05. PHIL IS FOUND
LISTEN ON
Eva has followed the story to Georgia, USA and tracked Dr. Phil down at his neurological practice. In the back of the surgery and after his original patients have left, Dr. Phil carries out some mind-blowing experiments - on himself, and others.
Brain interfacing is a bold new frontier for our ability to understand our minds - and in turn, help us to communicate.
If you’ve not listened to Episode 4: FINDING PHIL, where Eva, umm…tries to find Dr. Phil: https://www.thelifecyclepodcast.com/episodes/2019/11/8/finding-phil
Strap yourselves in and read the 2016 WIRED article written by Daniel Engber about Dr. Kennedy, “The Neurologist Who Hacked His Brain And Almost Lost His Mind.”: https://www.wired.com/2016/01/phil-kennedy-mind-control-computer/
To get an idea of what it’s like to be locked in and the power of communication, check out the incredible story of Simon Fitzmaurice who suffered from MND: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1m6ZPzGGhAE
As well as the movie The Diving Bell and Butterfly:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eawGsbRLzHQ
Head on over to Dr. Phil Kennedy's own website, Neural Signals, here.
05. PHIL IS FOUND
// Footsteps. A doorbell rings.
PHIL KENNEDY: Hey, good morning.
EVA KELLEY: Hi, I’m Eva.
PK: Eva, nice to meet you. I’m Phil. I hope you weren’t waiting too long.
EK: No, I was perfectly on time, funnily enough.
PK: Did you drive?
EK: Yeah, I took an Uber. I thought I might be a little late but then it was exactly …
JINGLE
// ROBOT VOICE »How are you. I love you. How are you. I love you.«
EK: We love you, too, robot voice. What you just heard is an audio recording from 1953, produced by Swedish professor Gunnar Fant. Professor Fant invented a machine able to create vowel sounds. So, a synthetic vowel machine, or a very bulky speech prosthesis. It kind of looks like a large rectangular refrigerator with lots of buttons and dials on it. Set up next to it, is a kind of sheet. Using a handheld receiver, Fant moves his hand over this sheet. As he moves it, the machine produces sounds. If he moves it very quickly, he can produce certain vowels. I haven’t seen video footage of this in action, and I’m not sure if there even is any, but there is a photograph of Fant and his creation, him proudly standing next to it. I imagine it to have looked like a choreographed game of air hockey. Fant, the Swedish professor, gracefully gliding his hand over his invention, biting his lip in concentration, only to tell us:
// ROBOT VOICE »How are you. I love you.«
EK: This recording was first played to me in Atlanta, Georgia, when I visited the legendary Dr. Phil Kennedy at his practice. “Gunnar Fant, he got us all going,” Kennedy told me. Phil Kennedy, remember? The neurologist who hacked into his own brain. The doctor who has devoted his life to developing a functional speech prosthesis for locked in patients. Going so far as to implant himself in the name of science. After being completely fascinated by Dr. Kennedy’s life and career, and the bizarrely dangerous choices he made throughout it, all I wanted was to speak to him in person.
If you haven’t already, I suggest you listen to episode #4 of this podcast, Finding Phil, before you continue listening to this one, episode #5, Phil is Found. In the previous episode, episode #4, we go into depth about Dr. Kennedy’s journey, his work, his implants, and how he ended up with half a brain implant consisting of a glass cone and some wires lodged underneath his skull.
What follows is the recording of my meeting with Phil Kennedy. I spent about four hours with him in his practice, set in a woody forested area right off the highway to Atlanta. Dr. Kennedy is very tall, and quite handsome. He wears his graying hair in a part that covers the dent he has in his skull from his self-induced brain surgery. He seems very patient and calm. During my visit, he told me about his former patients, the experiments he did with them, his journey to Belize where he had his own brain implanted after the FDA revoked its approval of his implantation on humans, the aftermath and side effects of his dicey operation, and how the future of brain implants might create a new super elite. He also showed me video footage – very bloody video footage – of his own brain operation, and videos of his experiments with Erik Ramsey, a former patient of his who suffered a brain stem stroke when he was sixteen and who, under Kennedy’s supervision, was able to produce a few vowel sounds by using a voice synthesizer controlled by an implant deep in his brain. But first, Dr. Kennedy told me about his sci-fi novel, 2051: Alpha O Royal, which he self-published in 2012. In it, the main character, Alpha, an Irish neurologist, just like Dr. Phil Kennedy, has his brain extracted and inserted into a two-foot tall life support robot. But this doesn’t stop it from being romantic.
This is Episode 5 of the podcast: PHIL IS FOUND.
PHIL KENNEDY: I wrote a small novel, 2051.
EVA KELLEY: I was going to ask you about that.
PK: Did you read it?
EK: I didn’t read it, no.
PK: It’s kind of like what you are saying, actually. They travel off to find another planet. It gets a little complicated, but basically, this guy is like a hundred years old, Alpha, is in a machine as just his brain, but he interacts. It’s all possible today, actually. Anyway, part of the deal is that he has to go and discover another planet so that everybody can move there, because they are getting attacked by the Chinese. The book opens with them making love, but he does it holographically. He turns himself into a hologram, and she has a suit on he can interact with, so she can feel him.
EK: Who is she?
PK: His lover, his wife. Anyways, she decides she has to go with him. So she has her brain extracted and put into a machine. They’re all doing that. It’s a center for doing it. All the younger people are doing this, having their brains extracted, putting them into machines to travel. Did I write that? That is crazy.
EK: But why can’t they travel with their bodies?
PK: To outer space? Because you can’t. Nobody can. We know that already. There is so much ionization radiation out there. It’s just not on. You have to find another way. Freeze them or something. But the idea is to go to the other planet and then regenerate their bodies. That is the plan for everybody. In the end, the Chinese get them. But they’re very nice to them. And they bring them back.
But the life support robot is just a machine. It’s just a machine that can move around, and it provides sustenance for the brain – oxygen – and then it takes out the metabolites. It is self-sufficient. Which, again, is all possible. The only problem would be infection.
EK: It is possible for us to take out our brains and put them in a machine?
PK: Well, it is theoretically possible. We could try it. Don’t try it at home.
EK: Are you planning on trying this?
PK: No, no … no way. It is theoretically possible to maintain a brain functioning. If you supply the oxygenated blood and supply sugar to the brain. All it lives on is sugar. Extract it to the veins and there you go.
EK: Really, all it lives on is sugar?
PK: They say, just a few spoons full of sugar every day is enough. Isn’t that crazy?
EK: That’s where Mary Poppins gets it from.
PK: Maybe. But yes, glucose is the main form for the brain, that is why, if you feel tired and you take a little bit of sugar, it perks you up.
EK: Our brains are the future. Not just in a literal sense, but in a financial sense, too. Entrepreneurs like Elon Musk and Bryan Johnson are working on methods to fuse humans with artificial intelligence, rendering us very much enhanced. One of Elon Musk’s companies for example, called Neuralink, is developing something called neural lace, which is basically an ultra thin mesh wrapping around the brain as a web of electrodes, and would then be able to monitor brain function. Bryan Johnson’s company Kernel is also working on ways to allow humans to interface and expand human cognition by facilitating the energy our brains emit. Johnson’s company kernel is creating non-invasive technology to achieve this. It’s called a non-invasive mind/body/machine interface, or MBMI. I asked Dr. Kennedy how his approach differed from the likes of Musk, and if he thought theirs would work.
PK: People like Elon Musk and others are working on making these electrodes to cover the whole brain. Of course, they are not going to work, because the problem is that they forgot the brain doesn’t like electrodes. It doesn’t like anything interfering with it. So it’s going to form a scar and get rid of them. Because once it grows in and through it, then it can’t reject it. It does not form any scarring either, which is critical.
For speech, of course, at a conversational rate, the way we are speaking now, my brain is buzzing trying to speak to you. But if you have a device where you have to click on a letter or a word, that’s real slow, that’s not speech. It’s too slow to be called conversational speech. It is communication. But it is not speech. For that, you need to either use ECoG or use single unit recording like we did, because the brain is trainable, believe it or not.
EK: And sorry, what is ECoG?
PK: ECoG is just tiny electrodes that lay on the surface of the brain. It stands for electrocorticography. Which is to go to that small area of the brain, more than an inch, just above the ear. That is the part of the brain that controls the articulators. The tongue, the lips, the jaw, and so on, and facial expression as well. For the research you do a functional MRI, like I did with Erik and others. You have them speak in their head and look at the activity in the functional MRI to see what areas light up.
EK: What I have difficulty grasping is, if you say that a person thinks something, and then you see the activity on the screen where the brain is flaring. How exact is that then supposed to be? If you would think, “I am drinking water,” would you recognize all those words? Or what exactly is it?
PK: No, with functional MRIs you have the person say something in their head, but they actually have to say it, they cannot just think of drinking water. You have to say, I am thirsty. I want water. You say that and that’s when you see an area light up. Then you know where to go. It is not a question of imagining something and picking it up. It is a question of speech, of saying something, and we pick up the activity either from the surface or deep, related to what they are trying to say. It’s the pattern of firing of the single units. For one phrase it will be one pattern, for another phrase, a different pattern. Each word has a certain pattern of firing in the brain. We are picking up patterns. That is what deep learning computers are very good at. If you give them enough data, they will pick it up.
EK: What would the speech prosthesis look like exactly in a physical sense?
PK: Nothing. It would look like nothing at all. Our plan is to place it on the chest. So you put an amplifier up there under your scalp to amplify all the data and then just bring it down through a wire into the chest, where you could power it up and receive the signals out. It would be cosmetically very acceptable, because you could put it into a chest pocket or shirt pocket to cover the device, and no one would see it. And then from there, you would send that out, again wirelessly, to the laptop, or to a receiver to plug into the laptop which would then have the software and the speakers on it.
EK: And so, there would be something on your scalp?
PK: No the amplifier would be underneath the scalp and then the wire is kind of like what they use for deep brain stimulation. You bring it down to your chest pocket, power it up wirelessly, and then you could transmit that wirelessly to a receiver. The receiver would go into the laptop.
EK: When would that be possible?
PK: You have to get FDA permission in this country. We are trying to modify the amplifier available right now. It has been approved for animals and will be approved for humans. We are just going to ride along with that one, train a few neurosurgeons, implant it in a few big animals, like sheep or something. Once that is done, then we should get FDA permission, again another year or so, and once that is done, we start implanting again. It is going to take a few years before I can implant something again.
EK: Ok, but just a couple of years.
PK: More than a couple of years.
EK: A decade.
PK: Three or four. Hopefully not a decade. Oh please! Anyway, it would be a speech prosthesis, so it would help people who can’t speak to speak. As long as we have the cortex ... This works as long as their cortex is still intact.
EK: Would you say that you, Elon Musk, and Bryan Johnson are all working toward the same goal?
PK: No, they are not working towards developing near-conversational-level-speech. In a sense, yes, we are trying to do more communication, and lots of other people, too, by the way. They are really going for a commercially applicable communication device. They have money, they invest it, and they want more money. I have no money, but am trying to work it out, and I probably won’t ever have any. I don’t really care if I have any, as long as I get it done.
I am from Ireland, a small town in the middle of Ireland called Cashel, very famous and very old. Fifteen hundred years at least. I grew up there. My father is a surgeon. He worked in a little hospital. Then we moved to Limerick. One of the influences on me was when I went to a summer camp one time for handicapped people, people with physical disabilities. There, some were paralyzed, or they had cerebral palsy. That made a big impression on me. One guy was totally paralyzed. I can’t remember the disease he had. He could smoke a pipe, he could speak, but he could not move. He was not locked in entirely. But, we did a study with this [other] guy on the axolotl. The salamander.
EK: The weird looking fish-like animal.
PK: Yes, they are like salamanders. If you cut off their leg, they will regrow the darn thing. It’s amazing. We did a study in regeneration and realized that it is possible to regenerate. What is their secret?
EK: What is their secret? The axolotl, a salamander native to Mexico, has been a mystery to scientists for many, many years. Research now shows that the axolotl’s connective tissue cells develop stem cell-like properties that allow it to regenerate its legs. After his study on axolotls, Kennedy read about a group in Montreal who had taken little slivers of sciatic nerve – that’s the largest and widest single nerve in the human body, the one running from the lower back all the way down to the foot – they put it in a rat brain. Areas of the brain that were damaged grew into the sciatic nerve and formed new bridges. In these new bridges, the scientists implanted little electrodes. They then tried to record the rat’s brain activity. They did pick up signals, but the electrodes weren’t permanent. So Kennedy thought to himself: Are they doing it the wrong way around? What he did was, he took a piece of sciatic nerve, inserted it into a tiny glass cone, and implanted that tiny cone into the rat brain. Then he added a couple of wires, and voilà, he could record the tissue that was regrowing in the rat’s brain. It stayed put. It was permanent.
PK: So I realized, this thing works. This is permanent. You get the tissue to grow through, and it stays there. The neat thing was that I implanted the vibrissa …
EK: What’s its vibrissa?
PK:The whiskers. so the part of the brain in the rat related to its vibrissa, the whiskers. You could deflect the whiskers on one side or the other, and you’d get no activity on one side, get some activity from certain whiskers, and then others you didn’t get any activity. So I played with that system for a while and it showed that it stays there, it does not fade out, does not disappear. That was hugely important, and I was telling everybody and they were saying: »Oh yeah? So what? We have our own electrodes.« You put tiny needles into the brain, the brain says, I don’t like that. The brain is always moving. As I am speaking, with my heartbeat, my breathing, the brain is moving slightly. And as it moves, the signals fluctuate. But when I started to implant the rats, I knew. Implanting the rats and seeing that, wow that’s it, this is the answer to chronic recording. There are other alternatives and spin-offs from it, but you have to grow the brain into the electrode. Trying to put the electrode into the brain ain’t gonna work.
EK: You mentioned your sci-fi novel already, but your own career also has a lot of sci-fi elements to it.
PK: That’s not a nice thing to say about my career.
EK: I would say so. I mean it as a compliment.
PK: I know you do, just teasing you. Some of the people I knew or met at the meeting every year were very friendly and said: “We are doing this and we are doing it your way.” Okay, do it my way. So, that was a big deal. Then we went on to implant monkeys for behavioral, just to show it really does work. And I separated out the single units. Then the FDA gave us permission to implant humans, so the first one, that was in 1996, Marjory, then 1998, and then a few more. Then Erik in 2004.
I will just tell you a little bit about Erik. We implanted him with the idea of picking up signals related to his articulators, so related to his tongue, his lips, his jaw, and see if we could figure out from there how to speak. You can’t just put electrodes in and say: What word is this going to be? This does not make any sense. Now we are mapping the speech areas with ECoG, but back then we didn’t know. It was a different way of approaching it.
I met Erik when he was 22. He was sixteen when he had the brain stem stroke in an accident. It damaged his brain stem, so he could not move at all, maybe his face a bit, even his eyes were divergent. But he could move his eyelids up and down for yes or no. That was about all he could do.
EK: And it was because of an accident he had.
PK: Yes. What happened was: when you flip like that, the brain moves suddenly, and in the back of the brain, just above the cerebellum, there is sort of a tent, the tentorium cerebelli, which is very stiff. And the blood vessel would mash against that and damage the inside of the vessel, the inner lining. When that happens – a dissection – then it clots up. So it clotted up. They thought he was in a coma, but he wasn’t. He was actually moving his eyes and looking around. You don’t do that if you are in a coma. So they realized he wasn’t in a coma at all. He was just locked in.
Then we implanted him. The problem is, later his brain stem stroke spread to the parts of the brain controlling his autonomic system, in other words: his blood pressure and pulse. Any time he would try to sit up or lift his head up, he would just pass out. That is what he did the last two years, and then he died. I am not sure, he just died. That was at the end of his life. For the first eight years that wasn’t a problem. And he could sit up in his wheelchair.
The problem in the study with Erik was that Erik couldn’t speak. With someone who can’t speak, we don’t know the difference in what the signals are like when they speak and when they do not speak. So we needed a volunteer who could speak, and then speak silently in their head. I looked around – and I said: Oops, it is me! So I decided I was going to dare to do that.
EK: So you came to that conclusion because…?
PK: Because after we did a little trial with Erik, when we asked him, were you trying to say that word in your head, or were you trying to say that sound, and he would turn his eyes up for “yes,” or sometimes down for “no,” you could never really be sure if he was saying it, or when he starts saying it exactly. So we needed to have somebody who could speak. I thought about ALS patients. Early on, they can still speak, and then they lose it as they become more paralyzed. So I thought you could transition them. But if you implant somebody who can still speak a bit and then they lose it all because of the implant, they won’t be happy and the experiment will fail. So I decided better not to do that.
// PLAYBACK RUNS IN THE BACKGROUND
EK: So this is Erik, Erik Ramsey?
PK: Yes, Erik Ramsey. I’d really like to show you this one.
EK: So there is »heat«–
PK: »Heat« is like »eeh«, and then »hoot« is »ooh«, »hut« is »ah« and he hangs around the middle, where it is like »eh«, »ah«, »eh«, »eeh«… so a progression of vowels. Let me explain that. This first.
So the computer goes to »heat« – we used words. Erik makes a mistake here.
EK: Dr. Kennedy is now showing me a video recording of an experiment with Erik Ramsey. I see Erik positioned in front of a screen. On the screen, there are little circles scattered randomly. There is a 2D format frequency playing, which means that Erik’s cursor is on the screen and he has control of it. In every circle, a vowel is written out. So »eh«, »oh«, »ah«, and so on. We hear it *ding*, and the computer starts the session off by saying one of these vowels. For example »eh«. Then the corresponding circle on the screen lights up in green. Now Erik moves the cursor with the power of his brain signals to the correct circle. When the cursor glides over a vowel, it makes the vowel sound. So Ramsey gets an audible confirmation of where he has moved the cursor. Let’s listen.
// PLAYBACK RUNS IN THE BACKGROUND
EK: And it always starts with »ah«? It always starts with the »hut« one?
PK: Right. It starts at the center. And the computer tells him where to go. And he could do it. The problem was that, if you’re trying to use this as a speech prosthesis, it’s too slow. It’s really slow. But it proves that he could control the cursor and move it around.
EK: Sadly, Erik Ramsey’s health declined, and the device in his brain declined as well. Slowly but surely, Kennedy’s dream started to slip from his grip. His grants weren’t renewed, he had to let his staff go and hire temporary help. To top it off, his longtime partner Dr. Bakay passed away. And then the FDA revoked its approval for Kennedy’s implants on humans. In order to regain approval, he had to prove that his work was safe. But without funding there was no way. He was stuck. All he needed was another patient who could ideally still speak, so he could keep pushing his grand idea. So, as any brilliant, or mad, scientist would do, he decided to experiment on himself and implant his brain with his own device. This was in 2014.
PK: First of all I had permission to implant the patients. And then the FDA came and said, you have to tell us what is in there. So I told them, and they said, now you have to prove that that is safe, that it doesn’t do this, doesn’t do that. If they continue to give me grief, I will just have to go abroad.
EK: Just back to Belize.
PK: Back to Belize. See, I’ve done the implant in forty two rats. I have worked with Dr. Bakay, the neurosurgeon, to do it in eight monkeys, and we’ve done five patients after this, plus variations on their electrodes. I knew all the side effects, and all the potential things that can go wrong. I prepared myself very carefully. I was ready for that if I could never speak again. As it turns out, for five days, I could not speak after the surgery. But I knew it would most likely come back, because it was just brain swelling.
EK: But didn’t anyone say to you that you’re crazy?
PK: Yes, they all did. My family didn’t like the whole thing. My girlfriend at the time was hysterical. And I said, look, it’s my brain, I am not going to hurt you. And if I hurt it, it’s my business. No one is going to tell me what to do. You have to have a persistence and stubbornness about it, not listen to everybody’s criticism … of which there was a considerable amount. I had a lot of side effects from the surgery. I couldn’t speak for five days, I had a little tremor in my jaw – it was a partial seizure, and they gave me medication that got rid of that. I was very exhausted after, it was amazing. The brain swelling, you just lay there. I watched the world cup soccer in Spanish the whole time. And I can’t remember anything about it.
I knew there could be side effects. We put four electrodes in, closely together, six millimetres apart. Which I knew would probably cause swelling, because that’s pretty close. But it got better. I knew it would. I wasn’t depressed about it. I was anxious a bit, to admit that, but I wasn’t depressed about it, because I knew it would get better.
EK: That was the second operation?
PK: Yes, in October. First it was July, then October. First of all, I had four electrodes, and they had four wires, so sixteen wires, but it recorded in pairs. That would be eight pairs. But we could only put in three. The problem is they wouldn’t fit, there was no space. So that was disappointing. I was hoping that we could externalize it and do the recording.
EK: You could externalize it?
PK: Yes, have the connectors come out to the skin. That is routinely done.
EK: That’s what you were hoping for.
PK: Yes. But the neurosurgeon said, “no!” They didn’t want to do it.
EK: You would have had wires come out of your head?
PK: Well, temporarily. No, you would have little connectors and you just connect amplifiers in there, and then you disconnect them when you leave the lab.
EK: Would you cover them with a hat?
PK: Oh yes. You would have to be super careful. You would have to cover them with bandages and antibiotics and everything. You don’t want to get an infection in there. As it turns out, the connectors were very bulky, the electronics were bulky, and the incision would not fully close. To my friend, the neurosurgeon, I said: “Come on, you have to sew it up!” So he sewed it up. He said, “I am taking these out,” and I said, “Not yet!” We played this game for about three weeks. I got loads and loads of data. Then I said, “Ok, you can take it out.” I gave in. What he did was, he opened it all up and took out all the electronics, took out the electrodes, and just cut the wires, so the actual tips of the electrodes are still in there. But there was no infection.
EK: So you still have the wires …
PK: I just have the glass tips with a tiny bit of wire sticking out of them in there.
EK: How many?
PK: Four. But I can get through TCA [TSA] at the airport, no problem.
PK: You’d be horrified by the surgery I guess?
EK: Oh no, I’d love to see the surgery!
PK: Ok. Sure? (Dr. Kennedy starts showing images.)
EK: Huh! Oh my god. Is that your brain?
PK: This one is yeah. Don’t be too horrified.
EK: Really?
PK: Yeah. Yeah. So. It’s probably too horrifying. Are you ok? (EVA utters a breathy Wooooow) It can be disgusting.
EK: That’s really bloody. No, it’s ok. But it’s very bloody.
PK: This is here is the temporal lobe, just above my ear. Then there is this vein, the sulcus, a big vein in that. That small area is the articulatory speech cortex. Now, you can see, there is an inch, just a little bit more than an inch in that area. That’s the area we target.
EK: So this is right over your ear?
PK: Yes. If you put about that much of your finger above your ear, it’s right over the ear.
EK: Yeah I can see the scar, also.
PK: It’s pretty gory, but that’s just neurosurgery.
EK: Is this the power coil or what is this, the wire?
PK: This is a gold wire.
EK: That looks so bizarre with the little wire coming out of it. It’s almost pretty. This gold little thing coming out of… I think it would be almost more shocking if it was further away, because this is so abstract. If I could see your entire head, it would probably be a lot more shocking.
PK: Do you want to see the electrode implantation?
EK: Sure, yeah.
EK: You’re hearing my reaction to the stills of the video of Kennedy’s brain surgery. These are just photographs. I had never seen a real life brain. Instead, surprisingly actually, I realized that up until this point, I’d only ever seen plastic models or renderings, or maybe a fake one in a gory movie scene. And now I was looking at the brain of the guy sitting next to me.
EK: So your brain operation video –
PK: It will probably disgust you when you look at it. (Dr. Kennedy starts the video, audible bone cutting sounds.) So that tiny knife is used for iridectomies. And he is really close to the blood vessels. He is making an incision in my poor little brain.
EK: Oh my god. Oh that’s a tiny little knife.
PK: It’s very tiny. That’s the sucker. The knife is 3mm. He’s got very steady hands, thank goodness.
EK: I’m now watching the actual footage of Phil Kennedy’s brain operation. The camera zoomed in very close to his skull, so it’s not as gory as it could be. The surgeon, Joel Cervantes, Belize’s first neurosurgeon, is pushing tiny gold wires into Kennedy’s brain which are very easily swallowed by the jelly that is the brain. You can hear people in the background chatter a little bit, comment here and there, there is some music, even. There is one part that made my blood leave my body every time I saw it. We watched it a couple of times. When these huge tweezers – they are called forceps – get so close to the brain that it’s really just a matter of millimeters.
EK: And you made these electrodes here and brought them with you?
PK: I made them over here. So he’ll push it in, until this little shelf here. He’s not allowed to go further than that. That gives a guide with how far to put it in.
EK: Oh god. And this is still in your brain?
PK: Yeah. They cut the wires here and left the electrode in – oh no, don’t do that! I wouldn’t do that. But he did it and it worked.
EK: That he pulls it off?
PK: No. He’s placed it down. He wants to–
EK: Oh god, it’s so close to – these are giant tweezers!
PK: Those scissors, yeah, they want to make a little… (sawing sounds) Should’ve done that first.
EK: My god. If your hand slipped! (Someone in the recording comments »yeah, that’s going good, forty five right there.«)
Wow. It really is surprisingly shiny, the brain. I don’t think I’ve ever seen a brain like this.
PK: There is fluid on it.
EK: Looks like jelly.
PK: It is.
EK: But with the tweezers, that was very close. Is that normal?
PK: Yeah. They do whatever they need to do, these neurosurgeons. They are crazy people – no, he’s a very good surgeon.
EK: Would you say that this is the craziest thing you’ve ever done?
PK: I don’t consider it crazy at all, actually, I consider it logical. It was putting myself at risk, but it is me, not somebody else at risk. So I don’t actually consider it crazy, I consider it a logical thing I had to do. If you want to push through research, then you have to push. There is no other way. You can’t just think about it. Thinking only goes so far. You have to do it. And that’s what I did. What you are really asking is what other crazy things have I done? No, that is not for this interview … but it was a bit far out.
EK: Were you scared when you woke up and you couldn’t speak?
PK: No. I was anxious about it. That’s not being scared, but I just said to myself: “Well, this is to be expected, and it will get better.” You’re also so exhausted. They just let me lie down, gave me the medication, let me watch tv.
EK: Sounds kind of nice.
PK: It was fine. It wasn’t that bad.
EK: Would you do it again?
PK: I wouldn’t be afraid to do it again, but I wouldn’t need to do it again, because what we found out was very important. I spent the next several years analyzing the data. We analyzed it the old-fashioned way. We looked at the firings of the single units, and looked for the patterns, and tried to say, this patterns means this and that pattern means that. And that part worked.
In the study at the time, I would sit there saying nothing, and then I would say a phrase ten times, and then I would say the phrase ten times in my head. We looked at the typical pattern and correlated the others to it. I have two other people using deep learning to decode the data.
EK: What is deep learning exactly?
PK: The computer can look at patterns of whatever kind of activity. They use that in the stock market to try to figure out what it is going to do next. Predictions. Deep learning is when you train the machine to detect a pattern, and then speak into it and the machine will say if it fits that pattern.
Look, you have a cell phone, right? We have already enhanced our brains by these devices.
Now, could we put that inside our brain? We could. Yes. If you had the thing implanted, then you could download information you need when you are in a conversation. Basically, a cellphone in your brain. The scary thing about that is if certain groups, either government or not government, acquire that technology, and make it just their own and give it to soldiers of some kind, you have a huge difference between those people and the rest of us. That is ethically unacceptable.
EK: So it would create a new elite?
PK: Yes, it would. You absolutely must avoid that. It is so ethically unacceptable to me that the way to avoid it is to simply make it available to everybody.
EK: How would you measure intellect if everyone had brain enhancements?
PK: I don’t think it would change the intellect. I think it would change our ability to know and do things rather than change our IQ.
EK: Do you think that there are people who already have this in their brain but we just do not know about it? They are secretly the most powerful people in the world?
PK: No. They’re not crazy enough for that.
EK: That’s for another sci-fi novel.
PK: That is conspiracy theories.
EK: Yeah. You are not into conspiracy theories.
How do you feel about the theme of the apocalypse? Or the end being near?
PK: I don’t believe that at all. Whatever, we will probably overheat the world or pollute it too much, but I’ll be dead and gone. No, I don’t see an end to the world. What I see, and I’ve said this probably many times, is that what we are doing is furthering the evolution of the human. I see this as evolution. It’s been predicted that AI, whether it’s in a robot or just AI in a computer of some kind, will equal and surpass human intelligence. It was predicted to be in 2040-something. So that’s why I called the book 2051. Could computers, AI totally take over and we’re just jettisoned? It’s theoretically possible, but I don’t think so. Certainly if we augment our own brains, we may even surpass computers, we may.
EK: So you don’t think we would be replaced by machines, you think we would merge with machines.
PK: Merge with machines, which we’re already doing. If you look at review articles showing how many prosthetics you can possibly get: you can replace your heart, your liver, your lungs, your ear, and you can add things. But that’s just physical add-ons. Intellectually, we have, like I was saying before, maybe these rich guys in California would think about this some more. I think they do, all these hacks that happen. There is no privacy. We just have to stop it. If your brain is connected directly to the cloud, what is to stop them hacking in and putting in, as you said, false information.
EK: They probably will. Or run ads. In your head.
PK: I hate ads!
EK: Do you consider yourself a dreamer type person or more a hard scientist?PK: Hard scientist. I have a good imagination. Reasonably good. But I don’t dream of the end of the world. I much prefer to do things. Dream of how to find solutions to the problems we have in the research. I work my way around them and think about how to solve a problem. How to raise money to do the research. I dream of all that. But I don’t … I guess there was a time when I wrote the book that I was dreaming more of the future. You gotta read it.
EVA KELLEY: So, John.
JOHN HOLTEN: You have definitely found Dr. Phil. I think all that’s left for us to do is read this novel he wrote. Like he just said, you gotta read this.
EK: Definitely. Just a little warning: it’s erotic sci-fi.
JH: Oh dear. What did he say on his website again, he makes no assumptions? I’m going to try and bear that in mind to make no assumptions until I read it.
EK: Yeah, you haven’t read it yet. We’re linking to it on our website as well.
JH: And I guess, as I’m Irish, just like Dr. Phil, I’ll read the narrative parts, and we can do the dialogue together.
EK: I’ll be Royal, and you can read the parts of Alpha.
»2051: Alpha O Royal, chapter 1: So Close, Yet So Far Away.
Royale touched the glass coffee table, calling up the virtual keypad controller for her terraplex. She scanned the menu until “BED ROOM” appeared, and activated “AUDIO” and “AMBIENT”.
“Alpha, I'm feeling a bit nostalgic this evening. Let's make love at that little cove on Goldeneye beach in Jamaica.”
She set the holographic image of the beach, dialled up vivid levels of “WIND” and “SURF”, then added:
“Have a deep tan for me, will you dear?”
“Just what are you thinking...?” ALPHA replied.
“Oh, I've got it: that weekend we broke protocol ---VERY AWOL we were --- jetting off to the islands. You know I don't think Base Commander Paxton forgave you for missing the aerial bombardment of Atlanta. Fascists or no fascists, you were his best wing commander and he wanted your kill score.”
“He got over my AWOL, and besides, I was days from mandatory retirement – the big NINE O! What were they going to do to me a week from 90? Toss me in the bring? See you in a few seconds.”
She went down the hallway to changing alcove of the bedroom. “Relax, damn it!” she said sternly to her reflection:
“You're getting tense again. The Outer World News is just that, outer world news. It's not your mind-crafted reality! So remember that!”
Royale turns up the wall light to take a good look at herself: But then she pauses, and as she pauses, her thoughts drift off into a stream, of consciousness of feelings and emotions...
...only a fool goes around worrying about things you have no control over...
you're a Down World dweller now dear...a survivor...and celebrating your 99th year on terra firma – even if it is a bit further below terra than you ever thought possible...and yet, there is that option...the option Alpha took, and what an option it is...!
She adjusts the lighting and sits to disrobe. Slipping off her running bra and panties, she really looks hard at her body:...Not bad for 99. Not bad in his eyes either...Alpha says my breasts feel young...Can't remember if I told him about that Swiss procedure. None of his business, really...and yet, after all those ion nutrient baths and Alpine health spas...it's kind of a moot point.
Royale lowers the love suit down form its ceiling cubby, and she pulls the pants on first – but then stops. She holds her fingers under the lubricant dispenser and reaches down between her legs. She felt her clitoris beginning to respond already, as it usually does, and caressed her labia with the lubricant, slipping a little inside.
JH: That is some wild stuff. Let’s leave it at that. I’m going to need a moment to digest all that.
EK: You can imagine what is about to follow: It’s a very detailed and explicit sex scene between a life support robot and his long time wife. If you’re intrigued by Dr. Kennedy’s book so far, you can check this link.
JH: Alright, remember everyone to like and subscribe, you can email us at contact@thelifecyclepodcast.com. We are always happy to hear from you.
The Life Cycle podcast is produced by Klang, its executive producer is Mundi Vondi. It was written, hosted, and produced by Eva Kelley and me, John Holten. We have some extra info on our site about Dr. Kennedy, including a link to where you can buy this amazing book, 2051.
EK: This has also been produced by Icelandic rock legend David Magnusson who did the mix and sound engineering. Thanks, as always, to him. Special thanks to Dr. Phil Kennedy – what an icon. Also thank you, Theresa Kampmeier for her incredible transcriptions.
JH: This episode was recorded at Neural Signals, in Atlanta, Georgia, in the USA, and the Klang headquarters in Berlin Kreuzberg. Thank you all for listening.