Neuroscientist Explains One Concept in 5 Levels of Difficulty | WIRED 

Their neurons while having this conversation must be like "omg theyre talking about us guys"

i like how he's lean in posture doesnt change between talking to a 5 year old and talking to a peer in his field.

I love how as you get higher in knowledge, the dialogue gets more and more around ethics and philosophy.

This gentleman looks like he’d be equally comfortable chilling over a beer joking around and also explaining the latest developments at a conference. In other words, my favorite kind of expert.

Being able to describe something complicated at different levels of understanding is a real skill.

You know you're knowledgeable in a subject, when you can explain it to anyone.

I like how they got Adrian Pimento to explain neurobiology

This is how an expert should be like. Not only bragging with jargons, but the ability to explain super complex concepts to everyone.

"To be honest I have no idea" "That's a great place to start"

"there's way more cells in your brain than all the stars we can see" kid: :o

As a molecular scientist with a master's degree, I am thankful for the "kid" explanation hahah

The little guy’s mouth dropping when he’s told there are more cells in his brain than stars in the sky 😂 So wholesome. Love this kind of content 👌🏼

"do you know what a brain is?" "something that remembers fings?" soooo cute lol

What’s weird is the brain is trying to map the brain to figure out how it talks to itself. It’s like the ultimate self awareness test

It wasn’t until “Would that computer, then, be you?” did I realize how deeply philosophical this is.

Imagine if this mapping were able to identify more accurate diagnoses for mental health and neurological disorders, and then find a way to trigger the neurons in the real brain to heal those pathways or simulate different medications to find the correct dosage for each individual/identify side effects without ever having to make the client endure that process of trial and error. That would be fantastic.

MY HEART EXPLODED when the little boy just gasped when he learned how many cells are in his brain 😭😭

The thing that’s crazy is that neuroscientists are basically brains studying brains.

how earnestly he says "yes" to something he agrees with makes me feel really good about stuff.

Imagine dying and having a scientist read out your dirtiest secrets and memories.

What if I am a college student but stupid

It literally goes from explaining to just basically having a convo about The Connectome, and that's amazing.

When he said the wetness was like the consciousness. Man, he’s good. It cleared it up.

You can tell how smart he is by how dirty his glasses are...and they're filthy...guy's a genius.

He's so good at explaining. For each level, he managed to invoke curiosity and conversation without being patronizing.

He forgot the 6th level: unenthusiastic teacher

Everyone after level one: "Guys let's put our brain in a computer"

Watching his body language throughout the video was so interesting. I love listening to this man talk, he's very passionate and looks genuinely interested in what everyone was saying.

"Why don't you explain this to me like I'm five." -Michael Scott

He's absolutely fantastic at explaining it to each person, his entire demeanour changes and he made each person want to learn about it. It was fascinating to watch.

Perfect example of Vygotsky’s “more knowledgeable other” when he’s talking to the 5 year old up to the graduate student. Awesome stuff.

as a medical science student that has a specific interest in neuroscience, i want to a have a conversation with this man about the brain. he seems so inviting good at explaining things in non medical terms which i sometimes need

welp you just put that teen in existential crisis mode

Expert demonstrates the minimal amount of chair that can be used, and still be considered "sitting"

I like how as we went through the levels not only did the conversation get more in depth but there were more questions asked as well

I'm a firm believer that if you can explain things either at a shallow or deeper level (a.k.a. you can adjust to who you're talking to) and do it excellently, then you're really good at what you do.

Level 1: lecture Level 5: test

That 5 year old knows what cells are. That's the 2nd most amazing thing I found about the video

it's funny cuz as the "levels" got higher, I realised I understood less and less as more jargon specific to neuroscience was used. Like when get for to the fellow expert, it almost felt as though they were speaking another language entirely. I enjoyed watching!

I'm appreciative that most of the guests were against mapping out the brain in order for a.i. to become stronger. Even the expert. That alone should prove there's more to the brain than meets the eye, literally

The intensity of the headbobbing shows his excitement

I fucking love this guy and his bouncy hair

I feel like the fatal flaw of a connectome is that it doesn't take into account of neuroplasticity which is a major part of brain function. Just my opinion as a medstudent.

This guy is a great teacher love how positive he is when people don't know something or have differing opinions wish I could speak with him and learn.

Wow, they rebooted Derek so many times that he's smart now.

Neuroscience is basically a brain looking at itself, then declaring it to be the smartest thing to ever exist, yet not understanding a thing.

I always like watching these because as the level of understanding or complexity of thought goes up, it becomes more of a conversation rather than just an expert teaching a student. I love when this side of science is shown. It's not just the expert talking.

I love how the last one wasn’t him explaining so much as it was just a conversation between two great minds

grad student: *says something* Neuroscientist: huh.

Mohammad Salah... Top Goalscorer in the EPL and still has time to become a Neuroscientist... WOW

Hey if you ever want a highly intelligent person to explain something to 6 levels of difficulty (6th being an idiot) I am totally up to be the 6th difficulty.

So cool to see how well he was able to teach and talk about things even when they knew nothing about it. Keeping them engaged and allowing them to ask questions is a huge part of learning and I’m pretty sure they all left with a bit more knowledge about our brains.

when I saw him talking to the 5 year old, I was like "ugh he does the thing where he leans wayyyy down to talk to kids" and then by the end of the video I'm like "lol no that's just the way he sits in a chair lmao"

Please do this interview with a philosophy expert explaining a complex concept

I am a prospective neuroscience student that has fibromyalgia, a nervous and autoimmune disorder. I would love to see this concept in motion with a “normal” brain versus a fibromyalgia brain to see if patterns and responses are different.

I need this guy to explain everything in life to me like he did to the child

I just like how the college student knows how to bullshit by incorporating what little they know into the topic lol been there done that

It amazes me how the 5 year old is so small and adorable yet as he grows older, he will have the potential to gain as much knowledge as the expert. Our brains truly are remarkable

Can this guy do more videos? He seems so down to earth & good at explaining.

Interesting what the entrepreneur was saying about memory. He mentioned LTP and LDP, which are the most widely accepted models, however my professor is looking into alternate models. This is the beauty of science, things get uncovered constantly. There will always be something to learn

This dude was mad-dogging the grad student hard. Every 'huh' felt like part of his soul left his body.

Now explain this to Joey Tribbiani.

I like how you can watch him get more comfortable as each level goes up

The conversation between the expert and the Dr was so interesting that I didn’t want the video to end. I could listen to them for hours!

As we traveled up the ladder i think it became less of an explanation and more of a conversation lol

5 year old: PURE AWE 13 year old: interest and questioning of the idea college student: understanding and listening, making connections grad student: PHILOSOPHY OF HUMAN ETHICS Entrepreneur: questioning the neuroscientist lol

This is awesome. It’s great to see the development! Really fantastic explanations and conversations.

I think we’ve genuinely hit a point in science and health education/research that it feels more like anything is possible including something as in depth and in reality a little out of reach as this! I agree with his last statement that it really is incredible

They need to do this for every concept ever. This should be as prevalent as "react" videos. society needs this.

I like that he uses the same tone to talk to everyone and also give them space to say what they think about it. Education is not only about knowledge but also about being nice to other people. Great video! 👏

I loved this. What a brilliant example of trying to explain somethings complicated in a simple way and the other way around. Great job on the presenter side as well. Especially with younger guests. It’s very hard for people who think and operate on a certain level to switch to a “lower” one. To adapt to a particular level of their corresponder. And that what makes people who can do it great teachers.

This guy is awesome. It'd be nice to have him around while teaching my apprentice.

Neuroscientist travels back in time to explain his 5 year old self what a connectome is...

The Level 5 conversations are always fascinating. I feel like the awkward third wheel in a conversation between geniuses.

This is a brilliant way to teach… building up the concept makes it easier to follow along.

This dude was genuinely interested in what the people he was talking to thought about what he was asking them. He seemed especially interested on the “if we put the map in a computer” responses. It’s definitely an intriguing question.

I'm 2 months old and I thoroughly understand his explanation in all 5 levels of difficulty.

*"-Huh"*

Impressed at how you guys find these amazing and humble experts!

I’m a screenwriter and this concept (along with the questions it presents) makes me wonder about the creative process in that a computer with these downloaded connections might be able to arrive at a new idea faster than us- or, it might not be able to generate the new idea at all. I’ve wondered about this seeing as most ideas are made up of information we already possess but have yet to connect. Would a computer with your exact archive of knowledge be able to make the same connections to create your same idea? Would it be able to do it faster as its sole difference is automation?

4:44 - huh 5:21 - huh 5:31 - huh 6:36 - huh

Last level should be a conspiracy theorist who is deathly afraid of AI lol

I love that Dr. Kasthuri started to implement the philosophical question with the teenager.

I'v been doing nuro feedback therapy for about 9 months it has changed me in such a good way.

Level 6: Neoroscientist explains connectone to a representation of himself Edit: Didn't expect to get this much attention lol

"Huh" What he says when he didn't agree with someone

so glad you guys got to the point of discussing the concept that consciousness extends into the peripheral nervous system. that's still something so powerful for me to think about at this point in my learning. thanks!

I saw this video 6 years ago at the beginning of neuroscience career. I was very confused at the higher levels. Now, I watch this and understand the concept so much better. What an amazing feeling!

He looks just like you'd imagine a smart nueroscientist looks like 😂

The five year old looks like he’s the Neuroscientist’s son 😂

It's a great explanation and discussion of the connectome, but there's more to consciousness than connectomics. The perfect map of connections would certainly be instrumental (I would even say necessary) to simulating consciousness. But, there's more to the communication than the connection map itself. Different kinds of synapses and receptor sites cause different downstream effects (for instance there are excitatory inhibitory and neuromodulatory neurotransmitters), and there's a substantial body of research on the temporal synchrony of neuronal oscillations as really important signals in terms of both their periodicity and phase. So, while it's true that we most likely need to fully understand the connectome to understand consciousness, there is a LOT of metadata for each of the quadrillions of connections comprising it that we need to tack on before we're anywhere close to simulating even a basic process. If we could simulate perfectly all the information present in a human brain, though, we'd also need to be able to give that simulation accurate inputs to process in order to confirm it. For instance, you'd also need to simulate the output of a human eyeball and feed it to a simulated brain in order to have it create a conscious percept. Personally, I think rather than trying to do something like a full human connectome, it'd be a more tractable approach to simulate the simplest possible conscious system, say by simulating the the consciousness of a much less complex brain (like a mouse or a dog), then scale that up. But that's not the only advantage to this approach. I would say that, if you can simulate the most basic of consciousnesses and then successfully scale that up, you would have a better understanding of how consciousness arises (what are the laws governing the architecture that produces consciousness). If we had a perfect model of human consciousness, that wouldn't particularly tell us what in the whole simulation produced it any more than an actual human brain does. If looking at a fully simulated brain did produce consciousness, then on some level, we ought to be able to observe it in a physical brain just as well as a simulation.

I'd love to see so much more of this!

why do neuroscientists always look slightly crazy? lol. like mad scientists. i love it 😂

"That's crazy have you ever tried DMT?"

Great point by that last guy - its not just the synapses and neural connections - its the glia and immune cells and the body’s overall metabolism.

Love this series. Please keep doing them, Wired

As a fan of science-fiction, it's frustrating most media only gets to about the level of that 13 year old.

“Computers can only think in binary so only have 2 options” Quantum computer: hold my 1, or 0, or both i don’t mind

The thing I wonder about when it comes to memory is how important context is when remembering. Our brains don’t literally store data, they are able to reimagine the thing that happened in real time - inventing the moment again as a hallucination in the present. If that’s the case, wouldn’t you have to create some kind of life simulation that forces the brain to conjure up a memory? Or could you just find programmed ways to force the brain to show its memories? Quite a crazy leap we’ve taken in understanding the brain lately

Holy crap. That on the spot "hurricane" relation blew my mind.