I wanna see how an ordinary roach
moves around and uses its antenna.
[Tim] So let's just see where this guy goes.
He wants to explore my hand.
All right, and then, oh wow.
-Wow. -Racin' away.
And you can you see he's hugging that wall.
You can see he keeps tapping the wall and moving along.
He's not in the middle of the road,
-he's on the edge of it. -[Michael] Yeah.
As we know, roaches use their antennas
to explore their surroundings
and locate food and shelter.
When no walls or obstacles were sensed,
the roaches felt free
to move around at will.
-Hey, guys... -[Tim] Hey, whoa, whoa.
[Michael] follow the rules.
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