Christopher Roussi: Sufficiently advanced magic
The Story Collider
Story Collider, Inc.
4.4 • 824 Ratings
🗓️ 15 July 2012
⏱️ 12 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
After becoming ill during a trip to Ecuador, DARPA researcher Chris Roussi seeks medical advice from a local expert: a shaman. "Here I am, an engineer-scientist, and here's this educated man spouting the worst kind of fuzzy thinking, superstitious claptrap. I look him in the eye and I say: OK!"
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | A science story, huh? |
| 0:04.0 | Is NYU a scientist? |
| 0:06.0 | I felt. |
| 0:07.0 | I felt. |
| 0:08.0 | I was so... |
| 0:09.0 | And I just thought, well, |
| 0:10.0 | it was that golden moment. |
| 0:12.0 | Because science was on my side. |
| 0:19.0 | Hey guys. Welcome to The Story Collider, where we bring you true stories of how science has affected people's lives. |
| 0:30.0 | It's me, Aaron Barker, one more time before Ben Lilly's glorious return next week. |
| 0:35.3 | This week we have a story from Chris Rusey. The story was recorded June 21st, 2012 at Live in Ann Arbor, Michigan. |
| 0:47.6 | So in 2006, I was working on a project funded by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, otherwise known |
| 0:55.8 | as DARPA. Now, DARPA will not fund hard projects. That would be too easy. They fund what |
| 1:03.2 | they call DARPA hard projects, which to ordinary human would be considered impossible or magical. |
| 1:11.6 | So here we are funded to read the brain waves of a fighter pilot, |
| 1:16.6 | extract from the data the activity in the visual part of the brain, |
| 1:21.6 | determine if the pilot is looking at something blurry or not, |
| 1:25.6 | and then use that in a feedback loop to focus whatever it is he's looking at something blurry or not, and then use that in a feedback loop to focus whatever |
| 1:29.8 | it is he's looking at. That led me to Bellevue Mental Hospital in New York City to have |
| 1:36.7 | my head examined. Well, really, because they had the instrument there that was sensitive enough |
| 1:42.5 | to measure the brain waves. |
| 1:45.5 | It was a helmet covered with superconducting quantum interference devices, which are magical |
... |
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