Welcome to the Uberman Lab podcast where we discuss science and science-based tools for everyday life.

I'm Andrew Uberman and I'm a professor of neurobiology and ophthalmology at Stanford School of Medicine.

Today my guest is Dr. Matthew McDougall.

Dr. Matthew McDougall is the head neurosurgeon at NeuralLink.

NeuralLink as a company whose goal is to develop technologies to overcome specific clinical challenges of the brain and nervous system,

as well as to improve upon brain design, that is to improve the way that brains currently function by augmenting memory, by augmenting cognition,

and by improving communication between humans and between machines and humans.

These are all of course tremendous goals and NeuralLink is uniquely poised to accomplish these goals because they are approaching these challenges by combining both existing knowledge of brain function from the fields of neuroscience and neurosurgery,

with robotics, machine learning, computer science, and the development of novel devices in order to change the ways that human brains work for the better.

Today's conversation with Dr. Matthew McDougall is a truly special one because I and many others in science and medicine consider neurosurgeons the astronauts of neuroscience and the brain.

That is they go where others have simply not gone before and are in a position to discover incredibly novel things about how the human brain works because they are literally in there, probing and cutting, stimulating, etc,

and able to monitor how people's cognition and behavior and speech changes as the brain itself is changed structurally and functionally.

Today's discussion with Dr. McDougall will teach you how the brain works through the lens of a neurosurgeon.

It will also teach you about NeuralLink's specific perspective about which challenges of brain function and disease are immediately tractable, which ones they are working on now, that is, as well as where they see the future of augmenting brain function for sake of treating disease and for simply making brains work better.

Today's discussion also gets into the realm of devising the peripheral nervous system. In fact, one thing that you'll learn is that Dr. McDougall has a radio receiver implanted in the periphery of his own body.

He did this not to overcome any specific clinical challenge, but to overcome a number of daily, everyday life challenges.

In some ways, to demonstrate the powerful utility of combining novel machines, novel devices with what we call our nervous system and different objects and technologies within the world.

I know that might sound a little bit mysterious, but you'll soon learn exactly what I'm referring to. By the way, he also implanted his family members with similar devices.

While all of this might sound a little bit like science fiction, this is truly science reality. These experiments, both the implantation of specific devices and the attempt to overcome specific movement disorders such as Parkinson's and other disorders of deep brain function, as well as to augment the human brain and make it work far better than it ever has in the course of human evolution, are experiments and things that are happening now at NeuralLink.

Dr. McDougall also generously takes us under the hood, so to speak, of what's happening at NeuralLink, explaining exactly the sorts of experiments that they are doing and have planned, how they are approaching those experiments.

We get into an extensive conversation about the utility of animal versus human research in improving brain function and in devising and improving the human brain and in overcoming disease in terms of neurosurgery and NeuralLink's goals.

By the end of today's episode, you will have a much clearer understanding of how human brains work and how they can be improved by robotics and engineering, and you will have a very clear picture of what NeuralLink is doing toward these goals.

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