Dr. Poppy Crum

Thanks, Andy.

It's great to be here.

I do think we're much more plastic than we talk about or we realize in our daily lives.

And just to your point about creating robots, the more we create robots, there's neuroplasticity that comes with using robots as humans when we use them in partnerships or as tools to accelerate our capabilities.

Right.

So neuroplasticity, where I resonate with it a lot, is trying to understand, and this is what I've done a lot of in my career, is thinking about building and developing technologies, but with an understanding of how they shape our brain.

Everything we engage with in our daily lives, whether it's the statistics of our environments and our contexts,

or the technologies we use on a daily basis are shaping our brains in ways through neuroplasticity.

Some more than others, some we know as we age are very dependent on how attentive and engaged we are as opposed to passively just consuming and changing.

But we are in a place where everyone, I believe, needs to be thinking more about how the technologies they're using, especially in the age of AI and immersive technologies,

how they are shaping or architecting our brains as we move forward.

You go to any Neuroscience 101 medical school textbook, and you'll see a few pages on something called the homunculus.

Now, what is the homunculus?

It's a data representation, but it'll be this sort of funny-looking creature when you see it.

But that...

picture of this sort of distorted human that you're looking at is really just a data representation of how many cells in your brain are helping, are coding and representing information for your sense of touch, right?

And that image though, and this is where things get kind of funny, that image comes from Wilder Penfield back in the 40s.

He recorded the somatosensory

cells of patients just before they were to have surgery for epilepsy and such.

And since we don't have pain receptors in our cortex, you could have this awake human and be able to touch different parts of their brain and ask them to report what sensation they felt on their bodies.