Ask most people what a brain chip does and they will tell you it reads your mind. Dr. Michael Lawton implants these devices, and he says that is not what comes off them. He is President and CEO of Barrow Neurological Institute in Phoenix, the hospital where Neuralink's first human implant was performed, and he has completed more than 10,000 brain operations and clipped around 5,500 aneurysms. Louisa sat down with him inside Barrow to find out what the electrodes actually pick up, how far the technology has come, and where it...
Ask most people what a brain chip does and they will tell you it reads your mind. Dr. Michael Lawton implants these devices, and he says that is not what comes off them. He is President and CEO of Barrow Neurological Institute in Phoenix, the hospital where Neuralink's first human implant was performed, and he has completed more than 10,000 brain operations and clipped around 5,500 aneurysms. Louisa sat down with him inside Barrow to find out what the electrodes actually pick up, how far the technology has come, and where it stops.
He walks through the surgery itself. The device goes into the hand knob, one small lobule of the motor cortex, where 64 electrodes have already become 108. The threads carrying them are about a tenth the thickness of a hair, so a robot inserts them while avoiding every arteriole on the surface. You'll hear what Nolan Arbaugh, Neuralink's first patient, can now do with a cursor at world record speed, and why Lawton can't keep up with him in a head to head. Then the correction. The data coming off these electrodes is a train of spikes, the same electrical language every neuron in your head is already using, and decoding it tells you whether a person meant to move a cursor left or right. Reading an emotion, or what someone thinks of you, is nowhere close.
The second half turns to the brain Lawton has spent 29 years operating inside. He describes cooling a patient to 15 degrees Celsius and stopping their circulation completely, which shrivels a giant aneurysm like a raisin and opens a short window to repair it. He explains why the hardest cases will still need a pair of human hands, and what he tells trainees who think their craft is disappearing. On brain aging he is direct about what works. He predicts alcohol will be viewed in 20 years the way cigarettes were viewed in the 60s, he takes zero supplements and no peptides, and he says exactly what he can and cannot see when he looks at a living brain on the table.
You'll also hear about Barrow's Mindgenuity Labs and its six mysteries of the mind, why he ranks movement as the first one to fall and consciousness as the one that may never be solved, what he believes consciousness physically is inside 86 billion neurons, and the ground underneath all of it. His sister died of a brain tumor. Louisa's father had a stroke in 2019. Both of them have watched this from the other side of the table.
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*TOPICS DISCUSSED*
00:00 Intro: The Brain Surgeon at Neuralink's First Hospital
00:39 The Guy Who Does the Cases Nobody Else Wants
02:17 A Day in the Life: 5:30am Starts and Three Surgeries
03:20 "Game Tape": Reviewing Every Operation Like an Athlete
04:24 The Surgeon Athlete and Why Surgery Is a Physical Skill
05:32 Fifty Years From Now: What Happens to Neurosurgery
06:11 The ROSA Robot and Mapping a Seizure Focus
08:16 Deep Brain Stimulation and Hitting an Exact Target
08:52 Will We All Be Operated On by Robots?
10:02 The Brain AVM: The One Case a Robot Can't Take
11:18 Why Bleeding Breaks a Robot: The Waymo Problem
13:15 What a Brain-Computer Interface Actually Does
14:49 The Hand Knob: 108 Electrodes in One Small Spot
15:50 Cursor Control at World Record Speed
16:31 Inside the Implant: Threads a Tenth the Width of a Hair
17:27 "No, the Chip Cannot Read Your Thoughts"
17:58 What the Device Really Reads: A Train of Spikes
19:18 From Movement to Sensation: What Comes Next
19:48 Why Restoring Sight Is So Much Harder
20:58 The 1943 Paper That Predicted All of This
22:37 Elon, Telepathy, and What's Actually Possible
23:00 Boosting Creativity and Intelligence in 50 Years
25:10 "When I Retire, We'll Be Treating Depression and Addiction"
26:04 Alzheimer's: Light Therapy and the Blood-Brain Barrier
27:11 Treating the Disease vs Preventing It
28:25 10,000 Operations: How He Feels About Robots Taking Over
29:54 Neuroplasticity: How Nolan's Brain Learned the Device
31:34 What Actually Changes at the Neuron Level
32:04 Patient Two and the Robotic Arm
32:42 5,500 Aneurysms: The Cases That Stay With Him
33:16 Cardiac Standstill: Cooling a Brain to 15 Degrees
35:46 What Separates a Great Surgeon From an Average One
36:17 Traits of Greatness: The Formula Nobody Has Cracked
37:21 The Phone Call in the Middle of a 16-Hour Surgery
39:35 "I Must Have Been Born for This"
41:26 Can You Tell How Old a Brain Is Just by Looking?
43:12 Why Alzheimer's Is Invisible in a Living Brain
44:14 What a Neurosurgeon Does to Protect His Own Brain
44:40 "Alcohol Will Be Viewed Like Cigarettes in the 60s"
45:13 Peptides, Injectables, and Zero Supplements
46:52 The Last Generation to Operate With Open Hands
48:10 How Louisa Found Him on Twitter in 2021
48:53 The Six Mysteries of the Mind
49:14 Which One Gets Solved First, and Which May Never
50:03 Is Consciousness in the Tissue?
51:39 Memory: The Circuitry We Still Can't Explain
53:18 Why Consciousness Is Harder Than Memory
55:12 Louisa's Father's Stroke
56:02 Advice for Anyone Watching a Parent Decline
56:21 His Sister's Brain Tumor and How He Carries It
57:38 A World Where Stroke Is an Outpatient Repair
58:40 Forty Years On, Finally at the Dawn
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I'm Louisa Nicola - clinical neurophysiologist - Alzheimer's prevention specialist - founder of Neuro Athletics.
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