From 600+ conversations with the world’s leading thinkers.
In December 2020, we published in the journal nature that we could turn on 3 genes in mice, that are normally only switched on in embryos. By doing this, we could reverse the age of complex tissues in adult mice. We used this system to restore eyesight to blind, old, mice!
The problem is that you put cells in the same vat and ask them to grow and they're producing ammonia, you're going to have a nice glass of urine! We must solve all of that!!
Emotions are like the reward (or punishment) the brain gives us for getting what we need, want, or could be harmed by.
If you use a complex system approach which doesn't have a fixed period of time in the model, it enables you to start exploring what types of animals you will see! It's classifying the elephants in the room - it may not tell you which one will come, but it will give you a better idea of what is out there in terms of risk.
The easiest way to understand noise is by thinking about measurements. The variability of the error is noise – and that's important. In the mathematics of accuracy, the expression for total error is very simple and quite compelling. It is bias-squared plus noise-squared.
It's difficult to describe to people who aren't curious, just what curiosity is. Imagine explaining to a robot or a computer what curiosity is! For those of us who experience it however, it's almost a primal-pull.
A model that's really strong at mathematical reasoning is likely to be strong at coding. And a model that's excellent at both math and code is often very good at analysing the nuts and bolts of legal reasoning as well.
Many biologists I speak to would say it's almost incomprehensible that something as complex as us has even appeared at all—we might just be very lucky. Or maybe it normally only takes a few hundred million years to go from life to intelligence, and we were just slow. We have a sample size of one.
Anyone worth following in peak performance will tell you that 90% of human performance is mental. The understanding of that mental aspect of the game is brand-new – perhaps 10-20 years old. The work being done around the neuroscience of performance is creating an unprecedented rate of change; it's honestly off the charts.
Our brains consist of about 100 billion nerve cells and neurons, with a potential for making anywhere from tens to hundreds of trillions, some even say a quadrillion, connections known as synapses. Due to a phenomenon known as neuroplasticity, our neural network continually restructures itself. Each time we learn something new or encounter a fresh experience, we trigger a reconfiguration of our brains.
From a rather dispassionate, clinical perspective, and if you remove the awful consequences that people experience when something does go wrong, you can see conditions like synesthesia as nature's experiments. We can learn a lot about the underlying functioning of our nervous system.
Many people assume that they understand what stress truly is. Yet, I believe our collective definition might be somewhat misguided. Hans Selye, often regarded as the pioneer in stress research, characterized it as the body's non-specific response to any demand. Rather than categorizing stress as either good or bad, we should understand it as the body's reaction to any non-specific challenge.