I had brain surgery 18 years ago, and since that time, brain science has become a personal passion of mine. I'm actually an engineer. And first let me say, I recently joined Google's Moonshot group, where I had a division, the display division in Google X, and the brain science work I'm speaking about today is work I did before I joined Google and on the side outside of Google.
18 年前我動了大腦手術, 從那個時候開始,大腦科學變成了 我的一個個人愛好。 我其實是個工程師。 首先我想說,我最近加入了 谷歌的「科技登月」計畫, (Google X Moonshots) 在那裏我有個部門, 谷歌實驗室的顯示器部門, 今天我要說的大腦科學, 是我在加入谷歌之前的工作, 以及不涉及谷歌的方面的事情。
So that said, there's a stigma when you have brain surgery. Are you still smart or not? And if not, can you make yourself smart again?
所以有這麼一個汙名, 就是當妳進行了大腦手術, 妳是不是依舊聰明? 如果不是,妳能再次變得聰明嗎?
After my neurosurgery, part of my brain was missing, and I had to deal with that. It wasn't the grey matter, but it was the gooey part dead center that makes key hormones and neurotransmitters. Immediately after my surgery, I had to decide what amounts of each of over a dozen powerful chemicals to take each day, because if I just took nothing, I would die within hours. Every day now for 18 years -- every single day -- I've had to try to decide the combinations and mixtures of chemicals, and try to get them, to stay alive. There have been several close calls.
在我的神經外科手術後, 我大腦的一部份遺失了, 而且我需要解決這個問題。 那一部份並不是灰質, 而是那個黏糊糊的死點, 生產關鍵的荷爾蒙 和神經傳導物質的部分。 我的手術一結束, 我需要決定 每天攝入多少那些強效的化學藥品。 因為如果我什麽都不做, 那我會在幾個小時以後死去 18 年來的每一天,真的是每一天, 我不得不去決定如何組合 並且混合各種化學藥品, 同時我也要獲取它們, 以便我能維持生命。 曾經有幾次我已經幾乎面對死亡。 但幸運地是, 我的本質是一個實驗者,
But luckily, I'm an experimentalist at heart, so I decided I would experiment to try to find more optimal dosages because there really isn't a clear road map on this that's detailed. I began to try different mixtures, and I was blown away by how tiny changes in dosages dramatically changed my sense of self, my sense of who I was, my thinking, my behavior towards people. One particularly dramatic case: for a couple months I actually tried dosages and chemicals typical of a man in his early 20s, and I was blown away by how my thoughts changed. (Laughter) I was angry all the time, I thought about sex constantly, and I thought I was the smartest person in the entire world, and —(Laughter)— of course over the years I'd met guys kind of like that, or maybe kind of toned-down versions of that. I was kind of extreme. But to me, the surprise was, I wasn't trying to be arrogant. I was actually trying, with a little bit of insecurity, to actually fix a problem in front of me, and it just didn't come out that way.
所以我決定我要通過實驗 去嘗試找出最佳的劑量, 因為這之前並沒有 一個清晰明確指導 關於各種細節的介紹。 我開始嘗試不同的混合, 我已經強烈的感受到 一點點的劑量變化 會戲劇性的改變我的 自我感知能力, 我對我自己的感受,我的思考, 以及對待別人的行為。 我有一個非常戲劇性的例子, 在幾個月的時間中我真的試驗了 給 20 歲出頭的男性 所用的藥品及劑量。 而我被我自己的想法 因此改變而震驚。 (笑~) 那時我一直很生氣, 我時常會想到性, 並且我覺得自己是世界上 是最聰明的人, (笑~) 當然這幾年我遇到了 一些很類似的傢伙 或者說比那種稍微低調一點的人。 我其實是有點極端。 但是對我而言,令我震驚的是 我並不是去嘗試變得傲慢。 我實際上是在嘗試 帶著一點不安 去解決擺在我面前的問題, 只是結果總是不像我所設想的一樣。 所以我並沒有辦法解決。
So I couldn't handle it. I changed my dosages. But that experience, I think, gave me a new appreciation for men and what they might walk through, and I've gotten along with men a lot better since then.
我改變了我用藥的劑量。 但是那段經歷,我認為,讓我對於 男人以及他們所經歷的一切 有了新的評價, 所以從那時開始, 我和他們相處地更好了。 我想嘗試的是
What I was trying to do with tuning these hormones and neurotransmitters and so forth was to try to get my intelligence back after my illness and surgery, my creative thought, my idea flow. And I think mostly in images, and so for me that became a key metric -- how to get these mental images that I use as a way of rapid prototyping, if you will, my ideas, trying on different new ideas for size, playing out scenarios. This kind of thinking isn't new. Philiosophers like Hume and Descartes and Hobbes saw things similarly. They thought that mental images and ideas were actually the same thing. There are those today that dispute that, and lots of debates about how the mind works, but for me it's simple: Mental images, for most of us, are central in inventive and creative thinking.
去調節這樣的一些荷爾蒙, 以及神經傳導物質等等, 去恢復我的智力水平, 在我生病並且手術之後, 以及我那些我充滿創意的想法。 並且我是以圖像思考的人, 所以對我而言這是一個重要的指標, 如何獲得這些心智圖像, 你也可以這樣說,讓我快速建立 我的想法原型的圖像, 嘗試各種新想法, 推演不同的情節。 這種想法並不新鮮。 哲學家像休謨、笛卡兒以及霍布斯, 也有著相同的想法。 他們覺得心智圖像以及想法 其實是一樣的東西。 現今有很多懷疑這樣的觀點, 也有很多關於心智如何工作的辯論, 但是對我而言,這很簡單: 心智圖像,對大多數我們而言, 其實是發明以及創造性想法的中心。 所以很多年後,
So after several years, I tuned myself up and I have lots of great, really vivid mental images with a lot of sophistication and the analytical backbone behind them. And so now I'm working on, how can I get these mental images in my mind out to my computer screen faster? Can you imagine, if you will, a movie director being able to use her imagination alone to direct the world in front of her? Or a musician to get the music out of his head? There are incredible possibilities with this as a way for creative people to share at light speed. And the truth is, the remaining bottleneck in being able to do this is just upping the resolution of brain scan systems.
我調整好了我自己, 並且擁有了很多很好、 非常生動,有著各種複雜的心智圖像, 並且有很多分析支撐著這樣的觀點。 我現在開始研究, 我如何才能將我大腦裡的心智圖像 更快速的顯示在我的電腦螢幕上? 你能夠想像,這麼說吧, 一個電影的導演能夠只用 她大腦的想像力去操縱 她眼前的世界的想法? 或者一個音樂家 直接從頭裡取得音樂? 這種方式創造出不可思議的可能性 對於那些有創造性的人們而言 他們可以以光速來分享他們的想法。 但事實上,有待突破的瓶頸是, 想實現這樣的效果 必須提高腦部斷層掃描的解析度。 現在讓我展示爲什麽我認為 我們幾乎已經成功了,
So let me show you why I think we're pretty close to getting there by sharing with you two recent experiments from two top neuroscience groups. Both used fMRI technology -- functional magnetic resonance imaging technology -- to image the brain, and here is a brain scan set from Giorgio Ganis and his colleagues at Harvard. And the left-hand column shows a brain scan of a person looking at an image. The middle column shows the brainscan of that same individual imagining, seeing that same image. And the right column was created by subtracting the middle column from the left column, showing the difference to be nearly zero. This was repeated on lots of different individuals with lots of different images, always with a similar result. The difference between seeing an image and imagining seeing that same image is next to nothing.
通過我們最近的兩個實驗, 來自我們兩個頂尖的神經學小組。 他們都採用了 fMRI 技術, 也就是功能性核磁共振造影 去給大腦成像, 這裡有一組從哈佛的喬治·甘尼斯 以及他的同事得到的大腦掃描圖。 左手邊的一列顯示了大腦的掃描圖, 是一個人正在看一張圖片的時候掃描的。 中間這一列顯示的大腦掃描圖 是同樣的一個人 去想像那張圖片的時候掃描的。 右邊的這一列圖則是 用左邊的圖減去中間的圖的結果, 你可以發現幾乎沒有差別。 已經在很多人身上做了這個實驗 得到大量不同的圖片, 都得到了相同的結果。 看一張圖以及 想像同一張圖 大腦幾乎沒有變化。
Next let me share with you one other experiment, this from Jack Gallant's lab at Cal Berkeley. They've been able to decode brainwaves into recognizable visual fields. So let me set this up for you. In this experiment, individuals were shown hundreds of hours of YouTube videos while scans were made of their brains to create a large library of their brain reacting to video sequences. Then a new movie was shown with new images, new people, new animals in it, and a new scan set was recorded. The computer, using brain scan data alone, decoded that new brain scan to show what it thought the individual was actually seeing. On the right-hand side, you see the computer's guess, and on the left-hand side, the presented clip. This is the jaw-dropper. We are so close to being able to do this. We just need to up the resolution. And now remember that when you see an image versus when you imagine that same image, it creates the same brain scan.
接下來讓我分享另外的一個實驗, 來自柏克萊的傑克·格蘭特的實驗室 他們能夠解密腦電波, 轉化成可以辨認的視場。 讓我來為你解釋這個。 在這個試驗中,我們給每個人 播放了上百小時 YouTube 的影片 同時掃描著他們的大腦, 並且根據大腦的反應 建立一個龐大的數據庫, 依照影片的順序。 然後我們播放有著新圖像, 新人物,新動物的新電影, 並且記錄了新的一系列掃描結果。 而電腦則使用之前的 大腦掃描數據庫 對這個新的大腦掃描圖解碼, 並且展示電腦認為 人們看見的圖像。 在右手邊,你可以看見電腦的猜測, 左手邊則是我們提供的影片片段。 這樣的結果是令人震驚的。 我們就要成功的實現這樣的技術, 我們要做的只是去提高解析度。 現在請記住當你看到一張圖片 同時當你想像同樣的圖片的時候, 它會產生相同的大腦變化。
So this was done with the highest-resolution brain scan systems available today, and their resolution has increased really about a thousandfold in the last several years. Next we need to increase the resolution another thousandfold to get a deeper glimpse. How do we do that? There's a lot of techniques in this approach. One way is to crack open your skull and put in electrodes. I'm not for that. There's a lot of new imaging techniques being proposed, some even by me, but given the recent success of MRI, first we need to ask the question, is it the end of the road with this technology? Conventional wisdom says the only way to get higher resolution is with bigger magnets, but at this point bigger magnets only offer incremental resolution improvements, not the thousandfold we need. I'm putting forward an idea: instead of bigger magnets, let's make better magnets. There's some new technology breakthroughs in nanoscience when applied to magnetic structures that have created a whole new class of magnets, and with these magnets, we can lay down very fine detailed magnetic field patterns throughout the brain, and using those, we can actually create holographic-like interference structures to get precision control over many patterns, as is shown here by shifting things. We can create much more complicated structures with slightly different arrangements, kind of like making Spirograph.
這是用現今可得的最高解析度 大腦掃描系統得到的結果 它們的解析度最近幾年都是 以千倍的速度增長。 下一步我們需要再一次 以千倍的速度提高解析度, 以獲得更深層次的變化。 那我們應該如何做呢? 現在有很多科學方法 可以用於實現。 一種方法是打開 你的腦殼並放入電極。 我並不支持這種方法。 現在有很多新的成像技術 正在開發,有些則是由我負責, 想到最近 MRI(核磁共振成像) 的成功, 首先我們要問的是, 這項科技已經走到了盡頭嗎? 傳統意義上講,只有採用更大的磁體 才能產生更高解析度的圖片, 但是所謂更大的磁體 只能夠持續改進成像解析度, 而不是我們所需要的千倍提高。 我們有這樣的一個想法: 不要使用大型的磁體, 而是採用更好的磁體。 現在有一些技術 能夠取得突破性的進展, 在納米科技中, 當對磁體的結構進行改造, 就能產生一個全新級別的磁體, 當使用這些磁體的時候,我們可以 在大腦中產生 非常精細的磁場圖案 並且通過這樣的技術,我們可以產生 如全像攝影般的干涉結構, 便能精確地控制不同的圖案, 就像這裡通過移動 而展示出來的效果。 我們可以創造更多複雜的結構, 通過一點點不同的排列安排 就像製作呼吸運動記錄器。 爲什麽這個這麼重要?
So why does that matter? A lot of effort in MRI over the years has gone into making really big, really huge magnets, right? But yet most of the recent advances in resolution have actually come from ingeniously clever encoding and decoding solutions in the F.M. radio frequency transmitters and receivers in the MRI systems. Let's also, instead of a uniform magnetic field, put down structured magnetic patterns in addition to the F.M. radio frequencies. So by combining the magnetics patterns with the patterns in the F.M. radio frequencies processing which can massively increase the information that we can extract in a single scan. And on top of that, we can then layer our ever-growing knowledge of brain structure and memory to create a thousandfold increase that we need. And using fMRI, we should be able to measure not just oxygenated blood flow, but the hormones and neurotransmitters I've talked about and maybe even the direct neural activity, which is the dream.
這些年來在 MRI(核磁共振成像)的努力, 已經取得了巨大的成果, 非常大的磁體,對不對? 但是近些年來在解析度上的進步 實際上來自 在 MRI (核磁共振成像)系統中 對調頻信號頻率的傳輸和接收 巧妙的加密和解密的方法。 同樣的,我們不採用標準的磁場, 而是記下有結構磁性的圖案 以及所對應的調頻信號頻率。 通過結合磁性的圖案 以及調頻信號頻率中產生的圖案, 一次掃描所提取的資訊 取得了巨大的進展 在僅僅的一次掃描中。 最重要的是,我們可以將 我們持續增長的 大腦結構和記憶分層, 產生我們所需要的成千倍的增長。 使用 fMRI(功能性磁共振成像), 我們不僅僅能夠測量 血液含氧量, 還有我之前說的荷爾蒙 以及神經傳導物質, 甚至是直接的神經活動, 就是我們所說的夢。
We're going to be able to dump our ideas directly to digital media. Could you imagine if we could leapfrog language and communicate directly with human thought? What would we be capable of then? And how will we learn to deal with the truths of unfiltered human thought? You think the Internet was big. These are huge questions. It might be irresistible as a tool to amplify our thinking and communication skills. And indeed, this very same tool may prove to lead to the cure for Alzheimer's and similar diseases.
我們能夠實現將我們的想法 直接轉換為數位媒體資訊。 你能想像我們能夠不使用語言 而直接通過人類的思想進行交流嗎? 那我們還能再做甚麼? 我們要如何學習處理 未篩選的人類想法中真實的內容? 你們認為網路的問題很大。 這些都是很大的問題。 這可能是一個不可抵擋的工具 用來放大你的想法以及交流的技能。 確實,也就是這個相同的工具 可能是解決 阿茲海默症以及 相似的疾病的方法。
We have little option but to open this door. Regardless, pick a year -- will it happen in five years or 15 years? It's hard to imagine it taking much longer. We need to learn how to take this step together.
我們別無選擇,只能打開這扇門 無論如何,隨便選一年, 5 年後還是 15 年後? 很難想像這會花費太多時間。 我們需要學習 如何一起走過這一步。
Thank you.
謝謝。
(Applause)
(掌聲~)