Dr. Terry Sejnowski
Appearances
Huberman Lab
How to Improve at Learning Using Neuroscience & AI | Dr. Terry Sejnowski
what you identified is a very important feature, which is that rewards, by the way, every time you do something, you're updating this value function, every time. And it accumulates. And the answer to your first question, the answer is that it's always going to be there. It doesn't matter. It's a very permanent part of your experience and who you are.
Huberman Lab
How to Improve at Learning Using Neuroscience & AI | Dr. Terry Sejnowski
And interestingly, and the behaviorists knew this back in the 1950s, that you can get there two ways of trial and error. Small rewards are good because you're constantly coming closer and closer to getting what you're seeking, better tennis player or being able to make a friend, but the negative Punishment is much more effective, one trial learning.
Huberman Lab
How to Improve at Learning Using Neuroscience & AI | Dr. Terry Sejnowski
You don't need to have 100 trials, which you need when you're training a rat to do some tasks with small food rewards. But if you just shock the rat, boy, that rat doesn't forget that.
Huberman Lab
How to Improve at Learning Using Neuroscience & AI | Dr. Terry Sejnowski
And this is also PTSD, post-traumatic stress disorder, is another good example of that. That can screw you up for the rest of your life. But the other thing, and you pointed out something really important, which is that a large part of the prefrontal cortex is devoted to social interactions.
Huberman Lab
How to Improve at Learning Using Neuroscience & AI | Dr. Terry Sejnowski
And this is how humans, you know, when you come into the world, you don't know what language you're going to be speaking. You don't know what the cultural values are that you're going to have to be able to become a member of this community. society and things that are expected of you, all of that has to become through experience, through building this value function.
Huberman Lab
How to Improve at Learning Using Neuroscience & AI | Dr. Terry Sejnowski
This is something we discovered in the 20th century and now it's going into AI. It's called reinforcement learning in AI. It's a form of procedural learning as opposed to the cognitive level where you think and you do things. Cognitive thinking is much less efficient. because you have to go step by step. With procedural learning, it's automatic.
Huberman Lab
How to Improve at Learning Using Neuroscience & AI | Dr. Terry Sejnowski
Well, no, you know a lot of examples, but since we've been talking about tennis, can you imagine learning how to play tennis through a book, reading a book?
Huberman Lab
How to Improve at Learning Using Neuroscience & AI | Dr. Terry Sejnowski
It's really essential for things that have to be executed quickly and expertly to get that really down pat so you don't have to think. And This happens in school, right? In other words, you have classroom lessons where you're given explicit instruction, but then you go do homework. That's procedural learning. You do problems, you solve problems.
Huberman Lab
How to Improve at Learning Using Neuroscience & AI | Dr. Terry Sejnowski
And I'm a PhD physicist, so I went through all of the classes in theoretical physics. And it was really the problems that really were the core of becoming a good physicist. You can memorize the equations, but that doesn't mean you understand how to use the equations.
Huberman Lab
How to Improve at Learning Using Neuroscience & AI | Dr. Terry Sejnowski
So this is a battle that's going on right now in schools. What you've just said is absolutely right. You need both. We have two major learning systems. We have a cognitive learning system, which is cortical. We have a procedural learning system, which is subcortical, basal ganglia. And the two go hand in hand. If you want to become good at anything, the two are going to help each other.
Huberman Lab
How to Improve at Learning Using Neuroscience & AI | Dr. Terry Sejnowski
And what's going on right now in schools, in California at least, is that they're trying to get rid of the procedural.
Huberman Lab
How to Improve at Learning Using Neuroscience & AI | Dr. Terry Sejnowski
They don't want students to practice because it's going to be, you know, you're stressing them. You don't want them to feel that, you know, that they're having difficulty. But it can do everything.
Huberman Lab
How to Improve at Learning Using Neuroscience & AI | Dr. Terry Sejnowski
It's crazy. It's crazy. And I'll tell you, Barbara Oakley and I have a MOOC, Massive Open Online Course, on learning how to learn. And it helps students. We aimed it at students, but it actually has been taken by 4 million people in 200 countries, ages 10 to 90. What is this called? Learning How to Learn.
Huberman Lab
How to Improve at Learning Using Neuroscience & AI | Dr. Terry Sejnowski
No, it's free, completely free. Amazing. And, you know, I get incredible feedback, you know, fan letters almost every day.
Huberman Lab
How to Improve at Learning Using Neuroscience & AI | Dr. Terry Sejnowski
You know, you've put your finger on it, which is that, and this is what we teach the students, is that you have to, the way the brain works, right, is not, it doesn't memorize things like a computer, right? But it has to be active learning. You have to actively engage.
Huberman Lab
How to Improve at Learning Using Neuroscience & AI | Dr. Terry Sejnowski
In fact, when you're trying to solve a problem on your own, this is where you're really learning by trial and error, and that's the procedural system. But if someone tells you what the right answer is,
Huberman Lab
How to Improve at Learning Using Neuroscience & AI | Dr. Terry Sejnowski
That's just something that is a fact that gets stored away somewhere, but it's not going to automatically come up if you actually are faced with something that's not exactly the same problem but is similar. And by the way, this is the key to AI, completely essential for the recent success of these large language models that the public now is beginning to use, is that they're not parrots.
Huberman Lab
How to Improve at Learning Using Neuroscience & AI | Dr. Terry Sejnowski
the data that they've taken in, they have to generalize. That means to be able to do well on new things that come in that are similar to the old things that you've seen, but allow you to solve new problems. That's the key to the brain. The brain is really, really good at generalizing. In fact, in many cases, you only need one example to generalize.
Huberman Lab
How to Improve at Learning Using Neuroscience & AI | Dr. Terry Sejnowski
So you're right at the cusp here of where we are in neuroscience right now. We don't know the answer to that question. In the past, it had been thought that, you know, the cortex had... countries that each part of the cortex was dedicated to one function, right? And interestingly, you record for the neurons, and it certainly looks that way, right?
Huberman Lab
How to Improve at Learning Using Neuroscience & AI | Dr. Terry Sejnowski
In other words, there's a visual cortex in the back, and there's a whole series of areas, and then there's an auditory cortex here in the middle, and then the prefrontal cortex for social interaction. And so it looked really clear-cut that it's modular. And now what we're facing is we have a new way to record from neurons.
Huberman Lab
How to Improve at Learning Using Neuroscience & AI | Dr. Terry Sejnowski
Optically, we can record from tens of thousands, from dozens of areas simultaneously. And what we're discovering is that if you want to do any task, you're engaging not just the area that you might think has the input coming against the visual system, but the visual system is getting input from the motor system. In fact, there's more input coming from the motor system than from the eye. Really?
Huberman Lab
How to Improve at Learning Using Neuroscience & AI | Dr. Terry Sejnowski
Yes. Anne Churchland at UCLA has shown that in the mouse. So now we're looking at global interactions between all these areas. And that's where real complex cognitive behaviors emerge. It's from those interactions. And now we have the tools for the first time to actually be able to see them in real time. And we're doing that now forever. first on mice and monkeys, but we now can do this in humans.
Huberman Lab
How to Improve at Learning Using Neuroscience & AI | Dr. Terry Sejnowski
So I've been collaborating with a group at Mass General Hospital to record from people with epilepsy, and they have to have an operation for people who are drug resistant, to be able to find out where it starts in the cortex, where it is initiated, where the seizure starts.
Huberman Lab
How to Improve at Learning Using Neuroscience & AI | Dr. Terry Sejnowski
And then to go in, you have to go in and record simultaneously from a lot of parts of the cortex for weeks until you find out where it is. And then you go in and you try to take it out. And often that helps. very, very invasive, but for two weeks we have access to all those neurons in that cortex that are being recorded from constantly.
Huberman Lab
How to Improve at Learning Using Neuroscience & AI | Dr. Terry Sejnowski
And so I've used, I started out because I was interested in sleep and I wanted to understand what happens in the cortex of a human during sleep. But then we realized that, you know, you can also figure, you know, people who have these debilitating problems with seizures, You know, they're there for two weeks and they have nothing to do.
Huberman Lab
How to Improve at Learning Using Neuroscience & AI | Dr. Terry Sejnowski
So they just love the fact that scientists are interested in helping them and, you know, teaching them things and finding out where in the cortex things are happening when they learn something. This is a goldmine. It's unbelievable. And I've learned things from humans that I could have never gotten from any other species. Amazing. Obviously, language is one of them.
Huberman Lab
How to Improve at Learning Using Neuroscience & AI | Dr. Terry Sejnowski
But there are other things in sleep that we've discovered. having to do with traveling waves. There are circular traveling waves that go on during sleep, which is astonishing. Nobody ever really saw that before.
Huberman Lab
How to Improve at Learning Using Neuroscience & AI | Dr. Terry Sejnowski
This is non-REM sleep. This is a jargon. This is during intermediate,
Huberman Lab
How to Improve at Learning Using Neuroscience & AI | Dr. Terry Sejnowski
Transition states.
Huberman Lab
How to Improve at Learning Using Neuroscience & AI | Dr. Terry Sejnowski
This is light, slow-wave sleep, yeah.
Huberman Lab
How to Improve at Learning Using Neuroscience & AI | Dr. Terry Sejnowski
Oh, okay. So in the case of the... They're called sleep spindles. Mm-hmm. The waves last for about... a second or two, and they travel, like I say, in a circle around the cortex. And it's known that these spindles are important for consolidating experiences you've had during the day into your long-term memory storage. So it's a very important function.
Huberman Lab
How to Improve at Learning Using Neuroscience & AI | Dr. Terry Sejnowski
And if you take out, see, it's the hippocampus that is replaying the experiences. It's a part of the brain. It's very important for long-term memory. If you don't have a hippocampus, you can't learn new things. That is to say, you can't remember what you did yesterday or, for that matter, even an hour earlier.
Huberman Lab
How to Improve at Learning Using Neuroscience & AI | Dr. Terry Sejnowski
But the hippocampus plays back your experiences, causes the sleep spindles now to need that into the cortex. And it's important you do that right because you don't want to overwrite the existing knowledge you have. You just want to basically incorporate the new experience into your existing knowledge base in an efficient way that doesn't interfere with what you already know.
Huberman Lab
How to Improve at Learning Using Neuroscience & AI | Dr. Terry Sejnowski
So that's an example of a very important function that these traveling ways have.
Huberman Lab
How to Improve at Learning Using Neuroscience & AI | Dr. Terry Sejnowski
No, this is a fascinating literature, and it's all pointing in the same direction, which is that we always neglect to appreciate the importance of sleep. I mean, obviously, you're refreshed when you wake up, but there's a lot of things happening. It's not that your brain turns off.
Huberman Lab
How to Improve at Learning Using Neuroscience & AI | Dr. Terry Sejnowski
It's that it goes into a completely different state, and memory consolidation is just one of those things that happens when you're fall asleep. And of course, there's dreams and so forth. We don't fully appreciate or understand exactly how all the different sleep stages work together. But exercises are particularly important part of getting the motor system tuned up.
Huberman Lab
How to Improve at Learning Using Neuroscience & AI | Dr. Terry Sejnowski
And it's thought that the REM, rapid eye movement sleep, may be involved in that. So that's yet another part of the sleep. stages. You go through, you go back and forth between dream sleep and the slow-wave sleep, back and forth, back and forth during the night. And then when you wake up, you're in the REM stage, more and more REM, more and more REM. But, you know, that's all observation.
Huberman Lab
How to Improve at Learning Using Neuroscience & AI | Dr. Terry Sejnowski
But, you know, as a scientist, what you want to do is perturb the system and see if you can – maybe if you had more sleep spindles, maybe you'd be able to remember things better. So it turns out Sarah Mednick, who's at UC Irvine, did this fantastic experiment. So it turns out there's a drug called zolpidem, which – It goes by the name Ambien. You may have some experience with that.
Huberman Lab
How to Improve at Learning Using Neuroscience & AI | Dr. Terry Sejnowski
That's right. A lot of people take it in order to sleep. Okay. Well, it turns out that it causes more sleep spindles. Really? Yeah. It doubles the number of sleep spindles. If you take the drug... You take the drug... after you've done the learning, right? You do the learning at night and then you take the drug and you have twice as many spindles.
Huberman Lab
How to Improve at Learning Using Neuroscience & AI | Dr. Terry Sejnowski
You wake up in the morning, you can remember twice as much.
Huberman Lab
How to Improve at Learning Using Neuroscience & AI | Dr. Terry Sejnowski
Yes, yeah, no, it consolidates it. I mean, that's the point.
Huberman Lab
How to Improve at Learning Using Neuroscience & AI | Dr. Terry Sejnowski
Okay, here's the downside. Okay, so people who take the drug, say if you're going to Europe and you take it and then you sleep really soundly, but often you... You find yourself in the hotel room and you completely have no clue, you have no memory of how you got there.
Huberman Lab
How to Improve at Learning Using Neuroscience & AI | Dr. Terry Sejnowski
It's terrifying. Well, that's another problem that you have with jet lag. Jet lag really screws things up. But this is something where it could be an hour. You know, you took the train or you took a taxi or something. Now, this seems crazy. How could it be a way to improve learning and recall on one hand and then forgetfulness on the other hand?
Huberman Lab
How to Improve at Learning Using Neuroscience & AI | Dr. Terry Sejnowski
Well, it turns out what's important is that when you take the drug, In other words, it helps consolidate experiences you've had in the past, before you took the drug, but it'll wipe out experiences you have in the future after you take the drug, right?
Huberman Lab
How to Improve at Learning Using Neuroscience & AI | Dr. Terry Sejnowski
That's true. I think that this is something that is true, not just of drugs for the brain, but steroids for the body.
Huberman Lab
How to Improve at Learning Using Neuroscience & AI | Dr. Terry Sejnowski
Yeah. And one of the things about the way the body evolved is that it really has to balance a lot of things. And so with drugs, you're basically unbalancing it somehow. And the consequence is, as you point out, is that in order to make one part better, one part of your body, you sacrifice something else somewhere else.
Huberman Lab
How to Improve at Learning Using Neuroscience & AI | Dr. Terry Sejnowski
Well, it's against the law, I think.
Huberman Lab
How to Improve at Learning Using Neuroscience & AI | Dr. Terry Sejnowski
But when I was growing up, you know, as you know, it was against the law.
Huberman Lab
How to Improve at Learning Using Neuroscience & AI | Dr. Terry Sejnowski
No, it's a great question. I mean, you have all these great questions, and we don't have complete answers yet. But specifically with regard to connectivity, if you look at what happens in an infant's brain during the first two years, there's a tremendous amount of new synapses being formed. This is your area, by the way.
Huberman Lab
How to Improve at Learning Using Neuroscience & AI | Dr. Terry Sejnowski
But then you prune them. The second phase is that you have overabundant synapses, and now what you want to do is to prune them. Why would you want to do that? You know, synapses are expensive. It takes a lot of energy to activate all of the neurons and the synapses, especially, because there's the turnover of the neurotransmitter.
Huberman Lab
How to Improve at Learning Using Neuroscience & AI | Dr. Terry Sejnowski
And so what you want to do is to reduce the amount of energy and only use those synapses that have been proven to be the most important, right? Now, unfortunately, as you get older... The pruning slows down, but it doesn't go away. So the cortex thins and so forth. So I think it goes in the opposite direction. I think that as you get older, you're losing connectivity.
Huberman Lab
How to Improve at Learning Using Neuroscience & AI | Dr. Terry Sejnowski
But interestingly, you retain the old memories. The old memories are really rock solid because they were put in when you were young.
Huberman Lab
How to Improve at Learning Using Neuroscience & AI | Dr. Terry Sejnowski
The foundation upon which everything else is built. But it's not totally one way in the sense that Even as an adult, as you know, you can learn new things, maybe not as quickly. By the way, this is one of the things that surprised me. So Barbara and I have looked at the people who really benefited the most. It turns out that the peak of the demographic is 25 to 35. Barbara? Oakley, Oakley.
Huberman Lab
How to Improve at Learning Using Neuroscience & AI | Dr. Terry Sejnowski
Yeah, she's really the mastermind. She's a fabulous educator and background in engineering. But what's going on? So it turns out we aimed our MOOC at kids in high school and college because that's their business. They go every day and they go into work. They have to learn, right? That's their business. But in fact, very few of the students are actually, you know, they weren't taking the course.
Huberman Lab
How to Improve at Learning Using Neuroscience & AI | Dr. Terry Sejnowski
Why should they? They spent all day in the class, right? Why did they want to take another class?
Huberman Lab
How to Improve at Learning Using Neuroscience & AI | Dr. Terry Sejnowski
Learning how to learn.
Huberman Lab
How to Improve at Learning Using Neuroscience & AI | Dr. Terry Sejnowski
So I did with Barbara. And now 25 to 35, we have this huge peak, huge. So what's going on? Here's what's going on. It's very interesting. So you're 25. You've gone to college. Half the people, by the way, who take the course went to college, right? So it's not like filling in for college. This is like topping it off. But you're in the workforce. you have to learn a new skill.
Huberman Lab
How to Improve at Learning Using Neuroscience & AI | Dr. Terry Sejnowski
Maybe you have mortgage, maybe you have children, right? You can't afford to go off and take a course or get another degree. So you take a MOOC and you discover, you know, I'm not quite as agile as I used to be in terms of learning, but it turns out with our course, you can boost your learning And so that even though your brain isn't learning as quickly, you can do it more efficiently.
Huberman Lab
How to Improve at Learning Using Neuroscience & AI | Dr. Terry Sejnowski
Yeah, okay. So it's bite-sized videos lasting about 10 minutes each. And there's about 50 or 60 over a course of one month.
Huberman Lab
How to Improve at Learning Using Neuroscience & AI | Dr. Terry Sejnowski
Yeah, there are tests. There are quizzes. There are tests at the end. And there are forums where you can go and talk to other students. You have questions. We have TAs. And anyone can do this? Anyone in the world. In fact, we have people in India, housewives, who say, thank you, thank you, thank you, because I could have never learned about how to be a better learner.
Huberman Lab
How to Improve at Learning Using Neuroscience & AI | Dr. Terry Sejnowski
And I wish I had known this when I was going to school.
Huberman Lab
How to Improve at Learning Using Neuroscience & AI | Dr. Terry Sejnowski
You'll enjoy it. We have like 98% approval. It's just phenomenal. It's sticky.
Huberman Lab
How to Improve at Learning Using Neuroscience & AI | Dr. Terry Sejnowski
No, no math. We're not teaching anything specific. We're not trying to give you knowledge. We're trying to tell you how to acquire knowledge. And how to do that, how to deal with exam anxiety, for example, or how to, you know, we all procrastinate, right? We put things off.
Huberman Lab
How to Improve at Learning Using Neuroscience & AI | Dr. Terry Sejnowski
How to avoid that. We teach you how to avoid that.
Huberman Lab
How to Improve at Learning Using Neuroscience & AI | Dr. Terry Sejnowski
Well, this is generational. Okay. So Technologies provide us with tools. You mentioned the calculator, right? Well, a calculator didn't eliminate you know, the education you need to get in math, but it made certain things easier. It made it possible for you to do more things and more accurately.
Huberman Lab
How to Improve at Learning Using Neuroscience & AI | Dr. Terry Sejnowski
However, interestingly, students in my class often come up with answers that are off by, you know, eight orders of magnitude, and that's a huge amount, right? It's clear that they didn't key in the calculator properly, but they didn't recognize that it was a fairly... was completely way off the beam because they didn't have a good feeling for the numbers.
Huberman Lab
How to Improve at Learning Using Neuroscience & AI | Dr. Terry Sejnowski
They don't have a good sense of exactly how big it should have been, order of magnitude, basic understanding. So it's kind of a... The benefit is that you can do things faster, better, but then you also lose some of your intuition if you don't have the procedural system in place.
Huberman Lab
How to Improve at Learning Using Neuroscience & AI | Dr. Terry Sejnowski
Okay. So I'm going to come back to that because this is how you, the way you put it at the beginning is, had to do with how your brain is allocating resources. So when you're younger, you can take in things. Your brain is more malleable. For example, how good are you on social media?
Huberman Lab
How to Improve at Learning Using Neuroscience & AI | Dr. Terry Sejnowski
Well, this speaks well for the fact that you've managed to break, you know, to go beyond the generation gap because- I can type with my thumbs, Terry. Okay, there you go. That's a manual skill that you learned.
Huberman Lab
How to Improve at Learning Using Neuroscience & AI | Dr. Terry Sejnowski
I couldn't believe it. I saw people doing that, and now I can do it too. But the thing is that if you learn how to do that early in life, you're much more good at it. You can move your thumbs much more quickly. You can have many more tweets going. What are they called now? They're not called tweets.
Huberman Lab
How to Improve at Learning Using Neuroscience & AI | Dr. Terry Sejnowski
Okay, we'll call them tweets. Okay, that's good. But, you know, I walk across campus and I see everybody, like half the people are tweeting. Or, you know, they're doing something with their cell phone. I mean, it's unbelievable.
Huberman Lab
How to Improve at Learning Using Neuroscience & AI | Dr. Terry Sejnowski
Every day is different.
Huberman Lab
How to Improve at Learning Using Neuroscience & AI | Dr. Terry Sejnowski
And, you know, they're looking down at their phone and they're walking along, even people who are skateboarding. Unbelievable. I mean, it's amazing what the human being can do when they get into something. But what happens is the younger generation picks up whatever technology it is and the brain gets really good at it.
Huberman Lab
How to Improve at Learning Using Neuroscience & AI | Dr. Terry Sejnowski
And you can pick it up later, but you're not quite as agile, not quite as maybe obsessive.
Huberman Lab
How to Improve at Learning Using Neuroscience & AI | Dr. Terry Sejnowski
So, you know, this is fascinating. I'd like to know what's going on in your brain. Why is it... And also, I'd like to know from younger people whether they have the same... I think not. I think my guess is that they don't feel fatigue because they got into this early enough. And this is actually a very, very... I think that it has a lot to do with... the foundation you put into your brain.
Huberman Lab
How to Improve at Learning Using Neuroscience & AI | Dr. Terry Sejnowski
In other words, things that you learn when you're really young, are foundational and they make things easier, some things easier.
Huberman Lab
How to Improve at Learning Using Neuroscience & AI | Dr. Terry Sejnowski
Well, there you go. And it's because you don't have the foundation. You didn't do it when you were younger. And now you have to sort of use the cognitive powers to do a lot of what was being done now in a younger person procedurally.
Huberman Lab
How to Improve at Learning Using Neuroscience & AI | Dr. Terry Sejnowski
I'm going to tell you something which is going to help all of your listeners. My book, Chat GDP and the Future of AI, I went through and I looked at other people's experiences with Chat GDP. I just wanted to know what people were thinking.
Huberman Lab
How to Improve at Learning Using Neuroscience & AI | Dr. Terry Sejnowski
And I came across, it was an article, I think it was the New York Times, of a technical writer who decided she would spend one month using it to help her write things, her articles. And she said that when she started out At the end of the day, she was drained, completely drained. And it was like working on a machine, like a tractor or something.
Huberman Lab
How to Improve at Learning Using Neuroscience & AI | Dr. Terry Sejnowski
You're struggling, struggling, struggling to get it to work. And then she started, said, well, wait a second. What if I treat it like a human being? What if I'm polite instead of being curt? She said, suddenly... I started getting better answers by being polite and, you know, back and forth the way with the human, you know.
Huberman Lab
How to Improve at Learning Using Neuroscience & AI | Dr. Terry Sejnowski
Yeah, please, I'm really having trouble. No, you know, that answer you gave me was fabulous. It's exactly what I was looking for. And, you know, now I need you to go on to the next part and help me with that too. In other words, the way you talk to a human, right? If you're an assistant.
Huberman Lab
How to Improve at Learning Using Neuroscience & AI | Dr. Terry Sejnowski
I think it's both. First of all, the chat GDP is mirroring the way you treat it. It will mirror that back. You treat it like a machine, it will treat you like a machine, okay? Because that's what it's good at. But here's the surprise. The surprise is, she said, once I started treating it like a human, at the end of the day, I wasn't fatigued anymore. Why?
Huberman Lab
How to Improve at Learning Using Neuroscience & AI | Dr. Terry Sejnowski
Well, it turns out that all your life you interact with humans in a certain way, and your brain is wired to do that, and it doesn't take any effort. And so by treating the chat GDP as if it were a human, you're taking advantage of all the brain circuits in your brain
Huberman Lab
How to Improve at Learning Using Neuroscience & AI | Dr. Terry Sejnowski
You know, you ask these great questions and I wish that I had great answers.
Huberman Lab
How to Improve at Learning Using Neuroscience & AI | Dr. Terry Sejnowski
So, you know, it is interesting. I think it's true that we all, as we get older, have less of the vigor. If I could use a somewhat different word from energy. We'll come back to that. But I think there are some who manage to keep an active life. Here's... Something that, again, in our MOOC, we really emphasize.
Huberman Lab
How to Improve at Learning Using Neuroscience & AI | Dr. Terry Sejnowski
Okay, this is, they've been around for about, actually started at Stanford, Andrew Ng and Daphna Kohler. So they have a company called Coursera. And what happens is that you get professors and, in fact, anybody who has knowledge or professional expertise to give lectures that are available to anybody in the world who have access to the Internet.
Huberman Lab
How to Improve at Learning Using Neuroscience & AI | Dr. Terry Sejnowski
And, you know, it could – there's like probably tens of thousands now, any specialty, history. science, music, you name it. There's somebody who's an expert on that and wants to tell you because they're excited about what they're doing. Okay. So what we wanted to do was to help people with learning. And so part of the problem is that it gets more difficult. It takes more effort as you get older.
Huberman Lab
How to Improve at Learning Using Neuroscience & AI | Dr. Terry Sejnowski
Yeah, that's right. So let's actually use the word energy. As you know, in the cell, there is a physical power plant called the mitochondrion, which is supplying us with ATP, which is the coin of the realm for the cell to be able to operate all of its machinery, right? And so one of the things that happens when you get older is that your mitochondrial run down.
Huberman Lab
How to Improve at Learning Using Neuroscience & AI | Dr. Terry Sejnowski
That's right. They're less efficient. And actually, drugs can do that to you, too. They can harm mitochondria.
Huberman Lab
How to Improve at Learning Using Neuroscience & AI | Dr. Terry Sejnowski
No, the drugs you take for illness. I'm not sure about recreational drugs, but I know it's the case that there are a lot of drugs that people take because they have to. But... But the other thing, and this is something, that's the bad news. Here's the good news. The good news is that you can replenish your energy by exercise. Exercise is the best drug you could ever take.
Huberman Lab
How to Improve at Learning Using Neuroscience & AI | Dr. Terry Sejnowski
It's the cheapest drug you could ever take that can help every organ in your body. It helps obviously your heart. It helps your brain. It rejuvenates your brain. It helps your immune system. Every single organ system in the body benefits from a regular exercise. I run on the beach every day.
Huberman Lab
How to Improve at Learning Using Neuroscience & AI | Dr. Terry Sejnowski
at the Salk Institute, I can, I, and I also at the, it's on a Mesa, 340 foot above the, so I go down every day and then I, I climb up the cliff.
Huberman Lab
How to Improve at Learning Using Neuroscience & AI | Dr. Terry Sejnowski
They are, they are. And so this is something, this is something that has kept me active and it's, and I do hiking. I went hiking in the Alps this, in last fall. So this is in September. So this is, I think, something that people really ought to realize is that it's like putting away reserves of energy for when you get older. The more you put away, the better off you are. Here's something else.
Huberman Lab
How to Improve at Learning Using Neuroscience & AI | Dr. Terry Sejnowski
Okay, now this is jumping now to Alzheimer's. So a study that was done in China many, many years ago, when I first came to La Jolla, San Diego, I heard this from the head of the Alzheimer's program. He had done a study in China on onset. And they went and they had three populations. They had peasants who had almost no education.
Huberman Lab
How to Improve at Learning Using Neuroscience & AI | Dr. Terry Sejnowski
Then they had another group that had high school education, and then people who were, you know, advanced education. So it turns out that the onset of Alzheimer's was earlier for the people who had no education. And it was the latest for the people who had the most education. Now, this is interesting, isn't it? And presumably the genes aren't that different, right? I mean, they're all Chinese.
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How to Improve at Learning Using Neuroscience & AI | Dr. Terry Sejnowski
What a great question. And, you know, I have a... Pat Churchland and I wrote a book, Computational Brain, and in it, there's this levels diagram.
Huberman Lab
How to Improve at Learning Using Neuroscience & AI | Dr. Terry Sejnowski
So one possibility, and obviously we don't really know why, but one possibility is that the more you exercise your brain with education, the more reserve you have. Later in life.
Huberman Lab
How to Improve at Learning Using Neuroscience & AI | Dr. Terry Sejnowski
And levels of investigation at different spatial scales from the molecular at the very bottom to synapses and neurons, circuits, neural circuits, how they're connected with each other, and then brain areas in the cortex and then the whole central nervous system span 10 orders of magnitude, you know, 10th to the 10th in spatial scale. So, you know, where is consciousness in all of that?
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How to Improve at Learning Using Neuroscience & AI | Dr. Terry Sejnowski
Very likely, that's one part of it. By the way, the way that you've adjusted the speed is very interesting because it turns out that stress, everybody thinks, oh, stress is bad, but no, it turns out stress that is transient, that is only for a limited amount of time, that you control, is good for you, is good for your brain, is good for your body.
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How to Improve at Learning Using Neuroscience & AI | Dr. Terry Sejnowski
I run intervals on the beach, just the way that you do cognitive intervals when you're reading. In other words, I run like hell for about 10 seconds, and then I go to a jog, and I run like hell for another 10 seconds, and it's pushing your body into that. extra gear that helps the muscles. The muscles need to know that this is what they've got to put out.
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How to Improve at Learning Using Neuroscience & AI | Dr. Terry Sejnowski
And that's where you gain muscle mass, not from just doing the same running pace every day.
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How to Improve at Learning Using Neuroscience & AI | Dr. Terry Sejnowski
They are already learning how to use AI. And again, it's just like new technology comes along, who picks it up first? It's the younger people. And it's astonishing. They're using it a lot more than I am. I use it almost every day, but I know a lot of students who basically, and by the way, it's like any other tool. It's a tool that you need to know how to use it.
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How to Improve at Learning Using Neuroscience & AI | Dr. Terry Sejnowski
Well, I think exactly what you did, which is there's now dozens and dozens of different chatbots out there. And different people will feel comfortable with one or the other. Chat GDP is the first, so that's why it's kind of taken over a lot of the... cognitive space, right? It's become like Kleenex, right? That word. That was why I used it as the first word in my new book, because it's iconic.
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How to Improve at Learning Using Neuroscience & AI | Dr. Terry Sejnowski
So there are two approaches that neuroscientists have taken. I shouldn't say neuroscientists, I should say that scientists have taken. And the one you described, which is, you know, let's look at all the parts, that's the bottom-up approach. You know, take it apart and do a reductionist approach. And you make a lot of progress.
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How to Improve at Learning Using Neuroscience & AI | Dr. Terry Sejnowski
But some of them, I have to say that, for example, there are some that are really much better at math than others.
Huberman Lab
How to Improve at Learning Using Neuroscience & AI | Dr. Terry Sejnowski
Google's Gemini recently did some fine-tuning with what's called chain of reasoning. When you reason, you go through a sequence of steps. And when you solve a math problem, you go through a sequence of steps of first finding out what's missing and then adding that. And it went from 20% correct to 80%. right, on those problems.
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How to Improve at Learning Using Neuroscience & AI | Dr. Terry Sejnowski
So I think we are... being perhaps a little bit unfair to compare these large language models to the best humans rather than the average human, right? As you said, most people couldn't pass the LSAT, the test to get into law school, or MCAT, the test to get into medical school, and JetGPT has.
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How to Improve at Learning Using Neuroscience & AI | Dr. Terry Sejnowski
Okay. So I've lived through this myself. Back in the 1980s, I was just starting my career, and I was one of the pioneers in developing learning algorithms for neural network models. Jeff Hinton and I collaborated together on something called the Bosa Machine, and he actually won a Nobel Prize for this recently.
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How to Improve at Learning Using Neuroscience & AI | Dr. Terry Sejnowski
You can figure out, you know, how things are connected and understand how development works, how neurons connect. But it's very difficult to really make progress because quickly you get lost in the forest. Now, the other approach, which has been successful, but at the end unsatisfying, is the top-down approach.
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How to Improve at Learning Using Neuroscience & AI | Dr. Terry Sejnowski
Yeah, he's one of my best friends. Brilliant. And he well deserved it for not just the Bosa Machine, but all the work he's done since then on machine learning and then back propagation and so forth. But back then, We, Jeff and I, had this view of the future. AI was dominated by symbol processing, rules, logic, right? Writing computer programs.
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How to Improve at Learning Using Neuroscience & AI | Dr. Terry Sejnowski
For every problem, you need a different computer program. And it was very human resource intensive to write programs so that it was very, very slow going. And they never actually got there. They never wrote a program for vision, for example, even though the computer vision community really worked hard for a long time. But we had this view of the future.
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How to Improve at Learning Using Neuroscience & AI | Dr. Terry Sejnowski
We had this view that nature has solved these problems. There's existence proof that you can solve the vision problem. Look, every animal can see, even insects, right? Come on. Let's figure out how they did it. Maybe we can help by following up on nature. Again, going back to algorithms, I was telling you.
Huberman Lab
How to Improve at Learning Using Neuroscience & AI | Dr. Terry Sejnowski
And so in the case of the brain, what makes it different from a digital computer, digital computers basically can run any program, but a fly brain, for example, only runs the program that its special purpose hardware allows it to run.
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How to Improve at Learning Using Neuroscience & AI | Dr. Terry Sejnowski
There's enough there, just enough habituation and so forth, so that you can...
Huberman Lab
How to Improve at Learning Using Neuroscience & AI | Dr. Terry Sejnowski
Okay, I can see I've pressed your button here.
Huberman Lab
How to Improve at Learning Using Neuroscience & AI | Dr. Terry Sejnowski
Of course, of course. But you have to, you know, one step at a time. Nature first has to be able to create creatures that can survive. And then, you know, their brains get bigger as the environment gets more complex. And, you know, here we are. But the key is that... It turns out that certain algorithms in the fly brain are present in our brain, like conditioning, classical conditioning.
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How to Improve at Learning Using Neuroscience & AI | Dr. Terry Sejnowski
You can classical condition a fly in terms of training it to, when you give it a reward, it will produce the same action, right? This is like conditioned behavior. And that algorithm that I told you about, that is in your value function, right? Temporal difference learning. That algorithm is in the fly brain. It's in your brain. So we can learn about learning from many species.
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How to Improve at Learning Using Neuroscience & AI | Dr. Terry Sejnowski
And this is the approach that psychologists have taken looking at behavior and trying to understand the laws of behavior. This is the behaviorists. But even people in AI were trying to do a top-down to write programs that could replicate human behavior, intelligent behavior.
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How to Improve at Learning Using Neuroscience & AI | Dr. Terry Sejnowski
Right, that's where we are right now. But now, just go into the future now. I'm telling the story about what we already were. We were predicting the future. We were saying, this is an alternative to traditional AI. We were not taken seriously. Everybody was, experts said, no, no, write programs, write programs. They were getting all the resources, the grants, the jobs.
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How to Improve at Learning Using Neuroscience & AI | Dr. Terry Sejnowski
And we were just like the little furry mammals under the feet of these dinosaurs, right? In retrospect. I love the analogy. But the dinosaurs died off. But the point I'm making is that it's possible for our brain to make these extrapolations into the future. Why not AI versions of brains? Why not? I think your idea is a great one.
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How to Improve at Learning Using Neuroscience & AI | Dr. Terry Sejnowski
And I have to say that both of those approaches, bottom up or top down, have really not gotten to the core of answering any of those questions, the big questions. But there's a whole new approach now that is emerging in both neuroscience and AI at exactly the same time. At this moment in history, it's really quite remarkable.
Huberman Lab
How to Improve at Learning Using Neuroscience & AI | Dr. Terry Sejnowski
Specifically for schizophrenia, I'm pretty sure that if we had these large language models 20 years ago, we would have known back then that ketamine would have been a really good drug to try to help these people.
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How to Improve at Learning Using Neuroscience & AI | Dr. Terry Sejnowski
One of the things now that we know, see, the problem is that if you look at the endpoint, that doesn't tell you what started the problem. It started early in development. Schizophrenia It's something that appears when, you know, late adolescence, early adulthood, but it actually is already a problem, a genetic problem from the get-go.
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How to Improve at Learning Using Neuroscience & AI | Dr. Terry Sejnowski
So here's the experiment. Okay, this is very, very, it's been replicated many, many times in mice, I should say. Oh, no, actually, okay, let me start with a human. Okay, so ketamine is, for a long time, and it still is a party drug, special K. I've never taken it, but this is what I hear.
Huberman Lab
How to Improve at Learning Using Neuroscience & AI | Dr. Terry Sejnowski
But I'll tell you what happens, because I've talked to these people who have done this, You take ketamine, sub-anesthetic. By the way, it's an anesthetic. It's given to children. It's a pretty good anesthetic. And it's also used in veterinary medicine. But in any case, you give it to, you take young adults. Here's what they experience. They experience out-of-body experience.
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How to Improve at Learning Using Neuroscience & AI | Dr. Terry Sejnowski
They have this wonderful feeling of energy. And they're very, it's a high, but it's a very unusual high. Now, you know, if they just go and have one experience, but if they have two, like they party two days in a row, a lot of them come into the immersion zero. And here's what the symptoms are. Full-blown psychosis. Full-blown. We're talking about, you know, indistinguishable psychosis.
Huberman Lab
How to Improve at Learning Using Neuroscience & AI | Dr. Terry Sejnowski
from a schizophrenic break.
Huberman Lab
How to Improve at Learning Using Neuroscience & AI | Dr. Terry Sejnowski
Yeah, auditory hallucinations, paranoia, very, very advanced. You'd say that, my God, this person here has become a schizophrenic. And this is really, like you say, the symptoms are the same. However, if you isolate them for a couple of days, they'll come back. Right?
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How to Improve at Learning Using Neuroscience & AI | Dr. Terry Sejnowski
So it means that schizophrenia can induce, I'm sorry, ketamine can induce a form of schizophrenia, psychosis, temporarily, not permanently fortunately. Okay, so what does it attack? Okay, and there's another literature on this. It turns out that it binds to a form of receptor, a glutamate receptor called NMDA receptors, which are very important by way for learning and memory.
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How to Improve at Learning Using Neuroscience & AI | Dr. Terry Sejnowski
So there's an intermediate level between the implementation level at the bottom, how you implement some particular mechanism. And the actual behavior of the whole system is called the algorithmic system. level. It's in between. So algorithms are like recipes. They're like when you bake a cake, you have to have ingredients and you have to say the order in which they're put together and how long.
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How to Improve at Learning Using Neuroscience & AI | Dr. Terry Sejnowski
But we know the target, and we also know what the acute outcome is that it... reduces the strength of the inhibitory circuit, the interneurons that use inhibitory transmitters. The enzyme that creates the inhibitory transmitter is downregulated. And what does that do? It means that there's more excitation. And what does that mean when there's more excitation?
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How to Improve at Learning Using Neuroscience & AI | Dr. Terry Sejnowski
It means that there's more activity in the cortex, and there's actually much more vigor, and you start becoming crazy, right, if it's too much activity. So this is interesting. So this is telling us, I think, that we should be thinking about – and now there's a whole field now in psychiatry that has to do with the glutamate hypothesis for the first – where the actual – imbalance first occurs.
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How to Improve at Learning Using Neuroscience & AI | Dr. Terry Sejnowski
It's an imbalance between the excitatory-inhibitory systems that are in the cortex that keep you in balance.
Huberman Lab
How to Improve at Learning Using Neuroscience & AI | Dr. Terry Sejnowski
That's one class. That's right. Okay, so now... Here is a hypothesis for why ketamine might be good for depression. People are taking it now who are depressed, right? So here you have a drug that causes overexcitation, and here you have a person who is underexcited. Depression is associated with lower excitatory activity in some parts of the cortex.
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How to Improve at Learning Using Neuroscience & AI | Dr. Terry Sejnowski
Well, if you titrate it, you can come back into balance, right? So what you do is you fight depression with schizophrenia, a touch of schizophrenia. Now, you have to keep giving. I think once every three weeks, they have to have a new dose of ketamine. But it's helped an enormous number of people with very, very severe clinical depression.
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How to Improve at Learning Using Neuroscience & AI | Dr. Terry Sejnowski
So as we learn more about the mechanisms underlying some of these disorders, extrapolating and coming up with some solutions at least to prevent it from getting worse. By the way, I'm pretty sure that the large language models could have figured this out long ago.
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How to Improve at Learning Using Neuroscience & AI | Dr. Terry Sejnowski
Like, hey, this stuff is going to turn out to be wrong, or hey, this stuff is... Okay, you know, this is all very, very speculative. And really, we can begin actually to see this happening now. So I have a colleague at the Salk Institute, Rusty Gage. Mm-hmm.
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How to Improve at Learning Using Neuroscience & AI | Dr. Terry Sejnowski
very uh distinguished uh neuroscientist and he was he was one of the he discovered that there are new neurons being born in the hippocampus right which is something in adults which is something that in a textbook says that doesn't happen right so that was around 1998 that's right that's right and i actually have a paper with him where we tested ltp long-term potentiation of
Huberman Lab
How to Improve at Learning Using Neuroscience & AI | Dr. Terry Sejnowski
Actually, the effects of exercise on neurogenesis.
Huberman Lab
How to Improve at Learning Using Neuroscience & AI | Dr. Terry Sejnowski
It increases the cells. It increases neurogenesis and also the cells that become part of the circuit. More cells become integrated.
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How to Improve at Learning Using Neuroscience & AI | Dr. Terry Sejnowski
Yeah. And there was some cancer drug that was given that they showed that there were new cells that they were able to later in postmortem to actually see that they were born in the adult. Okay. So here we are, okay, in 1998. And the question is, can you jump? Can you jump into the future? Okay. So Rusty...
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How to Improve at Learning Using Neuroscience & AI | Dr. Terry Sejnowski
And if you get it wrong, it doesn't work. It's just a mess. Now, it turns out that we're discovering algorithms. We've made a lot of progress. with understanding the algorithms that are used in neural circuits. And this speaks to the computational level of how to understand the function of the neural circuit.
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How to Improve at Learning Using Neuroscience & AI | Dr. Terry Sejnowski
We happened to talk about this issue about he's using these large language models now for his research. I said, oh, wow, how do you use it? And he said, we use it as an idea pump. What do you mean idea pump? Well, we give it all of the experiments that we've done. And we have the literature, it's access to the literature and so forth. And we ask it for ideas for new experiments.
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How to Improve at Learning Using Neuroscience & AI | Dr. Terry Sejnowski
And they might not actually come up with the same answers, right? Right. Actually, this is something that is happening in medicine, by the way, for doctors who are using AI as an assistant. This is really interesting. And this is dermatology. It was a paper in Nature, skin lesions. There's 2,000 skin lesions. Some of them are cancerous and others are benign.
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How to Improve at Learning Using Neuroscience & AI | Dr. Terry Sejnowski
And so in any case, they tested the expert doctors and then they tested an AI and they were both doing about 90%, right? However, if you let the doctor use the AI, it boosts the doctor to 98%.
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How to Improve at Learning Using Neuroscience & AI | Dr. Terry Sejnowski
Yes. And what's going on there? It's very interesting. So it turns out that Although they got the same 90%, they had different expertise that the AI had access to more data. And so it could look at the lesions that were rare that the doctor may never have seen.
Huberman Lab
How to Improve at Learning Using Neuroscience & AI | Dr. Terry Sejnowski
But I'm going to give you one example of an algorithm, which is one we worked on back in the 1990s when Peter Dayan and Reed Montague were postdocs in the lab. And it had to do with a part of the brain below the cortex called the basal ganglia, which is responsible for learning sequences of actions in order to achieve some goal.
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How to Improve at Learning Using Neuroscience & AI | Dr. Terry Sejnowski
But the doctor has more in-depth knowledge of the most common ones that he's seen over and over again and knows the subtleties and so forth. But so putting them together, it makes so much sense that they're going to improve if they work together.
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How to Improve at Learning Using Neuroscience & AI | Dr. Terry Sejnowski
And I think that now what you're saying is that using AI as a tool for discovery with the expert who's interpreting and looking at the arguments, the statistical arguments, and also looking at the paper maybe in a new way, Maybe that's the future of science. Maybe that's what's going to happen. Everybody's worried about, oh, AI is going to replace us.
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How to Improve at Learning Using Neuroscience & AI | Dr. Terry Sejnowski
It's going to be much better than we are, everything. And humans are obsolete. Nothing can be further from the case. Our strengths and weaknesses are different. And by working together, it's going to strengthen both sides. You know, what we do and what AI does, and it's going to be a partnership. It's not going to be adversarial. It's going to be a partnership.
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How to Improve at Learning Using Neuroscience & AI | Dr. Terry Sejnowski
Okay, this has already been done, not for traffic, but for hurricanes. So, as you know, the weather is extremely difficult to predict. And except here in California where it's always gonna be sunny here. But now what they've done is to feed a lot of previous data from previous hurricanes and also simulations of hurricanes. You can simulate them in a supercomputer. It takes days and weeks.
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How to Improve at Learning Using Neuroscience & AI | Dr. Terry Sejnowski
So it's not very useful for actually accurately predicting where it's gonna hit Florida. But what they did was after training up the AI, on all of this data, it was able to predict with much better accuracy exactly where in Florida it's going to make a landfall. And it does that on your laptop in 10 minutes.
Huberman Lab
How to Improve at Learning Using Neuroscience & AI | Dr. Terry Sejnowski
For example, if you want to play tennis, you have to be able to coordinate many muscles and a whole sequence of actions has to be made if you want to be able to serve accurately. And you have to practice, practice, practice. Well, what's going on there is that the basal ganglia basically is taking over from the cortex and producing actions that get better and better and better and better.
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How to Improve at Learning Using Neuroscience & AI | Dr. Terry Sejnowski
It might. And it depends on the data you have. It depends on the complexity of the disease. But it will happen. In other words, we will use those tools the best we can. Because obviously, if you can make any progress at all and jump into the future, wow, that would save lives. That would help so many people out there.
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How to Improve at Learning Using Neuroscience & AI | Dr. Terry Sejnowski
I really think the promise here is so great that even though there are flaws and there are regulatory problems, we really, really have to really push forward. And we have to do that in a way that is going to help people in terms of making their jobs better and helping them solve problems that otherwise they would have had difficulty with and so forth.
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How to Improve at Learning Using Neuroscience & AI | Dr. Terry Sejnowski
And it's beginning to happen, but these are early days. So we're at a stage right now with AI that is similar to what happened after the first flight of the Wright brothers. In other words- It's that significant. The achievement that the Wright brothers made was to get off the ground 10 feet and to power forward with a human being 100 feet. That was it. That was the first flight.
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How to Improve at Learning Using Neuroscience & AI | Dr. Terry Sejnowski
And it took an enormous amount of improvements. The most difficult thing that had to be solved was control. How do you control it? How do you make it go in the direction you want it to go? And shades of what's happening now in AI is that we are off the ground. We're not going very far yet, but who knows where it will take us into the future.
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How to Improve at Learning Using Neuroscience & AI | Dr. Terry Sejnowski
So as you point out, Parkinson's is first a degenerative disease. It's very interesting because The dopamine cells are a particular part of the brain, the brain stem. And they are the ones that are responsible for procedural learning. I told you before about temporal difference. It's dopamine cells. And it's a very powerful way for the, it's a global signal.
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How to Improve at Learning Using Neuroscience & AI | Dr. Terry Sejnowski
It's called a neuromodulator because it modulates all of the other signals taking place throughout the cortex. And also, it's very important for learning sequences of actions that produce survival for survival. But the problem is that with certain environmental insults, especially toxins like pesticides, those neurons are very vulnerable.
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How to Improve at Learning Using Neuroscience & AI | Dr. Terry Sejnowski
And when they die, you get all of the symptoms that you just described. The people who have lost those cells actually before the treatment, you know, L-DOPA, which is a dopamine precursor, they actually became comatose, right? They didn't move. They were still alive, but they just didn't move at all. It's tragic. Locked in, it's called. Yeah, it's tragic, tragic.
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How to Improve at Learning Using Neuroscience & AI | Dr. Terry Sejnowski
And that's true not just of the muscles, but it's also true of thinking. If you want to become good in any area, if you want to become a good financier, if you want to become a good doctor, or neuroscientists, right? You have to be practicing, practicing, practicing in terms of understanding the details of the profession and what works, what doesn't work, and so forth.
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How to Improve at Learning Using Neuroscience & AI | Dr. Terry Sejnowski
So when the first trials of L-DOPA were given to them, it was magical because suddenly they started talking again.
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How to Improve at Learning Using Neuroscience & AI | Dr. Terry Sejnowski
Okay, that's a wonderful observation or a question. I'll bet you know the answer. Okay, here's something that is really amazing. It was discovered, interestingly, when they tend to move slowly, as you said, but to them, cognitively, they think they're moving fast. Now, it's not because they can't move fast, because you can say, well, can you move faster? Sure. And they move normal, right?
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How to Improve at Learning Using Neuroscience & AI | Dr. Terry Sejnowski
But to them, they think they're moving at super velocities.
Huberman Lab
How to Improve at Learning Using Neuroscience & AI | Dr. Terry Sejnowski
So it's a set point issue. Yes, it's all about set points. That's what's really going on. And as the set point gets further and further down, without moving at all, they think they're moving, right? I mean, this is what's going on. By the way, you can ask them, what was it like? We were talking to you and you didn't respond. Oh, I didn't feel like it.
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How to Improve at Learning Using Neuroscience & AI | Dr. Terry Sejnowski
Well, that they confabulated it because they didn't have enough energy. They couldn't initiate. They couldn't initiate actions. That's one of the things that they have trouble with, with movements, starting a movement.
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How to Improve at Learning Using Neuroscience & AI | Dr. Terry Sejnowski
is also different though. I think in the morning, I'm better at creative stuff. And then I think that in the evening, I'm better at actually just cranking it out.
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How to Improve at Learning Using Neuroscience & AI | Dr. Terry Sejnowski
I've actually noticed This is something that is just purely subjective, but the temperature of the salt inside the building is kept 75. It's like, you know, it's rock solid. But in the afternoon, I feel a little chilly.
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How to Improve at Learning Using Neuroscience & AI | Dr. Terry Sejnowski
And it turns out that this basal ganglia interacts with the cortex, not just in the back, which is the action part, but also with the prefrontal cortex, which is the thinking part.
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How to Improve at Learning Using Neuroscience & AI | Dr. Terry Sejnowski
it's probably my internal body temperature is probably going down. And that may correspond to the loss of energy, the amount of the ability for the brain and everything else. By the way, you know, this is Q10, this is a jargon. Every single enzyme in your every cell it can go at different rates depending on the temperature, right?
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How to Improve at Learning Using Neuroscience & AI | Dr. Terry Sejnowski
And so, yeah, so the body temperature is doing this and all the cells are doing this too, right? So this is, it's an explanation. I'm not sure if it's the right one, but.
Huberman Lab
How to Improve at Learning Using Neuroscience & AI | Dr. Terry Sejnowski
Boy, amphetamines are a good example. Boy, you're going a mile a minute. when you're taking the drug, of course, I fully understand that that's your impression. And the reality is you don't actually accomplish that much more.
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How to Improve at Learning Using Neuroscience & AI | Dr. Terry Sejnowski
We've done this experiment on our whole cadre, a whole generation. And I really would like to know the answer. I wonder if anybody's studying it. That's really a great question. Because we gave them speed effectively, the drug that causes the brain to be activated. But by the way, the consequence is that when it wears off, you... have no energy. You're just completely spent.
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How to Improve at Learning Using Neuroscience & AI | Dr. Terry Sejnowski
But that's why you take more of it. That's the problem. It's a spiral.
Huberman Lab
How to Improve at Learning Using Neuroscience & AI | Dr. Terry Sejnowski
Well, if you go back 500 years, you know, to the Middle Ages, the concept didn't exist, or at least not in the way we use it. Because everybody, it was the way that humans felt about the world. you know, the world and how it worked and its impact on them was that it's all fate.
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How to Improve at Learning Using Neuroscience & AI | Dr. Terry Sejnowski
They had this concept of fate, which is that there's nothing you can do that something is going to happen to you because of what's going on in the gods above or whatever it is, right? You attribute it to the physical forces around you that caused it. Not to your own free will, not to something that caused this to happen to you, right?
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How to Improve at Learning Using Neuroscience & AI | Dr. Terry Sejnowski
So I think that these words, by the way, that we use, free will, consciousness, intelligence, understanding, they're weasel words because you can't pin them down. There is no definition of consciousness that everybody agrees on. And it's tough to solve a problem scientific problem if you don't have a definition that you can agree on.
Huberman Lab
How to Improve at Learning Using Neuroscience & AI | Dr. Terry Sejnowski
And you know, there's this big controversy about whether these large language models understand language or not, right? The way we do. And what it really is revealing is we don't understand what understanding is. Literally, we don't have a really good argument or measure that you could measure someone's understanding and then apply it to the chat GDP and see whether it's the same.
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How to Improve at Learning Using Neuroscience & AI | Dr. Terry Sejnowski
It probably isn't exactly the same, but maybe there's some continuum here we're talking about, right? You know, the way I look at it, you know, it's as if an alien suddenly landed on Earth and started talking to us in English, right? And the only thing we could be sure of was that it's not human.
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How to Improve at Learning Using Neuroscience & AI | Dr. Terry Sejnowski
Okay, okay. Well, okay, now there's a big diversity amongst humans too.
Huberman Lab
How to Improve at Learning Using Neuroscience & AI | Dr. Terry Sejnowski
You know, not everybody has adopted the same social conventions. You know, it could be a touch of autism. I mean, that's a problem. I mean, in other words, there are very high-functioning autistic people out there.
Huberman Lab
How to Improve at Learning Using Neuroscience & AI | Dr. Terry Sejnowski
And often they are. There are high people who are brilliant with autism.
Huberman Lab
How to Improve at Learning Using Neuroscience & AI | Dr. Terry Sejnowski
I reviewed a paper.
Huberman Lab
How to Improve at Learning Using Neuroscience & AI | Dr. Terry Sejnowski
It's been done. There was a paper that I reviewed where they took the LM and they fine-tuned it with different data from people with different disorders, autism and so forth. And sociopaths That's scary.
Huberman Lab
How to Improve at Learning Using Neuroscience & AI | Dr. Terry Sejnowski
No, no. And they got these LLMs to behave just like those people who have these disorders. You can get them to behave that way. Yes.
Huberman Lab
How to Improve at Learning Using Neuroscience & AI | Dr. Terry Sejnowski
I haven't seen that, but it's pretty clear that, to me at least, that if you can do sociopathy, you can probably do any political belief.
Huberman Lab
How to Improve at Learning Using Neuroscience & AI | Dr. Terry Sejnowski
Okay, there's a lot of information that, as you point out, which has to do with the tone, the spatial expressions. You know, there's a tremendous amount of information that is passed, not just with words, but with all the other parts, the visual input and so forth. And some people are good at picking that up and others are not. There's a tremendous variability between individuals.
Huberman Lab
How to Improve at Learning Using Neuroscience & AI | Dr. Terry Sejnowski
And biology is all about diversity and it's all about needing a gene pool that's very diverse so that you can evolve and survive catastrophic changes that occur in a climate, for example. But wouldn't it be wonderful if we could create an LLM that could understand what those differences are. Now, just think about it, right?
Huberman Lab
How to Improve at Learning Using Neuroscience & AI | Dr. Terry Sejnowski
Yeah, but here's what you'd have to do. What you'd have to do is to train it up on data from a bunch of individuals, human individuals. Now, one of the things about these LLMs is that they don't have a single persona. They can adopt any persona. You have to tell it what you're expecting from.
Huberman Lab
How to Improve at Learning Using Neuroscience & AI | Dr. Terry Sejnowski
I once gave it an abstract from a paper, very technical, a computational paper. And I said, you are a neuroscientist. I want you to explain this abstract to a 10-year-old. It did it in a way that I could never have done it. Was it accurate? It really simplified it. Some of the subtleties were not in it, but it explained what plasticity it was and explained what a synapse is. Amazing. It did that.
Huberman Lab
How to Improve at Learning Using Neuroscience & AI | Dr. Terry Sejnowski
Well, I mentioned the prefrontal cortex and that part, the loop with the basal ganglia, that is one of the last to mature in early adulthood. And the problem is that for adolescents, it's not the no-go part for planning and actions isn't quite there yet. And so often it doesn't kick in to prevent you from doing things that are not in your best interest. So yes, absolutely right.
Huberman Lab
How to Improve at Learning Using Neuroscience & AI | Dr. Terry Sejnowski
I haven't encountered that, but it's fascinating. That's a sign of a real generative internal model. See, here's the thing that most distinguishes, I think, an LLM from a human is that if you go into a room, quiet room, and just sit there without any sensory stimulation, your brain keeps thinking.
Huberman Lab
How to Improve at Learning Using Neuroscience & AI | Dr. Terry Sejnowski
In other words, you think about what you want to do, planning ahead or something that happened to you during the day. Your brain is always generating internally. After talking to you, One of these large language models just goes blank. There is no self-continuous, self-generated thoughts.
Huberman Lab
How to Improve at Learning Using Neuroscience & AI | Dr. Terry Sejnowski
We're getting closer. And so this is something I'm working on myself, actually, trying to understand how that's done in our own brains, was generating continual brain activity that leads to planning and things. We don't know what the answer to that is yet in neuroscience. And by the way, you go to a lecture and you hear the words one after the next,
Huberman Lab
How to Improve at Learning Using Neuroscience & AI | Dr. Terry Sejnowski
over an hour and you see the slides went after the next, at the end you ask a question, right? Just let's think about what you just did. Somehow you're able to integrate all that information over the hour and then use your long-term memory then to come up with some insight or some issue that you want. How did your brain remember
Huberman Lab
How to Improve at Learning Using Neuroscience & AI | Dr. Terry Sejnowski
all that information, working memory, traditional working memory that neuroscientists study is only for a few seconds, right? Or maybe a telephone number or something. But we're talking about long-term working memory. We don't understand how that is done. And LLMs, actually large language models, can do something. It's called in-context learning.
Huberman Lab
How to Improve at Learning Using Neuroscience & AI | Dr. Terry Sejnowski
And it's a really, it was a great surprise because there is no plasticity. The thing learns at the beginning, you train it up on data, and then all it does after that is to inference, you know, fast loop of activity, one word after the next, right? That's what happens with no learning, no learning. But it's been noticed that as you continue your dialogue, it seems to get better at things.
Huberman Lab
How to Improve at Learning Using Neuroscience & AI | Dr. Terry Sejnowski
How could that be? How could it be in context learning, even though there's no plasticity? That's a mystery. We don't know the answer to that question yet, but we also don't know what the answer is for humans either.
Huberman Lab
How to Improve at Learning Using Neuroscience & AI | Dr. Terry Sejnowski
No, it's funny you mentioned that because I get my best ideas, not sprinting on the beach, but just either walking or jogging. And it's wonderful. I don't know. I think serotonin goes up. It's another neuromodulator. I think that that stimulates ideas and thoughts. And so inevitably, I come back to my office And I can't remember any of those great ideas.
Huberman Lab
How to Improve at Learning Using Neuroscience & AI | Dr. Terry Sejnowski
But one of the things, though, is that learning is involved. And this is really a problem that we cracked. first theoretically in the 90s and then experimentally later by recording from neurons and also brain imaging in humans. So it turns out we know the algorithm that is used in the brain for how to learn sequences of actions to achieve a goal.
Huberman Lab
How to Improve at Learning Using Neuroscience & AI | Dr. Terry Sejnowski
Well, now I take notes.
Huberman Lab
How to Improve at Learning Using Neuroscience & AI | Dr. Terry Sejnowski
Yeah. And some of them pan out. You know, there's no doubt about it.
Huberman Lab
How to Improve at Learning Using Neuroscience & AI | Dr. Terry Sejnowski
You're put into a situation. It is a form of meditation. You know, if you're running in a steady pace, nothing distracting about, you know, the beach.
Huberman Lab
How to Improve at Learning Using Neuroscience & AI | Dr. Terry Sejnowski
It's been studied. Psychologists call it mind-wandering.
Huberman Lab
How to Improve at Learning Using Neuroscience & AI | Dr. Terry Sejnowski
Yeah. It is a significant literature. And it's often when you have an aha moment, right? Mm-hmm. Your mind is wandering and it's thinking non-linearly in the sense of not following a sequence that is logical, hopping from thing to thing. Often that's when you get a great idea with just letting your mind wander. Yeah, and that happens to me.
Huberman Lab
How to Improve at Learning Using Neuroscience & AI | Dr. Terry Sejnowski
Okay, so we have a whole session, you know, a clip in learning how to learn about exactly this phenomenon. Here's what we tell our students, right? is that if you're having trouble with some concept or you don't understand something, you're beating your head against the wall, don't, stop, stop. Just go off and do something. Go off and clean the dishes. Go off and walk around the block.
Huberman Lab
How to Improve at Learning Using Neuroscience & AI | Dr. Terry Sejnowski
And inevitably what happens is when you come back, your, your mind is clear and you figure out what to do. And, and that's one of the best pieces of advice that anybody could get because, you know, we don't, nobody has told us how the brain works, right?
Huberman Lab
How to Improve at Learning Using Neuroscience & AI | Dr. Terry Sejnowski
We, we, we, we, you, some people are really good at intuitings, uh, because they've experienced, you may be, um, and, and, and, and, but everybody I, okay. The other thing is everybody I know who's really, uh, made important contributions. And I'll bet you're one of them.
Huberman Lab
How to Improve at Learning Using Neuroscience & AI | Dr. Terry Sejnowski
You know, you're struggling with some problem at night and you go to bed and you wake up in the morning, ah, that's the solution.
Huberman Lab
How to Improve at Learning Using Neuroscience & AI | Dr. Terry Sejnowski
That's right. That's the thing that is so amazing about sleep. And you can see people who know this can count on it. In other words, the key is to think about it before you go to sleep. Right. Your brain works on it during the sleep period. Right. And so, you know, don't watch TV because then who knows what your brain is going to work on.
Huberman Lab
How to Improve at Learning Using Neuroscience & AI | Dr. Terry Sejnowski
And it's the simplest possible algorithm you can imagine. It's simply to predict... the next reward you're going to get. If I do an action, will it give me something of value? And you learn every time you try something, whether you got the amount of reward you expected or less, you use that to update the synapses.
Huberman Lab
How to Improve at Learning Using Neuroscience & AI | Dr. Terry Sejnowski
You know, use the time before you fall asleep to think about something that is bothering you or maybe something that, you know, you're trying to understand, maybe, you know. A paper that you read the paper and say, oh, you know, I'm tired. I'm going to go to sleep. You wake up in the morning and say, oh, I know what's going on in that paper. Yeah. I mean, that's what happens.
Huberman Lab
How to Improve at Learning Using Neuroscience & AI | Dr. Terry Sejnowski
You can use, you know, once you know something about how the brain works, you can take advantage of that.
Huberman Lab
How to Improve at Learning Using Neuroscience & AI | Dr. Terry Sejnowski
Okay. So here's the problem. Dreams seem so iconic and a lot of people, you know, somehow attribute things to them. But there has never been any good theory or any good understanding, first of all, why we dream. It's still not completely clear. I mean, there are some ideas. Or why this particular dream? Does that have some significance for you?
Huberman Lab
How to Improve at Learning Using Neuroscience & AI | Dr. Terry Sejnowski
And the only thing that I know that might explain a little bit is that the dreams are often very visual, rapid eye movement sleep, so that there's something happening. Actually, it's interesting. All the neuromodulators are downregulated during sleep. And then during REM sleep, the acetylcholine comes up, right? So that's a very powerful neuromodulator. It's important for attention, for example.
Huberman Lab
How to Improve at Learning Using Neuroscience & AI | Dr. Terry Sejnowski
But it doesn't come up in the prefrontal cortex. which means that the circuits in the prefrontal cortex that are interpreting the sensory input coming in, are not turned on. So any of these, whatever happens in your visual cortex is not being monitored anymore.
Huberman Lab
How to Improve at Learning Using Neuroscience & AI | Dr. Terry Sejnowski
So you get bizarre things, you know, that you start floating and, you know, things happen to you and, you know, it's not anchored anymore. And so, but that still doesn't explain why, right? Why you have that period. It's important because if you block it and there are some sleeping pills that do block it, you know, it really does cause problems with, you know, normal cognitive function.
Huberman Lab
How to Improve at Learning Using Neuroscience & AI | Dr. Terry Sejnowski
No, no. It's an imbalance that was caused because the brain adjusted to the endocannabinoid levels. And now it's got to go back and it takes time. But it's interesting. It's interesting. It affects dreams. I think that may be a clue.
Huberman Lab
How to Improve at Learning Using Neuroscience & AI | Dr. Terry Sejnowski
You know, that's an interesting hypothesis. How would you test it?
Huberman Lab
How to Improve at Learning Using Neuroscience & AI | Dr. Terry Sejnowski
synaptic plasticity so that the next time you'll have a better chance of getting a better reward and you build up what's called a value function. So the cortex now over your lifetime is building up a lot of knowledge about things that are good for you, things that are bad for you. Like you go to a restaurant, you order something, how do you know what's good for you, right?
Huberman Lab
How to Improve at Learning Using Neuroscience & AI | Dr. Terry Sejnowski
It's true. Yeah, it's true. By the way, there are two kinds of dreams. Very interesting. So if you wake someone up during REM sleep, you get very vivid dreams. Changing. Dreams, they're always different and changing. But if you wake someone up during slow-wave sleep, you often get a dream report, but it's a kind of dream that keeps repeating over and over again every night.
Huberman Lab
How to Improve at Learning Using Neuroscience & AI | Dr. Terry Sejnowski
And it's a very heavy emotional content.
Huberman Lab
How to Improve at Learning Using Neuroscience & AI | Dr. Terry Sejnowski
Yeah, probably slow-wave sleep, yeah.
Huberman Lab
How to Improve at Learning Using Neuroscience & AI | Dr. Terry Sejnowski
Well, so the NIH has something called the Pioneer Award. And what they're looking for are big ideas. that could have a huge impact, right? So I put one in recently and here's the title is a temporal context in brains and transformers.
Huberman Lab
How to Improve at Learning Using Neuroscience & AI | Dr. Terry Sejnowski
AI, right? The key to chat GTP is the fact there's this new architecture, it's a deep learning architecture, feed forward network, but it's called a transformer. And it has certain parts in it that are unique. There's one called self-attention. And it's a way of doing what is called temporal context. What it does is it connects words that are far apart.
Huberman Lab
How to Improve at Learning Using Neuroscience & AI | Dr. Terry Sejnowski
You give it a sequence of words and it can tell you the association. Like if I use the word this, And then you have to figure out in the last sentence what it did refer to. Well, there's three or four nouns it could have referred to. But from context, you can figure out which one it does. And you can learn that association.
Huberman Lab
How to Improve at Learning Using Neuroscience & AI | Dr. Terry Sejnowski
Yes. I think that that's an example, but it turns out that every word is ambiguous. It has like three, four meanings. And so you have to figure that out from context. And so in other words, there are words that live together. and that come up often. And you can learn that from just by predicting the next word in a sentence. That's how a transformer is trained.
Huberman Lab
How to Improve at Learning Using Neuroscience & AI | Dr. Terry Sejnowski
You've had lots of meals in a lot of places and now that is part of your value function. This is the same algorithm that was used by AlphaGo. This is the program that DeepMind built. This is an AI program that beat the world Go champion. And Go is the most complex game that humans have ever created. played on a regular basis.
Huberman Lab
How to Improve at Learning Using Neuroscience & AI | Dr. Terry Sejnowski
You give it a bunch of words and it keeps predicting the next word in a sentence.
Huberman Lab
How to Improve at Learning Using Neuroscience & AI | Dr. Terry Sejnowski
Okay, well, that's because it's a very primitive version of this algorithm. What happened is if you train it up on enough, not only can it answer the next word, it internally builds up a semantic representation in the same way you describe the words that are related to each other, having associations.
Huberman Lab
How to Improve at Learning Using Neuroscience & AI | Dr. Terry Sejnowski
It can figure that out and it has representations inside this very large network with trillions of parameters. It's unbelievable how big they've gotten. And those associations now form an internal model of the meaning of the sentence. Literally, this is something that now we've probed these transformers, and so we pretty much are pretty confident.
Huberman Lab
How to Improve at Learning Using Neuroscience & AI | Dr. Terry Sejnowski
And that means that it's forming an internal model of the outside world, in this case, a bunch of words. And that's how it's able to actually respond to you in a way that is sensible, that makes sense and actually is interesting and so forth. And it's all the self-attention I'm talking about. So in any case, my pioneer proposal is to figure out how does the brain do self-attention, right?
Huberman Lab
How to Improve at Learning Using Neuroscience & AI | Dr. Terry Sejnowski
It's got to do it somehow. And I'll give you a little hint. Basal ganglia.
Huberman Lab
How to Improve at Learning Using Neuroscience & AI | Dr. Terry Sejnowski
That's my hypothesis. Well, we'll see. I mean, you know, I'll be working with experimental people. I've worked with John Reynolds, for example, who studies primate visual cortex. And we've looked at traveling ways there. And there are other people that have looked at in primates.
Huberman Lab
How to Improve at Learning Using Neuroscience & AI | Dr. Terry Sejnowski
And so now these traveling waves, I think, are also a part of the puzzle, pieces of the puzzle that are gonna give us a much better view of how the cortex is organized and how it interacts with the basal ganglia. We've already been there, but we still, neuroscientists have studied each one of these parts of the brain independently.
Huberman Lab
How to Improve at Learning Using Neuroscience & AI | Dr. Terry Sejnowski
And now we have to start thinking about putting the pieces of the puzzle together, right? Trying to get all the things that we know about these areas and see how they work together in a computational way. And that's really where I want to go.
Huberman Lab
How to Improve at Learning Using Neuroscience & AI | Dr. Terry Sejnowski
Yeah, that's right. So go is to chess, where chess is to something like checkers. In other words, the level of difficulty is another way off above it because you have to think in terms of battles going on all over the place at the same time. And the order in which you put the pieces down are going to affect what's going to happen in the future.
Huberman Lab
How to Improve at Learning Using Neuroscience & AI | Dr. Terry Sejnowski
Well, thank you. And I have to say that I've been blessed over the years with wonderful students. and wonderful colleagues, and you among them, who really I've learned a lot from. Thank you. But science is a social activity. And we learn from each other. And we all make mistakes. But we learn from our mistakes. That's the beauty of science is that we can make progress.
Huberman Lab
How to Improve at Learning Using Neuroscience & AI | Dr. Terry Sejnowski
Now, you know, your career has been remarkable, too, because you have affected and influenced more people than anybody else I know personally with the knowledge that you are broadcasting. through your interviews, but also just in terms of your interests. I'm really impressed with what you've done and I want you to keep at it because we need people like you.
Huberman Lab
How to Improve at Learning Using Neuroscience & AI | Dr. Terry Sejnowski
We need scientists who can actually express and reach the public. If we don't do that, everything we do is behind closed doors, right? Nothing gets out. And so you're one of the best of the breed in terms of being able to explain things in a clear way that gets through to more people than anybody else I know.
Huberman Lab
How to Improve at Learning Using Neuroscience & AI | Dr. Terry Sejnowski
You're welcome.