All language subtitles for Through the Wormhole S04E06 Can Our Minds Be Hacked [pseudo]

Freeman: Our minds
store our entire lives...

Our memories, our talents,
our deepest desires.

Tell no one,
and our thoughts remain our own.

But that might be
about to change.

Our brains
are biological computers,

vulnerable to data theft.

Computer hackers
can read our e-mail.

Brain hackers
may someday read our minds...

And even rewrite our thoughts.

Can our minds be hacked?

Space, time, life itself.

The secrets of the cosmos
lie through the wormhole.

Subtital By RA_One

we live in a world of data.

We all know how vital it is

to protect
our personal information,

our passwords
and credit-card numbers,

but what if hackers
learned to read or tamper with

our most precious and private
store of data...

The contents of our minds?

Can the brain be hacked
by a computer?

The data in our brain is not
stored as simple ones and zeros.

Hacking into our thoughts

requires decoding
the logic of our neurons.

Science is getting close
to achieving that goal.

One day soon,

our innermost thoughts
may no longer be our own.

I once tried to hide the truth
from my mother.

I lied,

but when
she looked into my eyes,

I knew that she knew.

How could she know?

Man: How you doing?

Please turn off your cellphones.

Now put your hands together
for the one and only Marc Salem.

Enjoy the show.

[ Cheers and applause ]

It's only me.

Good evening, everybody.
I'm delighted to be here.

What I'd like to do
is choose somebody at random...

Freeman: Marc Salem
is one of new.

York's most prominent
psychologists,

but he also
has a remarkable talent,

one that has catapulted him
into show business.

All right,
here's what I want you to do.

I want you to say "Stop"
At any point.

Say "Stop" At any point.

Woman: Stop. Okay.

Look at the first word
on the first line.

Have you got it? Yeah.

Okay. Hold onto this.

All right.
Say nothing at all to me.

Say nothing at all to me.
Just think of the first letter.

A, b, c, d, e, f, g, h,
I, j, k, I, m, n, o, p,

q, r, s, t, u, v, w, x, y, z.

Okay.
It's an "S." Is that correct?

- Yes.
- Okay, good.

Let's see. The second letter,
probably a vowel.

A, e, I, o, u. A, e, I, o, u.

- It's an "E, " Isn't it?
- Yes.

Freeman: Marc's mind-reading
ability is not magic.

He's reading tiny physical clues

his subjects
are unwittingly giving him.

Se..."E."

- the word is "Second"?
- Yes.

Give her a round of applause,
please.

What I'm looking for,
first of all,

is some kind of difference

in the way that
they're expressing themselves.

Should I get rid of this one
or this one?

- That one.
- Get rid of this one.

I think every mental thought
that we have

has some physical
corresponding emission.

There's something that
we can tell about that thought.

We literally can see
people thinking.

My friends,
let me just say once again,

nothing that I did this evening
is supernatural.

Nothing that I do is occult.

Thank you so very much.

[ Applause ]

Freeman: From his stage shows
and from his academic research,

Marc has learned

that it's almost impossible
to keep a secret.

What our brains are thinking

can't help but leak out
into our physical bodies.

Now, this light board is really
somewhat like your brain

in a simplistic form.

We have impulses traveling out
interdependently.

That is,
each relies on the other one.

Freeman: Just as your brain

controls every
muscle in your body,

our theater light board

sends signals
to every light in the house,

and just as the light board

operates groups of lights
with a single command,

so does the brain.

For example, Clarissa,
show what would happen

if we switched
switch number one.

A single button triggers
a complex set of actions.

Lights turn on.
Lights turn off.

Others move or change color
all at once.

In the same way,
when we think a thought,

our brains trigger a whole set
of movements in our bodies.

Let's say suddenly,

it occurred to the person
that they look ridiculous.

Hit number two, please.

Suddenly,
that thought would change,

and the physical
would also change.

Perhaps a sly smile
would come on someone's face.

Psychologists like Marc

call these involuntary muscle
reactions information leakage.

He believes
there's no way to stop it,

even if you have
the perfect poker face.

Hi, guys. I'm glad you're here.

I know that you're,
among other things, gamblers,

and we're gonna try
a little bit of an experiment

with how you think

and information
you may be giving off...

What sometimes
you may call tells...

What we're really looking at
as nonverbal communication.

Could everybody
look at their card, please?

Remember it and put it down.

To play a game of poker,

you need to prevent
everyone at the table

from guessing your cards,

but Marc believes
he can see through any player,

no matter how blank
their expression may be.

Let's try you.

Think red, black.

Focus on it.
Black, red, black, red.

Black, black, black. Red, red.

I think it's definitely black.
Is that correct?

- Yes.
- Okay.

Spades, clubs, spades, clubs.

Okay, there's a rapid blinking,
discomfort at the spades,

so is it a spade?

Okay.

Ace, 2, 3, 4, 5,
6, 7, 8, 9, 10.

Jack, queen, king.

There was a very tight blink
on the Jack,

so I would think Jack.

Salem: There are ways to know
what people are thinking.

You have to learn
to pay attention

to the subtle differences,
the subtle nuances,

and that's what I do.

I try to look
at what's normally done

and then
what those subtle nuances are

and plus what are universal.

Freeman:
Natural mind readers like Marc

can decipher thoughts from
involuntary muscle movements,

but cutting-edge technology

could give brain hackers
direct access to our thoughts,

even if our muscles never move.

Augie nieto is
a fitness industry entrepreneur.

In 2005,
he was diagnosed with a.L.S.

And soon became
almost completely paralyzed.

The only parts of his body
he can move are his feet.

He uses them
to control a speech computer.

Even these muscles
will eventually degenerate,

but he may not
lose the ability to communicate.

Neurotechnology pioneer
Dr. Philip low

is hoping to hack into augie's
mind before it's too late.

Philip and a team of engineers

are building
a state-of-the-art brain reader,

a device they call the ibrain.

I'm wearing the first portable
brain monitor ever built,

and what it is doing is
it is recording my brain data.

It is actually
sending it over to our servers,

and our algorithms
can crunch it.

Freeman: Every time we decide
to move our muscles,

billions of neurons fire
miniature bolts of electricity

inside our brains.

Philip's
electrically sensitive ibrain

can detect
these electrical pulses

by measuring the small changes
in voltage

they produce
on the surface of the scalp.

By seeing the activation of
particles of brain structures,

we can tell, "Oh, this person
is trying to move his hands."

Freeman: Philip
thought the ibrain

might help patients like augie

who, despite their paralysis,

have healthy, functioning brains

that can still send signals
to their muscles.

A.L.S. Patients
do not have problems

when it comes to
their own brains.

The areas
that his brain is using

in order to control these limbs,

these areas are still
working perfectly fine.

They're just unemployed
right now.

Hi, augie.
Nice to see you again.

Freeman: If the ibrain

can pick up augie's
mental intention to move,

Philip could create a new means
for him to communicate.

You will have a prompt.

It will ask you to imagine to,
you know, move your right hand

for four seconds at a time,

and, of course, we're going to
be monitoring your brain waves

very, very closely
during that time

and having all of our algorithms
crunch the data

in the background, as well.

The test is successful.

Philip's ibrain recognizes

whenever augie is thinking about
moving his right or left hand.

Low: Augie had
a very successful first test.

We will use these brain patterns

in order to control
a virtual hand on the screen,

which will enable him
to just pick these words

and pick these letters
and enable him to communicate,

so this gives us
a lot of hope and encouragement

that, in fact, we have a system
that will work for everybody

and that will enable individuals
to use their brain patterns

in order to communicate.

Man: The biggest fear
for someone with a.L.S.

Is to be not able
to communicate.

That is called being locked in.

With the ibrain, I will
never, never be locked in!

Freeman: Soon,
augie may not even

have to think about
moving his hand

in order to communicate

because a laboratory
in California

has already begun
to translate thoughts

into pictures and words.

We all have thoughts
we'd rather keep to ourselves.

When computer scientists
want to keep something secret,

they encrypt it,

but it's just a matter of time
before any code is cracked.

The electrical activity buzzing

between the neurons
in our brains

could be
the next code we decipher.

In fact, some neuroscientists

are already translating
the language of the brain

into plain English.

Neuroscientist Jack gallant
is on a mission

to translate the flurry
of activity inside our heads

into plain English.

You might say
he's writing the book on it.

Gallant: You can think
of each part of the brain

as translating between the world

and whatever the brain activity
is in that part of the brain,

so there's some sort of language
you can think of

that's gonna mediate
between the world and the brain,

and if you had a list
of all of the things

that related the world
to the brain,

you would essentially
have a dictionary.

Freeman: The first brain

dictionary Jack set out to build

was for the language of sight.

There are about 50 or 70
brain areas

that are devoted to vision,

so there's gonna be,
essentially,

50 or 70 different dictionaries

that we're gonna
have to build...

One dictionary
for each region of the brain.

Now, that's gonna be
a really big dictionary.

It's gonna be
much thicker than this

because the number of things
you can see in the world

is really, really
a large number.

Freeman:
To build a brain dictionary,

Jack and his colleagues
shinji nishimoto and Alex huth

use an fmri scanner to measure
exactly how the brain responds

to a long series of video clips.

So, this is a viewer
that allows us

to visualize the blood flow
while the movie plays.

Blue means
relatively less blood flow,

and red means
relatively more blood flow,

and you can see

that the blood flow's changing
quite dramatically

as the scenes in this movie
play,

and the problem that we have
in modeling the brain

is to try to understand
what the relationship is

between each individual point
in this brain and these movies.

Freeman: But as they compiled
thousands of scans of brains

reacting to thousands
of frames of video,

Jack and his team found
that certain objects

trigger predictable patterns
of blood flow,

and they began to build

a dictionary
of objects in the world,

defined as particular patterns
of blood flow in the brain.

Gallant: And then once we have
this world-brain dictionary,

we can actually take it,

and we can sort of
run it backwards,

and we can create
a brain-world dictionary.

Freeman:
To test that dictionary,

they send their test subjects
back into the fmri

to watch more movies,

except this time, they don't see
what the subject sees.

Jack and his team have to guess
using only the raw data

from the brain scans and
an advanced computer algorithm.

So, there are probably, say,

10,000 points on the brain,
5,000,

that are being used
in this model,

and each point in the brain
has a predicted brain activity

that it generates when you
stick an image through it,

and then
we aggregate information

across all those 10,000 points

to come up
with the best prediction.

Freeman: This is the image
that only the subject could see.

These are the top choices
the computer selects

from the brain-world dictionary,

and this is
the composite average.

No matter what the subject sees
in the world,

the brain-world dictionary
can produce a rough copy.

But this algorithm does more

than just guess
what images people are watching.

It can also guess what they are
thinking about those images.

Here on the left is the movie
that the subjects saw,

and on the right, you can see
2,000 nouns and verbs,

and they change their size,

and the size of the word
indicates the probability

that that concept appeared
in the video at that time.

You can see here, it
gets "Talk, "

"Face, "
"Woman, " "Man."

here, "Talking,
" "Man."

you'll see, here's "Hand, "
"Room, " "Face."

so, this is a complicated scene.

Here we go.
We switch to an ocean scene.

"Clouds, " "Sky, "
"Vegetation" "Waikiki, "

"Body of water, "
"Building, "

"Sky, " "People
walking, " "Tree."

these are all really very
accurate semantic decodings.

Freeman: Jack's team has built

a dictionary of 2,000
emotionally neutral concepts

that people might think

when they watch
their series of videos.

Calibrating their computers
to decode more personal meaning

is only a matter of time

and increasing the level
of detail in the brain scans.

We're constantly surprised

by how much information
we can recover,

especially given

that the measurements
we're taking of the brain

are still, at this point,
really, really primitive.

That's one thing that I think is
really exciting about this field

and really interesting,

and I also think
it raises a caution flag

that I think we're gonna have to
deal with these ethical issues

involving brain decoding
sooner rather than later,

because we don't know

how fast this technology's
gonna progress,

and that opens up
a big ethical can of worms.

You know,
when is that gonna be used?

And what can it be used for?

And I really think this needs
to get addressed right away.

Freeman: Brain
hackers may soon be

able to read your every thought.

What then?

If your thoughts can be decoded,
could they be altered?

This neuroscientist
and entrepreneur

is pushing the boundaries
of brain manipulation

with a device

that could turn amateurs
into experts in a single day.

We'd all love to be truly great
at something...

Maybe a physicist like Einstein

or an artist like Picasso

or a great leader
like Nelson mandela.

Most of us have to settle

for simply good
instead of incredible,

but what if we could change that
by hacking our mental software

and giving ourselves
capabilities

we weren't born with?

Chris berka is a neuroscientist,
engineer, inventor,

and c.E.O.
Of a neurotech startup company.

It's a workload
that would crush most of us,

but she handles it
by getting into

a high-performance,
high-output brain state.

It's what athletes call
"The zone."

berka: Being in the zone,

it's essentially
just focused attention

and the ability
to not be distracted.

It's what allows you to really
develop perfection in any skill.

Freeman: Getting
into the zone is

a full-time obsession for Chris.

Her company
is developing a device

that she claims
can train your brain

to work like the brain
of a highly-skilled expert.

Chris oosterlinck

is a California state
archery champion.

Berka: He has a small band
around his head

that has four sensors

for sensing
the brain's electrical activity.

We're gonna be looking for
the particular state

leading up to the shot

that we know
is the peak performance state.

So, Chris,
do you want to get ready and go?

Freeman: Inside Chris' brain,
billions of neurons are firing,

creating waves of electricity.

Different states of mind have
different frequencies of waves.

When people are in the zone,
two frequencies dominate...

Alpha waves,

which indicate a state
of meditative concentration,

like those of a zen master,

and lower-frequency theta waves,
which show extreme relaxation.

Berka: The red line indicates
the e.E.G. Theta activity,

and the green line indicates
the Alpha activity,

and we see both of those
Alpha and theta increase

just prior
to taking the perfect shot.

Freeman: Chris brings in
a group of amateurs.

She wants to see
what will happen

if she coaxes the amateurs
to take their shots

while in the same brain state
as a professional archer.

Berka: So, what we're doing is

monitoring
the brain's electrical activity.

We do that
by putting sensors on the scalp,

and as you move through

different cognitive states
and mental states,

the electronic frequencies
of your brain will change,

and we can record those
in real time and analyze them.

Freeman: Each amateur focuses
and relaxes to reach the zone.

Chris' monitor
records their brain waves,

and a small haptic buzzer
on their collar

lets them know
when they've achieved

the same brain state
as the professional.

We're seeing the e.E.G. Alpha
increase and theta increase.

The haptic buzzer stopped,

and now he's ready
to take the perfect shot.

Go ahead, Shane.

That was perfect. [ Chuckles ]
That was perfect.

That's exactly the goal.

Freeman: By the end
of only one day of practice,

Chris' technology hacked
the minds of a group of amateurs

to shoot at or close to a
professional level of expertise.

Berka: And what we're able
to demonstrate

is a 230% increase
in the speed and accuracy

of marksmanship training.

Freeman: Chris sees no end
of potential customers

for her brain-hacking device...

A corporate board that needs to
make smart group decisions,

a president
who needs peak performance,

or a special-forces operative
whose split-second choices

make the difference
between life and death.

What we're trying to do
is to give you the ability

to control your mind
and your mental state,

your ability to deal with

even the most challenging
environments,

and just by training you
to control your brain,

you get this kind of
metacognitive awareness

that allows you
to be much more resilient

and adaptable
to stressful situations.

If we can hack into our own
brains to amplify our talents,

what's stopping us from hacking
into the brains of other people?

Could one mind reprogram
the reality of another?

Let's do an experiment.

Close your eyes.

Keep them closed.

Now imagine you're alone
in the desert

and your throat and mouth
are swollen with thirst.

Now think about drinking
a cool glass of water.

Open your eyes.

Do you feel refreshed?

If you do,

I just hacked into your mind
and altered your perception.

Stanford's David spiegel is not
your typical psychiatrist.

He helps his patients
overcome their struggles

through a technique
that is controversial

for a university doctor...

Hypnosis.

Hypnosis is a form
of highly focused attention

coupled with
an ability to dissociate,

or put outside
of conscious awareness,

things that would ordinarily
be in consciousness

and a heightened response to
social cues or suggestibility.

And hypnosis
is highly focused attention.

It's been called
believed-in imagination.

Freeman: David wanted to know

how people perceived the world
when hypnotized,

so he has designed an experiment
to look at the brains of people

who have the ability
to hypnotize themselves.

Okay, Katie,
you doing all right?

Katie: Yep.

- Good.
- All right, now,

we're gonna go into
a state of self-hypnosis now.

Uh-huh.

So now I want your eyes
to be relaxed and closed,

and imagine your body floating
somewhere safe and comfortable,

like a bath, a lake, a hot tub,
or just floating in space.

Each breath deeper and easier.

Body floating safe
and comfortable.

Once she is under hypnosis,

David shows Katie
a grid of colors.

What colors do you see now?
Just name a few.

Good.

Katie perceives the color grid,

and her fusiform gyrus
lights up.

This part of the brain becomes
active whenever we see color.

But because
Katie's under hypnosis,

David can now
tamper with her senses.

And now
I want you to drain the color

from the image in front of you

so that what you start to see
is just gray, white, and black.

Just drain away the color.

Now again, remaining in this
state of concentration, Katie,

please tell me what
the image looks like to you now.

- Good.
- Yeah.

Physically,
the color image has not changed,

but David now takes another scan
of Katie's fusiform gyrus.

Spiegel: So, we're looking now

at the regions of the brain

that actually light up,

because there's more blood flow
when they're looking at color

than when they're looking
at black and white.

Here is what the blood flow was

when they were
really looking at color,

and here's the blood flow
when they were looking at color

but drained it of color
and saw it as black and white.

Freeman: Even though she's still
looking at a color image,

the blood flow to Katie's
fusiform gyrus is decreasing.

It is proof that her brain

is turning off her ability
to see color

at David's suggestion.

The image she perceives
is becoming black and white.

David believes that
hypnosis opened up Katie's brain

for reprogramming.

His thoughts
hacked into her mind

and became
her real living experience.

We tend to think that the brain
processes raw information

and we make sense of it
afterwards,

but it turns out,

especially
in studies of hypnosis,

that we can reset the brain,

that we can change the way

the brain
actually perceives information,

so it's not that it reacts
differently to the same input.

It changes what the input is.

Freeman: David's work suggests
that while under hypnosis,

the way our brains
perceive reality is altered.

I had a student who was doing
research with me on hypnosis

who is also a really talented
athlete for the football team.

He was terrific,
and he was very hypnotizable,

and I would say to him,

"So, what's going on
when you're playing like this?"

he said, "Doc,
when I'm having a good day,

I'm aware of two things.

I'm aware of the football
and the defender."

[ crowd cheering ]

And he said, "And there's
20 other big guys on the field.

I don't know they're there.

There's 60,000 people
yelling at me from the stands.

I don't hear them."

clearly, our minds
are programmable.

We have hardware that allows us
to take in input, process it,

and do something with it,

and that input
can come from ourself

or from people around us.

Freeman: Hypnotism opens
our minds to brain hackers,

but we have to make
a conscious choice

to enter a hypnotic state,

like a computer
that can accept or reject

another user logging on.

There may be a hole in our
neurological security, however.

A team of researchers
in Tel Aviv

claims to have found an exploit

that could open
our unconscious mind to hackers.

Freeman:
Think back to your childhood.

What do you recall?

Your mother's perfume?

Fresh-cut grass?

Oatmeal cookies
baking in the oven?

A familiar scent
can flood the mind

with images, memories,
and emotions

whether we like it or not.

Computer hackers write programs
called cracks

to break into secure systems.

Could your sense of smell
be a crack for a brain hacker?

Ilana hairston
is a research psychologist

in Tel Aviv, Israel.

Ilana is fascinated
by what happens in our brains

when we sleep.

It began with an experiment
she did in her student days.

Hairston: At the time,
I was working with animals,

and I could see that
I would train animals on a maze

and they would not learn.

"Clearly, " I thought,
"These animals are very stupid, "

and then I'd go back,
put them in the cage,

come back the next day,
and boom,

they performed like they'd been
practicing the whole night,

and it just blew my mind.

It made me realize we spend
a third of our life asleep,

and there's so much going on
while we sleep.

Freeman: Ilana thinks that our

minds must be able to learn

when we lose consciousness.

To prove it, she's plotting
to break into the sleeping mind.

It's a job that requires her
to first get past

the brain's night watchman,
the thalamus.

Hairston: There's a part of
the brain called the thalamus.

What it typically does,

it's gonna clamp down
on sensory information

and stop you from waking up,

or if it says, "Okay,
this is important information.

You need to wake up, "
It'll cause you to wake up.

Freeman: But Ilana
believes there

is a back door into the brain

when we sleep...

Our sense of smell.

Smell goes first
to the cortex...

And so it kind of bypasses
this relay station.

Basically, you can
enter the sleeping brain

without going through
this relay station.

Freeman: When we fall asleep,

the thalamus
acts like a watchful nanny.

Our senses try to deliver
information to the brain

but are turned away.

Input from our sense of smell,
however,

has direct access,

and once inside,

sensory signals
that are normally tuned out

during our sleep

can be snuck in.

Ilana teamed up
with research partners

at the weizmann institute

to hack into the minds
of sleeping test subjects

using odors.

They hook a test subject up
to a machine

that can produce
a wide variety of sense

and then measure
how deeply the subject breathes.

The subject falls
into a deep sleep,

and Ilana and her colleague
go to work.

They release a pleasant perfume

and immediately play
a high-pitched tone.

[ High-pitched tone plays ]

Later, they release the smell
of rotting fish...

And play a low-pitched tone.

[ Low-pitched tone plays ]

The process repeats throughout
the night until morning arrives.

Hairston: So, we just got
our participant out of bed,

and he's not hearing or smelling
anything,

and we're gonna present the
tones alone without the smells

to see if he responds
to the tones.

So, now we're just
watching him breathing.

Freeman: The subject
had no conscious awareness

of the odors presented
throughout the night

and has no memory of them now,

but Ilana wants to see

if his breathing patterns reveal

an unconscious,
visceral reaction

to the high and low tones.

She first plays the tone
linked to the perfume.

[ High-pitched tone plays ]

The inhale
was much bigger and wider

compared to his normal inhales.

We paired this tone
with a pleasant odor.

Then she plays
the low-pitched tone,

the one that was paired
with the foul stench.

[ Low-pitched tone plays ]

Again, you can see
the trigger of the tone,

and he's literally
holding his breath.

The subject
does not smell anything,

but his mind reacts
as though he does.

He associates
the high-pitched tone

with pleasant, breathable air

and the low-pitched tone
with foul, nauseating odors.

The key issue here

is also that he doesn't
actually remember anything

that happened during the night.

He's not actually aware
that this tone was associated

with a bad smell
or a good smell.

He's just responding
to the tone

without any knowledge
of what we expect him to do.

Ilana believes that
this brain-hacking technique

can be refined and used to
manipulate any unconscious mind.

Hairston:
And then the question is

can we do this
with a more subtle paradigm,

like training people
during sleep?

And I think the answer
would be "Yes."

Freeman:
Take, for example, politics.

Your support of one candidate

might seem, to you,
to be unswervable.

But while you are sleeping,

scent hackers
could train your mind

to associate
pleasant or foul odors

with just about any sound,

even the sound
of a particular person's voice.

The next time
you hear that voice,

your newly-learned
subconscious reaction

could turn adulation
into disgust.

Hairston:
Because odors are emotional,

I think we could modify our
emotional responses to stimuli,

so I think you could
modify emotional responses

and thereby modify behavior.

Freeman: Someday,

how we react to anything
in the world around us

could be manipulated
by a brain hacker.

It's a future that may come
sooner than you think,

because this scientist

is already building
the ultimate brain hack.

His technology could
put any thought into our heads

with a flash of light.

Today,
we can manipulate human brains

by tampering with the senses,
bathing the brain in chemicals,

or by playing
psychological mind games.

But all these methods influence
the brain from the outside in.

A true mind hack,

one that opens us up
for reprogramming of any kind,

may require something
more audacious...

Reaching inside a living brain
and flicking a switch.

M.I.T. Engineer, physicist,
and neuroscientist ed boyden

has spent his career figuring
out how complex machines work.

He's now working on the
most complex machine of all...

The human brain.

A cubic millimeter of
brain tissue has 100,000 cells,

and there are a billion
connections between them.

These cells compute
using electricity,

and if all these
little electrical computers

could be recorded, perturbed,
controlled, and analyzed,

then maybe we could understand
how the brain computed it

in the same way that computers

are engineered to do
all the things that they do

and our phones
and on the Internet and so on.

So,
if you have a complex system,

whether it's a computer or a
city or the economy or a brain,

one of the ways that you
can figure out what's going on

is to actually put
little inputs into the system

and see what happens.

Freeman: It's easy to test the

components on a
computer circuit board,

but brain cells
are a little trickier,

so ed set out
to find a natural switch

that can turn individual neurons
on or off,

and he found one swimming around
in a puddle of pond water.

Boyden: This kind of algae
actually has this light sensor.

It sits in a little eye spot
in the back of the algae,

and basically, these are
little light-activated proteins

known as opsins

that sit
in the membranes of cells

and serve as photosynthetic
or photosensory protein,

and this is a molecule
that converts light

into a very specific change
in electrical potential,

the exact same kind that occurs
in neurons when they're active.

Freeman: Ed and his colleagues
extracted from the algae

the genetic code that produces
these light-sensitive opsins.

They then inserted this gene
into a virus

that could splice itself into
the DNA of living brain cells.

Boyden: The neurons in the brain
will manufacture the protein

because now the genome
has been incorporated

into the nucleus of other cells

and then expressed those
proteins all over the membranes,

or boundaries, of those cells.

Freeman: Ed's virus
instructs any infected neurons

to build
a light-sensitive on/off switch.

With these switches,
any brain circuit

from our senses to
our emotional state and memories

could be controlled with this.

Boyden: So, this is a laser
that we developed here,

which will then
split that laser light

out into an array
of optical fibers

that we can enter information
into the brain

into many different points

that are distributed
in a three-dimensional pattern.

The brain doesn't feel pain,

so we can implant little probes
into the brain,

deliver light
out the end of these probes,

and then we'll turn on or off
parts of the brain

just by pulsing this laser,

turning the laser on and off
very rapidly.

Freeman: Ed and his colleagues

first put that technology
to trial

with animal subjects.

Ed wired
his light-sensitive switches

into a mouse's
pleasure-reward brain circuits.

We put in an optical fiber
into the brain

such that it could deliver light
to those cells.

Then we programmed a computer
such that

whenever a mouse hooked its nose
into a little sensor,

it would get a pulse of light.

Freeman:
Each pulse of blue light

activates the same
pleasure-reward circuits

that turn on when
the rodent eats a piece of food

or finds a mate.

The mouse keeps poking its head
into the hole,

convinced
that this simple action

is the source of the reward.

Boyden: And so, what we found

was that mice would actually
work for light.

They would poke their nose
in the little sensor,

get a pulse of light, say,
"Hey, that was interesting, "

and then do it
over and over again,

basically doing a task in order
to get a pulse of light.

And so what this tells us is

that very brief activation
of this set of cells

with a pulse of light

is enough to reinforce
whatever the animal was doing

just before.

Freeman: Ed has
hacked the mind of a mouse

and changed its behavior,

and he believes it won't be long

before we are ready to use the
technique on the human brain.

Boyden: Arguably, humans
have been hacking the brain

for a very long time, you know.

Beer, coffee...

Those are examples
of neurotechnologies

that their main role is
to change what the brain does.

Drugs, pharmaceuticals
have been very, very impactful

in treating brain disorders,

but if you think about the brain
as a circuit,

then a drug that goes throughout
the entire brain

is gonna affect circuits
that you want to leave intact,

as well as circuits
that you want to fix,

and that's where
our technologies come into play.

We really can make
a subset of those cells

activatable or silenceable
with our tools.

Freeman: Ed's
technology could be a

cure for the nearly
1 billion people

who suffer from mental illness

by turning off
only unhealthy cells.

It would be a revolution
in psychiatric medicine,

and one day,
it could give us all

complete control
of the workings of our brains.

The rewards for hacking into
our brains could be momentous.

Mental diseases
could be eliminated.

We could unlock
the highest levels of talent,

and we could truly understand
what another person feels.

But there is a dark side
to this technology.

We could be creating a future

where no one
is sure of who they are,

no secrets could ever be safe,

and where we might all
lose our minds to brain hackers.