Dr. Michael Kilgard

And the other, the sound, was a distraction.

So his brain learned touch, not sound.

One of the other monkeys was randomized to be in the other group.

That monkey was also getting his finger vibrated, but that vibration was a distraction.

And now the sounds mattered.

When the sound made a tiny change, he had to pull his hand away, not because of the vibration, but because of the sound.

And that monkey had no change in the way his brain processed the sense of touch on his finger, but quadrupled the number of neurons in his brain that responded to that particular pitch because that particular pitch had information.

At the time, I was a biochemistry major, and I thought, wait, I know the cellular basis of life.

There's all these cells.

This is kind of a big idea from the last century.

Life is made of cells.

Why?

Who knows?

But that's a core idea, and it's true.

DNA is one of the other core ideas, how proteins work.

But how does a cell, one 100 billionth of me, how does it know, which I'm paying attention to?

It can't know everything.

With chat GPT, it does know everything.

We send a signal to every cell.

We have a broadcast system.