Speaker 1 [00:00:00] So, if we could just start, if you could introduce yourself to me any way you like.
Adam Gazzaley [00:00:05] Sure. My name is Adam Gazzaley. I'm a professor here at University of California, San Francisco. And I am the executive director of Neuroscape.
Speaker 1 [00:00:14] That's great. And can we do one where we don't place you in a location?
Adam Gazzaley [00:00:17] Sure.
Speaker 1 [00:00:18] Because we don't know where this will end up.
Adam Gazzaley [00:00:20] Sure, sure. My name is Adam Gazzaley. I'm a professor of neuroscience here at, oh, not here. My name Adam Gazzaley. I'm professor of Neuroscience at University of California, San Francisco and the executive director of NeuroScape.
Speaker 1 [00:00:36] So, you have and do wear many hats in your career and I'm wondering if you could just sort of, in a broad sense, kind of talk about your work and what your kind of overarching mission and all the things you've done is in your life.
Adam Gazzaley [00:00:53] Yeah, I wear a lot of hats, but one of the connecting themes is that there are new approaches that we can create and then validate to help improve the health of our minds. And I use that really broadly, that term, to improve our attention, our perception, our memory, how we regulate our emotions, how we make decisions, how we feel empathy and compassion. I would say across all those domains, we've been really tragically lacking. In terms of both assessing and improving them. So can we come up with new approaches that allow us to accomplish that goal?
Speaker 3 [00:01:31] What got you into this?
Adam Gazzaley [00:01:34] I'd say my first inspiration to work in what I now think of as translational research, so not scientific research just to understand the brain, but actually to create tools to help people, was really born largely out of frustration. So in 2008, I had been interacting with patients as a neurologist and older adults as a neuroscientist. I studied the aging brain for many years. And although we had done a lot of work in understanding how the brain changes as we get older, we didn't really have great tools to help the aging brain. And that's pretty much true across most of neurology and psychiatry. We've been relying on pretty much the same meds for decades and decades, and we're left with an incredible crisis of cognition and mental health. And so my efforts to be innovative in this space and to develop new approaches. Or really largely because we just don't have the tools that we need to help people.
Speaker 1 [00:02:33] Was that a sort of, failure might be too strong a word, but when you say pills and there's other traditional methods, were you sort of distinctly trying to avoid that and use kind of technology in a different way?
Adam Gazzaley [00:02:46] Yeah, my frustration was that our traditional approach of using a molecule or a pill to help improve cognition and the function of the brain and the mind has really been very limited. They don't help everyone. Many people have debilitating side effects from the treatments. And while we've seen improvements in so many other conditions, like cardiac disease and even infectious disease and cancer, we find that... Anxiety, depression, suicide, dementia, all on the rise. And so I was interested in what we can do outside of what has been thought of as traditional, conventional medicine, where we develop a molecule, put it in a pill form, and tell someone to take it every day and see me in a month, what we could do different. And I was really inspired by a foundational aspect of neuroscience, which is plasticity, that our brain has the ability to modify itself at every level. Its function, its chemistry, even the structure of the brain in response to experiences. So my goal was to create experiences that were very targeted and personalized to help improve brain function. Using digital technology was really the secondary aspect of that, a way to deliver experiences in a very accessible and very targeted manner.
Speaker 1 [00:04:06] I'd love to, if you're okay with it, talk about Achilles.
Adam Gazzaley [00:04:10] Mm-hmm. Well, then, have a good night.
Speaker 1 [00:04:12] Fully aware that you are not, that's not your present day life.
Adam Gazzaley [00:04:15] Yes.
Speaker 1 [00:04:16] Necessarily. Yeah.
Adam Gazzaley [00:04:16] Yeah, I mean I'm still on the board of Achille, and I'm chief science advisor, and you know the technology is my invention, so it's my baby. But yeah, my full daytime is here, is at UCSF.
Speaker 1 [00:04:29] So we'll get into some of this and I want to talk about sort of the broader problems that you just touched on as well that are being addressed as well.
Adam Gazzaley [00:04:38] Yeah, I'm happy to.
Speaker 1 [00:04:39] So, and we're gonna go back to Akili, by the way, and talk to some of them. Right.
Adam Gazzaley [00:04:42] Right. Good. Good
Speaker 1 [00:04:45] So tell me a little bit about how that came about. You addressed some of your hopes and the problems in the pharmaceutical industry and in attacking some of these issues you were hoping to address. How did you get to video games?
Adam Gazzaley [00:05:06] So when you start with the idea of creating an experience to help improve people's brain, and then you take the next step to say, how do we deliver that experience? How do we get it to people that don't have access to doctors or teachers or other human-delivered experiences? You arrive at the conclusion that technology is a great way of doing that. It's affordable. It's accessible all over the world. There's Wi-Fi everywhere. Device is a small It has all the elements that make sense to be able to deliver experiences. And we already deliver experiences using technology, often in the form of entertainment. So that's the first leap is experience to technology delivered experiences. Then when you think about, well, how do you use technology to deliver an experience to people, the idea was we wanted to do it in a manner that people find engaging and immersive and fun. And then you arrive with a video game, which has all those ingredients. So the elements of a video games that are really an exciting platform to deliver experiences to people is that it is deeply immersive, which allows you to really harness the brain's plasticity by applying pressure through deep engagement. It also has this tendency for people wanting to return to it and come back, and that's something also that's important. You're unlikely to change the brain. In a meaningful and sustainable way with just one engagement. You need people to come back again and again. So those were the elements of video games that really attracted me at the very earliest stages of development.
Speaker 1 [00:06:42] Can you tell us about Endeavor RX and sort of what, how does it work?
Adam Gazzaley [00:06:47] Yeah, so Endeavor Rx is a game that is now FDA approved to treat inattention in children with ADHD. That's FDA cleared now. But that game came from an early version of the game called Neuroracer, which was designed and developed and then tested at UCSF at Neuroscape. And both Neuracer, the original game, which has its first paper in older adults published in Nature in 2013. And Endeavor RX, which is to treat children with ADHD, has the same game mechanics. Endeavor is a much better game, art, music, story, engagement, because it's meant to be delivered as a product, while NeuroRacer was really a research tool. But the mechanics of the game are identical. And how the game is designed to improve attention is that it challenges a player's ability to hold their attention, but also to move it rapidly, to ignore distractions. What we call cognitive control, the ability that an individual has to move their attention in space and time based upon their goals. And this game does it at a very high level. It also does it adaptively, what we called closed loop, meaning that as you play, data is being generated that leads to the game to challenge and reward you appropriately. So that we call this personalization. And it allows that every person playing the game is doing so. Just at the level of their ability, so that they're not so frustrated because it's too hard, although it is hard, and they're so bored because it is too easy. It just finds that perfect spot of challenge, like a personal trainer might do in a gym, where it's pushing you right to the level of your ability. So that's a little bit of what's under the hood in Endeavor RX.
Speaker 3 [00:08:35] Is it safe to just go to your right? Oh, yeah, to my right, okay. Sure, sure. One second. One more.
Speaker 1 [00:08:45] Good. Try not to gesticulate. You guys are great. It's really cool. Is there a comment about video games in general as opposed to a movie or music or other things that could be turned into a healing device? Is it the interactivity? What do you think it is?
Adam Gazzaley [00:09:11] Yeah, so experiences have the power to change the brain. That's well-established. And that occurs throughout our lifespan. And that's many, many types of experiences, so passive experiences, like a walk in nature, or maybe even music or a movie can influence you and change your brain. Video games are particularly interesting because they're interactive experiences. So they have challenge and they have rewards that can be coupled with your engagement and your performance. So they involve not just sensory systems but also motor systems because you move and respond in them. So those are the elements that make video games particularly attractive tools to deliver these experiences.
Speaker 1 [00:09:54] What kind of team does it take to create an FDA approved video game? What is the mixture of people on that team?
Adam Gazzaley [00:10:02] Yeah, can I interrupt for one second? Are your questions gonna be on here? No. No, okay, so I'm doing my best to repeat.
Speaker 1 [00:10:10] Oh, I appreciate that. Yeah, yeah, but I
Adam Gazzaley [00:10:11] But I just want to, because if you are here, then I would do it less.
Speaker 1 [00:10:14] No, no, no. I'm not in this at all.
Adam Gazzaley [00:10:16] Okay, I assume that was the case, but I want you to ask, okay. Yeah, so in order to create an FDA approved video game takes a really diverse team of individuals and experts because you need all the expertise on the game development side. So artists, musicians, storytellers, programmers, engineers that really create a rich, rewarding and exciting experience and a fun one. It's not easy to build something that's fun like that. So we really work with the best in the industry that have. Lots of experience building entertainment video games. But you also need scientists and doctors and people that know how to target the game for a clinical population and also know how do the research to validate it and convince both regulatory agencies like the FDA but also patients and insurance companies that this game is really medicine. So the diversity of people involved are actually quite impressive.
Speaker 1 [00:11:14] My crack research team over here spotted that you were named in Newsweek one of the disruptors in this space. I'm curious if you could comment on that distinction and what that means for you.
Adam Gazzaley [00:11:28] Yeah, you know, there's lots of accolades that you hope to get across your career as a scientist and being named one of the largest disruptors is an unusual one. I like it, I want to disrupt, not for the sake of disrupting, I wanna disrupt because I think that our current system is lacking in really, really profound ways. And we've been sort of trapped in a paradigm that somehow there's gonna be a magic brain pill that we discover that's going to fix it all. Schizophrenia, autism, depression, Alzheimer's gone. That has not happened. So we need to disrupt the system. We need to change it in a very deep way in order to help people that are in great need.
Speaker 1 [00:12:13] Well what else can this do if under the hood there's sort of a secret sauce that could be applied to different afflictions neurologically? What is the scope of potential for something like Endeavor Rx?
Adam Gazzaley [00:12:28] Yeah, the scope of potential for EndeavorX is massive, and I'd say it's beyond Endeavor X. Endeavor is one product from one company. Now granted, it's one I've spent the last 15 years working on, but it should never be an end-all right there. There's many other companies and products that, you know, this should be as big as the pharma industry. And there can be solutions for all types of neurological and psychiatric conditions to help people without relying. Drugs as people have in the past.
Speaker 1 [00:13:00] You've written about the ancient brain in a high-tech world. I'm curious, you know, where that's concerned about the kind of cause and effect of all this. You know, you could look at ADHD, for example, and wonder, does the world we're living in sort of create that problem more than it used to? Is this something that has always existed and we're just flagging it now? Mm-hmm. And meanwhile, a high tech world is one that is also solving these problems. So can you kind of speak to that dichotomy? Yeah.
Adam Gazzaley [00:13:35] Yeah, so there's an interesting challenge that I have when I talk to people about my work because on one side I've written about the distracted mind and the ancient brain in a high-tech world and on the other side I build video games to help improve brain function which can seem complete polar opposites and that makes sense to me because all swords cut both ways. So anything that has the power to do good has the powers to do bad. Running might be great for your health, but then you could destroy your knees. Even the best of foods and excess would be would be negative and it's the same thing for for technology I believe that technology has challenged our brains in many fundamental ways by changing the environment that we live in very different from the environment That our brains evolved and it has created all sorts of challenges from you know distraction and multitasking to depression and you know, obviously privacy and other other aspects of technology that have been a burden that we're still trying to figure out. On the flip side, I believe that technology can do wonderful things. And it's really just a tool that doesn't have a directionality of use. We decide on how we use it. And so when you design technology thoughtfully and intentionally from the very beginning as a tool to help people, you wind up with very, very different tools than you do when you don't pay attention to that. How we also deliver it in very time-limited fashions. For example, Endeavor RX is only played for 20 minutes a day, five days a week for a month, which is a dose. We don't want people to play it continuously and not go outside and get fresh air and play with other people and interact with the world around them. So I believe that, as I believe everything, can have both harmful and positive effects. And now is, I think, a really critical time in the history of modern technology, information technology, where we can really thoughtfully turn it into a tool to enhance what makes us human and not diminish us.
Speaker 1 [00:15:41] I just have one more question on video games before we kind of shift gears, but, you know, we have more traditional stories about video games and developers making games for market today. As an art form, you now, video games I think are still not entirely taken seriously despite being one of the biggest industries in entertainment, and of course you take it very seriously as a tool for healing. Can you speak to how we get there, the kind of cultural perception? I think the idea of a video game as a medicine is as hard to believe for people as video games as art in some cases. So can you kind of touch on that cultural perception and if you feel like maybe we're heading toward a different perception.
Adam Gazzaley [00:16:26] I think people tend to get very stuck in categories, and for a long time, video games were thought of as maybe trivial, frivolous, maybe even harmful. And recognizing them as an art form, which many, many people do, and people in the industry consider an artform, and it is undoubtedly an art-form in all the ways that any other art is, may take time for people to recognize. And I think with the increase in general of digital art... Outside of video games, growing rapidly, that translation will happen. But video games as art and video games as medicine is here already. It's just people becoming aware that video games do actually serve all of those different functions.
Speaker 1 [00:17:15] Thank you. You're speaking for video games as an industry.
Adam Gazzaley [00:17:19] I feel comfortable doing that.
Speaker 1 [00:17:20] Yeah, so shifting gears a little bit, so our show, broadly speaking, is about art, science, and creativity, which is a huge topic to get your arms around. So I just want to speak to you about those ideas kind of broadly. First of all, one of my favorite questions I have to ask people is, in your view, what is creativity?
Adam Gazzaley [00:17:45] Creativity is the act of using your imagination to picture and think about realities that are not currently present. And those could be in the past, they could be present, they can be in future, but they're not here right now. And so it involves imagination.
Speaker 1 [00:18:09] From a neuroscientist perspective, can you get your arms around creativity? Do you study this? Is there something in the brain that you can detect?
Adam Gazzaley [00:18:19] Yeah, imagination and creativity have been really elusive as areas of neuroscience research. There is research there, but it is challenging. I am personally very interested in it, and it is an area that I would like to tackle more as a neuroscientist. But for most part, neuroscience does best on very reproducible events. The brain is hard to access. And so in order to get a strong signal of what's happening in the brain, you need something that happens again and again and creativity is something that doesn't happen that way. There are sparks of awareness and imagination that lead to them. And so it is more difficult to study, but it is a big part of what makes us human and so important for the richness of our existence that it is an area that deserves more attention.
Speaker 1 [00:19:17] Sort of the irony of it to me is you use it all the time, we need it to survive, and yet it's still so elusive. It hasn't sort of hardwired.
Adam Gazzaley [00:19:26] Yeah, I agree.
Speaker 1 [00:19:29] Well, let us know if you think so.
Adam Gazzaley [00:19:30] Yeah, yeah.
Speaker 1 [00:19:31] Well I'm curious to speak to you as an artist, you know, yourself, as a photographer, and obviously as a scientist, you now, is there in your, just anecdotal experience, do you feel like there's a different way of thinking, a different of being creative when you're doing one versus the other?
Adam Gazzaley [00:19:50] Personally, I feel that my artistic endeavors and my scientific endeavors are almost the same. For me, it feels completely coherent across my life when I do both of those things. When I am out in nature as a photographer, it's an act of exploration, looking for beauty and organization in nature. When I'm looking through the lens of a microscope for an MRI. At the brain, it's really very similar. Looking for organization and often beauty in the brain. They often go hand in hand to make sense of all this and to share it. So it doesn't feel different to me. They're creative acts that lead to a deeper appreciation and understanding of nature.
Speaker 1 [00:20:47] That was beautiful and the comparison of a microscope to a camera is what I hadn't even
Adam Gazzaley [00:20:51] That's how I learned photography. Is that right? Yes. So before I ever did anything artistic, I actually did nothing artistic in my life until I discovered photography by looking through a microscope as part of my graduate school work. So I was taking photographs of neurons with a 35 millimeter camera. This was, there were no digital cameras. So there were digital backs on analog cameras that just started appearing at that time. This is in the early 90s. And I was photographing neurons in the brain of young and old animals trying to understand changes. And I got really excited about photography and photograpting nature. Neurons tend to look like trees, which is still a big inspiration for me in my nature photography work. And so learning 35-millimeter photography through a microscope is one of the things that led me to take photography out into the world.
Speaker 1 [00:21:52] Do you find that art comments on science in a way that is meaningful to you and not just a sort of throwaway isn't that nice, but has real meaning in your scientific work?
Adam Gazzaley [00:22:05] It's deeply meaningful, art is deeply meaningful for my scientific work in many ways. There is the organization and inherent beauty in nature, which I see both on the science side and when I'm doing photography, but there are more things. For example, when you are out in a beautiful place like a national park taking a photograph, It's really about perception and attention. And also understanding your emotional state at the time, if you want to take a picture that anyone's going to care about. It's not just pointing your camera at El Capitan in Yosemite, it's understanding, is there something about what you're looking at that is inducing an emotional response in you? And if you can find that and capture that in time, then it will do it to someone else when they see it. And so there's a lot of cognitive neuroscience in nature photography. In. It's been really exciting for me to study that in the lab, but then also through my own personal experience out in nature.
Speaker 1 [00:23:13] You know, we have a story about a group of sisters who are gastrobiologists and they use immunofluorescence to stain their slides and they create beautiful images with it. Um, and I'm curious if you feel like you, in a different way, but the same way, use photography or even in your brain scans and that kind of imagery to communicate science to people, if you're, if your part of that.
Adam Gazzaley [00:23:41] My first photomicroscopy was immunofluorescence as well. So I was trying to understand how neurons change as we get older using immunoflorescent dyes of different chemicals and different neurotransmitter receptors in the brain. And as my scientific career sort of evolved over the years, I went from microscopy to neuroimaging of MRI to also see the brain on a different scale. And which often has this element of sort of artistic rendering involved in it as well. So I've always been naturally inclined to science that involved visualization.
Speaker 1 [00:24:25] You know, the chicken and egg of tech and art, too, is one we're kind of fascinated by. Sometimes there's a technology that spurs artists into making a whole series of work, and sometimes there's art. By-graphique. Exactly, exactly. We'll get to that, we'll get that. So I'm curious how that works in your work. Both sides.
Adam Gazzaley [00:24:49] Yeah, technology is such a big part of my life, certainly from a career perspective. I use it in my photography, you know, always moving from analog to digital cameras was such a shift for every photographer and going through that transition and understanding the opportunity and also the limitations has been a big of my photographic journey in the laboratory. Every new technology holds promise to understand the brain in a unique way. They also have their own distinct limitations that you have to be aware of. So we use the latest technologies to both record brain activity but also record physiological signals from throughout the body. So we're very interested in integrated approaches, what we call multimodal biosensing. Can we use the latest sensors, but also artificial intelligence and machine learning and signal processing to make sense of the state that a human experiences in the moment, our level of stress, our mood, where our attention is, what our level of awareness is. I believe that is accessible to us now, but it is as much a technological problem as it is a scientific one. So it's always a question of when are you using technologies a little too early? Where you spend all of your time in the methods, this would be true for an artist or a scientist, the methods are fun. You could go down an entire road of just working on the methods themselves and the technologies, and there are many brilliant people that do that. I am more applied. I want to create art, I want create scientific discoveries. And so there's a sweet spot when a technology has reached a level of maturation that it's ready for application, and finding that is actually quite a challenge.
Speaker 1 [00:26:40] That's really interesting. I wanted to ask the cultural question about all this, in terms, again, about public perception of art and science. And this is asking you as a professor, as well, because we don't necessarily teach these things as one in the same.
Speaker 4 [00:26:55] Mm-hmm.
Speaker 1 [00:26:57] And how do you feel about that fact that we do separate art and science when, for a lot of human history, the da Vinci's of the world, but many, many, many others, sort of were one and the same. And you kind of seem to be that person as well.
Adam Gazzaley [00:27:14] Yeah, I do not think it is a good idea to separate art and science. They have differences. They have different methodologies. But even within art, there are many different methodologists. And within science, there different methodology. But they are more connected than they are different. And the creative approaches that are taken to understand and to appreciate and to share complex things are common across both of them.
Speaker 1 [00:27:42] Great. Nailed it. Do you apply that thinking in your work as a professor?
Adam Gazzaley [00:27:50] For sure. So I apply the thinking that art and science are connected all the time as a professor, and we do that at Neuroscape. So we have divisions of neuroscience and education and clinical. We have a psychedelics division. We also have an art division. A lot of where we're inspired are working with active artists, people that are excited about understanding how brain visualizations might create beautiful works of art, how that could be sort of reinterpreted as dance and other performances. So we are always excited to share the data we collect and the inspiration that we have from the brain with artists.
Speaker 1 [00:28:35] Tell me a little bit about neuro-skepticism.
Adam Gazzaley [00:28:37] Yeah, so NeuroScape is 15 years old. It evolved from my laboratory. And it is a research center at UCSF that is really designed to bridge what I view, and all of us here view, as a gap between neuroscience and technology to really lead to innovative solutions for brain dysfunction, and also improving brains of people that are healthy. So, as I described, we had... So we have these very long-standing tradition of relying on drugs to help people when they are suffering in the many ways that the mind does. But there is an incredible opportunity for technology to be a solution. And that is the main goal of NeuroScape. Can we use technology both to understand the brain in a richer way, to record it, to make real-time predictions about what is occurring in someone's brain that leads to their behavior? And can we build technologies that help improve brain function? So closed loop adaptive video games, non-invasive brain stimulation, sensory immersive technology. Even our work with psychedelics, which has shown a lot of promise in mental health, is integrating psychedelics with sensory immersive technology, so we can create a set and setting to lead to safer and more personalized psychedelic treatments. So pretty much everything we do is trying to... Take technology and use it as tools to help the brain and that's all based in neuroscience.
Speaker 1 [00:30:13] That's one of the ways the artists on your team are contributing to all of this tech innovation.
Adam Gazzaley [00:30:19] And one of the fundamental ways that we work with artists that contribute to our technology innovation at Neuroscape is game development. And beyond game development, experience creation. Not all of the technology and experiences that we create are interactive games. We also build, we're building right now working with Louis Schwarzberg, who is a wonderful videographer, and he's far as a musician to build a nature experience. That will be digitally delivered to create awe and wonder and understand how nature can help improve brain function. Where we spend a tremendous amount of time is using art to create environments that are then presented in video games. And these might be in virtual reality where you're navigating complex environment to improve your memory. They may be. In a mobile device, such as what we've done with Endeavor, where you're navigating down a river and collecting these items and avoiding these obstacles to improve attention abilities.
Speaker 1 [00:31:23] And someone whose name has already been invoked, Rafiq, one of my favorite people that we've talked to on this project. You are, of course, collaborating with him on something, and I'd love to hear a little bit about what that is, if you could talk about it. Thank you, everyone. Thank you!
Adam Gazzaley [00:31:41] Yeah, I think Rafik is a brilliant artist. We have a lot in common, the use of technology. New technologies to create new science and new art is a very common interest of ours. I'm a big fan of his as a viewer of his art. And we've worked together for many years to try to think about creative ways of collecting data, neural and other physiological data. That could then be used in his artistic expressions. And that's how we first met, what projects like that, especially EEG recordings that he has used in art pieces. Most recently, we're interested in how we can record brain activity as well as physiological responses when people are viewing his art, a lot of his machine learning art. The hope is that that data will have some insights into the emotional and neural responses that someone has when viewing this particular type of artwork, but also can that data then be used to generate art so you get this sort of circle, this closed loop, which is really intriguing to us, both scientifically and artistically.
Speaker 1 [00:32:57] And this is something of a brass tacks question, but are you, uh, are you going to be doing this at MoMA soon or where is this?
Adam Gazzaley [00:33:04] We have meetings all planned in the coming weeks to discuss the details of what we'll collect in the Museum of Modern Art in New York as people engage in these artistic journeys through Rafik's work. So that is the plan for the MoMA project, and that's off and running. There's always the details, what exactly we're recording, how we're going to record, what interpretations can we reach or can't we reach. That's the phase that we're in right now.
Speaker 1 [00:33:35] As a side note to flag, we're very interested in knowing more about when that might happen. Sure, sure.
Adam Gazzaley [00:33:41] I think I have a call this week actually, Thursday I'm pretty sure.
Speaker 1 [00:33:45] We'll be reminding you about this even if you don't. You know, we did talk to, I don't know if you're aware of Taylor Kuhn, another neuroscientist. You know we spoke to him about Rafik's work, about generative art, and he had found, I don't want you, I want to, as colleagues and professionals, I know what you have to comment on somebody else's work specifically, but he did find in his study that comparing uh... Nature photos as a data set run through an algorithm to create generative art based on it had a significant healing effect as compared to just the nature photos by itself and i'm curious as you enter a collaboration with Rafiq you have hypotheses and things you hope that you're going to see or approve uh... What you think if you could first of all two-parter tell me what generative Art is. Why this is something that's interesting to you as a potential healer.
Adam Gazzaley [00:34:50] Yeah, generative art is the creation of unique art forms using machine learning algorithms that have already sampled a large array of art, as complicated as we know that has become, to create something new that was not created by a human being. And I find it very interesting. I find a very challenging in many ways, but it does allow the creation of new perspectives and new perceptions. And that is of great interest to me as a scientist, especially one that has directed their attention to creating new healing tools. What does it mean to view nature in an incredibly unique manner? This is still largely unknown, but I think a really interesting research question.
Speaker 1 [00:35:35] I mean, as you're going to do this project with Rafique and hopefully test people's reactions, the skeptic, not me, but somebody, might say, well, it's big and beautiful. I mean of course you're gonna sit and watch something marvelous, like a lava lamp kind of thing. But is your sense that there's something more to it, even anecdotally, you're a photographer, is there something else there?
Adam Gazzaley [00:35:59] Yeah, my sense as a photographer and a viewer of generative art works is that there is something unique about it that is particularly captivating compared to other art. But that is, you know, an anecdotal and of one statement. It does capture my imagination. Part of it is knowing that is being created by a non-human is fascinating. And even the type of work that is being created, you know, it all depends on the artwork. There's a lot of roles of creatives like Rafik in the generation of that, as opposed to using an online tool where you put in a text query and you get something back. But it's, you know it's just a new frontier and it's really interesting.
Speaker 1 [00:36:48] Let me ask you in a different way, too. This camera is just weird to go on. Oh, OK.
Speaker 5 [00:36:54] Is it off, off, or is it just needed?
Speaker 6 [00:36:59] Does it need to cool down?
Speaker 5 [00:37:02] It shouldn't, it shouldn't. That's the way to do it.
Speaker 6 [00:37:12] Well, fine. Excuse me.
Speaker 5 [00:37:16] I think it went off at the beginning of that last one. OK. That's OK. So Lucas has been doing that? Yeah. It might be a new thing. I don't know.
Speaker 1 [00:37:31] We're keeping an eye on the clock too, so I just want to follow up on that idea of extended to art in general, so not even just generative, but do you think the effect that art has on people is significant, is that real, in terms of a healing benefit?
Adam Gazzaley [00:37:47] The effect that art has on people in terms of healing, I would say, falls into the larger category that experiences have in terms healing. And it will vary tremendously from individual to individual. And art, music, even exposure to nature itself influences the brain. And how we create experiences to maximize its potential to heal is my main question. And that's going to be complicated because, as I said, it very much varies from person to person and how it's applied. It depends on their own brain makeup and their own previous experiences. But there's something that has been missed here that's really powerful. This is entertaining for sure, but it's more than that. This can have transformative impacts on people and change the rest of their lives.
Speaker 1 [00:38:41] We have a story on a roboticist named Pindar Van Orman who has created robot paintings via AI and there's a lot more to it. But he had a line about creativity and that his theory was that creativity really is just an algorithm. And I'm curious as, we're not going down the AI rabbit hole. Thank you.
Speaker 4 [00:39:05] At all this time.
Speaker 1 [00:39:08] As someone who studies the brain and is trying to understand it every day, what is your sense about creativity in terms of understanding it, replicating it, creating something that can do it the way we do it? Is it that simple? Do you think it's just an algorithm?
Adam Gazzaley [00:39:26] If it's an algorithm, it's one that we certainly do not understand. If creativity is an algorithm it's that we don't understand all the variables and it would be an incredibly complex one. There are things that are technically interpretable or predictable, but are not in a practical way. For example, a coin flip. A coin flip we view as random, but it's really not random. If you knew. Every aspect of the force being applied and the wind and all the elements, you could predict with 100% certainty what it's going to land at. But it's fair to call it random because we don't have that data and that capabilities. Maybe it's the same with creativity. Maybe from a theoretical perspective it is possible to think of it as an algorithm. But there are so many variables that go into creating it that it's almost not relevant from a practical perspective.
Speaker 1 [00:40:24] That's a great answer. And then I have one pick up, and then I want to ask Marion, I'm sure she has a few thoughts to add, but we, I know music is not your sort of area of study, but we.
Adam Gazzaley [00:40:36] But we do work with music.
Speaker 1 [00:40:38] You do? Well, perfect, because we have a lot to say on drumming, where we're going to have a great drummer named Will Kelp.
Adam Gazzaley [00:40:44] Yeah, and we work with Drummer 2. We work with Mickey Hart from The Grateful Dead for many, many years.
Speaker 1 [00:40:50] What is it about a drummer's mind as a comparison to other musicians?
Adam Gazzaley [00:40:56] Yeah, well, we have a lot of activities at Neuroscape that are intersections with the music world. We've worked for many years with Mickey Hart, the drummer from The Grateful Dead, to design, and now we have research papers on the role of rhythm in improving cognition, that rhythm can improve memory abilities. We have a paper working on now that becoming more rhythmically capable through training can lead to improvement. Even in school performance metrics, we're working on that now. Our brains work on rhythms, they're rhythmic machines. When we record brain activities, one of the clearest things that we see are rhythms across many, many different frequencies, alpha, beta, gamma, people probably familiar with these terms. These are rhythms in the brain. Our brain. Operates on rhythms, our whole body and nature has rhythms. And so the idea is that if you engage in rhythms, either passively or through creation of music or synchronized with rhythms, you can change your brain and improve its function. So that's something that we are studying actively, and it's reasonable to then hypothesize that drummers who have engaged in rhythm their whole lives professionally have very different brains because of that.
Speaker 1 [00:42:20] And it sounds like you're saying that it re-taps into something kind of primal.
Adam Gazzaley [00:42:24] Yeah, I think it tops it. Rhythm is foundational in physics, in biology. It is present throughout nature and it's not subtle, it's there. It's through our cycles of life, menstrual cycles, circadian rhythms. As I mentioned, our brain uses rhythms, also uses rhythms to communicate between brain areas. We see it everywhere we look. And so it would be foolish to deny how fundamental it is to being human.
Speaker 6 [00:42:58] So you're still talking to Chris? These are all follow-ups in one way or another? Sounds good. With drumming, do you think drummers' brains are wired differently than other people?
Adam Gazzaley [00:43:12] Well, I think that drummers, by the very nature of having been so engaged in rhythmic creation throughout their lives, certainly have different brains than non-drummers. It's how the brain works. They have a very unique experience with rhythm, and rhythm is a fundamental aspect of how the brains work. So I'd say, yes, their brains are certainly different.
Speaker 6 [00:43:33] This is just a statement, if you agree with it. Do you see immunofluorescence and brainless microscopy as the latest in the long trajectory of art explaining science?
Adam Gazzaley [00:43:53] Immunofluorescence and microscopy have been around for decades, and they are still very powerful ways to both understand the brain and present it esthetically, and that field continues to advance, both artistically and scientifically. But there are many ways to understand the brand as well as to share it in a beautiful manner, including latest recording techniques to look at real-time brain activity, EEG, and other approaches. A lot of it is not just the recording of brain activity, but how we use things like machine learning to make sense of it and present it in a unique way.
Speaker 6 [00:44:36] What is it about fun that makes experiences, that makes the experiences stick?
Adam Gazzaley [00:44:44] Yeah, I tend to view fun as a core aspect of experiences that lead to valuable outcomes. It is not critical for it, it doesn't have to be there in order for experiences to have an enduring outcome. A matter of fact, many experiences lead to enduring outcomes like post-traumatic stress disorder that are negative with no fun at all. But fun is just a part of being alive. It's how we play ever since we're children. And I think trivializing it, thinking that it's superficial, is wrong. It's not the right move. We want to embrace that aspect of being human, that we enjoy fun, we enjoy play and games, and that it leads to deep engagement and immersion. And it's that level of immersion, and also the positive emotional tagging that goes along with fun, that really creates the opportunity for it to have meaningful, positive change.
Speaker 5 [00:45:43] Um...
Speaker 6 [00:45:44] So obvious.
Adam Gazzaley [00:45:45] I think so.
Speaker 6 [00:45:47] We're doing a story with a MIT engineering graduate who has a not-for-profit called STEM from Dance. And she uses dance to teach inner city girls, in particular, STEM subjects. And she said the same thing. Well, I knew I wanted to do this, but it had to be, there had to something fun. So what's the deal with scientists and music going to conventions? There's always a chamber concert, physicists and jazz. What's going on there?
Adam Gazzaley [00:46:25] Yeah, I think that scientists and musicians really enjoy interacting with one another. Every time I tell a group of people about my research, I could find the musician right away. They always have follow-up questions. I don't understand it completely, but the act of being a musician leads you to really think about the brain a lot and think about what the creative process is doing that you share with an audience. I think it's somewhat true for all artists. But there is a mutual attraction I have discovered.
Speaker 6 [00:47:00] Two other quick questions. So I don't know whether there's a scientific answer to this or an answer at all, but what is it about experiences across the board that transform the brain? Positive or negative?
Adam Gazzaley [00:47:18] So a fundamental aspect of how the brain work is through a phenomenon known as neuroplasticity. And this is one of the strongest areas of neuroscience for decades. It exists at all types of neuroscience. It exists in all types of neuroscience pursuits from people that study animal brains to people that study human brains. You could see it through a microscope. You could it through an MRI machine. And essentially the brain changes and adapts itself. In response to experience, as known as experience-dependent neuroplasticity. And that is how we learn, it's how we grow. There was a time that we thought that this neuroplisticity essentially ended after critical stages of development, then you just basically went downhill. We know that's not true anymore. Your brain is capable of neuroplatic responses throughout the lifespan, and that's something that we should be very grateful for and embrace, because we always have the capacity to learn.
Speaker 6 [00:48:18] So we've cast a fairly wide net on this project in terms of talking about art, science and creativity. So this is two things that we're working on. One is a story about food, about Indian Tali. I bet you had one even recently. And how the science of taste and the artistry of cooking come together. And the other is about roller coasters.
Speaker 8 [00:48:48] Tied together.
Speaker 6 [00:48:49] Yeah, I don't know if I can do that. Well, you're on the roller coaster and let's see what the brain does. But there are all of these aspects that I suspect people would be surprised that they involve both art and science.
Adam Gazzaley [00:49:09] I don't know if I could take that one. I think I'll have to digest that. Good. There it is. Good.
Speaker 6 [00:49:16] All right, and what do you hope to accomplish at MoMA with that project?
Adam Gazzaley [00:49:21] I would say our goals at MoMA are really trying to advance the ability to record meaningful data outside of a laboratory. It's really a very, very difficult thing to do. Labs are designed to record data. They're controlled. They have expensive equipment. Everything is under the scientific design process. In the real world, it's quite different. I am very intrigued by that and doing it with Rafiq on this particular... Art-science combination is really exciting.
Speaker 8 [00:49:58] Let me ask you something here, we're talking about Western science and technology that's been developed here in our culture. Are there cultures you could think of that could be quite resistant, either through not literally understanding technology application or just like their thought processes are so counter to ours that it would be a tough sell, even though they're human beings? Yeah.
Adam Gazzaley [00:50:24] Yeah, I tend to find that when I travel around the world, which I do regularly, that people are pretty similar, more similar than they are different, and that this topic of using art to create experiences to improve brain function is pretty well received everywhere I've been. I think it has an intuitive appeal to people. You know, in some ways, experience has been the oldest medicine that we have. Meditation and mindfulness practices, art and dance. Are tools that we've always used in order to elevate ourselves and even to help release us from struggle and suffering. So I think it's very intuitive to people that this is the future and that it is a perfect use of technology to really act at that interface.
Speaker 6 [00:51:14] So why not study, why not studying this?
Speaker 1 [00:51:17] We're a few minutes from noon, by the way. Okay, yeah.
Speaker 6 [00:51:18] Why not study the brain of a bunch of kids looking at Surat's Sunday in the Park in Chicago? Why Rafiq? Why not Michelangelo? Why not...
Adam Gazzaley [00:51:33] Yeah, a lot of this is really generated by Rafik's curiosity. He has an intrinsic passion for creation, but also science, and also understanding. So driven by that and our relationship of the interface of science and art, it seemed like a really great place to start this process of rigorous recordings. In non-laboratory settings and also the interface of art and science.
