Dr. Erich Jarvis: The Neuroscience of Speech, Language & Music

00:00:00.000 | - Welcome to the Huberman Lab Podcast,

00:00:02.280 | where we discuss science and science-based tools

00:00:04.880 | for everyday life.

00:00:05.900 | I'm Andrew Huberman,

00:00:10.200 | and I'm a professor of neurobiology and ophthalmology

00:00:13.160 | at Stanford School of Medicine.

00:00:15.080 | Today, my guest is Dr. Eric Jarvis.

00:00:17.720 | Dr. Jarvis is a professor

00:00:19.120 | at the Rockefeller University in New York City,

00:00:21.920 | and his laboratory studies the neurobiology

00:00:24.520 | of vocal learning, language, speech disorders,

00:00:28.100 | and remarkably, the relationship between language, music,

00:00:31.800 | and movement, in particular, dance.

00:00:34.520 | His work spans from genomics,

00:00:37.200 | so the very genes that make up our genome,

00:00:40.840 | and the genomes of other species that speak

00:00:43.320 | and have language, such as songbirds and parrots,

00:00:46.840 | all the way up to neural circuits,

00:00:48.400 | that is the connections in the brain and body

00:00:50.680 | that govern our ability to learn

00:00:52.520 | and generate specific sounds and movements coordinated

00:00:55.520 | with those sounds, including hand movements,

00:00:58.160 | and all the way up to cognition,

00:01:01.300 | that is our ability to think in specific ways

00:01:04.040 | based on what we are saying

00:01:05.540 | and the way that we comprehend what other people are saying,

00:01:08.880 | singing, and doing.

00:01:10.840 | As you'll soon see, I was immediately transfixed

00:01:14.680 | and absolutely enchanted by Dr. Jarvis's description

00:01:18.040 | of his work and the ways that it impacts

00:01:20.280 | all the various aspects of our lives.

00:01:22.520 | For instance, I learned from Dr. Jarvis

00:01:24.640 | that as we read, we are generating very low levels

00:01:28.660 | of motor activity in our throat,

00:01:30.940 | that is, we are speaking the words that we are reading

00:01:33.480 | at a level below the perception of sound

00:01:36.920 | or our own perception of those words,

00:01:39.320 | but if one were to put an amplifier

00:01:40.920 | to measure the firing of those muscles in our vocal cords,

00:01:45.240 | we'd find that as we're reading information,

00:01:47.240 | we are actually speaking that information,

00:01:49.840 | and as I learned and you'll soon learn,

00:01:51.860 | there's a direct link between those species in the world

00:01:55.060 | that have song and movement,

00:01:57.400 | which many of us would associate with dance,

00:01:59.500 | and our ability to learn and generate complex language.

00:02:03.500 | So for people with speech disorders like stutter

00:02:06.540 | or for people who are interested

00:02:07.860 | in multiple language learning,

00:02:09.900 | bilingual, trilingual, et cetera,

00:02:11.940 | and frankly, for anyone who is interested

00:02:14.340 | in how we communicate through words, written or spoken,

00:02:18.060 | I'm certain today's episode is going to be

00:02:19.780 | an especially interesting and important one for you.

00:02:22.660 | Dr. Jarvis's work is so pioneering

00:02:24.800 | that he has been awarded truly countless awards.

00:02:27.220 | I'm not going to take our time

00:02:28.460 | to list off all the various important awards

00:02:30.980 | that he's received, but I should point out

00:02:33.100 | that in addition to being a decorated professor

00:02:35.780 | at the Rockefeller University,

00:02:37.260 | he is also an investigator

00:02:38.400 | with the Howard Hughes Medical Institute,

00:02:40.180 | the so-called HHMI,

00:02:42.260 | and for those of you that don't know,

00:02:43.820 | HHMI investigators are selected

00:02:46.340 | on an extremely competitive basis

00:02:49.060 | that they have to re-up.

00:02:50.620 | That is, they have to re-compete every five years.

00:02:53.120 | They actually receive a grade every five years

00:02:56.060 | that dictates whether or not

00:02:57.280 | they are no longer a Howard Hughes investigator,

00:02:59.940 | whether or not they can advance to another five years

00:03:03.260 | of funding for their important research,

00:03:05.400 | and indeed, Howard Hughes investigators are selected

00:03:07.820 | not just for the rigor of their work,

00:03:09.620 | but for their pioneering spirit

00:03:11.200 | and their ability to take on high-risk, high-benefit work,

00:03:15.460 | which is exactly the kind of work

00:03:16.740 | that Dr. Jarvis has been providing for decades now.

00:03:20.100 | Again, I think today's episode

00:03:21.540 | is one of the more unique and special episodes

00:03:23.500 | that we've had on the Huberman Lab Podcast.

00:03:25.140 | I single it out because it really spans

00:03:27.680 | from the basic to the applied,

00:03:29.500 | and Dr. Jarvis's story is an especially unique one

00:03:32.160 | in terms of how he arrived at becoming a neurobiologist.

00:03:35.060 | So for those of you that are interested

00:03:36.620 | in personal journey and personal story,

00:03:38.800 | Dr. Jarvis's is truly a special and important one.

00:03:42.700 | I'm pleased to announce that the Huberman Lab Podcast

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00:04:36.640 | Before we begin, I'd like to emphasize that this podcast

00:04:39.000 | is separate from my teaching and research roles at Stanford.

00:04:41.720 | It is, however, part of my desire and effort

00:04:43.520 | to bring zero cost to consumer information about science

00:04:46.060 | and science-related tools to the general public.

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00:07:58.980 | And now for my discussion with Dr. Eric Jarvis.

00:08:02.360 | Eric, so great to have you here.

00:08:04.060 | - Thank you.

00:08:04.900 | - Yeah, very interested in learning from you

00:08:07.200 | about speech and language.

00:08:09.900 | And even as I asked the question,

00:08:12.020 | I realized that a lot of people, including myself,

00:08:14.820 | probably don't fully appreciate the distinction

00:08:17.220 | between speech and language, right?

00:08:19.540 | Speech, I think of as the motor patterns,

00:08:21.440 | the production of sound that has meaning, hopefully,

00:08:25.740 | and language, of course, come in various languages

00:08:29.100 | and varieties of ways of communicating.

00:08:31.860 | But in terms of the study of speech and language

00:08:34.740 | and thinking about how the brain

00:08:36.540 | organizes speech and language,

00:08:38.740 | what are the similarities?

00:08:40.420 | What are the differences?

00:08:41.380 | How should we think about speech and language?

00:08:43.180 | - Yeah, well, I'm glad you invited me here

00:08:46.800 | and I'm also glad to get that first question,

00:08:49.900 | which I consider a provocative one.

00:08:52.580 | The reason why, I've been struggling,

00:08:55.420 | what is the difference with speech and language

00:08:57.380 | for many years and realize why am I struggling

00:09:00.760 | is because there are behavioral terms,

00:09:03.100 | let's call them psychology developed kind of terms,

00:09:07.720 | that don't actually align exactly with brain function, right?

00:09:12.660 | And the question is there a distinction

00:09:14.420 | between speech and language?

00:09:15.660 | And when I look at the brain of work

00:09:17.980 | that other people have done, work we have done,

00:09:20.060 | also compared it with animal models

00:09:21.900 | like those who can imitate sounds,

00:09:23.380 | like parrots and songbirds,

00:09:25.620 | I start to see there really isn't such a sharp distinction.

00:09:29.620 | So to get at what I think is going on,

00:09:32.380 | let me tell you how some people think of it now,

00:09:35.740 | that there's a separate language module in the brain

00:09:38.420 | that has all the algorithms and computations

00:09:42.320 | that influence the speech pathway on how to produce sound

00:09:46.340 | and the auditory pathway on how to perceive

00:09:49.160 | and interpret it for speech or for sound that we call speech.

00:09:54.160 | And it turns out, I don't think there is any good evidence

00:10:00.160 | for a separate language module.

00:10:02.600 | Instead, there is a speech production pathway

00:10:07.260 | that's controlling our larynx,

00:10:08.640 | controlling our jaw muscles that has built within it

00:10:12.820 | all the complex algorithms for spoken language.

00:10:16.120 | And there's the auditory pathway

00:10:18.680 | that has built within it all the complex algorithms

00:10:21.300 | for understanding speech,

00:10:22.980 | not separate from a language module.

00:10:25.320 | And the speech production pathway is specialized to humans

00:10:29.260 | and parrots and songbirds,

00:10:32.540 | whereas this auditory perception pathway

00:10:35.260 | is more ubiquitous amongst the animal kingdom.

00:10:38.140 | And this is why dogs can understand sit, siente se,

00:10:42.160 | come here boy, get the ball and so forth.

00:10:44.860 | Dogs can understand several hundred human speech words,

00:10:48.580 | great apes, you can teach them for several thousand,

00:10:51.300 | but they can't say a word.

00:10:52.780 | - Fascinating.

00:10:55.360 | Because you've raised a number of animal species

00:10:58.140 | early on here and because I have basically an obsession

00:11:01.740 | with animals since the time I was very small,

00:11:03.580 | I have to ask which animals have language?

00:11:08.580 | Which animals have modes of communication

00:11:12.000 | that are sort of like language?

00:11:14.060 | - Yeah.

00:11:14.900 | - You know, I've heard whale songs.

00:11:16.360 | I don't know what they're saying.

00:11:17.540 | They sound very beautiful,

00:11:18.540 | but they could be insulting each other for all I know.

00:11:21.740 | And they very well may be.

00:11:24.180 | Dolphins, birds.

00:11:25.740 | I mean, what do we understand about modes of communication

00:11:30.460 | that are like language,

00:11:32.800 | but might not be what would classically be called language?

00:11:36.420 | - Right, so modes of communication

00:11:40.580 | that people would define as language,

00:11:43.300 | more in a very narrow definition,

00:11:46.180 | they would say production of sound, so speech.

00:11:49.020 | But what about the hands, the gesturing with the hands?

00:11:52.640 | What about a bird who is doing aerial displays in the air,

00:11:56.260 | communicating information through body language, right?

00:12:00.660 | Well, I'm gonna go back to the brain.

00:12:03.760 | So what I think is going on is for spoken language,

00:12:08.760 | we're using the speech pathway

00:12:10.940 | in all the complex algorithms there.

00:12:13.000 | Next to the brain regions that are controlling spoken language

00:12:16.280 | are the brain regions for gesturing with the hands.

00:12:19.400 | And that hand parallel pathway

00:12:22.240 | has also complex algorithms that we can utilize.

00:12:25.400 | And some species are more advanced in these circuits,

00:12:28.560 | whether it's sound or gesturing with hands,

00:12:31.320 | and some are less advanced.

00:12:33.900 | Now, we humans and a few others are the most advanced

00:12:37.300 | for the speech sounds or the spoken language,

00:12:41.380 | but a non-human primate can produce gesturing

00:12:45.320 | in a more advanced form than they could produce sound.

00:12:48.220 | I'm not sure I got that across clearly,

00:12:51.380 | just to say that humans are the most advanced

00:12:54.960 | at spoken language, but not necessarily

00:12:58.420 | as big a difference at gestural language

00:13:01.320 | compared to some other species.

00:13:03.300 | - Very clear and very interesting

00:13:05.500 | and immediately prompts the question,

00:13:08.460 | have there been brain imaging or other sorts of studies

00:13:12.740 | evaluating neural activity in the context of cultures

00:13:17.560 | and languages, at least that I associate

00:13:19.260 | with a lot of hand movement, like Italian versus,

00:13:22.560 | I don't know, maybe you could give us some examples

00:13:24.540 | of cultures where language is not associated

00:13:27.580 | with as much overt hand movement.

00:13:29.540 | - Yes, so as you and I are talking here today

00:13:32.720 | and people who are listening but can't see us,

00:13:35.040 | we're actually gesturing with our hands as we talk.

00:13:38.400 | Without knowing it or doing it unconsciously.

00:13:42.500 | And if we were talking on a telephone,

00:13:45.080 | I would have one hand here and I'd be gesturing

00:13:47.000 | with the other hand without even you seeing me, right?

00:13:50.460 | And so why is that?

00:13:52.580 | Some have argued, and I would agree

00:13:54.500 | based upon what we've seen,

00:13:56.200 | is that there is an evolutionary relationship

00:13:58.780 | between the brain pathways that control

00:14:00.920 | speech production and gesturing.

00:14:03.420 | And the brain regions I mentioned

00:14:05.980 | are directly adjacent to each other.

00:14:07.500 | And why is that?

00:14:08.520 | I think that the brain pathways that control speech

00:14:11.160 | evolved out of the brain pathways

00:14:13.200 | that control body movement, all right?

00:14:16.160 | And that when you talk about Italian, French,

00:14:21.160 | English, and so forth, each one of those languages

00:14:25.700 | come with a learned set of gestures

00:14:29.180 | that you can communicate with.

00:14:31.180 | Now how is that related to other animals?

00:14:33.200 | Well, Coco, a gorilla, who was raised with humans

00:14:35.980 | for 39 years or more, learned how to do gesture,

00:14:40.980 | communication, learned how to sign language, so to speak.

00:14:45.660 | But Coco couldn't produce those sounds.

00:14:48.100 | Coco could understand them as well

00:14:50.380 | by seeing somebody sign or hearing somebody produce speech.

00:14:56.220 | But Coco couldn't produce it with her voice.

00:14:58.820 | And so what's going on there is that

00:15:02.580 | a number of species, not all of them,

00:15:04.300 | a number of species have motor pathways in the brain

00:15:07.180 | where you can do learned gesturing,

00:15:09.500 | rudimentary language if you wanted, say, with your limbs,

00:15:12.740 | even if it's not as advanced as humans.

00:15:14.860 | But they don't have this extra brain pathway for the sound.

00:15:18.820 | So they can't gesture with their voice

00:15:21.180 | in the way that they gesture with their hands.

00:15:23.580 | - I see.

00:15:24.820 | One thing that I've wondered about for a very long time

00:15:27.100 | is whether or not primitive emotions

00:15:32.180 | and primitive sounds are the early substrate of language.

00:15:37.180 | And whether or not there's a bridge

00:15:39.180 | that we can draw between those

00:15:40.960 | in terms of just the basic respiration systems

00:15:44.540 | associated with different extreme feelings.

00:15:47.180 | Here's the way I'm imagining this might work.

00:15:50.620 | When I smell something delicious,

00:15:53.500 | I typically inhale more,

00:15:57.060 | and I might say mm, or something like that.

00:16:00.300 | Whereas if I smell something putrid,

00:16:02.100 | I typically turn away, I wince, and I will exhale,

00:16:06.140 | you know, or sort of kind of like turn away,

00:16:07.900 | trying to not ingest those molecules

00:16:10.060 | or inhale those molecules.

00:16:11.820 | I could imagine that these are the basic

00:16:14.900 | dark and light contrasts of the language system.

00:16:18.980 | And as I say that,

00:16:19.820 | I'm saying that from the orientation of a vision scientist

00:16:23.100 | who thinks of all visual images built up

00:16:26.100 | in a very basic way of a hierarchical model

00:16:29.180 | of the ability to see dark and light.

00:16:31.180 | So I could imagine this kind of primitive

00:16:33.420 | to more sophisticated pyramid of sound to language.

00:16:38.420 | Is this a crazy idea?

00:16:41.600 | Do we have any evidence this is the way it works?

00:16:45.460 | - No, it's not a crazy idea.

00:16:47.100 | And in fact, you hit upon one of the key distinctions

00:16:51.860 | in the field of research that I had started out in,

00:16:54.500 | which is vocal learning research.

00:16:56.540 | So for vocal communication,

00:17:00.380 | we have most vertebrate species vocalize,

00:17:03.700 | but most of them are producing innate sounds

00:17:06.420 | that they're born with producing.

00:17:10.260 | That is babies crying, for example, or dogs barking.

00:17:14.380 | And only a few species have learned vocal communication,

00:17:18.780 | the ability to imitate sounds.

00:17:20.500 | And that is what makes spoken language special.

00:17:23.540 | When people think of what's special about language,

00:17:26.740 | it's the learned vocalizations.

00:17:28.700 | That is what's rare.

00:17:31.180 | And so this distinction between innateness and learned

00:17:34.820 | is more of a bigger dichotomy when it comes to vocalizations

00:17:39.620 | than for other behaviors in the animal kingdom.

00:17:42.900 | And when you go in the brain, you see it there as well.

00:17:47.380 | And so all the things you talked about,

00:17:49.540 | the breathing, the grunting, and so forth,

00:17:51.900 | a lot of that is handled by the brainstem circuits,

00:17:55.220 | you know, right around the level of your neck and below.

00:17:58.740 | Like a reflex kind of thing.

00:18:00.660 | So, or even some emotional aspects of your behavior

00:18:04.500 | in the hypothalamus and so forth.

00:18:06.500 | But for a learned behavior, learning how to speak,

00:18:10.820 | learning how to play the piano,

00:18:12.660 | teaching a dog to learn how to do tricks

00:18:15.380 | is using the forebrain circuits.

00:18:17.940 | And what has happened is that there's a lot

00:18:20.540 | of forebrain circuits that are controlling

00:18:22.340 | learning how to move body parts in these species,

00:18:24.380 | but not for the vocalizations.

00:18:26.180 | But in humans and in parrots and some other species,

00:18:29.580 | somehow we acquired circuits where the forebrain

00:18:33.140 | has taken over the brainstem,

00:18:36.100 | and now using that brainstem not only to produce

00:18:39.020 | the innate behaviors or vocal behaviors,

00:18:41.180 | but the learned ones as well.

00:18:42.580 | - Do we have any sense of when modern

00:18:46.700 | or sophisticated language evolved?

00:18:49.900 | You know, thinking back to the species that we evolved from

00:18:54.140 | and even within homo sapiens,

00:18:56.500 | has there been an evolution of language?

00:18:59.340 | Has there been a devolution of language?

00:19:01.980 | - Yeah, I would say, and to be able to answer that question,

00:19:06.980 | it does come with the caveat that I think we humans

00:19:11.300 | overrate ourselves when it compared to other species.

00:19:14.900 | And so it makes even scientists go astray

00:19:19.100 | in trying to hypothesize when you especially

00:19:21.820 | don't find fossil evidence of language

00:19:23.900 | that easily out there in terms of what happened in the past.

00:19:28.900 | We, amongst the primates, which we humans belong to,

00:19:35.660 | we are the only ones that have this advanced

00:19:38.060 | vocal learning ability.

00:19:39.420 | Now, when it was assumed that it was only homo sapiens,

00:19:45.340 | then you can go back in time now based upon genomic data,

00:19:50.860 | not only of us living humans, but of the fossils

00:19:53.620 | that have been found for homo sapiens of Neanderthals,

00:19:57.300 | of Denisovan individuals, and discover that our ancestor,

00:20:02.300 | our human ancestors supposedly hybridized

00:20:06.980 | with these other hominid species.

00:20:10.660 | And it was assumed that these other hominid species

00:20:13.500 | don't learn how to imitate sounds.

00:20:15.380 | I don't know of any species today that's a vocal learner

00:20:19.980 | that can have children with a non vocal learning species.

00:20:23.180 | I don't see it.

00:20:24.020 | It doesn't mean it didn't exist.

00:20:25.940 | And when we look at the genetic data

00:20:28.740 | from these ancestral hominids where we can look at genes

00:20:33.740 | that are involved in learning vocal communication,

00:20:37.380 | they have the same sequence as we humans do

00:20:40.900 | for genes that function in speech circuits.

00:20:43.620 | So I think Neanderthals had spoken language.

00:20:46.180 | I'm not gonna say it's as advanced as what it is in humans.

00:20:48.820 | I don't know.

00:20:50.100 | But I think it's been there for at least between 500,000

00:20:53.380 | to a million years that our ancestors had this ability

00:20:58.380 | and that we've been coming more and more advanced

00:21:00.500 | with it culturally and possibly genetically.

00:21:03.140 | But I think it's evolved sometime

00:21:05.820 | in the last 500,000 to a million years.

00:21:08.140 | - Incredible.

00:21:08.980 | Maybe we could talk a little bit more about the overlap

00:21:12.580 | between brain circuits that control language and speech

00:21:16.420 | in humans and other animals.

00:21:19.780 | - Yeah, I was weaned in the neuroscience era

00:21:23.260 | where bird song and the ability of birds

00:21:27.580 | to learn their tutor's song was and still is

00:21:31.020 | a prominent field, subfield of neuroscience.

00:21:33.900 | And then of course, neuroimaging of humans speaking

00:21:37.980 | and learning, et cetera.

00:21:39.540 | And this notion of a critical period,

00:21:41.180 | a time in which language is learned more easily

00:21:44.420 | than it is later in life.

00:21:46.180 | And the names of the different brain areas

00:21:48.820 | were quite different.

00:21:50.500 | If one opens the textbooks,

00:21:52.140 | we hear Wernicke's and Broca's for the humans

00:21:54.620 | and you look at the birds.

00:21:55.940 | I remember, you know.

00:21:57.700 | - HPC.

00:21:58.540 | - Yeah, Robust Arch Triatum, Area X.

00:22:00.860 | - That's right, yes.

00:22:01.780 | - Et cetera.

00:22:02.780 | But for most of our listeners,

00:22:04.620 | those names won't mean a whole lot.

00:22:07.020 | But in terms of homologies between areas

00:22:11.820 | in terms of function, what do we know

00:22:13.620 | and how similar or different are the brain areas

00:22:17.260 | controlling speech and language in say a songbird

00:22:20.420 | and a young human child?

00:22:22.420 | - Yeah, so going back to the 1950s

00:22:26.060 | or even a little earlier and Peter Mahler

00:22:28.260 | and others who got involved in neuroethology,

00:22:31.460 | the study of neurobiology of behavior

00:22:34.780 | in a natural way, right?

00:22:36.300 | You know, they start to find that behaviorally,

00:22:40.860 | there are these species of birds like songbirds and parents

00:22:43.580 | and now we also know hummingbirds, just three of them

00:22:46.060 | out of the 40-something bird groups out there

00:22:48.060 | on the planet, orders,

00:22:50.020 | that they can imitate sounds like we do.

00:22:52.700 | And so that was the similarity.

00:22:54.420 | In other words, they had this kind of behavior

00:22:56.220 | that's more similar to us than chimpanzees have with us

00:22:59.300 | or than chickens have with them, right?

00:23:01.700 | They're close to relatives.

00:23:03.300 | And then they discovered even more similarities,

00:23:05.660 | these critical periods that if you remove a child,

00:23:10.180 | you know, this unfortunately happens

00:23:11.700 | where a child is feral and is not raised with human

00:23:14.740 | and goes through their puberty phase of growth,

00:23:18.060 | becomes hard for them to learn a language as an adult.

00:23:21.300 | So there's this critical period where you learn best.

00:23:24.100 | And even later on when you're in regular society,

00:23:26.460 | it's hard to learn.

00:23:27.620 | Well, the birds undergo the same thing.

00:23:30.580 | And then it was discovered that if they become deaf,

00:23:34.060 | we humans become deaf,

00:23:35.700 | our speech starts to deteriorate without any kind of therapy.

00:23:40.060 | If a non-human primate or, you know, or let's say a chicken

00:23:45.060 | becomes deaf, their vocalizations don't deteriorate,

00:23:48.500 | very little at least.

00:23:50.460 | Well, this happens in the vocal learning birds.

00:23:52.980 | So there were all these behavioral parallels

00:23:54.900 | that came along in a package.

00:23:56.620 | And then people looked into the brain.

00:23:59.020 | Fernando Nadama, my former PhD advisor,

00:24:01.580 | and began to discover the area X you talked about,

00:24:05.380 | the robust nucleus of the archipelion.

00:24:07.980 | And these brain pathways were not found

00:24:12.100 | in the species who couldn't imitate.

00:24:13.460 | So there was a parallel here.

00:24:15.100 | And then jumping many years later, you know,

00:24:18.540 | I started to dig down into these brain circuits

00:24:21.500 | to discover that these brain circuits

00:24:23.900 | have parallel functions with the brain circuits for humans,

00:24:26.900 | even though they're by a different name

00:24:28.340 | like Broca's and laryngomotor cortex.

00:24:30.980 | And most recently we discovered not only the actual circuitry

00:24:35.020 | and the connectivity are similar,

00:24:36.620 | but the underlying genes that are expressed

00:24:39.300 | in these brain regions in a specialized way,

00:24:41.980 | different from the rest of the brain are also similar

00:24:44.580 | between humans and songbirds and parrots.

00:24:46.940 | So all the way down to the genes,

00:24:48.300 | and now we're finding the specific mutations

00:24:51.420 | are also similar, not always identical, but similar,

00:24:55.020 | which indicates remarkable convergence

00:24:57.180 | for so-called complex behavior in species

00:25:00.140 | separated by 300 million years from the common ancestor.

00:25:03.020 | And not only that, we are discovering

00:25:05.540 | that mutations in these genes

00:25:08.460 | that cause speech deficits in humans, like in FOXP2.

00:25:12.260 | If you put those same mutations

00:25:15.340 | or similar type of deficits in these vocal learning birds,

00:25:18.180 | you get similar deficits.

00:25:19.860 | So convergence of the behavior is associated

00:25:22.900 | with similar genetic disorders of the behavior.

00:25:25.740 | - Incredible.

00:25:27.020 | I have to ask, do hummingbirds sing or do they hum?

00:25:31.140 | - Hummingbirds hum with their wings

00:25:33.060 | and sing with their syrinx.

00:25:34.900 | - In a coordinated way?

00:25:36.220 | - In a coordinated way.

00:25:37.660 | There is some species of hummingbirds

00:25:40.500 | that actually will, Doug Ashworth showed this,

00:25:44.540 | that will flap their wings and create a slapping sound

00:25:48.700 | with their wings that's in unison with their song.

00:25:52.380 | And you would not know it,

00:25:54.300 | but it sounds like a particular syllable in their songs,

00:25:57.620 | even though it's their wings

00:26:00.420 | and their voice at the same time.

00:26:02.180 | - Hummingbirds are clapping to their song.

00:26:04.580 | - Clapping, they're snapping their wings together

00:26:08.340 | in unison with a song to make it like,

00:26:10.940 | if I'm going, da-da-da-da-da, da-da-da.

00:26:14.140 | You know, and I banged on the table.

00:26:15.860 | Except they make it almost sound

00:26:17.500 | like their voice with their wings.

00:26:19.140 | - Incredible.

00:26:21.100 | - Yes.

00:26:22.660 | And they got some of the smallest brains around.

00:26:23.500 | - I guess as the kids would say, mind blown.

00:26:25.420 | - Yes, yes.

00:26:26.260 | - Incredible.

00:26:27.100 | - Yes.

00:26:27.940 | - Incredible, I love hummingbirds

00:26:28.780 | and I always feel like it's such a special thing

00:26:31.180 | to get a moment to see one because they move around so fast

00:26:33.500 | and they flit away so fast in these ballistic trajectories

00:26:37.100 | that when you get to see one stationary for a moment

00:26:40.700 | or even just hovering there,

00:26:42.860 | you feel like you're extracting so much

00:26:44.380 | from their little microcosm of life.

00:26:47.140 | But now I realize they're playing music essentially.

00:26:49.700 | - Right, exactly.

00:26:50.540 | And what's amazing about hummingbirds,

00:26:53.020 | and we're going to say vocal learning species in general,

00:26:56.340 | is that for whatever reason,

00:26:58.220 | they seem to evolve multiple complex traits.

00:27:01.860 | You know, this idea that the evolving language,

00:27:04.860 | spoken language in particular,

00:27:06.820 | comes along with a set of specializations.

00:27:09.740 | - Incredible.

00:27:11.300 | When I was coming up in neuroscience,

00:27:13.620 | I learned that, I think it was the work of Peter Marler,

00:27:17.540 | that young birds learn, songbirds learn their tutor's song

00:27:22.540 | and learn it quite well,

00:27:26.300 | but that they could learn the song of another tutor.

00:27:29.500 | In other words, they could learn a different,

00:27:31.180 | and for the listeners, I'm doing air quotes here,

00:27:32.860 | a different language, a different bird song,

00:27:35.620 | different than their own species song,

00:27:37.580 | but never as well as they could learn

00:27:39.660 | their own natural, genetically linked song.

00:27:44.660 | Genetically linked, meaning that,

00:27:46.300 | it would be like me being raised in a different culture

00:27:48.860 | and that I would learn the other language,

00:27:52.900 | but not as well as I would have learned English.

00:27:55.700 | This is the idea.

00:27:57.060 | Is that true?

00:27:57.900 | - That is true, yes.

00:27:58.860 | And that's what I learned growing up as well

00:28:01.180 | and talked to Peter Marler himself about before he passed.

00:28:04.540 | He used to call it the innate predisposition to learn.

00:28:09.500 | All right, so, which would be kind of the equivalent

00:28:13.900 | in the linguistic community of universal grammar.

00:28:16.420 | There is something genetically influencing

00:28:21.220 | our vocal communication on top of what we learn culturally.

00:28:25.500 | And so there's this balance between the genetic control

00:28:28.840 | of speech or a song in these birds

00:28:31.420 | and the learned cultural control.

00:28:34.380 | And so, yes, if you were to take,

00:28:37.280 | I mean, in this case, we actually tried this

00:28:41.580 | at Rockefeller later on, take a zebra finch

00:28:44.740 | and raise it with a canary, it would sing a song

00:28:48.260 | that was sort of like a hybrid in between.

00:28:49.900 | We call it a keninch, right?

00:28:51.900 | (laughing)

00:28:53.460 | And vice versa for the canary,

00:28:55.260 | because there's something different

00:28:56.340 | about their vocal musculature or the circuitry in the brain.

00:29:00.580 | And with a zebra finch, even with a closely related species,

00:29:03.760 | if you would take a zebra finch, a young animal,

00:29:07.320 | and in one cage next to it,

00:29:08.840 | place its own species, adult male, right?

00:29:12.140 | And in the other cage, place a Bengalese finch next to it,

00:29:15.500 | it would preferably learn the song

00:29:17.700 | from its own species' neighbor.

00:29:20.420 | But if you remove its neighbor,

00:29:22.180 | it would learn that Bengalese finch very well.

00:29:24.920 | - Fantastic.

00:29:25.760 | - And it has something to do with also the social bonding

00:29:29.020 | with your own species.

00:29:30.420 | - Incredible.

00:29:31.620 | That raises a question that I,

00:29:33.500 | based on something I also heard,

00:29:34.880 | but I don't have any scientific,

00:29:37.280 | peer-reviewed publication to point to,

00:29:39.000 | which is this idea of pidgin, not the bird,

00:29:41.520 | but this idea of when multiple cultures and languages

00:29:45.820 | converge in a given geographic area,

00:29:47.720 | that the children of all the different native languages

00:29:50.460 | will come up with their own language.

00:29:53.260 | I think this was in island culture, maybe in Hawaii,

00:29:55.780 | called pidgin, which is sort of a hybrid

00:29:58.100 | of the various languages that their parents speak at home

00:30:01.380 | and that they themselves speak.

00:30:03.380 | And that somehow pidgin, again, not the bird,

00:30:06.600 | but a language called pidgin for reasons I don't know,

00:30:09.400 | harbors certain basic elements of all language.

00:30:14.660 | Is that true?

00:30:15.820 | Is that not true?

00:30:16.660 | - I haven't studied enough myself

00:30:19.420 | in terms of pidgin specifically,

00:30:21.520 | but in terms of cultural evolution of language

00:30:24.160 | and hybridization between different cultures and so forth,

00:30:27.560 | even amongst birds with different dialects,

00:30:30.560 | and you bring them together,

00:30:32.080 | what is going on here is cultural evolution

00:30:37.960 | remarkably tracks genetic evolution.

00:30:41.180 | So if you bring people from two separate populations

00:30:44.740 | together that have been in their separate populations

00:30:47.360 | evolutionarily, at least, for hundreds of generations,

00:30:51.360 | so someone's speaking Chinese, someone's speaking English,

00:30:54.560 | and that child then is learning from both of them,

00:30:58.260 | yes, that child's gonna be able to pick up

00:31:00.700 | and merge phonemes and words together

00:31:05.700 | in a way that an adult wouldn't,

00:31:08.560 | because why they're experiencing both languages

00:31:11.740 | at the same time during their critical period years

00:31:16.060 | in a way that adults would not be able to experience.

00:31:19.780 | And so you get a hybrid.

00:31:21.620 | And the lowest common denominator

00:31:23.640 | is gonna be what they share.

00:31:25.420 | And so the phonemes that they've retained

00:31:27.860 | in each of their languages is what's gonna be,

00:31:31.860 | I imagine, used the most.

00:31:33.620 | - Interesting.

00:31:35.220 | So we've got brain circuits in songbirds and in humans

00:31:40.140 | that in many ways are similar,

00:31:41.780 | perhaps not in their exact wiring,

00:31:43.780 | but in their basic contour of wiring,

00:31:45.940 | and genes that are expressed in both sets of neural circuits

00:31:49.460 | in very distinct species that are responsible

00:31:53.260 | for these phenomenon we're calling speech and language.

00:31:56.900 | What sorts of things are those genes controlling?

00:32:00.580 | I could imagine they were controlling the wiring

00:32:03.400 | of connections between brain areas,

00:32:05.300 | essentially a map of a circuit,

00:32:08.860 | basically like an engineer would design a circuit

00:32:10.740 | for speech and language,

00:32:11.620 | nature designed the circuit for speech and language,

00:32:14.840 | but presumably other things too,

00:32:16.820 | like the ability to connect motor patterns

00:32:21.820 | within the throat, of muscles within the throat,

00:32:24.600 | when the control of the tongue.

00:32:26.020 | I mean, what are these genes doing?

00:32:27.780 | - You're pretty good.

00:32:28.900 | Yeah, you've made some very good guesses there

00:32:30.820 | that make sense.

00:32:32.120 | So yes, one of the things that differ

00:32:36.840 | in the speech pathways of us

00:32:38.340 | and these song pathways of birds

00:32:39.820 | is some of the connections are fundamentally different

00:32:42.480 | than the surrounding circuits.

00:32:44.100 | Like a direct cortical connection

00:32:47.960 | from the areas that control vocalizations in the cortex

00:32:50.300 | to the motor neurons that control the larynx in humans

00:32:53.540 | or the syrinx in birds.

00:32:54.900 | And so we've actually made a prediction

00:32:57.660 | that since some of these connections differ,

00:33:00.140 | we're gonna find genes that control neural connectivity

00:33:03.460 | and that specialize in that function that differ.

00:33:05.900 | And that's exactly what we found.

00:33:07.660 | Genes that control what we call axon guidance

00:33:11.580 | and form-instant connections.

00:33:12.900 | And what was interesting,

00:33:14.100 | it was sort of in the opposite direction that we expected.

00:33:18.000 | That is, some of these genes,

00:33:20.620 | actually a number of them that control neural connectivity

00:33:23.100 | were turned off in the speech circuit, all right?

00:33:27.860 | And it didn't make sense to us at first

00:33:29.460 | and so we started to realize the function of these genes

00:33:31.820 | are to repel connections from forming.

00:33:34.540 | So repulsive molecules.

00:33:36.460 | And so when you turn them off,

00:33:38.620 | they allow certain connections to form

00:33:40.300 | that normally would have not formed.

00:33:42.260 | So by turning them off,

00:33:43.940 | you gotta gain a function for speech, all right?

00:33:46.520 | Other genes that surprised us

00:33:49.740 | were genes involved in calcium buffering, neural protection.

00:33:54.060 | Like a parvalvumine or a heat shock protein.

00:33:56.720 | So when your brain gets hot, these proteins turn on.

00:33:59.740 | And we couldn't figure out for a long time

00:34:01.340 | why is that the case?

00:34:03.020 | And then the idea popped to me one day and said,

00:34:05.660 | ah, when I heard the larynx

00:34:08.140 | is the fastest firing muscles in the body, all right?

00:34:11.720 | In order to vibrate sound

00:34:13.840 | and modulate sound in the way we do,

00:34:16.720 | you have to control, you have to move those muscles,

00:34:20.600 | you know, three to four to five times faster

00:34:23.120 | than just regular walking or running.

00:34:25.500 | And so when you stick electrodes in the brain areas

00:34:29.940 | that control learned vocalizations in these birds

00:34:32.300 | and I think in humans as well,

00:34:34.520 | those neurons are firing at a higher rate

00:34:36.960 | to control these muscles.

00:34:38.800 | And so what is that gonna do?

00:34:40.980 | You're gonna have lots of toxicity in those neurons

00:34:43.660 | unless you upregulate molecules

00:34:45.480 | that take out the extra load

00:34:48.800 | that is needed to control the larynx.

00:34:51.000 | And then finally, a third set of genes

00:34:52.900 | that are specialized in these speech circuit

00:34:55.280 | are involved in neuroplasticity.

00:34:56.940 | Neuroplasticity meaning allowing the brain circuits

00:35:01.620 | to be more flexible so you can learn better.

00:35:05.540 | And why is that?

00:35:06.860 | I think learning how to produce speech

00:35:09.300 | is a more complex learning ability

00:35:12.640 | than say learning how to walk

00:35:14.600 | or learning how to do tricks and jumps and so forth

00:35:18.420 | that dogs do.

00:35:19.760 | - Yeah, it's interesting as you say that

00:35:21.400 | because I realized that many aspects of speech

00:35:24.680 | are sort of reflexive.

00:35:25.740 | I'm not thinking about each word I'm gonna say,

00:35:27.800 | they just sort of roll out of my mouth.

00:35:29.120 | Hopefully with some forethought,

00:35:31.040 | we both know people that seem to speak,

00:35:34.600 | think less, fewer synapses between their brain

00:35:36.880 | and their mouth than others, right?

00:35:38.360 | A lot of examples out there.

00:35:39.760 | And some people are very deliberate in their speech,

00:35:41.600 | but nonetheless, that much of speech has to be precise,

00:35:46.440 | and some of it less precise.

00:35:49.000 | In terms of plasticity of speech

00:35:51.340 | and the ability to learn multiple languages,

00:35:53.680 | but even just one language,

00:35:55.680 | what's going on in the critical period,

00:35:57.880 | the so-called critical period?

00:35:59.200 | Why is it that, so my niece speaks Spanish,

00:36:02.960 | she's Guatemalan, speaks Spanish and English incredibly well.

00:36:06.240 | She's 14 years old.

00:36:08.160 | I've struggled with Spanish my whole life.

00:36:09.640 | My father's bilingual, my mother is not.

00:36:11.720 | I've tried to learn Spanish as an adult.

00:36:14.000 | It's really challenging.

00:36:15.920 | I'm told that had I learned it when I was eight,

00:36:18.100 | I would be better off.

00:36:19.200 | - That's right.

00:36:20.020 | - Or it would be installed within me.

00:36:22.680 | So the first question is,

00:36:24.520 | is it easier to learn multiple languages

00:36:26.360 | without an accent early in life?

00:36:28.080 | And if so, why?

00:36:29.260 | And then the second question is,

00:36:30.800 | if one can already speak more than one language

00:36:34.560 | as a consequence of childhood learning,

00:36:36.640 | is it easier to acquire new languages later on?

00:36:39.940 | - So the answer to both of those questions is yes in that,

00:36:43.460 | but to explain this, I need to let you know,

00:36:49.020 | actually the entire brain

00:36:50.760 | is undergoing a critical period development,

00:36:54.360 | not just the speech pathways.

00:36:56.340 | And so it's easier to learn how to play a piano.

00:36:59.280 | It's easier to learn how to ride a bike for the first time

00:37:02.120 | and so forth as a young child

00:37:05.000 | than it is later in life.

00:37:07.220 | What I mean easier in terms of when you start from,

00:37:10.920 | you start from first principles of learning something.

00:37:13.920 | So the very first time if you're gonna learn Chinese

00:37:16.560 | as a child versus the very first time

00:37:18.440 | you learn Chinese as an adult,

00:37:20.080 | or learning to play piano as a child versus an adult.

00:37:22.860 | But the speech pathways, or let's say speech behavior,

00:37:28.320 | I think has a stronger critical period change to it

00:37:32.680 | than other circuits.

00:37:34.280 | And why, what's going on there in general?

00:37:36.640 | If you, why do you need a critical period

00:37:41.020 | to make you more stable,

00:37:43.960 | to make you more stubborn, so to speak?

00:37:47.160 | The reason I believe is that the brain is not for,

00:37:52.160 | brain can only hold so much information.

00:37:55.560 | And if you are undergoing rapid learning

00:38:00.400 | to learn, to acquire new knowledge,

00:38:02.640 | you also have to, you know, dump stuff.

00:38:05.760 | Put memory or information in the trash, like in a computer.

00:38:10.200 | You only have so many gigabases of memory.

00:38:12.960 | And so therefore, plus also for survival,

00:38:17.280 | you don't wanna keep forgetting things.

00:38:19.640 | And so the brain is designed, I believe,

00:38:23.840 | to undergo this critical period

00:38:25.920 | and solidify the circuits with what you learned as a child

00:38:29.400 | and you use that for the rest of your life.

00:38:31.120 | And we humans stay even more plastic in our brain functions,

00:38:36.000 | controlled by a gene called SRGAP2.

00:38:38.480 | We have an extra copy of it that leaves our speech circuit

00:38:41.280 | in other brain regions in a more immature state

00:38:43.880 | throughout life compared to other animals.

00:38:46.080 | So we're more immature.

00:38:47.720 | We're still juvenile-like compared to other animals.

00:38:49.760 | - I knew it.

00:38:50.600 | - But we still go through the critical periods

00:38:52.880 | like they all do.

00:38:54.240 | And now the question you asked about,

00:38:57.120 | if you learn more languages as a child,

00:39:01.640 | is it easier to learn as an adult?

00:39:03.480 | And that's a common finding out there in the literature.

00:39:06.400 | There are some that argue against it.

00:39:08.120 | But for those that support it, the idea there is

00:39:10.800 | you are born with a set of innate sounds

00:39:14.640 | you can produce of phonemes and you narrow that down

00:39:18.040 | because not all languages use all of them.

00:39:20.400 | And so you narrow down the ones you use

00:39:22.680 | to string the phonemes together in the words that you learn

00:39:26.120 | and you maintain those phonemes as an adult.

00:39:29.440 | And here comes along another language

00:39:31.640 | that's using those phonemes

00:39:32.840 | or in different combinations you're not used to.

00:39:36.000 | And therefore, it's like starting from first principles.

00:39:39.480 | But if you already have them in multiple languages

00:39:42.320 | that you're using, then it makes it easier to use them

00:39:45.080 | in another third or fourth language.

00:39:47.600 | - I see, incredible.

00:39:49.760 | - So it's not like your brain

00:39:51.120 | has maintained greater plasticity.

00:39:54.560 | Your brain has maintained greater ability

00:39:57.440 | to produce different sounds

00:39:59.520 | that then allows you to learn another language faster.

00:40:02.160 | - Got it.

00:40:03.600 | Are the hand gestures associated with sounds

00:40:08.000 | or with meanings of words?

00:40:10.200 | - I think the hand gestures are associated

00:40:11.920 | with both the sounds and the meaning.

00:40:14.440 | When I say sound, like if you are really angry, right,

00:40:19.320 | and you are making a loud screaming noise, right,

00:40:22.840 | you may make hand gestures

00:40:25.120 | that look like you're gonna beat the wall, right,

00:40:27.880 | because you're making loud sounds and loud gestures, right?

00:40:32.680 | But if you wanna explain something like come over here,

00:40:35.880 | what I just do now to you, for those who can't see me,

00:40:38.640 | I swung my hand towards you and swung it here to me,

00:40:41.880 | that has a meaning to it, to come here.

00:40:44.480 | So just like with the voice,

00:40:46.800 | the hand gestures are producing both,

00:40:50.680 | you know, both qualities of sounds.

00:40:53.120 | - And for people that speak multiple languages,

00:40:55.880 | especially those that learn those multiple languages

00:40:58.400 | early in development,

00:40:59.760 | do they switch their patterns of motor movements

00:41:02.280 | according to, let's say, going from Italian to Arabic

00:41:06.600 | or from Arabic to French

00:41:08.760 | in a way that matches the precision of language

00:41:12.880 | that they're speaking?

00:41:13.960 | - You know what, you just asked me a question

00:41:15.600 | I don't know the answer to.

00:41:17.120 | I would imagine that would make sense

00:41:19.400 | because of switching in terms of,

00:41:24.040 | sometimes people might call this code switching,

00:41:25.920 | even different dialects of the same language.

00:41:28.400 | Could you do that with your gestures?

00:41:30.560 | I imagine so, but I really don't know if that's true or not.

00:41:34.320 | - I certainly don't know from my own experience

00:41:35.880 | because I only speak one language.

00:41:37.480 | [both laughing]

00:41:39.640 | Before we continue with today's discussion,

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00:42:52.860 | To go a little bit into the abstract, but not too far,

00:42:57.560 | what about modes of speech and language

00:42:59.440 | that seem to have a depth of emotionality and meaning,

00:43:03.040 | but for which it departs from structured language?

00:43:07.080 | Here's what I mean, poetry.

00:43:09.160 | I think of musicians, like there are some Bob Dylan songs

00:43:13.140 | that to me, I understand the individual words.

00:43:17.180 | I like to think there's an emotion associated with it.

00:43:20.240 | At least I experienced some sort of emotion

00:43:21.960 | and I have a guess about what he was experiencing.

00:43:25.660 | But if I were to just read it linearly without the music

00:43:29.480 | and without him singing it or somebody singing it like him,

00:43:32.800 | it wouldn't hold any meaning.

00:43:33.840 | So in other words, words that seem to have meaning,

00:43:37.200 | but not associated with language,

00:43:39.660 | but somehow tap into an emotionality.

00:43:43.100 | - Yep, absolutely.

00:43:44.120 | So we call this difference semantic communication,

00:43:49.120 | communication with meaning, and affective communication,

00:43:52.600 | communication that has more of an emotional feeling

00:43:56.720 | content to it, but not with the semantics.

00:44:00.300 | And the two can be mixed up.

00:44:02.580 | Like with singing words that have meaning,

00:44:05.680 | but also have this affective emotional,

00:44:07.960 | you just love the sound of the singer that you're hearing.

00:44:12.020 | And initially, psychologists, scientists in general

00:44:17.020 | thought that these were gonna be controlled

00:44:20.580 | by different brain circuits.

00:44:22.160 | And it is the case there are emotional brain centers

00:44:25.760 | in the hypothalamus, in the cingulate cortex and so forth

00:44:29.720 | that do give tone to the sounds.

00:44:33.060 | But I believe based upon imaging work

00:44:37.120 | and work we see in birds,

00:44:39.120 | when birds are communicating semantic information

00:44:42.720 | in their sounds, which is not too often, but it happens,

00:44:45.640 | versus affective communication,

00:44:48.520 | sing because I'm trying to attract the mate,

00:44:50.540 | my courtship song or defend my territory,

00:44:53.380 | it's the same brain circuits.

00:44:54.700 | It's the same speech-like or song circuits

00:44:57.120 | are being used in different ways.

00:44:59.300 | - A friend of mine who's also a therapist said to me,

00:45:04.220 | it's possible to say I love you with intense hatred

00:45:07.900 | and to say I hate you with intense love.

00:45:10.500 | And reminded me that it's possible to hear

00:45:12.520 | both of those statements in either way.

00:45:15.080 | So I guess it's not just limited to song or poetry.

00:45:19.260 | It also, there's something about the intention

00:45:23.680 | and the emotional context in which something's spoken

00:45:27.240 | that it can heavily shape the way

00:45:29.060 | that we interpret what we hear.

00:45:31.280 | - That's right.

00:45:32.120 | And I consider all of that actually meaning,

00:45:35.400 | even though I defined it as, as people commonly do,

00:45:38.520 | semantic and affective communication,

00:45:41.740 | affective communication to say I hate you

00:45:43.960 | but meant love, right, does have emotional meaning to it.

00:45:48.960 | And so one's more like an object kind of meaning

00:45:53.780 | or an abstract kind of meaning.

00:45:55.560 | There's several other points here I think it's important

00:45:57.600 | for those listening out there to hear,

00:46:00.460 | is that when I say also this affective

00:46:03.220 | and semantic communication being used

00:46:07.800 | by similar brain circuits,

00:46:08.840 | it also matters the side of the brain.

00:46:11.320 | In birds and in humans, there's left-right dominance

00:46:16.320 | for learned communication, learned sound communication.

00:46:21.520 | So the left in us humans is more dominant for speech

00:46:25.680 | but the right has a more balance for singing

00:46:29.240 | or processing musical sounds

00:46:31.160 | as opposed to processing speech.

00:46:32.840 | Both get used for both reasons.

00:46:34.800 | And so when people say your right brain

00:46:37.600 | is your artistic brain

00:46:39.160 | and your left brain is your thinking brain,

00:46:41.440 | this is what they're referring to.

00:46:43.700 | And so that's another distinction.

00:46:46.220 | The second thing that's useful to know

00:46:49.720 | is that all vocal learning species use their learned sounds

00:46:53.300 | for this emotional affective kind of communication

00:46:58.040 | but only a few of them like humans

00:47:00.380 | and some parrots and dolphins use it

00:47:02.660 | for the semantic kind of communication we're calling speech.

00:47:06.660 | And that has led a number of people to hypothesize

00:47:11.300 | that the evolution of spoken language of speech

00:47:14.440 | evolved first for singing,

00:47:17.180 | for this more like emotional kind of made attraction

00:47:21.380 | like the Jennifer Lopez, the Ricky Martin kind of songs

00:47:24.060 | and so forth.

00:47:25.480 | And then later on,

00:47:27.440 | it became used for abstract communication

00:47:29.600 | like we're doing now.

00:47:31.160 | - Interesting.

00:47:32.200 | Well, that's a perfect segue for me

00:47:34.700 | to be able to ask you about your background

00:47:38.400 | and motor control, not only of the hands, but of the body.

00:47:42.700 | So you have a number of important distinctions to your name

00:47:46.340 | but one of them is that you were a member

00:47:49.100 | of the Alvin Ailey dance school, school of dance.

00:47:52.540 | - That's right, that's right.

00:47:54.040 | - So you're an accomplished and quite able dancer, right?

00:47:58.180 | Tell us a little bit about your background

00:48:00.860 | in the world of dance and how it informs your interest

00:48:05.860 | in neuroscience, excuse me,

00:48:08.200 | and perhaps even how it relates specifically to your work

00:48:10.960 | on speech and language.

00:48:12.100 | - Yes, well, it's interesting.

00:48:14.500 | And then this kind of history even goes before my time.

00:48:17.300 | So in my family, my mother and father's side,

00:48:19.900 | they both went to the high school of music and art

00:48:21.740 | here in New York City.

00:48:23.580 | And particularly my mother's family,

00:48:25.220 | going back multiple generations, they were singers.

00:48:28.340 | And I even did my family genealogy

00:48:30.340 | and found out not only we have some relationships

00:48:33.880 | to some well-known singers,

00:48:35.460 | distant relationships like Thelonious Monk,

00:48:37.780 | but going back to the plantations in North Carolina

00:48:42.060 | and so forth, my ancestors were singers in the church

00:48:45.800 | for the towns and so forth.

00:48:48.000 | And this somehow got passed on multiple generations

00:48:51.260 | to my family and I thought I was gonna grow up

00:48:53.700 | and be a famous singer, right?

00:48:55.440 | And me and my brothers and sister formed a band

00:48:58.840 | when we were kids and so forth.

00:49:01.680 | But it turned out that I didn't inherit

00:49:04.620 | the singing talents of some of my other family members,

00:49:07.620 | even though it was okay, but not like my brother,

00:49:12.020 | not like my mother or my aunts and my cousin, Pudafe,

00:49:16.160 | who's now a talented Native American singer.

00:49:19.000 | And so that then influenced me to do other things.

00:49:27.280 | And I started competing in dance contests.

00:49:31.380 | Actually, this is around the time of the Saturday Night Fever

00:49:34.580 | and I was a teenager and I started winning dance contests

00:49:38.380 | and I thought, oh, I can dance.

00:49:40.060 | And I auditioned for the High School of Performing Arts

00:49:42.860 | and I got in here in New York City

00:49:45.420 | and got into ballet dance and got in, right?

00:49:48.120 | And thought if I learn ballet, I can learn everything else.

00:49:50.860 | It was that idea, if you learn something classical,

00:49:53.000 | it can teach you for everything else.

00:49:55.660 | And I was, yeah, at Alvin Ailey Dance School,

00:49:58.340 | Joffrey Ballet Dance School,

00:50:00.080 | and at the end of my senior concert,

00:50:03.480 | I had this opportunity to audition

00:50:06.340 | for the Alvin Ailey Dance Company

00:50:08.380 | and I had an opportunity to go to college.

00:50:11.120 | And I also fell in love with another passion

00:50:13.320 | that my father had, which was science.

00:50:15.880 | And so I liked science in high school

00:50:18.560 | and I found an overlap also between the arts and sciences.

00:50:22.860 | Both required creativity, hard work, discipline,

00:50:26.900 | new discovery, both weren't boring to me.

00:50:29.740 | And the one decision I made at that senior dance concert

00:50:33.840 | was in talking to the Alvin Ailey recruiter

00:50:36.780 | and thinking about it, I have to make a decision.

00:50:39.420 | And I thought something my mother taught me

00:50:42.780 | because she was growing up in the 1960s cultural revolution,

00:50:46.120 | do something that has a positive impact on society.

00:50:49.960 | And I thought that I can do that better

00:50:51.360 | as a dancer than a scientist.

00:50:53.420 | So now jump, I get into college, undergraduate school,

00:50:57.860 | I major in molecular biology and mathematics,

00:51:00.160 | I decided I wanted to be a biologist,

00:51:02.140 | got into graduate school, wanted to study the brain

00:51:04.880 | at the Rockefeller University,

00:51:06.480 | so I went from Hunter College to Rockefeller University.

00:51:08.880 | And so now I got to the brain

00:51:11.280 | and why did I choose the brain?

00:51:14.180 | Is because it controls dancing.

00:51:16.420 | But I didn't, there wasn't anybody studying dancing.

00:51:20.120 | And I wanted to study the brain, something that it does

00:51:22.660 | that's really interesting and complex.

00:51:25.100 | And I thought, ah, language is what it does.

00:51:27.600 | You couldn't study that in mice,

00:51:28.760 | you couldn't study in non-human primates,

00:51:30.800 | but these birds do this wonderful thing

00:51:32.560 | that Fernando Nadebaum was studying at Rockefeller.

00:51:34.840 | And so that's what got me into the birds.

00:51:37.840 | And then jumping now 15 years later,

00:51:42.840 | yeah, that's right, even after I'm into

00:51:46.780 | now having my own lab studying vocal learning

00:51:49.880 | in these birds as a model for language in humans,

00:51:52.560 | it turns out that Ani Patel and others have discovered

00:51:57.560 | that only vocal learning species can learn how to dance.

00:52:04.600 | - Is that right?

00:52:05.500 | - That's right, yes.

00:52:06.640 | - So I've seen these, I'm just scrolling through

00:52:10.040 | the files here in my mind.

00:52:12.280 | I think about every once in a while someone will,

00:52:14.040 | I loved parrots.

00:52:16.380 | Every once in a while someone will send me

00:52:17.880 | one of these little Instagram or Twitter videos

00:52:20.220 | of a parrot doing what looks to me like dance.

00:52:22.620 | Typically it's a cockatoo.

00:52:23.760 | - That's right, that's right.

00:52:24.920 | - Even foot stomping to the sound.

00:52:27.080 | - Famous one called snowball out there,

00:52:28.660 | but there are many snowballs out there.

00:52:31.460 | - They're all, all the dancing birds are named snowball.

00:52:33.800 | That's interesting tactic.

00:52:35.060 | So only animals with language dance.

00:52:40.160 | - Yeah, vocal learning in particular,

00:52:41.800 | the ability to imitate sounds, yes.

00:52:44.700 | - Incredible.

00:52:45.540 | - Yes, and this now is bringing my life full circle, all right?

00:52:49.680 | And I, and so when that was discovered in 2009,

00:52:54.080 | at that same time in my lab at Duke,

00:52:57.880 | we had discovered that vocal learning brain pathways

00:53:02.120 | in songbirds as well as in humans and in parrots, right,

00:53:06.020 | like snowball, are embedded within circuits

00:53:09.520 | that control learning how to move.

00:53:12.540 | And that led us to a theory called the brain pathway

00:53:15.640 | or motor theory of vocal learning origin,

00:53:18.240 | where the brain pathways for vocal learning and speech

00:53:21.300 | evolved by a whole duplication

00:53:23.440 | of the surrounding motor circuits

00:53:24.920 | involving learning how to move.

00:53:27.620 | Now, how does that explain dance, right?

00:53:30.720 | Well, when snowball, the cockatoos are dancing,

00:53:35.260 | they're using the brain regions

00:53:36.660 | around their speech-like circuits

00:53:38.500 | to do this dancing behavior.

00:53:40.760 | And so what's going on there?

00:53:42.320 | What we hypothesize and now like to test

00:53:46.500 | is that when speech evolved in humans

00:53:51.500 | and the equivalent behavior in parrots and songbirds,

00:53:55.240 | it required a very tight integration

00:53:58.980 | in the brain regions that can hear sound

00:54:01.880 | with the brain regions that control your muscles

00:54:04.460 | from moving your larynx and tongue and so forth

00:54:07.260 | for producing sound.

00:54:09.060 | And that tight auditory motor integration,

00:54:11.860 | we argue then contaminated the surrounding brain regions.

00:54:16.260 | And that contamination of the surrounding brain regions

00:54:18.760 | now allows us humans in particular in parrots

00:54:22.740 | to coordinate our muscle movements of the rest of the body

00:54:26.340 | with sound in the same way we do for speech sounds.

00:54:30.680 | Well, so we're speaking with our bodies when we dance.

00:54:33.540 | - Incredible, and I have to say that as poor as I am

00:54:37.380 | at speaking multiple languages, I'm even worse at dancing.

00:54:40.120 | So-- - But I guarantee

00:54:42.020 | you're better than a monkey.

00:54:44.220 | - But not Snowball the Cockatoo.

00:54:45.920 | - Maybe not Snowball.

00:54:47.560 | On YouTube, we have a video where there's some scientists

00:54:49.860 | dancing with Snowball, and you'll see Snowball's

00:54:52.420 | doing better than some of the scientists.

00:54:54.000 | - Okay, well, as long as I'm not the worst

00:54:55.540 | of all scientists at dancing,

00:54:57.140 | there's always neuroplasticity.

00:55:00.540 | May it save me someday.

00:55:02.100 | You said something incredible that I completely believe,

00:55:07.540 | even though I have minimum to,

00:55:10.680 | let's just say minimum dancing ability.

00:55:12.920 | I can get by at a party or wedding

00:55:14.640 | without complete embarrassment,

00:55:16.280 | but I don't have any structured training.

00:55:18.920 | So the body clearly can communicate with movement.

00:55:25.040 | As a trained dancer and knowing other trained dancers,

00:55:29.680 | I always think of dance and bodily movement

00:55:34.840 | and communication through bodily movement

00:55:36.600 | as a form of wordlessness, like a state of wordlessness.

00:55:40.240 | In fact, the few times when I think that

00:55:42.140 | maybe I'm actually dancing modestly well

00:55:45.820 | for the context that I'm in,

00:55:47.520 | where I see other people dancing

00:55:48.980 | and they seem to just be very much in the movement,

00:55:51.400 | it's almost like a state of non-language,

00:55:54.400 | non-spoken language.

00:55:55.720 | And yet what you're telling me is that

00:55:59.940 | there's a direct bridge at some level

00:56:02.700 | between the movement of the body and language.

00:56:05.680 | So is there a language of the body

00:56:08.560 | that is distinct from the language of speech?

00:56:12.040 | And if so, or if not, how do those map onto one another?

00:56:15.800 | What does that Venn diagram look like?

00:56:17.480 | - Yeah, yeah.

00:56:18.500 | So let me define first dance in this context

00:56:22.400 | of vocal learning species.

00:56:24.600 | This is the kind of dancing that we are specialized in doing

00:56:28.400 | and the vocal learning species are specialized in doing

00:56:31.400 | is synchronizing body movements of muscles

00:56:34.560 | to the rhythmic beats of music.

00:56:37.040 | And for some reason, we like doing that.

00:56:39.560 | We like synchronizing to sound

00:56:42.520 | and doing it together as a group of people.

00:56:45.400 | And that kind of communication amongst ourselves

00:56:49.120 | is more like the effective kind of communication

00:56:51.800 | I mentioned earlier, unlike the semantic kind.

00:56:54.900 | So we humans are using our voices

00:56:58.140 | more for the semantic abstract communication,

00:57:02.440 | but we're using learn dance for the effective,

00:57:05.620 | emotional bonding kind of communication.

00:57:09.200 | It doesn't mean we can't communicate semantic information

00:57:12.240 | in dance and we do it, but it's not as popular.

00:57:16.640 | Like a ballet in the Nutcracker, it is popular

00:57:21.180 | where they are communicating, the Arabian guy comes out,

00:57:26.000 | which I was the Arabian guy in the ballet Nutcracker,

00:57:28.180 | that's how I remember.

00:57:29.160 | Yeah, for the Westchester Ballet Company

00:57:30.760 | when I was a teenager, we're trying to communicate meaning

00:57:35.720 | in our ballet dance and it can go on with a whole story

00:57:38.080 | and so forth, but people don't interpret that

00:57:40.960 | as clearly as speech.

00:57:43.000 | They're seeing the ballet with semantic communication

00:57:46.200 | with a lot of emotional content.

00:57:48.580 | Whereas you go out to a club,

00:57:50.300 | you're not communicating, okay, how are you feeling today?

00:57:55.180 | Tell me about your day and so forth.

00:57:57.320 | You're trying to synchronize with other people

00:57:59.960 | in an effective way.

00:58:01.360 | And I think that's because the dance brain circuit

00:58:06.360 | inherited the more ancient part of the speech circuit,

00:58:10.080 | which was for singing.

00:58:12.160 | - I always had the feeling that with certain forms of music,

00:58:16.200 | in particular opera, but any kind of music

00:58:19.000 | where there are some long notes sung,

00:58:23.320 | that at some level there was a literal resonance created

00:58:29.200 | between the singer and the listener that,

00:58:32.980 | or I think of like the deep voice of a Johnny Cash

00:58:35.940 | or where at some level you can almost feel the voice

00:58:38.820 | in your own body.

00:58:40.360 | And in theory, that could be the vibration

00:58:44.240 | or the firing of the phrenic nerve controlling the diaphragm

00:58:48.100 | for all I know.

00:58:49.120 | Is there any evidence that there's a coordination

00:58:51.120 | between performer and audience

00:58:53.440 | at the level of mind and body?

00:58:57.740 | - I'm gonna say possibly yes.

00:59:02.740 | And the reason why is because I just came back

00:59:05.860 | from a conference on the neurobiology of dance.

00:59:08.580 | - Clearly I'm going to the wrong meetings.

00:59:11.860 | Vision science can be so boring.

00:59:14.380 | - Yes, one of my colleagues, Tukumseh Fitch

00:59:17.180 | and Jonathan Fritz, they organized a particular section

00:59:20.900 | on this conference in Virginia.

00:59:23.340 | And this is the first time I was in the room

00:59:25.460 | with so many neuroscientists studying

00:59:28.080 | the neurobiology of dance.

00:59:29.340 | It's a new field now in the last five years.

00:59:32.140 | And there was one lab where they were putting EEG electrodes

00:59:37.140 | on the dancers, on two different dancers partnering

00:59:42.820 | with each other, as well as the audience seeing the dance.

00:59:47.820 | And some argued, okay, if you're listening to the music

00:59:51.980 | as well, how are you responding?

00:59:53.180 | Because you're asking a question about music

00:59:55.820 | and I'm giving you an answer about dance.

00:59:58.100 | And what they found is that the dancers,

01:00:02.340 | when they resonated with each other during the dance

01:00:04.700 | or the audience listening to the dancers and the music,

01:00:07.820 | there's some resonance going on there

01:00:09.740 | that they've score as higher resonance.

01:00:13.140 | Their brain activity with these wireless EEG signals

01:00:16.500 | are showing something different.

01:00:18.100 | And so that's why I say possibly yes.

01:00:20.100 | It needs more rigorous study and this is some stuff

01:00:25.100 | they published, but it's not prime time yet,

01:00:27.500 | but they're trying to figure this out.

01:00:29.500 | - Love it, so at least if I can't dance well,

01:00:32.380 | maybe I can hear and feel what it is to dance

01:00:35.740 | in a certain way.

01:00:36.700 | - That's right.

01:00:37.740 | And this will be, some people will think that they,

01:00:41.700 | even songs that they hear and they can almost sing

01:00:45.380 | to themselves in their own head and they know

01:00:47.820 | what they want it to sound like.

01:00:49.700 | They know what it really sounds good, what it sounds like,

01:00:52.660 | but they can't get their voice to do it.

01:00:55.580 | - I'm raising, for those listening, I'm raising my hand.

01:00:58.380 | No musical ability.

01:01:00.220 | Others in my household have tremendous musical ability

01:01:03.380 | with instruments and with voice, but not me.

01:01:06.260 | - Yeah, and so this is one of my selfish goals

01:01:11.260 | of trying to find the genetics of why can some people

01:01:16.020 | sing really well and some not?

01:01:18.260 | Is there some genetic predisposition to that?

01:01:20.860 | And then can I modify my own muscles or brain circuits

01:01:23.860 | to sing better?

01:01:24.700 | - You're still after the singing.

01:01:26.180 | I guess this is what happens when siblings

01:01:28.380 | are very in proficiency is that that competitiveness

01:01:32.340 | amongst brothers and sisters never goes away.

01:01:34.900 | - I've been trying to be as good as my brother,

01:01:36.900 | Mark and Victor, for the rest of my entire life.

01:01:40.460 | - Watch out, Mark and Victor, he's coming for you

01:01:42.380 | with neuroscience to back him.

01:01:45.140 | Earlier you said that you discovered that you could dance.

01:01:49.180 | That caught my ear.

01:01:51.500 | It sounds like you didn't actually have to,

01:01:53.100 | I'm not suggesting you didn't work hard at it,

01:01:55.020 | but that at the moment where you discovered it,

01:01:57.700 | it just sort of was a skill that you had

01:02:00.420 | that up until that point, you didn't target a life

01:02:04.340 | in the world of dance.

01:02:06.260 | But the fact that you "discovered" that you could dance

01:02:09.820 | really well and then went to this incredible school of dance

01:02:12.060 | and did well tells me that perhaps there is an ability

01:02:16.420 | that was built up in childhood and/or that perhaps

01:02:20.460 | we do all have different genetic leanings

01:02:22.740 | for different motor functions.

01:02:24.940 | - Yeah, well, for me, both explanations could be possible.

01:02:29.300 | For the first, I grew up in a family listening

01:02:32.700 | to Motown songs, dancing at parties and so forth,

01:02:37.700 | family parties, an African-American family basically.

01:02:41.540 | And so I grew up dancing from a young child.

01:02:46.540 | But this discovery, maybe dancing even more so,

01:02:53.300 | in terms of a talent, the genetic component,

01:02:58.700 | if it really exists, I don't know.

01:03:00.660 | You know, with my 23andMe results,

01:03:03.740 | it says I have the genetic substitutions

01:03:07.820 | that are associated with high-intensity athletes

01:03:11.460 | and fast-twitch muscles.

01:03:13.180 | And who knows, maybe that could have something to do

01:03:15.620 | with me being able to synchronize my body

01:03:19.820 | to rhythmic sounds, maybe, maybe better than some others.

01:03:25.420 | It turns out that my genetics also show

01:03:28.900 | that I have a genetic substitute that does it,

01:03:32.020 | that makes it hard for me to sing on pitch.

01:03:34.660 | And so that does correlate with my, you know,

01:03:37.100 | even though I can sing on this pitch,

01:03:38.300 | especially if I hear a piano or, you know, kind of playing it

01:03:41.700 | but, you know, maybe that's why my siblings, you know,

01:03:44.780 | who didn't have that genetic predisposition

01:03:47.140 | in his 23andMe results, you know,

01:03:49.700 | could go along with the genetic component as well.

01:03:52.740 | - I'm imagining family gatherings with 23andMe data

01:03:55.780 | and intense arguments about it, innate and learned ability.

01:03:59.620 | - Yes. - Fun.

01:04:01.300 | Love to be an attendant.

01:04:02.980 | I'm not inviting myself to your Thanksgiving dinner,

01:04:05.020 | by the way, but I suppose I am.

01:04:07.300 | - You're welcome to.

01:04:08.140 | - Thank you.

01:04:09.260 | I'll bring my 23andMe data.

01:04:11.540 | I'd love to chat a moment about facial expression

01:04:14.700 | because that's a form of motor pattern that, you know,

01:04:17.180 | I think for most people out there,

01:04:19.360 | just think about smiling and frowning,

01:04:22.360 | but there are of course, you know, thousands,

01:04:24.460 | if not millions of micro expressions

01:04:27.460 | and things of that sort, many of which are subconscious.

01:04:31.000 | And we're all familiar with the fact that

01:04:34.680 | when what somebody says doesn't match some specific feature

01:04:38.440 | of their facial expression, that it can call, you know,

01:04:42.520 | that mismatch can cue our attention,

01:04:45.220 | especially among people that know each other very well.

01:04:47.920 | Like somebody will say, well, you said that,

01:04:50.440 | but your right eye twitched to the, you know,

01:04:53.560 | a little bit in a way that tells me

01:04:55.360 | that you didn't really mean that, these kinds of things.

01:04:57.680 | Or when, in the opposite example,

01:05:01.800 | when the emotionality and the content of our speech

01:05:05.040 | is matched to a facial expression,

01:05:07.200 | there's something that's just so wonderful about that

01:05:11.220 | because it seems like everything's aligned.

01:05:13.000 | - Yeah.

01:05:13.840 | - So how does the motor circuitry

01:05:16.240 | that controls facial expression map onto the brain circuits

01:05:20.320 | that control language, speech,

01:05:21.960 | and even bodily and hand movements?

01:05:23.320 | - Yeah, you ask a great question

01:05:26.100 | because we both know some colleagues

01:05:28.020 | like Munrich Freiwald at Rockefeller University

01:05:30.600 | who studied facial expression and the neurology behind it.

01:05:33.780 | And now we both share some students that were co-mentoring

01:05:37.520 | and talk about this same question that you brought up.

01:05:41.280 | And what I'm learning a lot is that non-human primates

01:05:45.200 | have a lot of diversity in their facial expression

01:05:47.720 | like we humans do.

01:05:49.120 | And what we know about the neurobiology

01:05:52.160 | of brain regions controlling those muscles of the face

01:05:55.620 | is that these non-human primates and some other species

01:05:58.240 | that don't learn how to imitate vocalizations,

01:06:00.720 | they have strong connections from the cortical regions

01:06:05.720 | to the motor neurons that control facial expressions,

01:06:09.360 | but absent connections or weak connections

01:06:12.420 | to the motor neurons that control the voice.

01:06:14.760 | So I think our diverse facial expression,

01:06:18.920 | even though it's more diverse than these non-human primates,

01:06:21.040 | there was already a preexisting diversity of communication,

01:06:25.680 | whether it's intentional or unconscious

01:06:28.080 | through facial expression in our ancestors.

01:06:31.400 | And on top of that, we humans now add the voice

01:06:35.760 | along with those facial expressions.

01:06:38.120 | - I see.

01:06:39.760 | And in terms of language learning when we're kids,

01:06:42.800 | I mean, children fortunately are not told

01:06:45.220 | to fake their expressions or to smile

01:06:47.040 | when they say I'm happy.

01:06:48.480 | So at some point, everybody learns for better or for worse

01:06:52.960 | how to untangle these different components

01:06:57.260 | of hand movement, body posture, speech,

01:07:00.280 | and facial expression, but in their best form, I would say,

01:07:05.280 | assuming that the best form is always,

01:07:07.440 | I guess there are instances where, for safety reasons,

01:07:10.040 | one might need to feign some of these aspects of language.

01:07:13.920 | But in most cases, when those are aligned,

01:07:16.740 | it seems like that could reflect

01:07:19.040 | that all the different circuitries

01:07:20.720 | are operating in parallel,

01:07:22.340 | but that the ability to misalign these

01:07:25.480 | is also a powerful aspect to our maturation.

01:07:29.920 | I even think of theater, for instance,

01:07:31.860 | where deliberate disentangling of these areas is important,

01:07:36.740 | but also we know when an actor, when it feels real,

01:07:41.000 | and when bad acting is oftentimes

01:07:44.500 | when the facial expression or body posture

01:07:46.480 | just doesn't quite match what we're hearing.

01:07:48.780 | So are these skills that people that learn and acquire

01:07:53.260 | according to adaptability and profession,

01:07:55.220 | or do you think that all children and all adults

01:07:58.580 | eventually learn how to couple and uncouple

01:08:00.560 | these circuits a little bit?

01:08:02.460 | - Yeah, I think it's this similar argument

01:08:05.240 | I mentioned earlier about the innate

01:08:07.480 | and the learned for the vocalizations.

01:08:09.680 | And by the way, when I say we humans have facial expressions

01:08:12.720 | associated with our vocalizations

01:08:14.640 | in a different way than primates, non-human primates,

01:08:17.040 | it's the learned vocalizations I'm talking about.

01:08:19.600 | So there is a common view out there

01:08:23.680 | that facial expressions in non-human species,

01:08:26.440 | like non-human primates, or you can have them in birds too,

01:08:30.240 | are innate, all right?

01:08:33.460 | And so they're reflexive controlled.

01:08:36.240 | I don't believe that.

01:08:37.080 | I think there's some learned component to it,

01:08:38.880 | and I think we have more learning component to it as well,

01:08:41.880 | but we also have an innate component.

01:08:44.880 | And so if you try to put your hands behind your back

01:08:48.020 | and hold your fists, or even just not,

01:08:49.920 | and try to speak and try to communicate,

01:08:52.440 | it's actually harder to do.

01:08:53.760 | You have to force yourself or put it by your side.

01:08:56.920 | This comes naturally.

01:08:58.360 | Facial expressions comes naturally

01:08:59.880 | because there is an innate component.

01:09:01.840 | And yes, you have to learn how to dissociate the two,

01:09:06.320 | communicate something angry with your hands

01:09:08.380 | or with your face, but politely with your voice.

01:09:13.380 | It's very hard to separate at those two

01:09:16.320 | because there is that innate component

01:09:18.320 | that brings them together.

01:09:19.760 | So it's like an email too.

01:09:22.400 | You're emailing and someone says something by email.

01:09:25.680 | Someone can interpret that angrily or gently,

01:09:29.460 | and it becomes ambiguous.

01:09:32.680 | The facial expressions get rid of that ambiguity.

01:09:35.640 | - I'm so glad you brought that out

01:09:37.040 | because my next question was and is about written language.

01:09:41.320 | The first question I'll ask is when you write,

01:09:44.120 | either type or write things out by hand,

01:09:46.780 | do you hear the content of what you want to write

01:09:51.860 | in your head, just you personally?

01:09:54.580 | - Yes, I do.

01:09:55.760 | Yeah, and I know that I do

01:09:59.580 | because I was trying to figure out a debate about this issue

01:10:03.520 | and trying to resolve the debate

01:10:06.040 | with my own self-experimentation on me.

01:10:09.120 | - I ask that because a quite well-known colleague of ours,

01:10:12.720 | Carl Deisseroth at Stanford, who's been on this podcast

01:10:15.940 | and is of optogenetics fame and psychiatry fame, et cetera.

01:10:19.220 | - I know him.

01:10:20.060 | - Yeah, he sends his regards.

01:10:21.680 | - Yeah, and told me that his practice for writing

01:10:26.680 | and for thinking involves a quite painful process

01:10:32.300 | of forcing himself to sit completely still

01:10:36.200 | and think in complete sentences,

01:10:38.360 | to force thinking in complete sentences.

01:10:40.300 | And when he told me that, I decided to try this exercise

01:10:42.800 | and it's quite difficult.

01:10:43.920 | First of all, it's difficult for the reason

01:10:45.400 | that you mentioned, which is that with many thoughts,

01:10:48.340 | I want to look around

01:10:49.440 | and I start to gesticulate with my hands.

01:10:52.120 | So there it is again,

01:10:53.040 | the connection between language and hand movement,

01:10:55.660 | even if one isn't speaking.

01:10:57.100 | And the other part that's challenging

01:11:01.480 | is I realized that while we write in complete sentences,

01:11:05.160 | most of the time, we'll talk about how that's changing now

01:11:08.200 | and texting, et cetera,

01:11:10.160 | that we don't often think in complete sentences

01:11:14.600 | and specifically in simple declarative sentences,

01:11:18.760 | that a lot of our thoughts would be,

01:11:20.740 | if they were written out onto a page,

01:11:23.320 | would look pretty much like passive language

01:11:27.320 | that a good copy editor or a good editor would say,

01:11:30.360 | oh, like we need to cross this out,

01:11:31.940 | make this simple and declarative.

01:11:33.620 | So what I'm getting at here is what is the process

01:11:36.920 | of going from a thought to language to written word?

01:11:41.920 | And I also wanted to touch on handwritten versus typed,

01:11:46.920 | but thought to language to written word,

01:11:49.680 | what's going on there?

01:11:50.720 | What do we know about the neural circuitry?

01:11:53.120 | And I was gonna ask, why is it so hard?

01:11:55.500 | But now I want to ask, why is this even possible?

01:11:58.800 | It seems like a very challenging

01:12:00.640 | neural computational problem.

01:12:02.280 | - Yeah, yeah.

01:12:03.720 | And coming from the linguistic world

01:12:07.880 | and even just the regular neurobiology world,

01:12:10.120 | going back to something I said before

01:12:11.640 | is about a separate language module in the brain.

01:12:14.560 | There was this thought or hypothesis

01:12:16.760 | that this language module

01:12:18.600 | has all these complex algorithms to them

01:12:21.740 | and they're signaling to the speech circuit,

01:12:24.520 | how to produce the sounds,

01:12:26.480 | the hand circuit, how to write them or gesture,

01:12:29.280 | the visual pathway on how to interpret them from reading

01:12:34.400 | and the auditory pathway for listening.

01:12:36.360 | I don't think that's the case, all right?

01:12:39.960 | And that this thinking

01:12:41.200 | where there's this internal speech going on,

01:12:43.920 | what I think is going on is to explain

01:12:46.640 | what you're asking is about,

01:12:49.040 | that I'm gonna take it from the perspective

01:12:50.520 | of reading something.

01:12:51.720 | You read something on a paper,

01:12:53.840 | the signal from the paper goes through your eyes,

01:12:56.800 | it goes to the back of your brain

01:12:58.120 | to your visual cortical regions eventually,

01:13:01.520 | and then you now got to interpret that signal

01:13:04.120 | in your visual pathway of what you're reading.

01:13:07.160 | How are you gonna do that internal speech?

01:13:09.320 | That visual signal then goes to your speech pathway

01:13:12.760 | in the motor cortex in front here in Broca's area

01:13:15.840 | and you silently speak what you read in your brain

01:13:19.560 | without moving your muscles.

01:13:21.400 | And sometimes actually if you put electrodes,

01:13:24.160 | EMG electrodes on your laryngeal muscles,

01:13:29.040 | even on birds you can do this,

01:13:30.640 | you'll see activity there while reading

01:13:33.960 | or trying to speak silently

01:13:36.480 | even though no sound's coming out.

01:13:38.600 | And so your speech pathway

01:13:42.120 | is now speaking what you're reading.

01:13:45.600 | Now to finish it off,

01:13:47.600 | that signal is sent to your auditory pathway

01:13:49.840 | so you can hear what you're speaking in your own head.

01:13:53.320 | - That's incredible.

01:13:54.160 | - And this is why it's complicated

01:13:56.160 | because you're using like three different pathways,

01:13:59.200 | the visual, the speaking motor one and the auditory

01:14:02.640 | to read, oh, and then you got to write, right?

01:14:06.920 | Okay, here comes the fourth one.

01:14:08.720 | Now the hand areas next to your speech pathway

01:14:11.520 | has got to take that auditory signal

01:14:13.320 | or even the adjacent motor signals for speaking

01:14:16.200 | and translate it into a visual signal on paper.

01:14:19.400 | So you're using at least four brain circuits

01:14:22.360 | which includes the speech production

01:14:25.560 | and the speech perception pathways to write.

01:14:28.480 | - Incredible.

01:14:29.640 | And finally explains to me why,

01:14:33.120 | so I was weaned teaching undergraduates,

01:14:35.800 | graduate students and medical students

01:14:37.280 | and I've observed that when I'm teaching

01:14:40.640 | I have to stop speaking

01:14:42.080 | if I'm going to write something on the board.

01:14:44.360 | I just have to stop all speaking completely.

01:14:47.000 | Turns out this is an advantage to catch

01:14:49.200 | because it allows me to catch my voice,

01:14:51.440 | it allows me to slow down a bit,

01:14:53.960 | breathe and inhale some oxygen and so on

01:14:56.520 | because I tend to speak quickly

01:14:57.760 | if I'm not writing something out.

01:14:59.920 | So there's a break in the circuitry for me

01:15:02.120 | or at least they are distinct enough

01:15:03.720 | that I have to stop and then write something.

01:15:06.560 | - Yes, that does imply competing brain circuits

01:15:10.440 | for your conscious attention.

01:15:13.920 | - We have colleagues up at Columbia Med

01:15:16.960 | who are known at least in our circles

01:15:20.040 | for voice dictating their papers, not writing them out

01:15:23.640 | but just speaking into a voice recorder.

01:15:26.280 | I've written papers that way.

01:15:27.760 | It doesn't feel quite as natural for me

01:15:31.480 | as writing things out

01:15:32.920 | but not because I can go quickly

01:15:34.800 | from thought to language to typing.

01:15:36.920 | I type reasonably fast, I can touch type now.

01:15:39.360 | I don't think I ever taught my, I think I taught myself.

01:15:41.600 | I never took a touch type course

01:15:43.200 | but it just sort of happened now.

01:15:44.400 | My motor system seems to know where the keys are

01:15:47.360 | with enough accuracy that it works.

01:15:51.320 | This is remarkable to me that any of us can do this

01:15:56.280 | but when it comes to writing,

01:15:59.320 | what I've found is that if my rate of thought

01:16:02.960 | and my rate of writing are aligned nicely, things go well.

01:16:07.960 | However, if I'm thinking much faster than I can write,

01:16:11.380 | that's a problem.

01:16:12.720 | And certainly if I'm thinking more slowly

01:16:15.160 | than I want to write, that's also a problem.

01:16:17.920 | And the solution for me has been to write with a pen.

01:16:21.460 | I'm in love with these

01:16:22.520 | and I have no relationship to the company,

01:16:24.480 | at least not now, although if they want to come,

01:16:26.400 | if they want to work with us, I love these Pilot V5, V7s

01:16:29.840 | because not necessarily because of the ink or the feel,

01:16:33.600 | although I like that as well

01:16:34.600 | but because of the rate that allows me to write.

01:16:37.240 | They write very well slowly and they write very well quickly.

01:16:40.520 | And so I have this theory supported only

01:16:44.760 | by my own ANIC data, no peer-reviewed study,

01:16:48.280 | that writing by hand is fundamentally different

01:16:53.280 | than typing out information.

01:16:55.760 | Is there any evidence that this motor pathway for writing

01:17:00.760 | is better or somehow different

01:17:04.420 | than the motor pathway for typing?

01:17:06.960 | - Yeah, that's interesting.

01:17:09.440 | And I don't know of any studies,

01:17:11.760 | I have my own personal experience as well,

01:17:13.520 | but trying to put this into the context,

01:17:16.280 | if I had to design an experiment to test the hypothesis here

01:17:21.280 | to explain your experience in mind

01:17:23.720 | is that writing by hand, I would argue,

01:17:28.720 | requires a different set of less skills

01:17:32.120 | with the fingers than typing.

01:17:35.100 | So you have to coordinate your fingers

01:17:37.740 | more in opposite directions and so forth with typing

01:17:42.740 | but also writing by hand requires more arm movement.

01:17:45.460 | And so therefore, I would argue that the difficulty there

01:17:51.320 | could be in the types of muscles

01:17:57.480 | and the fine motor control you need of those muscles

01:18:00.180 | along with speaking in your brain at the same time.

01:18:02.520 | - So basically I'm coarse, I'm a brute

01:18:04.400 | and so it makes sense

01:18:05.320 | that a more primitive writing device would work.

01:18:07.980 | - That's right, yes.

01:18:09.080 | But let me add to this in terms of my own personal experience

01:18:14.080 | what I find is I can write something faster by hand

01:18:20.000 | for a short period of time compared to typing

01:18:25.580 | and that is because I think I run out of the energy

01:18:28.780 | in my arm movements faster than I run out of muscle energy

01:18:32.800 | in my finger movements.

01:18:34.520 | And I think it takes a longer time

01:18:38.520 | for us to write words with our fingers

01:18:41.360 | because in terms of the speech.

01:18:43.880 | So I think your writing, whether it's by hand or typing

01:18:48.120 | and your speech, it only will align very well

01:18:51.760 | if you can type as fast as you can speak

01:18:54.600 | or write as fast as you can speak in your head.

01:18:56.680 | - I love it.

01:18:57.500 | So what you've done, if I understand correctly,

01:18:59.480 | is created a bridge between thought and writing

01:19:02.800 | and that bridge is speech.

01:19:04.800 | - That bridge is speech, that's right.

01:19:07.120 | That's right.

01:19:07.960 | When you're writing something out,

01:19:09.160 | you're speaking it to yourself.

01:19:11.240 | And if you're speaking faster than you can type,

01:19:13.480 | you got a problem.

01:19:14.480 | - Interesting, I do a number of podcast episodes

01:19:18.620 | that are not with guests, but solo episodes.

01:19:20.440 | And as listeners know, these are very long episodes,

01:19:22.760 | often two or more hours.

01:19:24.660 | And we joke around the podcast studio

01:19:27.640 | that I will get locked into a mode of speech

01:19:30.600 | where some of it is more elaborative and anecdotal

01:19:34.360 | and then I'll punch out simple declarative sentences.

01:19:38.520 | I find it very hard to switch from one module to the next.

01:19:42.120 | The thing that I have done in order to make that transition

01:19:46.840 | more fluid and prep for those podcast episodes

01:19:49.960 | is actually to read the lyrics of songs

01:19:53.480 | and to sing them in my head

01:19:55.740 | as a way of warming up my vocal cords.

01:19:57.760 | But luckily for those around me, when I do that,

01:20:01.340 | I'm not actually singing out loud.

01:20:03.780 | And so what you're telling me supports this idea

01:20:08.220 | that even when we are imagining singing or writing

01:20:13.220 | in our mind, we are exercising our vocal cords.

01:20:16.520 | - You're actually getting little low potentials

01:20:19.820 | of electrical currents reaching your muscles there,

01:20:22.800 | which also means you're exercising

01:20:24.240 | your speech brain circuits too without actually going

01:20:27.480 | with the flow of activity in the muscles.

01:20:29.940 | - Incredible. - Yes.

01:20:30.780 | And this idea of singing helps you as well.

01:20:33.920 | Even with Parkinson's patients and so forth,

01:20:38.080 | when they wanna say something,

01:20:39.020 | singing or listening to music helps them move better.

01:20:41.260 | And the idea there is that the brain circuits for singing,

01:20:45.160 | or let's say the function of the brain circuits for speech

01:20:47.960 | being used for singing first is the more ancestral trait.

01:20:51.460 | And that's why it's easier to do things with singing

01:20:54.280 | sometimes than it is with speaking.

01:20:56.220 | - I love it.

01:20:57.060 | Stutter is a particularly interesting case.

01:21:02.260 | And one that every once in a while,

01:21:04.500 | I'll get questions about this from our audience.

01:21:06.920 | Stutter is complicated in a number of ways,

01:21:11.100 | but culturally, in my understanding from these emails

01:21:14.560 | that I receive is that stutter can often cause people

01:21:18.180 | to hide and speak less because it can be embarrassing.

01:21:21.980 | And we are often not patient with stutter.

01:21:25.160 | We also have the assumption that if somebody's stuttering,

01:21:27.540 | that their thinking is slow,

01:21:28.620 | but it turns out there are many examples historically

01:21:31.460 | of people who could not speak well,

01:21:33.160 | but who were brilliant thinkers.

01:21:35.400 | I don't know how well they could write,

01:21:37.900 | but they found other modes of communication.

01:21:40.400 | I realize that you're not a speech pathologist or therapist,

01:21:45.100 | but what is the current neurobiological understanding

01:21:48.780 | of stutter and what's being developed

01:21:51.900 | in terms of treatments for stutter?

01:21:53.540 | - Yeah, so we actually accidentally came across

01:21:58.460 | stuttering in songbirds.

01:22:00.300 | And we've published several papers on this

01:22:03.020 | to try to figure out the neurobiological basis.

01:22:04.900 | The first study we had was a brain area

01:22:08.400 | called the basal ganglia or the striatum part

01:22:11.640 | of the basal ganglia involved in coordinating movements,

01:22:14.900 | learning how to make movements.

01:22:16.840 | When it was damaged in a speech-like pathway in these birds,

01:22:21.840 | what we found is that they started to stutter

01:22:25.240 | as the brain region recovered.

01:22:27.160 | And unlike humans, they actually recovered

01:22:31.880 | after three or four months.

01:22:33.740 | And why is that the case?

01:22:34.860 | Because bird brains undergoes new neurogenesis

01:22:38.120 | in a way that human or mammal brains don't.

01:22:41.780 | And it was the new neurons that were coming into the circuit

01:22:46.660 | but not quite with the right proper activity

01:22:50.620 | was resulting in this stuttering in these birds.

01:22:54.500 | And after it was repaired,

01:22:55.940 | not exactly the old song came back after the repair,

01:22:59.860 | but still it recovered a lot better.

01:23:02.420 | And it's now known, they call this neurogenics stuttering

01:23:07.420 | in humans with damage to the basal ganglia

01:23:10.540 | or some type of disruption to the basal ganglia

01:23:13.300 | at a young age also causes stuttering in humans.

01:23:16.700 | And even those who are born with stuttering,

01:23:19.360 | it's often the basal ganglia that's disrupted

01:23:24.940 | than some other brain circuit.

01:23:26.500 | And we think the speech part of the basal ganglia.

01:23:29.500 | - Can adults who maintain a stutter from childhood

01:23:33.020 | repair that stutter?

01:23:34.460 | - They can repair it with a therapy,

01:23:36.840 | with learning how to speak slower,

01:23:39.340 | learning how to tap out a rhythm during such.

01:23:42.060 | And yeah, I'm not a speech pathologist,

01:23:43.820 | but I started reading this literature

01:23:45.700 | and talking to others that colleagues

01:23:48.460 | who actually study stuttering.

01:23:50.540 | So yes, there are ways to overcome the stuttering

01:23:54.980 | through behavioral therapy.

01:23:58.940 | And I think all of the tools out there

01:24:04.180 | have something to do with sensory motor integration.

01:24:07.780 | Controlling what you hear with what you output

01:24:11.340 | in a thoughtful, controlled way helps reduce the stuttering.

01:24:15.960 | - There are a couple examples from real life

01:24:17.700 | that I want to touch on.

01:24:18.640 | And one is somewhat facetious,

01:24:20.860 | but now I realize is a serious neurobiological issue.

01:24:25.860 | Serious meaning, I think, interesting,

01:24:28.660 | which is that every once in a while,

01:24:31.180 | I will have a conversation with somebody

01:24:33.180 | who says the last word of the sentence along with me.

01:24:37.100 | And it seems annoying in some instances,

01:24:39.860 | but I'm guessing this is just a breakthrough

01:24:42.900 | of the motor pattern that they're hearing

01:24:44.500 | what I'm saying very well.

01:24:46.300 | So I'm going to interpret this kindly and think

01:24:48.340 | they're hearing what I'm saying.

01:24:50.020 | They're literally hearing it in their mind

01:24:53.540 | and they're getting that low level electrical activity

01:24:56.540 | to their throat.

01:24:57.380 | And they're just joining me in the enunciation

01:25:01.260 | of what I'm saying, probably without realizing it.

01:25:04.680 | Can we assume that that might be the case?

01:25:06.220 | - Well, I wouldn't be surprised.

01:25:08.320 | So the motor theory of speech perception

01:25:10.800 | where this idea originally came,

01:25:12.100 | what you hear is going through your speech circuit

01:25:15.420 | and then also activating those muscles slightly.

01:25:18.280 | So yes, so one might argue, okay,

01:25:24.020 | is that speech circuit now interpreting

01:25:26.380 | what that person is speaking now you listening to me

01:25:29.520 | and is going to finish it off

01:25:30.940 | because it's already going through their brain

01:25:33.860 | and they can predict it.

01:25:34.800 | That would be one theory.

01:25:37.120 | I don't think the verdict out there is no,

01:25:38.840 | but that's one.

01:25:40.020 | The other is synchronizing turn-taking in the conversation

01:25:45.020 | where you're acknowledging that we understand each other

01:25:52.100 | by finishing off what I say.

01:25:54.180 | And it's almost like a social bonding kind of thing.

01:25:58.580 | The other could be, I want the person to shut out

01:26:00.820 | so I can speak as well and take that turn.

01:26:03.260 | And each pair of people have a rhythm to their conversation.

01:26:08.260 | And if you have somebody who's over-talkative

01:26:10.460 | versus under-talkative or vice versa,

01:26:12.880 | that rhythm can be lost in them finishing ideas

01:26:15.520 | and going back and forth.

01:26:16.960 | But I think having something to do with turn-taking as well

01:26:20.940 | makes a lot of sense.

01:26:22.340 | - I have a colleague at Stanford who says

01:26:24.800 | that interruption is a sign of interest.

01:26:27.820 | I'm not sure that everyone agrees.

01:26:29.240 | I think it's highly contextual,

01:26:31.140 | but there is this form of a verbal nod of saying,

01:26:34.940 | "Mm-hmm," or things of that sort.

01:26:36.480 | And there are many of these.

01:26:38.720 | And I'm often told by my audience

01:26:40.780 | that I interrupt my guests and things of that sort.

01:26:43.140 | Oftentimes I'll just get caught in the natural flow

01:26:45.100 | of the conversation.

01:26:46.760 | - Well, I think we've had pretty good turn-taking here,

01:26:49.700 | I hope.

01:26:50.540 | - So far so good.

01:26:51.360 | - I feel that way.

01:26:52.200 | - I'm glad you feel that way,

01:26:53.100 | because especially in the context of a discussion

01:26:54.960 | about language, this seems important.

01:26:59.200 | Texting is a very, very interesting evolution of language,

01:27:04.200 | because what you've told us is that we have a thought,

01:27:09.520 | it's translated into language.

01:27:11.520 | It might not be complete sentences, but texting,

01:27:14.240 | I have to imagine this is the first time in human evolution

01:27:16.560 | where we've written with our thumbs.

01:27:18.600 | So I don't, you know, it seems more primitive to me

01:27:21.160 | than typing with fingers around your hands,

01:27:22.640 | but hey, who am I to judge the evolution of our species

01:27:25.720 | in one direction or the other?

01:27:27.320 | But the shorthand grammatically,

01:27:31.360 | often grammatically deficient incomplete sentence form

01:27:34.660 | of texting is an incredible thing to see.

01:27:37.760 | Early in relationships, romantic relationships,

01:27:41.280 | people will often evaluate the other's text

01:27:44.260 | and their ability to use proper grammar

01:27:47.100 | and spelling, et cetera.

01:27:48.480 | This often quickly degrades, and there's an acceptance

01:27:51.840 | that we're just trying to communicate through shorthand.

01:27:54.320 | Almost military-like shorthand,

01:27:57.880 | but with internally consistent between people,

01:28:00.700 | but there's no general consensus of what things mean.

01:28:02.940 | But, you know, WTFs and OMGs and all sorts of things.

01:28:07.940 | I wonder sometimes whether or not we are getting

01:28:12.640 | less proficient at speech because we are not required

01:28:17.160 | to write and think in complete sentences.

01:28:20.660 | I'm not being judgmental here.

01:28:22.920 | I see this in my colleagues, I see this in myself.

01:28:25.960 | This is not a judgment of the younger generation.

01:28:28.980 | I also know that slang has existed for decades,

01:28:34.880 | if not hundreds of years,

01:28:36.360 | but I also know that I don't speak the same way

01:28:38.280 | that I did when I was a teenager

01:28:40.240 | because I've suppressed a lot of that slang.

01:28:42.340 | Not because it's inappropriate or offensive,

01:28:45.300 | although some of it was, frankly,

01:28:46.940 | but because it's out of context.

01:28:50.520 | - So what do you think is happening to language?

01:28:53.020 | Are we getting better at speaking, worse at speaking?

01:28:56.080 | And what do you think the role of things like texting

01:28:58.980 | and tweeting and shorthand communication, hashtagging,

01:29:02.840 | what's that doing to the way that our brains work?

01:29:05.320 | - Yeah, I think that, one, in terms of, you know,

01:29:10.320 | measuring your level of sophistication and intelligence

01:29:14.320 | and you say OMG, right?

01:29:16.200 | I think that also could be a cultural thing,

01:29:19.080 | that, ah, you belong to the next generation.

01:29:21.940 | If you're, you know, or you're being cool

01:29:23.920 | if you're an older person, you know,

01:29:25.960 | using OMG and other things that the, you know,

01:29:29.040 | younger generation would use.

01:29:31.040 | But if I really think about it clearly,

01:29:34.380 | texting actually has allowed

01:29:39.320 | for more rapid communication amongst people.

01:29:43.360 | I think without the invention of the phone before then,

01:29:47.680 | or, you know, texting back and forth,

01:29:50.120 | you had to wait days for a letter to show up.

01:29:53.380 | You couldn't call somebody on the phone and talk as well,

01:29:55.920 | you know, and so this rapid communication,

01:29:57.840 | but in terms of the rapid communication

01:29:59.400 | of writing in this case.

01:30:00.600 | So I think actually, it's more like a use it or lose it

01:30:06.560 | kind of a thing with the brain.

01:30:10.140 | The more you use a particular brain region or circuit,

01:30:13.620 | the more enhanced, it's like a muscle.

01:30:16.320 | The more you exercise it, the more healthier it is,

01:30:19.160 | the bigger it becomes and the more space it takes

01:30:21.240 | and the more you lose something else.

01:30:23.400 | So I think texting is not decreasing

01:30:28.400 | the speech prowess or the intellectual prowess of speech.

01:30:34.260 | It's converting it and using it a lot in a different way.

01:30:38.080 | In a way that may not be as rich in regular writing

01:30:43.280 | because you can only communicate so much nuance

01:30:47.600 | in short term writing, but whatever is being done,

01:30:52.600 | you got people texting hours and hours and hours on the phone

01:30:56.600 | so whatever, your thumb circuit

01:30:58.980 | is gonna get pretty big actually.

01:31:01.040 | - I do wonder whether, you know,

01:31:04.340 | many people have lost their jobs based on tweets.

01:31:07.060 | The short latency between thought and action

01:31:11.600 | and distribution of one's thoughts is incredible.

01:31:15.920 | And I'm not just talking about people who have,

01:31:20.080 | who apparently would have poor prefrontal top-down control.

01:31:23.980 | This is geek speak, by the way,

01:31:25.240 | for people that lack impulse control.

01:31:27.360 | But high-level academics,

01:31:28.860 | I'm not gonna point fingers at anyone,

01:31:30.520 | but examples of where you see these tweets

01:31:33.320 | and you go, "What were they thinking?"

01:31:35.840 | So presumably there's an optimal strategy

01:31:39.800 | between the thought, speech, motor pathway,

01:31:44.360 | especially when the motor pathway engages communication

01:31:47.320 | with hundreds of thousands of people

01:31:49.160 | and retweets in particular and the cut and paste function

01:31:51.680 | and the screenshot function

01:31:53.240 | are often the reason why speech propagates.

01:31:55.680 | - Yep.

01:31:56.520 | - So to me, it's a little eerie

01:31:58.520 | that just that the neural circuitry can do this

01:32:03.520 | and that we are catching up a little bit more slowly

01:32:08.840 | to the technology and you've got these casualties

01:32:11.600 | of that mismatch.

01:32:14.600 | - I think that's a good adjective to use, the casualties,

01:32:19.320 | you know, of what's going on.

01:32:20.360 | Because yes, it is the case with texting.

01:32:23.320 | What you're really losing there

01:32:25.460 | is less so the ability to write,

01:32:28.320 | but more the ability to interpret what is being written.

01:32:32.000 | And you can over-undeterpit something that somebody means.

01:32:37.640 | - On the flip side of that, you know,

01:32:39.360 | when if somebody is writing something very quick,

01:32:42.460 | they could be writing instinctually, more instinctually,

01:32:47.140 | their true meaning, and they don't have time to modify

01:32:51.840 | and color code what they're trying to say.

01:32:55.040 | And that's what they really feel

01:32:56.920 | as opposed to say in a more nuanced way.

01:33:00.200 | So I think both sides of that casualty are present

01:33:05.040 | and that's a downturn, an unintended negative consequence

01:33:10.040 | of short word communication.

01:33:14.840 | - Yeah, I agree that this whole phenomenon

01:33:17.400 | could be netting people that normally

01:33:20.600 | would only say these things out loud

01:33:22.280 | once inside the door of their own home or not at all.

01:33:25.880 | It's an interesting time that we're in

01:33:28.280 | vis-a-vis speech and language and motor patterns.

01:33:30.960 | - So part of the human evolution for language,

01:33:32.880 | I think this is all part of our evolution.

01:33:35.440 | - That's right.

01:33:36.640 | So for those of you thinking terrible thoughts,

01:33:38.360 | please put them in the world and be a casualty.

01:33:40.320 | And for those of you that are not,

01:33:41.640 | please be very careful with how proficient

01:33:44.280 | your thought to language to motor action goes.

01:33:48.000 | Maybe the technology companies should install some buffers,

01:33:51.120 | some AI-based buffers.

01:33:52.760 | - Right, that's taking some EEG signals from your brain

01:33:55.640 | while you're texting to say,

01:33:56.960 | okay, this is not a great thought, slow down.

01:34:01.080 | - Right, this doesn't reflect your best state.

01:34:04.840 | That brings me to what was going to be

01:34:07.240 | the next question anyway,

01:34:08.240 | which is we are quickly moving toward a time

01:34:10.900 | where there will be an even faster transition

01:34:15.240 | from thought to speech, to motor output,

01:34:18.600 | and maybe won't require motor output.

01:34:20.760 | What I'm referring to here is some of the incredible work

01:34:23.320 | of our colleagues, Eddie Chang at UCSF

01:34:25.560 | and others who are taking paralyzed human beings

01:34:29.560 | and learning to translate the electrical signals of neurons

01:34:33.120 | in various areas, including speech and language areas,

01:34:35.540 | to computer screens that type out

01:34:37.480 | what these people are thinking.

01:34:38.400 | In other words, paralyzed people can put their thoughts

01:34:40.400 | on into writing.

01:34:42.320 | That's a pretty extreme and wonderful example of recovery

01:34:46.000 | of function that is sure to continue to evolve.

01:34:50.340 | But I think we are headed toward a time not too long

01:34:53.560 | from now where my thoughts can be translated

01:34:56.960 | into words on a page.

01:34:58.540 | If I allow that to happen.

01:35:00.460 | - Yeah, so, and Eddie Chang's work,

01:35:03.000 | which I admire quite a bit in sight in my papers,

01:35:06.380 | I think he's really one of those at the leading edge

01:35:10.160 | of trying to understand within humans

01:35:12.680 | the neurobiology of speech.

01:35:15.620 | And he may not say it directly,

01:35:17.680 | but I talked to him about this.

01:35:19.000 | It supports this idea that the speech circuit

01:35:21.960 | and the separate language module,

01:35:23.620 | I don't really think that there's a separation there.

01:35:26.840 | So with that knowledge, yes,

01:35:29.040 | and putting electrodes in the human brain

01:35:31.320 | and then translating those electrical signals

01:35:33.380 | to speech currents, yeah,

01:35:35.400 | we can start to tell what is that person thinking.

01:35:38.260 | Why?

01:35:39.100 | Because we often think in terms of speech

01:35:41.160 | and without saying words.

01:35:44.960 | And that's a scary thought.

01:35:46.660 | And now imagine if you can now translate those

01:35:49.780 | into a signal that transmits something wirelessly

01:35:52.700 | and so on from some distant part of the planet

01:35:55.640 | is hearing your speech from a wireless signal

01:35:58.680 | without you speaking.

01:36:00.560 | So probably that won't be done in an ethical way, who knows?

01:36:05.560 | I mean, the ethics of doing that probably might not happen,

01:36:10.260 | but who knows?

01:36:11.100 | We have these songbirds.

01:36:12.420 | We apply the same technique to them.

01:36:14.980 | We can start to hear what they're singing

01:36:16.420 | in their dreams or whatever,

01:36:18.480 | even though they don't produce sound.

01:36:19.800 | So we can find out by testing on them.

01:36:22.340 | - It's coming, one way or another, it's coming.

01:36:25.660 | For those listening who are interested

01:36:28.220 | in getting better at speaking and understanding languages,

01:36:32.500 | are there any tools that you recommend?

01:36:34.740 | And here again, I realize you're not a speech therapist,

01:36:37.860 | but here I'm not thinking about ameliorating

01:36:39.740 | any kind of speech deficiency.

01:36:42.220 | I'm thinking, for instance,

01:36:44.060 | do you recommend that people read different types of writing?

01:36:48.600 | Would you recommend that people learn how to dance

01:36:51.420 | in order to become better at expressing themselves verbally?

01:36:55.220 | And feel free to have some degrees of freedom

01:37:00.220 | in this answer.

01:37:01.600 | These are obviously not peer reviewed studies

01:37:04.200 | that we're referring to, although there may be,

01:37:07.160 | but I'm struck by the number of things

01:37:10.100 | that you do exceedingly well.

01:37:11.500 | And I can't help but ask, well, the singing,

01:37:16.140 | which I realize your brother didn't pay me to say this,

01:37:18.940 | may not be quite as good as your brother's yet,

01:37:21.420 | but you'll surpass him, I'm guessing at some point.

01:37:24.420 | - Getting there.

01:37:25.260 | - Getting there, exactly, there you go.

01:37:28.180 | Should kids learn how to dance and read hard books

01:37:34.540 | and simple books?

01:37:35.940 | What do you recommend?

01:37:36.780 | Should adults learn how to do that?

01:37:38.060 | Everyone wants to know how to keep their brain

01:37:40.040 | working better, so to speak,

01:37:41.780 | but also I think people want to be able to speak well

01:37:44.620 | and people want to be able to understand well.

01:37:46.660 | - Yeah, so what I've discovered personally, right,

01:37:50.580 | is that, so when I switched from pursuing a career

01:37:55.580 | in science from a career in dance,

01:37:58.320 | I thought one day I would stop dancing,

01:38:02.620 | but I haven't because I find it fulfilling for me,

01:38:06.120 | just as a life experience.

01:38:09.220 | So ever since I started college, my late teens

01:38:14.100 | and early 20s, I kept dancing even till this day.

01:38:18.300 | And there've been periods of time, like during the pandemic,

01:38:21.020 | where I slowed down on dancing and so forth.

01:38:23.260 | And when you do that, you realize, okay,

01:38:26.460 | they're parts of your body where your muscle tone

01:38:28.740 | decreases a little bit and somewhat,

01:38:31.060 | or you could start to gain weight.

01:38:32.660 | I somehow don't gain weight that easily,

01:38:34.340 | and I think it's related to my dance,

01:38:35.920 | if that's meaningful to your audience.

01:38:38.980 | But what I found is, in science,

01:38:43.140 | we like to think of a separation between movement

01:38:46.040 | and action and cognition.

01:38:48.340 | And there is a separation between perception

01:38:50.640 | and production, cognition being perception,

01:38:53.620 | production being movement, right?

01:38:55.860 | But if the speech pathways is next to the movement pathways,

01:38:59.840 | what I discover is by dancing, it is helping me think.

01:39:04.840 | It is helping keeping my brain fresh.

01:39:07.240 | It's not just moving my muscles.

01:39:09.340 | I'm moving or using the circuitry in my brain

01:39:13.100 | to control a whole big body.

01:39:16.500 | You need a lot of brain tissue to do that.

01:39:18.880 | And so I argue, if you wanna stay cognitively intact

01:39:23.760 | into your old age, you better be moving.

01:39:26.720 | And you better be doing it consistently,

01:39:28.440 | whether it's dancing, walking, running,

01:39:31.200 | and also practicing speech, oratory speech and so forth,

01:39:35.960 | or singing, is controlling the brain circuits

01:39:38.640 | that are moving your facial musculature.

01:39:40.540 | And it's gonna keep your cognitive circuits also in tune.

01:39:44.680 | And I'm convinced of that from my own personal experience.

01:39:48.460 | - For me, long, slow runs are a wonderful way

01:39:52.620 | to kind of loosen the joints for long podcasts,

01:39:56.800 | especially the solo podcasts,

01:39:58.180 | which can take many hours to record.

01:40:00.180 | And without those long, slow runs,

01:40:03.340 | at least the day before or even the morning of,

01:40:05.880 | I don't think I could do it, at least not as well.

01:40:08.260 | All right, well, you're experiencing something similar.

01:40:10.840 | So that's an N of two.

01:40:12.040 | - Yeah, N of two.

01:40:13.860 | I'm tempted to learn how to dance

01:40:15.820 | because there are a lot of reasons to learn how to dance.

01:40:18.660 | People can use their imagination.

01:40:21.140 | I definitely wanna get the opportunity

01:40:23.740 | to talk about some of the newer work

01:40:25.960 | that you're into right now about genomes of animals.

01:40:30.960 | As you perhaps can tell

01:40:32.500 | from my quite authentic facial expressions,

01:40:35.160 | I adore the animal kingdom.

01:40:38.020 | I just find it amazing.

01:40:39.140 | And it's the reason I went into neurobiology, in part.

01:40:41.920 | So many animals, so many different patterns of movement,

01:40:45.440 | so many body plans, so many specializations.

01:40:49.460 | What is the value of learning the genomes

01:40:52.020 | of all these animals?

01:40:53.180 | I can think of conservation-based schemes

01:40:58.780 | of trying to preserve these precious critters,

01:41:02.140 | but what are you doing with the genomes of these animals?

01:41:04.220 | What do you wanna understand about their brain circuits?

01:41:06.540 | And how does this relate to some of the discussion

01:41:08.420 | we have been having up until now?

01:41:09.260 | - Yeah, I've gotten very heavily involved in genomes,

01:41:13.300 | not just to get at an individual gene

01:41:16.980 | involved in the trait of interest, like spoken language,

01:41:21.500 | but I realize that nature has done

01:41:25.780 | natural experiments for us.

01:41:27.500 | With all these species out there, with these various traits,

01:41:31.620 | and the one that I'm studying, like vocal learning,

01:41:33.860 | has evolved multiple times among the animal kingdom,

01:41:36.500 | even if it's rare, it's multiple times.

01:41:39.580 | And the similar genetic changes occurred in those species.

01:41:44.580 | But to find out what those genetic changes

01:41:48.460 | that are associated with the trait of interest,

01:41:50.620 | and not some other trait like flying in birds,

01:41:53.440 | as opposed to singing,

01:41:55.560 | you have to do what's called comparative genomics,

01:41:58.900 | even in the context of studying the brain.

01:42:01.020 | And you need their genomes to compare the genomes

01:42:04.220 | and do like a GWAS, a genome-wide association study,

01:42:07.300 | not just within a species like humans, but across species.

01:42:10.620 | And so you need good genomes to do that.

01:42:13.660 | Plus, I've discovered I'm also interested

01:42:16.380 | in evolution and origins.

01:42:18.020 | How did these species come about a similar trait

01:42:21.060 | in the last 300 million years or 60 million years,

01:42:26.060 | depending on who you're talking about?

01:42:28.100 | And you need a good phylogenetic tree to do that.

01:42:31.020 | And to get a good phylogenetic tree,

01:42:32.740 | you also need their genomes.

01:42:34.580 | And so because of this,

01:42:35.980 | I got involved in large-scale consortiums

01:42:38.680 | to produce genomes of many different species,

01:42:41.820 | including my vocal learners and their closest relatives

01:42:45.140 | that I'm fans of.

01:42:46.420 | But I couldn't convince the funding agencies

01:42:49.260 | to give me the money to do that just for my own project.

01:42:52.660 | But when you get a whole bunch of people together

01:42:55.380 | who wanna study various traits,

01:42:58.020 | heart disease or loss and gain of flight and so forth,

01:43:03.020 | suddenly we all need lots of genomes to do this.

01:43:06.900 | And so now that got me into a project

01:43:09.700 | to lead something called the Vertebrate Genomes Project

01:43:12.700 | to eventually sequence all 70,000 species on the planet.

01:43:16.740 | And Earth Biogenome Project, all eukaryotic species,

01:43:20.780 | all 2 million of them.

01:43:22.020 | And to no longer be in a situation

01:43:26.820 | where I wish I had this genome,

01:43:28.980 | now we have the genetic code of all life on the planet,

01:43:32.300 | create a database of all their traits

01:43:34.740 | and find the genetic association with everything out there

01:43:38.980 | that makes a difference from one species to another.

01:43:41.580 | One more piece of the equation to add to this story

01:43:47.380 | is what I didn't realize as a neuroscientist

01:43:50.900 | were that these genomes are not only incomplete,

01:43:55.180 | but they have lots of errors in them.

01:43:58.260 | False gene duplications where mother and father chromosomes

01:44:01.820 | were so different from each other

01:44:03.940 | that the genome algorithm, assembly algorithms

01:44:06.740 | treated them as two different genes

01:44:08.340 | in this part of the chromosome.

01:44:10.540 | So there are a lot of these false duplicated genes

01:44:12.920 | that people were thought were real but were not.

01:44:16.180 | Or missing parts of the genome

01:44:18.480 | because the enzymes used to sequence the DNA

01:44:21.740 | couldn't get through this regulatory region

01:44:23.860 | that folded up on itself and made it hard to sequence.

01:44:28.500 | And so I ended up in these consortiums

01:44:31.780 | pulling in the genome sequencing companies

01:44:35.700 | developing the technology to work with us

01:44:38.820 | to improve it further.

01:44:40.140 | And the computer science guys who then take that data

01:44:43.580 | and that technology and try to make the complete genomes

01:44:46.380 | and make the algorithms better to produce

01:44:49.700 | what we now just did recently,

01:44:51.980 | led by Anafr, Bayad, and Filippi,

01:44:53.820 | is the first human telomere to telomere genome

01:44:56.560 | with no errors, all complete, no missing sequence.

01:45:00.780 | And now we're trying to do the same thing

01:45:02.420 | with vertebrates and other species.

01:45:04.820 | Actually, we improved that before we got to the,

01:45:07.700 | what we call telomere to telomere,

01:45:09.080 | from one end of the chromosome to another.

01:45:11.620 | And what we're discovering is in this dark matter

01:45:15.180 | of the genome that was missing before

01:45:17.700 | turns out to be some regulatory regions

01:45:20.580 | that are specialized in vocal learning species

01:45:23.340 | and we think are involved in developing speech circuits.

01:45:26.660 | - Incredible.

01:45:27.700 | Well, so much to learn

01:45:29.700 | and that we're going to learn from this information.

01:45:32.100 | Early on in these genome projects and connectome projects,

01:45:35.260 | I confess I was a little bit cynical.

01:45:37.020 | This would be about 10, 15 years ago.

01:45:38.580 | I thought, okay, necessary, but not sufficient for anything.

01:45:42.620 | We need it, but it's not clear what's going to happen.

01:45:44.580 | But you just gave a very clear example

01:45:46.220 | of what we stand to learn from this kind of information.

01:45:49.620 | And I know from the conservation side,

01:45:52.580 | there's a huge interest in this

01:45:53.800 | because even though we would prefer

01:45:55.420 | to keep all these species alive rather than clone them,

01:45:58.800 | these sorts of projects do offer the possibility

01:46:01.320 | of potentially recreating species that were lost

01:46:04.500 | due to our own ignorance or missteps or what have you.

01:46:09.420 | - Yes, and along those lines,

01:46:12.160 | because we got involved in genomics,

01:46:16.120 | some of the first species that we start working on

01:46:19.340 | are critically endangered species.

01:46:21.500 | And I'm doing that not only for perspectives

01:46:26.500 | to understand their brains

01:46:27.500 | and the genes involved in their brain function,

01:46:29.380 | but I feel like it's a moral duty.

01:46:31.800 | So the fact that now I've become more involved

01:46:34.560 | in genome biology and have helped develop these tools

01:46:37.640 | for more complete genomes,

01:46:39.000 | let's capture their genetic code now before they're gone.

01:46:43.820 | And could we use that information to resurrect the species

01:46:47.940 | at some future time, if not in my lifetime,

01:46:50.960 | in some time in the future and generations ahead of us.

01:46:54.820 | And so in anticipation of that,

01:46:59.540 | we create a database we call the Genome Arc,

01:47:02.080 | and no pun intended, like NOAA's arc,

01:47:05.940 | meant to store the genetic code

01:47:08.320 | as complete genome assemblies as possible

01:47:10.840 | for all species on the planet to be used for basic science,

01:47:14.660 | but also some point in the future.

01:47:17.300 | And because of that,

01:47:19.420 | funding agencies or private foundations

01:47:21.720 | that are interested in conservation

01:47:23.500 | have been reaching out to me now, a neuroscientist,

01:47:26.660 | to help them out in producing high quality genome data

01:47:30.420 | of endangered species that they can use

01:47:32.460 | like Revive and Restore,

01:47:34.200 | who want to resurrect the passenger pigeon,

01:47:36.560 | or Colossal, who wants to resurrect the wooly mammoth.

01:47:39.780 | And so we're producing high quality genomes for these groups

01:47:43.060 | for their conservation projects.

01:47:44.740 | - What a terrific and important initiative.

01:47:47.260 | And I think for those listening today,

01:47:49.100 | they now certainly understand the value

01:47:52.060 | of deeply understanding the brain structures

01:47:56.500 | and genomes of different species,

01:47:58.420 | because I confess,

01:48:00.300 | even though I knew a bit of the songbird literature,

01:48:02.820 | and I certainly understand

01:48:03.860 | that humans have speech and language,

01:48:05.460 | I had no idea that there was so much convergence

01:48:08.060 | of function, structure, and genomes.

01:48:10.260 | And to me, I feel a lot more like an ape

01:48:14.100 | than I do a songbird.

01:48:15.740 | And yet here we are with the understanding

01:48:18.540 | that there's a lot more similarity between songbirds

01:48:21.780 | and humans than I certainly ever thought before.

01:48:24.340 | - Yeah, something very close to home for us humans,

01:48:27.380 | I can give you an example of, is evolution of skin color.

01:48:31.160 | In skin color, we use it, unfortunately,

01:48:35.140 | for racism and so forth.

01:48:37.180 | We use it also for good things,

01:48:38.620 | to let in more light or let out less light.

01:48:41.340 | Depending on the part of the planet,

01:48:43.680 | our population evolved in.

01:48:45.340 | And most people think dark-skinned people

01:48:47.620 | all evolved from the same dark-skinned person,

01:48:50.000 | and light-skinned people all evolved

01:48:51.680 | from the same light-skinned person,

01:48:52.760 | but that's not the case.

01:48:54.420 | Dark skin and light skin amongst humans

01:48:57.420 | has evolved independently multiple times,

01:49:00.640 | like in the Pacific Islands versus Africa.

01:49:03.640 | And it's just depending on the angle of light

01:49:07.060 | hitting the Earth,

01:49:08.460 | as to whether you need more protection from the sun

01:49:10.660 | or less protection that's also associated

01:49:13.800 | with vitamin D synthesis in the skin.

01:49:16.520 | And each time where a darker or lighter skin

01:49:23.640 | evolved independently, it hit the same gene.

01:49:27.520 | The melatonin receptors, that's right, yes, yeah.

01:49:33.760 | Genes that are involved in melanin formation.

01:49:37.140 | And so those genes evolved some of the same mutations,

01:49:41.100 | even in different species.

01:49:42.680 | It's not just humans.

01:49:44.380 | In equatorial regions, there are darker-skinned animals

01:49:48.260 | than going away from the equator.

01:49:50.580 | - All right, I think of arctic foxes and things like that.

01:49:52.300 | - That's right, that's right.

01:49:53.200 | Polar bears, you know?

01:49:54.700 | And so some of the same genes are used

01:49:59.700 | in an evolutionary perspective to evolve

01:50:02.460 | in a similar way within and across species.

01:50:05.140 | - Incredible.

01:50:06.200 | And that's the same thing happening in the brain too.

01:50:08.360 | Language is no exception.

01:50:10.040 | - Well, I have to say,

01:50:10.880 | as somebody who is a career neuroscientist,

01:50:14.200 | but as I mentioned several times now,

01:50:15.880 | who also adores the animal kingdom,

01:50:18.280 | but is also obsessed with speech and language

01:50:22.200 | and at a distance, not as a practitioner of music and dance,

01:50:27.200 | this has been an incredible conversation

01:50:31.320 | and opportunity for me to learn.

01:50:33.440 | I know I speak for a tremendous number of people

01:50:35.560 | and I just really want to say thank you

01:50:37.320 | for joining us today.

01:50:38.800 | You are incredibly busy.

01:50:40.000 | It's clear from your description of your science

01:50:42.500 | and your knowledge base that you are involved

01:50:44.220 | in a huge number of things, very busy.

01:50:47.320 | So thank you for taking the time to speak to all of us.

01:50:50.280 | Thank you for the work that you're doing,

01:50:52.080 | both on speech and language,

01:50:53.640 | but also this important work on genomes

01:50:55.760 | and conservation of endangered species and far more.

01:51:00.720 | And I have to say, if you would agree to come back

01:51:03.360 | and speak to us again sometime,

01:51:05.000 | I'm certain that if we were to sit down

01:51:06.480 | even six months or a year from now,

01:51:08.160 | there's going to be a lot more to come.

01:51:09.400 | - Yeah, we have some things cooking

01:51:10.680 | and thank you for inviting me here to get the word out

01:51:14.440 | to the community of what's going on in the science world.

01:51:18.440 | - Well, we're honored and very grateful to you, Eric.

01:51:20.680 | Thank you. - You're welcome.

01:51:22.400 | - Thank you for joining me today

01:51:23.500 | for my discussion with Dr. Eric Jarvis.

01:51:25.700 | If you'd like to learn more about his laboratory's work,

01:51:28.360 | you can go to Jarvis Lab,

01:51:30.160 | spelled J-A-R-V-I-S, lab, all one word, JarvisLab.net.

01:51:35.020 | And there you can learn about all the various studies

01:51:37.140 | taking place in his laboratory,

01:51:38.940 | as well as some of the larger overarching themes

01:51:41.080 | that are driving those studies,

01:51:42.720 | including studies on human genomics and animal genomics

01:51:45.980 | that surely are going to lead to the next stage discoveries

01:51:49.600 | of how we learn and think about and indeed use language.

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01:54:15.220 | [upbeat music]

01:54:17.800 | [MUSIC PLAYING]

Dr. Erich Jarvis: The Neuroscience of Speech, Language & Music | Huberman Lab Podcast #87

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