The video begins by revisiting a historical moment in Switzerland where chemist Albert Hoffman experiences the mind-altering effects of LSD, a testament to Swiss fascination with mental science. This fascination continues today with Swiss labs pushing the limits of neuroscience, computing, and AI. It highlights pioneering research in spinal cord stimulation technology by Jocelyn Bloch and Gregoire Courtyn that enables paralyzed individuals to regain mobility using brain-computer interfaces and spinal implants. Their innovations represent a fusion of neurological science and cutting-edge technology, portraying potential groundbreaking advancements in medical treatments.

The video further explores Swiss research into enhancing AI and understanding brain functions through experiments with animals like mice and flies. In Zurich and Lausanne, researchers utilize the neurological processes observed in these animals to inform AI developments. Mackenzie Mathis trains rodents to play video games to understand learning processes, while Anna Maria Jaccic's work focuses on genetically breeding smarter flies to study the genealogy of intelligence. These studies underscore the intersection of biology and technology, aiming to translate animal cognition into AI systems.

Main takeaways from the video:

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Key Vocabularies and Common Phrases:

1. intrigue [ɪnˈtriːɡ] - (noun / verb) - The quality of being fascinating or mysterious. - Synonyms: (fascination, interest, curiosity)

Switzerland has long been obsessed with the science of the mind.

2. condensed [kənˈdenst] - (verb / adjective) - Made denser or more concise; compressed. - Synonyms: (compressed, concentrated, reduced)

All matter is merely energy condensed to a slow vibration.

3. neuroscience [ˈnʊroʊˌsaɪəns] - (noun) - The scientific study of the nervous system, especially the brain. - Synonyms: (neurology, brain science, neural science)

There's less blotter involved, but they're very much turned on and tuned in to a unique mix of neuroscience, computers, and AI

4. paralysis [pəˈræləsɪs] - (noun) - Loss of the ability to move in part or most of the body. - Synonyms: (immobility, powerlessness, incapacity)

Michel is a young man who had a motorbike accident a few years ago already with a complete motor and sensitive paralysis

5. anomalies [əˈnɒməliz] - (noun) - Something that deviates from what is standard, normal, or expected. - Synonyms: (irregularity, deviation, abnormality)

anomalies that Olaf first encountered while treating patients with neurological disorders

6. regenerate [riːˈdʒɛnəˌreɪt] - (verb) - To grow or cause to grow anew or restore. - Synonyms: (renew, rejuvenate, restore)

Michelle, whose legs were completely paralyzed, has regained a tiny amount of homegrown organic muscle control.

7. embody [ɪmˈbɑːdi] - (verb) - To give a tangible or visible form to an idea, quality, or feeling. - Synonyms: (incorporate, represent, personify)

We want something like an embodied agent that can act in the world.

8. interface [ˈɪntərˌfeɪs] - (noun / verb) - A point where two systems, subjects, organizations, etc., meet and interact. - Synonyms: (interaction, connection, communication)

They have started to combine brain computer interfaces with the spinal implants.

9. cognitive [ˈkɒɡnɪtɪv] - (adjective) - Related to mental processes of perception, memory, judgment, and reasoning. - Synonyms: (intellectual, mental, perceptual)

We can track specifically what are the genes that are being selected for cognitive behaviors

10. psychonaut [ˈsaɪkəˌnɔːt] - (noun) - A person who explores altered states of consciousness, especially through hallucinatory drugs. - Synonyms: (explorer of mind, mind pioneer, consciousness explorer)

This lab at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology is run by an eccentric psychonaut named Olaf Blanc.

From Psychedelic Insights to Modern Neuroscience Switzerland's Innovations

We went by bicycle, no automobile available because of wartime restrictions on their use. On the way home, my condition began to assume threatening forms. Everything in my field of vision wavered and was distorted as if seen in a curved mirror. I also had the sensation of being unable to move from the spot. Nevertheless, my assistant later told me that we had traveled very rapidly. From the diary of Albert Hoffman, swiss chemist, 1943. Switzerland has long been obsessed with the science of the mind. Take Albert Hoffman. He was the first person to synthesize LST. On April 19, 1943, he ingested a tiny amount, hopped on his bike, and then realized that all matter is merely energy condensed to a slow vibration. There is no such thing as death, and we are the imagination of ourselves.

Today, swiss labs and medical companies are still pushing the frontiers of our understanding of the mind. There's less blotter involved, but they're very much turned on and tuned in to a unique mix of neuroscience, computers, and AI. The research can be dazzling. It can sometimes feel like you need an iq of 1000 to understand it. But more and more, I'm seeing that we're on the cusp of things that used to be called miracles. And now you're going to turn on the stimulation and do a leg extension, and up. The steam is on now. How does it feel when it turns on like that? It's fantastic. Six years ago, Michelle here was in an accident that left him unable to move his legs at all. Then he had electrodes implanted on his spine and, well, check him out.

He's one of the first patients treated by onward, which has created a technology to help reconnect paralyzed people's brains with their bodies. The idea comes from a brain surgeon and a neuroscientist, Jocelyn Bloch and Gregoire Courtyn. Several years ago, Gregoire was studying paralyzed rats at UCLA and came up with a way to get their legs moving again. So very simple approach at the beginning, stimulating the spinal cord electrically, a region that normally control leg muscles anatomically intact after a spinal cord injury, but disconnected from the brain. And it was quite amazing because as early as you apply the stimulation, the animal would start stepping automatically on the treadmill.

When I met him, I saw the mice and rats walking, and it was fantastic. The idea was to bring it to the human being. I don't think like the average person knows that this is even possible right now. Maybe explain what you're finding people are able to do. If you have a spinal cord injury, your brain is intact, giving a command to your legs. But this command is interrupted at the level of the injury. And the idea of the treatment is to reactivate the disconnected part of the spinal cord in order to then activate your legs.

So how do you activate this part of the spinal cord? With electricity. So this is what we call the paddle lead. It has 16 electrodes, as you see here, eight and eight in parallel. And we implant these paddle leads in the dorsal aspect, above the spinal cord. The electrodes get implanted on a different part of the spine, depending on what the patient is trying to do. Place them on the lower spine, and you can get the legs moving. When the first patient stood up, I don't know. In my head, I'm picturing everybody, like, crying and hugging. What was it like? Or is it more. You are in Europe? There was a lot of bad words. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. But it was a big emotion. Yeah, it was, like, high. In other patients, the electrodes are placed higher up on the spine to help regulate blood pressure, a less obvious but equally life changing effect.

My name is Julie. I'm 23 years old, and I'm an archaeologist. Just one year and a half ago, we had a major car accident in Serbia, and I basically broke my neck. My condition of blood pressure issues got so bad that I was basically like, what you guys were looking for in the study. And then we came here and got implanted. I did not know the blood pressure issues. There's something that's quite common with this type of injury, but it is without. I mean, my blood pressure is so low that I'm basically just stuck in bed all the time. Even just sitting up in a wheelchair. It's like running a marathon. Yeah. It also has a huge impact on my mental state of mind. Without the stimulation, there is so little oxygen circulating in my brain that there is not much joy in life, let's say.

And then when you turn it on, it's like back to some sort of normal level, and it's just the increase of energy. Being able to breathe and speak at the same time, I'm able to make plans, to travel, to just have a more positive outlook on life in general. Now it's still a little bit of a warm up. Michel is a young man who had a motorbike accident a few years ago already with a complete motor and sensitive paralysis. Ok. And this is a real athlete. He trained a lot with us, and he's using this technology every day, many hours. They have two buttons, one per side. Every time I press, I send the signal to the tablet, and I have the movement. I make the step, the walk may be strained. But it's good enough that Michelle is mostly able to get around without a wheelchair. And the implant lets him do other kinds of exercises, too.

He has a program that just target the region of the spinal cord involving trunk muscle. So he is uploading the program, just pressing a button. I have a six pack. Oh, wow. I need this program rather fantastically. Michelle, whose legs were completely paralyzed, has regained a tiny amount of homegrown organic muscle control. Something in my body is changing now it's appearing. Some twitch on the muscles under the lesion. Yeah, we know that the residual nerve fibers, because there are always some residual nerve fibers, they grow because of the stimulation and that improve the communication to the point that they can regain control over their paralyzed muscles.

The doctors don't know how far the regrowth of nerve fibers can go. With only a handful of patients implanted so far, there's still much to learn. But there are other ways that Jocelyn and Gregoire want to push the tech forward. They have started to combine brain computer interfaces with the spinal implants. That is to say, they're putting electrodes in the brain and on the spine and having them communicate. This lets patients simply think about actions like walking or swimming, and have their bodies pick up on their desires.

What do you think? You going brain implants? I have to cut my hair. Two years ago, onward went public and raised $100 million. They're still in the clinical trial phase with much of this work, but are on track to become the first company to commercialize these kinds of implants. The hope is to get them covered by insurance and accessible to the millions of people around the world living with spinal cord injuries. Every time I see him progressing, each time I see him, it's very rewarding. On the other hand, it's very frustrating because I would like to see 1000 Michelin. It's very cool, man. I can tell you're very focused. Every day I want even more. Every time I want more.

As Wernher Herzog said, the fountain is life or a tourist attraction. It's totally up to you. This is Geneva's fountain hotspot. It's beautiful, ejaculatory, everything you could want in a fountain. Do you want me to do a straighter one? I'm not gonna lie. I didn't exactly do my homework on the touristy bits of Switzerland. Is this Lake Geneva? Let's find out. I'm not getting a clear answer on that, but we're gonna go with it. It's nice, as you can see. But me, I'm just here for the brains. And in cities like Zurich and Lausanne, you can find some of the world's brain research hotspots. Here. neuroscience and computer science mix promiscuously with wildly creative results.

For example, this lab full of rodent twitch streamers run by animal research superstar Mackenzie Mathis. So it sounds a little bit far out, but we really teach mice to play video games and use little joysticks like pilots. But the cool thing about this is, is that we then allow to see how they learn these different skills and how they adapt, and at the same time can record the neural activity. And we hope to turn sort of the lessons learned in the brain into literally new AI algorithms. What are we going to see today?

So today we're going to take you into the lab and show you some of the latest gen video games for mice. They're kind of in a freely moving world, but all the world is a screen, and it changes based on their real time movements. This is the VR world. Exactly. Are we gonna put a mouse in here? We're gonna put a mouse in here, yeah. So if I'm not mistaken, this is Anchovy and barracuda. So who is that? This is anchovy. Anchovy's off. It's this idea of they're learning this game, they're facing challenges, or they're going through this environment. Exactly. It's just, what is the brain doing as they try to, like, negotiate that and figure things out? Yeah, exactly.

What did she do? She made the things appear by standing in the middle and then facing with the right heading angle at the screen. Anchovy may be impressive, but she has yet to enter her final form. So in order to be able to measure the neural activity, what we do for part of the experiments is to replace the, the top of the skull with a glass plate. Behold, mouse brains. This mouse had this surgery, and now she's learned to play this game. I think the mouse turned out so funny.

The mice themselves are genetically engineered such that in some neurons, their neurons are actually glow green. And then you can capture this with the camera, and then we can extract sort of the regions of interest from all these different neurons and then analyze them in relation to the actual gameplay or the actual behavior of the animal. The ultimate goal is to turn these mousy thoughts into data. Mackenzie wants to record how brains function in certain situations and use those insights to inform and shape AI systems. In other words, she wants to use real brains to make better artificial brains. We hope by trying to understand, like, literally, the algorithm or the computations, like, are they using arithmetic? Is it calculus? Like, what are they doing? And how can we potentially take those sort of computations and then test them in new AI algorithms?

So, that's the general idea. Mice are nice and all, but they're not the only critters having their brains scanned here at swiss research institutes. These are our fly stalks. So, each and every single one of these fly vials contains flies that are genetically distinct. Meet Anna Maria Jaccic, the queen of the flies. We normally have to anesthetize them because they're flies. They fly, so we have to kind of keep them nice and still. Your objective is to find males versus females. Let's do that. The male is the dark butt, right? Yeah. Yeah, that's correct. That's right. You're a natural. So, our basic question in our lab is, in complex environments, you have to learn where things are, you have to memorize things.

So we're trying to kind of recreate these situations for the flies, and we try to evolve cognition in flies. So you're trying to make super smart flies? Yeah, exactly. Fly masterminds. What could go wrong? So you breed smarter and smarter flies. You get them to do these tasks, you find which ones perform the best, take those, breathe them again. Exactly. It's basically fly eugenics. But how do you separate the Fleinsteins from the flimbessels? With a fly q test, of course. So, right now, we are conditioning flies to pick one color in a set of two or three colors. They're picking between green or blue.

Every single fly at the very end of the experiment will get a learning score. We get rid of the 10% of the worst performers, and we take the majority of the flies. As she breeds generation after generation of bugs, Anna Maria hopes to learn about the relationship between genes and intelligence. We can track specifically what are the genes that are being selected for cognitive behaviors. How, specifically does the brain actually change in its structure? And all of this we can actually use for wetware. So, instead of using physical chips, we can use biological chips, like neurons itself to actually power our computers someday in the future. You know, I think every scientist I've interviewed for this show so far just about, is like, trying to make AI's smarter and better. It's the ultimate kind of goal to see how to produce ourselves, right.

In many ways, even the tiniest corporeal brains are smarter than our best AI's. So the researchers here think that studying these creatures is our best shot at creating things like highly capable robots. If we could build an AI that could do what a mouse does. I think that would be a huge feat for humanity. Maybe within ten years, we could have, you know, mini mice robots. Not that we want that for humanity, but conceptually, right. We want something like an embodied agent that can act in the world and very adaptively change its behavior. Just picture, like, New York, full of robotic AI mice. Horrifying. That would be pretty scary.

Of course, the brain I want most to understand is my own. So I decided to volunteer as a test subject. Okay, friends, ready to go down the rabbit hole? This lab at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology is run by an eccentric psychonaut named Olaf Blanc. He invited me to try an experiment that's meant to induce the feeling of a ghostly presence. Real talk. I'm a little bit scared. But first, let's get existential with Olaf. So I've been interested for a long time in the self and how it is related to our body, how the brain actually represents our body. How are my hands represented in my body? How is your brain representing your body?

What gives us the conscious experience of being someone? Of being a person? We're looking at something very perceptual. We call it a minimal self. And we think that this minimal self is crucial for feeling that I'm feeling right now sitting in front of you here, talking to you. So this very, like, basic, fundamental connection between mind and body. Exactly. So it's an active brain process. Yeah, on a millisecond by millisecond basis, we have to generate this representation where we are in space, and it better be here where my body is located for granted. But this process is happening all the time.

Well, accepts when it isn't think out of body experiences or feeling a ghostly presence in the room. anomalies that Olaf first encountered while treating patients with neurological disorders. They were talking, for example, that before they have an epidemic seizure, they may have an out of body experience. Okay. And of course, they didn't use that term, but they were saying, yeah, listen, Olaf, it was strange. I was. I had the sensations for about a couple of seconds that I was above myself, or it could have been a presence, hallucination, or ghost sensation. I remember one patient in particular who told me, well, there's somebody just at arm length behind me. And whenever she got up and moved, that person moved along. Okay, so very strange theory that stories of ghosts over time, this is kind of where it all comes from. Yeah. So people having these feelings.

You want a naive, quick response. Yes. That's what it is. It turns out. These sensations are a common symptom of Parkinson's disease. So the presence, hallucination, feeding somebody behind you that is not there, that you can't hear, that you can't see. 50% of Parkinson patients will have that. Naturally, this inspired Olaf to figure out how to induce these hallucinations on demand using VR and robotics. So you will be sitting on this chair, and your main task will consist in moving this robot. Okay, can you confirm you are in a dark environment right now? Yeah. Nothing, just black. Oh, there you are. You can see that he's immersed inside a virtual room, which is mimicking this real experimental room. So it's a recreation of the room in 3d.

As I moved my hand to poke a virtual avatar, a robot behind me gave me a corresponding poke. It's all meant to confuse your brain so much that you start to sense the presence of another being. While Olaf studies what's going on in your brain. Thank you. Okay, perfect. That was weird. Sometimes I sort of thought I was doing it. Then sometimes it really felt like almost like an animal or something was kind of needing in my. The sensation for me was not all that strong. But that's partly the point. Since Parkinson's patients are more susceptible to the illusion than others, the experiment could function as a kind of early warning system for the disease with a robotic device. We don't need to wait for the symptoms. We don't need to wait for the patient to have Parkinson's. But we could expose people to this much earlier if they have other risk factors and if they would be part of this very elevated sensitivity.

We could team up, for example, with companies starting very early, neuroprotectors, therapies, trying to delay the onset of Parkinson's or cure Parkinson's. What an exciting time between VR, brain, computer interface, artificial intelligence. I mean, it must be, like, exhilarating. It's a haven. Absolutely. So I think what is special about this time? I think when I started, neuroscience was neuroscience. You know, philosophy was philosophy, and certainly engineering was engineering. There was always an interest in medical applications. But what is really amazing happening now is it doesn't matter anymore, right? We're all working on similar problems and issues and want to resolve this.

The brain is, I think, by definition, something that's fascinating for everyone, and it needs expertise from all these domains, I think, to have even a chance to understand small parts of it. 80 years after Hoffman's psychedelic ride, Switzerland's brain research complex is still going strong. But the mysteries of the mind remain mysterious. We still don't really know how billions of neurons firing creates a thought or how to fully restore a broken connection between mind and body. Researchers here will be on this quest for a long time to come, but its a journey worth taking, and im excited to see whats next. That is, as long as its not AI rodents bent on our destruction.

Neuroscience, Innovation, Technology, Artificial Intelligence, Albert Hoffman, Swiss Research