Don Vaughn at TEDxUCLA

Following is the full text of Don Vaughns talk titled Neurohacking: rewiring your brain at TEDxUCLA conference.

Don Vaughn TEDx Talk TRANSCRIPT

Inside each one of us is a beautiful symphony. 100 billion neurons firing in concert, constructing this vivid reality that were living in. And inside each little piece of that neural activity lives a little bit of what makes you, you.

And after your experiences today, that activity will have shifted and you will never be the same. You are inextricably tied to your brain.

When I first learned these principles, when I was 16, I fell in love with the brain, and Ive been doing neuroscience research ever since.

Now, one day, we were doing a new MRI experiment. And I was surprised because the experiment went well, but much to all of our shock, I had a hole in my brain. It was a pretty big one too; it was like 30% of my cerebellum just wasnt there.

Which, as you might imagine, I was pretty shocked because I didnt feel like anything about me or my life and my experience of the world had changed or was missing.

The cerebellum is one of the most fundamental parts of your brain. It has, like, 80% of all of your neurons. So I got interested.

Now, theres this collision between what your brain is supposed to do and then what its dealt, and somehow it finds a middle ground. And I became really interested in the idea of your brain as a dynamic, flexible system.

And to that end, I want to tell you the story of Cameron Mott. Just after her third birthday, Cameron started having violent seizures. They started becoming worse and worse, and eventually, she was losing her ability to speak.

Doctors diagnosed her with something called Rasmussens encephalitis, and the only real treatment for this was a hemisphererectomy cutting out half of her brain. And keep in mind that one half of your brain controls and is responsible for movement and sensation in the other half of your body.

So this surgery would immediately leave Cameron hemiplegic. But just four weeks post-op, she walked out of the hospital. And she is still dealing with a bit of hemiplegia and a bit of peripheral vision loss. But otherwise, she is able to run around with her peers, and she is cognitively quite deft its amazing.

And I wondered, you know consider that for a second: if I gave you half of a car, or half of a phone, you wouldnt be going anywhere in LA, and you wouldnt be on Twitter right now tweeting about how mind expanding TEDxUCLA is.

Because for most devices, 50% equals broken. But somehow in this instance with Cameron, 50% is almost equal to 100%.

HOW IS THAT POSSIBLE?

Well, the remaining part of Camerons brain sensed the massive loss of neural tissue, and it physically rewired and reorganized itself to take over everything that the other half had previously handled. That is an ability known as neuroplasticity. Its the ability of the brain to change itself to rewire.

And so, I think its not a very good analogy when people say your brain is like a computer. Its actually just a really bad one because your brain is not static hardware.

And although the prevailing view in neuroscience for a long time was that the adult brain is a fixed processing unit, it seems like every day we find a new result that says thats not the case at all.

While there is structure to your brain, it is dynamic, flexible biology. Let me say that again: You and your brain are static, but youre also dynamic you can change yourself.

So the idea worth spreading is this: What if we were able to treat injuries and impairments in an entirely new way, by hacking into your brains ability to rewire itself.

To show you what I mean, lets look at how weve treated depression.

Since 1952, scientists and doctors have addressed the question of treatment for depression as a fixed hardware problem where there is a deficiency of happy neurotransmitters, like serotonin, dopamine, norepinephrine.

And in this context, it makes perfect sense that the way to go about it is to discover and design drugs which increase those neurotransmitter levels. Enter MAOIs, tricyclics, SSRIs there are hundreds of them, but they all work in pretty much the same way.

And these are marvels of modern medicine. I mean, on anti-depressants, we see about two-thirds of people see some sort of symptom relief. But that still leaves 1.5 million people, in the US alone, who are still struggling to enjoy their lives, who are becoming disconnected from their friends and their families. It is an awful, debilitating disease.

So what if we were able what would become possible if we addressed the problem from the perspective of neuroplasticity? So what were doing is were essentially finding regions in the brain that show different activation in depressed patients than in normals.

So for example, if someone with depression shows dorsolateral prefrontal cortex it is not as active as it is in other brains we actually use electromagnetic currents from devices placed on the scalp to induce neural rewiring in those areas.

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Neurohacking: Rewiring Your Brain by Don Vaughn ...