#248 – An interview with Greg and Tim of Backyard Brains - Boethetic Bug Brainwaves

Chris Gammell: This is The Amp Hour Podcast. Recorded May 5th, 2015. Episode 248 with Greg and Tim from Backyard Brains. Pathetic. Bug. Brainwaves. Welcome to the Amp Hour. I'm Chris Gammell of Contextual Electronics.

Greg Gage: And I'm Greg Gage for Backyard Brains. And I'm Tim Marzullo from Backyard Brains as well.

Chris Gammell: Thank you guys for being here. I'm excited. I'm sorry Dave can't be here, but I am excited to talk about cockroaches being mind-controlled and humans being mind-controlled. And what other kind of mind-control do you guys do?

Dave Jones: Yeah, that's a good question. I mean, the amount of invertebrates that are able to be mind-controlled are limited, I guess, to the – you have to have enough biomass to be able to wear a backpack. And so there are people out there that are actually building a lot smaller circuits for a lot smaller insects, but we don't have that technology yet. So we're sticking to larger critters like scorpions. It's one of the ones that we're going to publish a paper on soon. We have an abstract coming out at the Society for Neuroscience in the fall. Nice. It talks about a robo-scorpion and cockroaches and sort of larger invertebrates.

Chris Gammell: So how long until – you know that scene in Fifth Element where the guy's like driving the cockroach with like the joystick and then there's like the camera and he's listening in? Like how long until that point?

Dave Jones: Yeah, so the – that actually – we're laughing because that actually is our next goal is to put a video –

Dave Jones: I put a camera on the cockroach. We're trying to figure out how to do it in a Bluetooth low-energy format, and it's a little bit harder to do. So we may have to switch to a little bit like a bigger pipe to be able to get this to stream. Even like a picture every couple seconds would be cool for me. And creepy. Let's make sure we get that out.

Chris Gammell: I'm not a bug person myself. But okay, so let's take a step back. What is Backyard Brains?

Greg Gage: Sure. Backyard Brains is a company that invents and distributes equipment to allow students all over the world of all ages to begin learning about the electricity that the body generates, be it the electricity that neurons use to communicate or hearts use to pump and our muscles use to contract. So both Greg and I have PhDs in neural engineering. And that was because we had to get PhDs to gain access to this technology. Really? We often say neural interfaces right now or before Backyard Brains is kind of where computers were in the late 60s and early 70s that really only at big universities, professors with big government grants could gain access to the technology. And so we set about trying to make it to copy the computer revolution, but for a neural revolution, making it so that anybody can begin understanding how neurons work.

Chris Gammell: And so what technology is this you're talking about? So, I mean, like I think about the stuff I've seen, it looks like instrumentation amps and like I think op amps, but I always think op amps. So what is this technology that's difficult to get a hold of and difficult to get information about?

Dave Jones: The funny thing is that you didn't really have to wait until Backyard Brains said that the technology that we're using are chips and, you know, just gumball parts like resistors, capacitors that you could have put this, you could have put a spiker box together probably back in 1978. Okay. So the only thing that we've kind of done is just sort of re-engineered it to make it very simple to use and then make this kind of put the experiments together to make it more generally available to the public. Yeah, but we're using bio instrumentation amps, but you could build them with op amps if you wanted to. But we have basically three stages of amplification. We have the bio instrumentation amp in the front. And then we filter the signal. We just use a bandpass filter and we filter out kind of the low noisy signal that we don't want and then kind of the high signals that we don't want. This kind of sweet spots for neurons, about one kilohertz. It's about if you actually look at a spike on the screen, it's about a one millisecond peak. So that's kind of what we tune our amps to. And then we have one final stage of amplification that goes out to the speaker so you can hear it.

Chris Gammell: Okay, cool. Yeah. So that sounds like a signal chain that I'm familiar with. That's good. Yeah, I mean, that's what I'm saying.

Dave Jones: It's very kind of simplistic. And actually, we worked hard to make it simple. We would sort of keep removing components until we could get it down to it. I think when we released that spiker box, it was eight resistors, eight capacitors, and three ICs. And that's all it was to be able to record from many, many, many different types of animals.

Chris Gammell: Yeah. Okay. Okay. And so I've seen a lot of stuff with like – so I'm in the analog space. So I see a lot of the new chips coming out and stuff like that. And I see like the – they're biomonitoring, but it's like ECG. Is that – I always forget the name – the EEG versus ECG. I know the ground reference on like the ankle. That's the thing I think about. Yeah. Is that ECG or is that – which one is that?

Greg Gage: Classically, you can put the ground on the ankle for using the – for doing EKG if you want to copy what Wilhelm Eindhoven did in the early 20th century. But you can just put the reference on the back of your hand and the electrodes across your wrists. And then for EEG, you put the ground on the bone behind your ear. So yeah, a lot of the competing things and other amplifiers out there for human signals, which makes sense. I mean we – it's kind of weird because we started with cockroach neurons and then went into human signals because we studied neural signals when we were doing our graduate work. And so we started – our first amps were for neurons. And so – and then our second amps were for human muscles. And then our third amps were for human heart and brain. And then our fourth amp was for plant electrophysiology.

Chris Gammell: Plants. Yeah. Really? Tell me about plants. What is – what the hell does a plant need with electricity?

Dave Jones: Yeah. So no, it's funny. I didn't know this about this. And then actually many of the neuroscientists that we talked to don't know that plants actually fire action potentials. But they do. And so plants use electricity. And in plants that move, like sensitive mimosas or venous fly traps, they actually use it in a very similar way as humans do. And what they – what I mean by that is that it takes, for example, a venous fly trap. It takes a lot of energy for the plant to open back up again after it closes to catch a fly. Okay. And so therefore, the plant has evolved not to close the fly trap by accident. And so it figured out that if a fly is inside of the plant that is going to be in there for a few seconds, it's going to touch the – they're inside the – inside the little venous fly trap leaves that are open. There's some hairs inside of there. And if you touch a hair inside – from inside the leaf, then it's – it will fire an action potential inside that plant. But it doesn't actually close. It's just – it sort of sets this timer running for about, you know, 10 to 15, 20 seconds. And if it gets another movement of a hair, there's a pretty good probability if there's something inside of that, if that was just some random wind that went by. So on the second one, it actually closes. So it's almost like it's thinking. It's waiting.

Chris Gammell: It's got a really good – really long low-pass filter, right? Right. Exactly. And so then – Yeah, it's integration.

Dave Jones: And it's cool because as neuroscientists, one of the things that we talk about in we're doing lectures is like these different types of integration. There's temporal and there's spatial integration. And so this is a really good example of temporal integration. And which is exactly what neurons do when two neurons are firing at the same time or in close proximity to each other.

Greg Gage: Well, that's really cool. And – It's also interesting is that plant electrophysiology is just super wide open. There's only – I mean, fact checkers. But it appears to me there's only between 10 and 50 scientists that are studying it. So high school students and college students could really contribute to the field. So we're actually pretty excited because people just don't really believe us. And actually when we say we have amps for – amps for plants, they – people think that we're – we get a lot of hippie kind of requests that we're recording the living energy that exists in Mother Earth. And it's the same energy that exists in our bodies. I'm like, hold on, hold on, hold on, hold on, hold on, hold on. Dude, I put a fuzz box on my orchid last night.

Chris Gammell: It's so crunchy. It's like the best. I put it through my like – my Fender reverb. Sorry.

Greg Gage: Yeah. That was terrible. When people – No, no. I mean, I get that all the time with – down here in Chile because we used to work out of a maker space. So there's a lot of artists and designers that want to use the plant spiker shield to make music. Oh, yeah. And they show me YouTube videos of hooking up cauliflower to some sort of synthesizer. And they're just kind of using their cauliflower as an antenna. And it's just like, no, we're actually studying the real science here. We're actually going to plant to an amp.

Dave Jones: No, but what's funny about the plant thing is that it begs the question because we – we'll get into the Roboroach in a bit. But we got in a lot of arguments with people about consciousness and what – Like sentience? Yeah, sentience, stuff like that. And so when you would argue with people about what their definition was, a lot of people would talk about that. It has to be some type of a feeling that comes in. It gets sent an electrical signal to another part and then it causes a behavior. But this is what's happening inside. You can see there's papers on plants that it will be eaten by a bug on one side. And then it will send a message down to the rest of the plants and they'll excrete a different chemical. So depending on how one defines this type of consciousness, I guess you could say that these plants are alive too. But it's a bit silly to say that.

Chris Gammell: I assume it's just that whole argument is just to try and make vegans finally feel guilty. You know, like, you're murdering them, man. You're eating live things. That veggie burger was alive. You can see. Anyway, sorry. Bad jokes again. Bad jokes all around.

Greg Gage: So that's kind of our goal is any type of electrical signal that any type of living thing generates. We want to make it easy for someone to do it and for kind of a consumer level budget. So we've been slowly expanding to all types of bioelectricity. electricity. And also a secondary thing is the interfaces with the RoboRoach. And also we have various shields that people can use these, these signals like the heart, the brain neurons to control things. And that's kind of another side of what we work on. Very cool. Yeah. So okay,

Chris Gammell: so I've seen some of these signals before. And I've seen like, again, mostly for the brainwave, not necessarily like, so so how do how do I break out between like, like looking at like high level brainwave type stuff with like alpha and delta waves, theta wave type stuff, or even just like the the heart monitoring type stuff, and then down to the neuron level, what does the neuron level look like, compared to those other electrical signals that are kind of they seem like they're more like, like higher level waveforms? Are they the same thing? What is the difference?

Dave Jones: So the the individual neuron actually is responsible for the for those the alpha delta, these theta waves. But it's it's too small. So you remember that we're talking about extracellular, which is outside of the the neurons about, you know, 100 millivolts to or excuse me 100 microvolts signal. So that's a really, really weak, weak signal. And you imagine you have, you know, an air gap, you've got tissue or over the brain, then you've got your skin, and then you've got your hair, and then you've got like a sensor on the other side, you're trying to record from this really, really small signal on one end. And so it's, it's impossible to do that for to record a neuron. But the cool thing about the the cortex is it's done in layers. And so there's, there's all these different striated layers of the cortex. And so which sort of lines up the polarity of these of these neurons are all kind of pointing in one direction. That still doesn't, that still won't help you. If you can't record from a whole bunch of cells that are doing different things. But when the brain is, is in a is in a weird state where it's actually almost not online, then these neurons can either be like in an idle state. So they're all sort of waiting for input, for example, and they'll all kind of rise and fall at the same time. And if you get enough neurons that are sort of firing these acupotentials, and have the same sort of dipoles all lined up together, they sort of amplify. And that's what actually you're picking up on the outside of this of the of the skull. So that's actually what you pick up in an EEG signal. Okay, so that's really that. Yeah, that's really

Chris Gammell: interesting. Conversations of many, many neurons. Okay, so it's yeah, so it's that. Is it that we can't actually get to that resolution yet? Or is it that even if we could get that resolution, there'd be so many competing interests that it would be impossible to isolate?

Dave Jones: Yeah, it depends on who you take.

Greg Gage: Yeah, go ahead. No, it's just to... Oh, yeah, I'll just say, do you to record individual neurons, you have to stick needles in the brain. So that's why we use cockroaches, because we can stick, you know, needles in the antenna or the leg. And we can use that to show the firing of individual neurons. But to show the conversations of thousands and millions of neurons at the same time, we can do that with human EEG. Greg had a point.

Dave Jones: No, I was just saying that the new human brain initiative that the Obama administration is working on, they're trying to come up with techniques to be able to do exactly what you just said, which is like, from the outside of the brain, be able to see individual firing of neurons. So this will be all done with imaging type studies. But that's kind of where the future that's like the, that's like the holy grail of neuroscience, if you get able to record these neurons in front of the human, like while they're awake and behaving and doing interesting things.

Chris Gammell: Yeah, again, my reference point is popular, or sorry, science fiction. And I think in Iron Man 3, there was a guy that showed the brain map and said, yeah, I mean, this is a common theme throughout a lot of that stuff. I mean, this is, you know, a lot of this stuff, this is definitely the dream of being able to monitor that stuff and then, and then troubleshoot it, like the micro level of seeing each individual interaction. So how many years away are we from that? I mean, is it ever going to happen? Or is it?

Dave Jones: I mean, so one of the things that, and actually, this is one of our new projects that we're excited to release soon. It's called optogenetics. And what this does, it's not so much for recording the neurons, but it does something interesting. It actually puts, so it's a genetic virus that you put in, and it will only target specific cells inside the brain. But then it allows you to turn on or turn off those cells. And so it allows you to actually understand what those neurons are doing, like to draw a particular behavior, for example. But one of the long-term goals is that, you know, there's a lot of neurological disorders that have no, no cures or, and they're not even the treatments are that good. For example,

Chris Gammell: Yeah, like epilepsy, like, or something like that.

Dave Jones: Even in Parkinson's disease, like they have a deep brain simulation is like the latest and greatest that's been around for almost like 25, 30 years. And the, but that's actually, when you stick an electrode in the brain and you turn it on, you're, you're just making all the neurons in that general area sort of fire. And so one of the things that they're looking at doing next for, for these types of diseases, instead of using electricity, they use light by shining a light into the, into the brain. You can actually get only certain types of neurons that have been, that you want to actually fire at that particular time to turn on, and you can control individual pulsing of the, of these neurons. And so there's a lot of kind of hopeful you know, people that are out there that are, that are actually starting to look into this as a possible way to actually be an intervention for some of these diseases.

Chris Gammell: Yeah. Yeah. I mean, having an optical interface would definitely be lower, lower impact, right?

Greg Gage: Mm-hmm. I'll also let the listeners of the Amp Hour get an exclusive. So it's, it's not really live yet, but if you go on our website, backyardbains.com slash experiments slash history, this is a write-up that I'm slowly working on. It actually goes into the history of how we were able to amplify these signals of neurons. And then in the last, the, and it's really nicely illustrated by a Chilean comic book illustrator that works with us. And then the final three illustrations are, uh, Florencia and my attempt to predict the future. Um, so I, I said 2000, I said 2001, one, 2165 will be the year in which we'll be able to detect every neuron wire wire wirelessly. And then 2035 as a year, we'll be able to have kind of nanobots, you know, so you can take a look at it and that'll be live in a, in a week or so. But, um, you can, there's still some, still writing a text, but it goes through the history of how we

Chris Gammell: were able to do what we're doing today. 20, like 2035 or 2350 as the nanobots thing.

Greg Gage: Okay. So, okay. So the, the, the, the, the problem now is to record from neurons, you have to stick things inside needles inside the brain. And that's going to always limit the technology because opening the skull is dangerous and it's only done in medical conditions. So I know that there's a DARPA program and I even saw a paper on general of neuroengineering about neuro moats. So this has been kind of an idea that Greg and I have talked about and neuroscience students have talked about over bars at night, that if you could somehow swallow a pill that would have, um, kind of nanobots, maybe silicon circuits wrapped in a protective protein, so they wouldn't be attacked by the immune system. And if the, and if they could somehow bypass the blood brain barrier, and if they could somehow stick to a neuron, they could then wire wirelessly transmit, um, signals through the skull. This is me, this is not, there's their power. So I thought, so I just said maybe in 20 years, because given how fast the computer revolution is going, maybe in 20 years. And again, this is, this is me in Florencia and also conversations with Greg. So this is where I'm kind of stepping out of my role as a scientist and as a kind of a speculative person. And then in 2000, 1000, 2165 was some kind of, maybe some new type of physics will be discovered that, you know, it'll be able to, what you can want, be able to just detect the voltage point anywhere remotely, but that would require like a new type of science. So I said in this illustration, ever since Manuel Galvarino discovered that every neuron generates a microgravity well due to the constant voltage changes, the electropondrium can couple with a human brain non-invasively and monitor every neuron simultaneously. And that's just kind of me trying to sound like science fiction, but that was 150 years. I think that's pretty close, uh, to be honest. That's good. I like that. I like that a lot.

Chris Gammell: Okay. Uh, yeah. Yeah. And I think that, um, so, okay, so here's the question. So like right now, is there, so it seems like there's a lot of monitoring. You guys are talking about monitoring. And then let's kind of get into the affecting these neurons. And so how do you actually, uh, to, or rather, can you actually impact and then drive behavior from stimulating a neuron and

Dave Jones: then telling you to do something? Yeah, we can. And we actually sell a kit that allows anyone to do that, even your listeners. And so there's multiple ways that you could do that. There's, uh, but the most simplest way, and this is one of the, one of the oldies, but a goodie, uh, is to stick a little, a bit of electricity, uh, next to a cell body or an axon. Uh, and in a number of our experiments, you can do this just by using a gear, a cell phone, just play hip hop music. And which is the current that would normally go to your earbuds that would make the magnet shake back and forth and allow you to hear, uh, is the same current that are, are, uh, that passes through our neurons. And so, uh, when you pay, when you play music, um, the low frequencies have a long, uh, sort of waveform to it. And then the lower they go through in the, in the base frequencies below like 300 Hertz, uh, it, uh, it charges the membrane. So inside the neuron, if, if, if the current's passing through it, it depolarizes the, the, the cell because it's a little capacitive bilayer inside the, uh, the cell neuron. Uh, and if it discharges to a point where it actually, it could reach a threshold, it will be able to fire an actual potential that causes that neuron to fire. And so you could see that, um, if you, uh, in one of our experiments, we have, uh, you could hook it up to a, uh, like a, like a cockroach leg and make that sort of dance. And this is, uh, an, uh, kind of homage to, uh, uh, Luigi Galvani who did this almost 300 years ago, uh, with frog legs, but you can now do it with cockroach legs. And you actually could see that. And so at the lower frequency of the, the base frequencies of hip hop music, you actually see the muscles begin to twitch at that particular moment because of what's happening inside the, those neurons is kind of cool. Um, and then the other way is you can, you can turn down the current even a little bit more, more, and then, uh, you can affect behavior of a living organism. And so the, uh, the robot, the robo roach is example of that. And Tim, do you want to talk about that guy?

Greg Gage: Yeah, sure. So, uh, as Greg said, we, we had some experiments on the cockroach leg, but we wanted to do, to do some experiments on showing behavior and learning. And so we designed this, uh, backpack that can fit on a cockroach and you, you insert some very fine silver wires in the antenna and the cockroach uses its antenna to, uh, sense obstacles. And so with our wireless, uh, Bluetooth backpack on the cockroach, we can make the cockroach turn left and right for a couple minutes. Uh, what's neat about it is the cockroach actually adapts within one or two minutes. So you can kind of see this happening in front of you. So people like you asked at the beginning of the, of the podcast, when will we have a fully remote control cockroach? The rubber roach works and it works enough that we've demoed it in schools around the world and people see it and it's real. It's not just a YouTube video. Like thousands and thousands of people have seen it with their own eyes, but it's not, um, it's not, I don't think we'll ever really get to the point. We'll have full autonomous control of the cockroach because you're also competing with all these other normal cockroach behaviors that the cockroach wants to go towards dark. The cockroach maybe wants to find another cockroach to have fun with. Um, and the cockroach maybe wants to eat. So you're just competing with all these other behaviors. Um, and the cock and learning is what nervous systems do. Adapting is what nervous systems do. Uh, so that was kind of a product that Greg and I sponsored a student team at the University of Michigan and another student team in Chile. Um, and so that's kind of a mature product. Uh, and then our newest interface, uh, is the optogenetics with the light channels where with fruit flies. And then the more, the kind of popular one now, uh, is called the human human interface where we're detecting the muscle activity of one human, amplifying it and using the Arduino microcontroller to analyze this data. And then it's turning on a tens unit, uh, which can stimulate the arm of another person. So then when one person moves their arm, the other person's arm moves as well. And, uh, Greg just gave a Ted talk on this a few months ago that was, uh, released last week. And so you can see that on, uh, on the main Ted page of Greg doing a live demo of the human human interface. And it's been kind of popular because of two people, one person can control the other. And you know, there's, it's a way to get to know other people. And it's also, uh, the jokes kind of write themselves about who wants to be the controlled, who wants to be the controller, uh, what kind of personality you are. You can extrapolate to all other kinds of human behavior, which, you know, I'll let the, the imagine imaginative listener come

Chris Gammell: up with. So actually a lot of this stuff I've, I've seen in person, uh, the, yeah, I was, I was there in, in Michigan with some of the Hackaday folks. And, and actually I get to, I get to see this stuff firsthand. And I think I might've told the listeners about that when I was up there. So I think they've seen that. And, uh, yeah, the, uh, the robo roach for sure is like very, very interesting. Um, you know, so, and so just going back to that one second, um, so you said this mature product, what is the actual input to the antenna? So when you're trying to get it to go left and right?

Dave Jones: So it's just a little, uh, so we're using a coin cell battery, it's about three volts. And so we're just making a little square wave. Uh, we, we, we pass it through a little low pass filter because we are trying to charge balance it. So it pushes in current and then pulls it back out again. Uh, so yeah, it's, it's, it's really, and then, and then with the, with our little cell phone app, you kind of dial in the frequency of which that, that pull those pulses get sent. And so, uh, if you ever know anyone that has a cochlear implant, which is the, uh, the implant for, uh, if you're deaf and you can't hear and you put this electrode in there, uh, one of the things they, they often have to do is go back into the, talk to a doctor and they tune the frequency of the, of the cochlear implant for better neural stimulation. And, uh, that's what, that's what we do with the, with the robo roaches as well. We have a little app. You can go in there and find out which one best, but which, which settings, uh, actually best, uh, are for actually making neurons fire inside the, uh, cockroach antennae.

Chris Gammell: So, and so you mentioned before you said, uh, you said, uh, I wrote it down here somewhere, something about the sat, like saturating the, the, the membrane. So what is, what is the actual physics of that? I mean, like, why, why is it an AC signal versus DC signal? Why? And, and then, when then the actual frequency, is it just about what couples in best or how, how does that actually end up? Like, do we know, do we know what that is? Yeah. So the, yeah, we do. There, there are,

Dave Jones: and actually you're, you're challenging me. This is like, uh, this is what every, uh, neuroscientist has to learn at the very first day of grad school. Uh, there are equations. There's the, uh, oh no, I hope Josh. Yeah.

Greg Gage: I know all our, all our grad school friends are going to be listening now. Okay. Yeah. Charge, balance, and wave forms. Yeah. Okay. So cathodic first. No anode first.

Dave Jones: Which one? The, uh, uh, it's like, uh, there, there is a membrane. All right. And then one thing that's interesting about this membrane is that it doesn't allow all everything to pass through it. It's like a little wall, but it does allow certain things to pass through it. And so there are, uh, charged particles or charged ions like, uh, sodium, uh, calcium, like the, uh, potassium, the things that you get find in the sea. We are, we are from the oceans, you know, we still have it running through our veins. And so these ions are floating around inside the brain, but they're, they're not equally distributed. So you have these little pumps inside the neuron that will push the charges from, from the sodium on one into one side of only, uh, which happens to be on the outside of the cell. Uh, and then you have, uh, another pump that will actually same pump, but it pushes, uh, another ion, uh, sodium, no calcium. No, which it helped me out, Tim. It's, uh,

Greg Gage: actually we're joking about this.

Dave Jones: It's actually sodium flows in. Potassium flows out. Okay. We always joke about this because it's actually a hard, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's not, there's no real cute, like mnemonics to sort of remember this, uh, uh, way of doing it, but you have, you have a, you have a, you have a buildup of ions on one side and another one. And so there, when these, uh, when a, when a voltage hits to a certain threshold, um, these ion channels open up and it allows for like the current to sort of flow through. And that's naturally what happens inside the cell. Okay. So you have these currents that flow through because these ions. The ions are the actual charge carriers though.

Chris Gammell: That's the idea is basically. Yeah. Exactly. The key fundamental thing.

Greg Gage: It's not electrons. It's positively charged ions that are moving, that are causing this change in voltage. And so that's fundamentally different from the electronics that all your listeners use.

Dave Jones: Yeah. Okay. Yeah. So when you have, when you have this, just this, uh, this difference between the, the ions of one side with the other, it's like a little battery. It's just, there's a, there's like a positive battery going in one direction. And then you have another battery that's negative in the other direction, one sodium and one's potassium. Uh, and then the, the, the, the Hodgkin Huxley in the 1950s figured this out and got the Nobel prize, uh, that the timing at which these things open, they open at certain, certain points with it, when the voltage gets to a certain level, this was called the non-linear, uh, signal comes out where it just, it rushes in, all this sodium rushes in first and the voltage shoots straight up. And then that thing turns off and then potassium turns on and then it opens up and it rushes out in the other direction. So then the voltage drops in the other direction. So that's what creates that one millisecond spike. So, uh, getting back to that's one thing. Uh, the other thing is, and when you're using electricity, uh, when you drive a electrical current around there, you're actually going to move ions, uh, uh, to one side of the, of the membrane, it's like a little capacitive membrane on there. And that raises the internal, uh, voltage of the cell. And so when it reaches that threshold, then it fires. And so that's why that frequency matters. If you have a really high frequency and you're moving it up and down really quickly, uh, it, it doesn't have time to charge the membrane enough for the ion channels to open. So that's why the low frequencies are better. And DC is the worst way to do it. So you don't want

Chris Gammell: it too low. Right, right, right. Yeah. Cause DC, I would imagine it's like at the end of well, and also the end of like, I think I'm when I'm, when I'm picturing my head is kind of like, like you said, battery. And that's, that's kind of what I was picturing is like, when you have like, uh, like a cathode that kind of just collects too many ions and then nothing else can get through at that point. Like there's no charge flow through it at that. Is that correct? It burns tissue and

Greg Gage: you also can leach metal off your electrode. So there's two reasons you don't want to use DC. All these electrodes are really small. And so you can just blow them if you go DC. Yeah. Hmm. DC is forever.

Chris Gammell: Yeah. Okay. Yeah. No, that's, that's, that's very, very interesting. So, so, okay. So that's one of the implications then is that the, the, you have to, so it's like the, the ion, uh, the proportions basically help determine that, that exact dialed in frequency. Is that kind of the idea?

Greg Gage: Yeah. The, uh, your neuron takes advantage of both the differences, uh, in ion concentrations inside and outside of the neuron. And also there's a voltage difference due to the different differentiation of charges inside and outside. So there's a, as we neuroscientists call it, a chemical and electrical gradient is generated by the neurons, which requires a lot of energy to maintain. And this chemical and electrical gradient, it can lead to the pulse that Greg described. So the, the nervous system, nerves in particular use pulses and they can fire these pulses between on average one to 200 times a second. There are some examples otherwise, but so, and the, the, the rate of these pulses one to 200 times a second is one way that neurons encode information. So it's fast. It's not fast given things in the electronic revolution that we're seeing now, but it's fast. It's fast enough for for you old man. You know, People often, because you think you're thinking fast, uh, it feels instantaneous to you, but the speed of impulse conduction along the branches of neurons is anywhere between, um, half a meter per second, uh, uh, to the speed of kind of, uh, a high performance race car. So it's fast, but it's not, I ask people, it's not cell phone fast. It's not computer fast.

Chris Gammell: Right. I remember from biology classes, the myelin sheath that helps with the speed, right? Is that right? Very good. Yes. Yeah. Yeah. Look at you. Nice grade biology. Finally came, came into use for me.

Dave Jones: But actually, I think your listeners would enjoy this. The myelin sheath is how, uh, mammals have, have figured out how to do that. It actually asks us a little insulator that sort of wraps around the neurons. So the electricity can kind of jump from one node of Ron V8 to the next, just sort of, that's how you speed up, uh, transmission down an axon. But in, in insects, uh, and a lot of invertebrates, um, they actually chose a different way to make the axons faster. Because remember, it's really important for the axon to be fast. If you, uh, if you kind of hear something behind you and you need to like get out of the way before you're gonna get eaten, you want to make sure whatever that pathway is, that that's your defense is gonna be really, really quick, or you don't, you don't get killed. And so, uh, for example, in squid, the, uh, there's this, uh, the largest axon in the world is through the, it's called the, the, the squid, uh, giant axon. And it's a, you can actually see it with your eye. And so the reason why that is, is that they haven't evolved, uh, mylon. And so, and so then, uh, what you can do is you can actually do the, the cable equations. You can figure out that the more, the larger you make the actual, uh, tube itself of the axon, the faster the, the actual potential

Chris Gammell: would be. It's kind of cool. So this is, this is like the, uh, like the telegrapher's equation.

Greg Gage: Exactly. I mean, the same theory was used in neuroscience. Yeah.

Chris Gammell: Interesting. And okay. So one step back, the axon is the long, I, I remember the neuron looks like a big, like fuzzy bundle at the end. And then the axon is the long piece that actually does the transmission. Is that right? Yep. Yep. Okay. Well, we'll post Wikipedia links all over the place on this one. This is, this is a more challenge. I think because this is outside the realm of, of, uh, you know, a lot of electronics people, this is, you guys kind of really bridge that gap.

Dave Jones: That's very interesting. Yeah, no, that's what's cool about it. It is, it is electricity and it's biology like in like 50, 50, you know, it's kind of cool. Yeah. That's why we enjoy it as well.

Chris Gammell: What is the role? I also remember neurotransmitters, but that's a chemical, right? And that does that play in as well? It does. It's at the end of that road. Yeah.

Greg Gage: Go ahead, Tim. Yeah. Yeah. No, this is a, so backyard brains exists because of the electronic revolution, uh, that it's getting, uh, it's getting, as you guys have spoken about in your other episodes, that every year it's getting cheaper and cheaper to build your own boards and the circuits keep dropping in price. So being able to amplify a small signal, people have been working on that for years with a transistor and integrated circuits and all the wonderful things that that allows. So we can see the electrical impulse that neurons fire, but that's not, that's only half of how the brain works. Uh, in between an axon and a dendrite is a space called a synapse where neurotransmitters, uh, pass. And so when a, when a spike reached, it reaches the end of an axon, uh, it causes the axon to release neurotransmitter into the synapse. And then this neurotransmitter binds to sites on the dendrite and they can do a lot of things. A lot of things that, um, is a whole class we can give, but it can change when these neurotransmitters bind to the dendrite, they can actually change the voltage of the neuron. And if the voltage reaches a threshold, then the neuron will fire an impulse on its own. And there's, you know, billions of neurons doing this. Um, but we haven't really seen an optics revolution. So Greg and I have been all over the world from the most advanced, wealthy countries to the ones that are just getting started. And, um, we can show, uh, electrical impulses very easily out of our toolbox, but we cannot show synapses easily. Uh, that still requires going to a university using hugely powerful microscopes, uh, fluorescently tagged molecules imaged underneath this microscope. And that still is totally, and I don't, I don't really, I would love, you know, in 10 years for Greg or I to go to a high school and show a synapse in five minutes, but I just, I'm not really sure if that, the optics revolution will happen. Cause it's still, I can't, I can't really build an optics lab easily. I could give me a thousand dollars and I can have a pretty functional electronics lab to get started, but for optics, not really. Yeah. So anyway.

Chris Gammell: And so when you see, you say optics, you mean that just because you need that high level, you're talking about the magnification to see that, that actual.

Greg Gage: Yeah. And you're using lasers and fluorescently tagged molecules. And it's still very, very, very high end. I mean, these labs have all these crazy, it looks like the science fiction movies with all these mirrors and all these lasers and these huge microscopes and stuff like that. Yeah. Peg boards and stuff. Yeah.

Chris Gammell: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. No, that's interesting though, because of that. It's that chemical, like a lot of this biological electrical crossover type stuff. I was talking to someone over the weekend about the, about the, you know, the whole DNA kind of forming circuits, that kind of thing. And just like how, how that's very emerging right now as well. And it's, it's so foreign to me that it's just like, I, I, I'm excited about it. I think it's gonna be really cool stuff. But yeah, I just don't, I don't feel like I have any access to it other than wiki, Wikipedia or, you know, like listening to you guys. So, so right now though, there's so, there's not like a way to flood that, that, uh, crap. What's it? Synapse is between the two.

Dave Jones: Yeah. So you can, you can, um, uh, actually look at what happens when you change, uh, the different type of chemicals that are in the synapse. And so we have, uh, uh, experiments, uh, actually a few experiments that you can do that. You, if you inject, for example, uh, nicotine, which is, um, uh, binds to nicotine, nicotine, acetylcholine receptors, which is these receptors that are found inside that synapse. Um, you can see what happens when, when, uh, acetylcholine for example, is inside the synapse. It actually turns out that the insect will start to have a seizure because it's causes that all the neurons that have those types of receptors, it causes them to, to require ash potentials and all of them are firing at potentials at once. And it causes us, I guess this kind of, uh, weird looking to see a seizure inside the insect. Which is one of the reasons why plants have nicotine to begin with.

Greg Gage: It's kind of a neurotoxic for insects. Yeah. So you can see indirectly, um, you can see the effect of the synapse on the finding of neurons. So yeah. Uh, but being able to see the actual synapse, you can imagine your head, you want to look through a microscope and see chemicals going across the synapse, but that's a 200 nanometer, uh, space. So that's just kind of, it's really difficult.

Dave Jones: No, but there is something that's interesting about the synapse and these dendrites that are out there. And one of the questions is why doesn't the electricity just flow from one cell into the other? That seems to make more sense. Why go through this other weird process where you actually fuse like a vesicle and send a package of, you know, of a, of a chemical messenger across, like on a little voyage across to another cell only to like fuse into the other wall to create another type of process that was going to change the voltage slowly. So why is all that? I mean, why, why not just send electricity? Yes. Why? That was a, that's what I was going to ask. Yeah. So no, because it actually allows for a lot more, like a richer set of communication. So instead of, um, if you, if it was just electricity, the only thing you could do is sort of make, uh, uh, the electricity in the other cell get bigger, right? Uh, cause you're going to send an electrical pulse down from one cell to the other. You can only add to it. But when you, when you separate the voltages from the two cells and you put this chemical messenger, you could, you could be like firing a ton of action potentials on one side. So generating a lot of electricity, but in sending a chemical message, which instead of making the other cell become more positive with electricity, actually, it goes the completely the opposite direction. Uh, and so that's kind of the main reason why you do this. And so it gives you a lot more flexibility and maybe, uh, it doesn't just do it right away. Maybe it's a little slight delay in that. That delay is important for certain things. And so it just gives you a whole toolbox of things that you can do once with an action potential, uh, instead of just making the voltage of the next cell become bigger.

Chris Gammell: So it's almost like galvanic isolation between cells, right? It's, or well, and translation and a

Greg Gage: bunch of other things as well, buffering and yeah. Yeah. And actually, um, uh, if there's neuroscientists listening in, uh, sometimes in, in the talks we give, we say, we're only showing half the story and depending on your preference, you could even say, we're not even telling even half the story because of a lot of the interesting things about the brain, um, learning, uh, changing of properties all happen at the synaptic level. And we're just showing the transmission of the result.

Chris Gammell: Right. It's just the easiest thing to measure right now. And so that's the, not the easy, I'm not saying it's easy, but it's better, better known. Yeah. Huh. Yeah. So, uh, and, and you, and you guys are saying that you actually do influence some of these cells with the, the, uh, it was nicotine and stuff like that. Like the other, other neurotransmitters, other chemicals, you actually do, you do experiments with that kind of stuff. Yeah. We have these, some experiments,

Greg Gage: um, investigating neuropharmacology where you can change the properties of synapse. Um, but for obvious reasons, most of the drugs that can affect the function of the synapse tend to be illicit, um, or, uh, or, you know, uh, doing experiments. Yeah. See, uh, so we, we have, we have one with, with, uh, nicotine and then we have, some people have modified that to test the effects of caffeine or, or Adderall on neural activity, uh, a, uh, glutamate, yeah, glutamate, a talented young student, college, I mean, high school student in California near your neck of the woods, uh, tested a bunch of herbal, um, herbal supplements on the function of the synapse as a high school science project that he went pretty far in the California state science fair with. So that you can, you can study the effect of the synapse with, um, with, uh, chemical means, uh, but you, we still can't really see it directly.

Dave Jones: Oh, so what do you see is electricity, but you're actually affecting the chemicals, affecting the amount of electricity on another cell. Yeah.

Chris Gammell: And so, okay. So, so through the kits and I would like to talk about the education aspect, because I think that's a big, from what I understand, that's a big piece of your stuff, but, uh, also a little bit on the kit side. I mean, so, so right now people can go and get stuff. So like, what are some of the experiments that a school or, uh, you know, just a home hobbyist or just anyone interested in this kind of thing, what are some of the things that people can actually measure in their lab right now with, with your kits or then with other, other similar, uh, experimentation?

Dave Jones: So with our, our basic, the one we first came out with called the, the neuron spiker box, uh, that's literally two map pins, um, that are soldered to some radio shack wire. And that goes into our amplifier, but with those two little pins, you can record, uh, from a lot of different, uh, sensory inputs that are coming into the brain. Uh, so eating crickets, for example, you could record from, uh, like what they hear, and you can do that by recording from the, uh, they have little ears on their four, uh, legs, two little legs in the front and they can angle, they can angle them around and sort of like here. And then if you can record from that, uh, and actually see the neurons fire when you play different types of tones. And so you can do some experiments, for example, you can find out what they can hear. Uh, and turns out they can hear each other. You can play, uh, chirps from other crickets and they'll, they'll respond to that. Uh, but the other thing that's interesting, if you played around with that a little bit more, you'd find out that it actually can hear other frequencies as well, even like supersonic, like the really high frequency pitches, uh, which, um, physiologists have just discovered and they, they realized it's this frequency of bat, the sonar of bats coming in. So they got to hear bats from a while away and they'll, they'll run away from them. Evolution, huh? So, um, so that's one thing. Evolution, man, it's cool. Uh, so we have experiments, uh, looking at visual systems where grasshoppers are really hard to catch because of these beautiful eyes on both sides. And so, uh, their brain is actually calculating to figure out if you're coming towards it or coming, just, just passing by it. If you're passing by it, it won't jump, but if you're bringing your hand up to grab it, it will detect that. Um, and so with the the spiker box, you're able to record that, that signal that sends it from the, it's called the descending contrailt of motion detection neuron, DCMD. I can actually record that and actually see what the, what the, what the cockroach could see. And you can actually do, play these games. Can you sneak up on a, on a, on a grasshopper? You know, you can put the little wire there and actually see what the cockroach or the grasshopper could see, which sounds like you snuck them on it. Uh, there's all the cockroach stuff we do wire in it. Yeah. Yeah. Exactly. Uh, no, so the, the, the beautiful thing with all of our insect stuff is that you, it's, um, you can use some of the other properties of, of these invertebrates, which is that they're, they're cold blooded, right? So you can, uh, put them in the fridge and they'll slow down, uh, to the point where you could actually, uh, handle them. If you put them in a little bit of ice water, uh, these little ion channels I was telling you about before that opened and closed to let the voltage come through are actually going to be, um, sorry, I was hearing Tim pour his wine. Someone else is slowing down their neurons right now. So when you, uh, so when these, uh, when you put them in ice water, these ion channels, uh, this, they, they slow down, the kinematics change. And so, uh, you can actually anesthetize them pretty, pretty easily. So you can easily grab a cockroach or grab a grasshopper. They would normally jump away, but it's easy to do what to, uh, just lower the temperature just a little bit.

Chris Gammell: Huh? That's, is that why they live in warmer climates in the first place? Yeah. Or like they're not out in the winter?

Greg Gage: Yeah, exactly. And also, I mean, it's a good question you're asking because people say, well, you can record the electrical impulses of neurons, but what, what's the point of it? And we have lots of experiments on our website and Greg just went through a number of them, but it's also, um, what we're doing, this is a fundamental scientific instrument similar to a telescope or a microscope. Uh, it's allowing you to see and measure the electrical impulses that many systems in your body are using. Uh, so there's an endless number of experiments, just that this electrophysiology or the electricity that physical systems generate is not taught at the high school level. Um, so it's kind of hard for someone to come up with experiments on how to do it. And so that's why we have so many on our website to give people sort of inspiration to get started. Because if I gave you a telescope, a microscope and you said, well, what, what can I do with this? I kind of like take my hat off and kind of scratch my head and kind of look at you strangely or with a, with a telescope, um, the same thing. But with, uh, electrophysiology is still so new that, uh, a lot of the work that, uh, we do is to get people started about just getting the first types of, um, measurements on visual systems and auditory systems. Uh, we have, we're working, we've worked on some olfactory stuff. Uh, so any sense or any movement, uh, you make is encoded by the firing of impulses. So any kind of behavior you want to study, um, you can interface, uh, by using our neuroamplifiers. So, and, uh, I was just at a

Chris Gammell: hackathon event over the weekend. There was a guy with like a arm band. I think it was my electric where it was like measured. It had like light ups on it. It had like LEDs. Is that, is that the same

Dave Jones: spiker box or is that something else? Yeah, it's, it's, it's a form of our, uh, spiker box. We have one that's kind of more tuned towards the electromyogram, which is what the, the myo is recording. So it's the output of the brain. So the only way the brain can communicate to the outside world at all is through like the motor cortex. So you can, you move or you talk or you, uh, you know, everything that the brain sends an output to is through muscles basically. And so, uh, the, the myo is picking up the electrical activity of those muscles. And so, but that's, it's a, it's a cool signal and that's quite useful for neural engineering because if someone's like a spinal cord, has a spinal cord injury, they can often still move muscles above the brake. And so, uh, there's people that, that, uh, are, are working in this, the field of functional electrical stimulation where they'll record from the, from the muscles above the brake and then send it down to either prosthetic arms or even to their own muscle tissue to cause it to, uh, to grip, to be able to, to sort of, uh, regain some

Chris Gammell: mobility. Yeah. I saw that, uh, there was one a while ago where they had the, it was a double amputee who had two controlled arms. And I remember, I think they had probes in the shoulder or something like that where he was flexing nose and that allowed the, the grabbing action that kind of.

Dave Jones: Yeah. They often even take the muscle and they'll split apart a little bit. So you're going to get finer control of it. And then the brain does what the brain does. It adapts and it becomes like this plastic thing where you all of a sudden have these, these, uh, different sort of, uh, modes at which you can control these really novel objects, which is kind of cool.

Chris Gammell: So what does that look like in the future then? Like, so what is it, what is it going to take? What does the interface look like in the future? So it's less invasive and less, uh, uh, like surgery intensive, right? Is it, is it like, is it? I'll, I'll let Tim take this one.

Greg Gage: Okay. Yeah. So again, the interface is always the problem. Recording from muscles, uh, underneath the skin is relatively easy. So muscles of your chest, muscles of your forearm, your calf, your leg, that's all that can all be done with surface electrodes, uh, with neuro, the, there's something just so compelling about interfacing with the brain directly, um, with, uh, science fiction movies coming out every year, that dream of this from the Johnny Depp movie to the one from, you know, uh, the nineties, the matrix, which I remember seeing when I was in college. Um, the idea of just kind of jacking in, but it's just, it's just so hard to do that because to record the electrical activity of a neuron, you need to stick a needle in a electrode within anywhere from a hundred microns to a millimeter away in the best case. So that's, and that's in the brain. So there's really no way around that. The only animal in which we've successfully been able to record neural impulses outside body are an earthworm and an earthworm is a, we're all tubes within tubes, but the earthworm is a great example of a tube within a tube. Um, and its skin is very porous. Um, and so you can, you can record a neuron outside the body, but in, in humans, you can't. Um, so it's really going to take a new type of interface to record neurons non-invasively. And that's what kind of we've been thinking about what would the future look like with, uh, maybe nanobots inside the brain or a new type of physics to detect voltage remotely. I was talking to Greg about, uh, we really don't have a way to detect voltage and you may even know more about this than we do. Is there any kind of technology where you can kind of point something at a wall and, and see what the voltage is? Why? Just like almost like those.

Chris Gammell: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I actually, I, I heard you guys talking about this a little bit, but the, uh, you were, you were talking about like the IR thermometers where you're actually monitoring

Greg Gage: like the, the, uh, yeah. Does that technology exist where I can just kind of like, what's the voltage on that wall across the, across the yard respective to ground? And I just point something

Chris Gammell: at it. I mean like that's, yeah, I don't, I don't, I don't know of any of off the top of my head, but I, if we do have it, if we have listeners in the audience, I'm sure that they will write in about that because we will, we will move the science forward through, through listening.

Greg Gage: Yeah. I mean, I would love to know if that technology exists. The air power.

Chris Gammell: Yeah. So you expect to be mentioned in the paper, just so we know, we're so we're clear, right?

Greg Gage: Yeah. Yeah. So if that exists, if that, or that technology is being worked on, that would kind of be a step towards the, the dream of wirelessly, without putting something in the body, detecting the firing of an individual neuron in the brain. It's, and it's just something that people have dreamed about and Hollywood has, has stoked the fires of those dreams. Uh, but we just don't have it yet. So, um, I mean, I, I was maybe, maybe we'll, this new remote wireless remote voltage sensing or a new type of physics that allows the high temporal precision of neurons. We can detect brains non-invasively, but requires super cool magnets called, um, fMRI machines. And these are detecting the oxygenated, oxygenated versus deoxygenated states of, of blood. Yeah. Uh, hemoglobin. Yep. And that's got a timescale of two to four seconds, which is nowhere, which is nowhere near the one millisecond timescale of individual neurons. We just don't have a way of non-invasively showing, detecting the electrical impulse of a neuron. So listeners who are, maybe have some skills in electrical engineering and biological interfaces, that's a problem that none of us have solved. And if you solve it, um, you would advance science. And I think you'd also have a pretty, pretty nice little company as well. Yeah. Right, right, right. Yeah.

Chris Gammell: I think the hard part with that, uh, to lug in an fMRI with you too, it might be the, might be the weight. Those, those magnets aren't, aren't very cheap or light. Yeah, yeah, yeah, exactly. That's a big backpack. Uh, yeah, yeah, yeah. So, okay. So you guys mentioned education. I do want to get into this. So, so how, how does all this play into education? I mean, you mentioned high school. Uh, I, I, when I, when I get to visit the, up in Ann Arbor where you, where, uh, when your offices is, I saw some of the students working there, but how, what is, what is the program there? And, and, and especially for people listening, how, how do they get involved in, you know, pulling, pulling that to their schools?

Dave Jones: Yeah. So we have, uh, what we try to do is make, uh, teachers and the, and the general public basically become the experts. And so, uh, what we don't want to do, we don't want to like have to go out to like your school or, you know, your work and give you a lecture about neuroscience. And so the goal of our education program is to sort of make sort of a lot of very tractable experiments, um, that make a lot of these very complex ideas, uh, kind of come to life by doing these hands-on, these hands-on things. And so, uh, what we'd like to see is, um, you know, uh, a teacher or, uh, sort of come to our site, download the lesson plans, get a little bit familiar with what this stuff, and then actually do these sort of exploratory, uh, labs with, with their students to really sort of understand how the brain works. Because that's, uh, we talk about this all the time that given the amount of like, uh, neural problems that are out there, like 20% of the world has a neurological disease with no cures. Uh, we actually don't really pay, we don't even pay lip service, we pay no service, uh, really in, in K through 12 and even an undergrad, uh, you get a lot, I mean, except for you, uh, Chris, you, you happen to, to know about synapses and things from your, or no, you knew about the myelin teeth from your ninth grade class. That's actually impressive. Most people don't actually get neuroscience taught in school. So yeah, the idea is that the teacher be able to be able to, uh, get these lesson plans and become the expert, uh, for, for the, for the students within the classroom. And then everyone's going to sort of learn together.

Chris Gammell: Yeah, no, that's, that's really great. And so what, what's the site, what section of your site is under the experiment section of your site that does?

Dave Jones: Yeah, experiments. And that's, uh, so the experiments are kind of our polished stuff. And, uh, in the blog, uh, is where we're, we kind of like, uh, put out our dirty laundry, I guess, as we're starting to, uh, our dog food, as we started to build it. That's good. Uh, and so I think when you were here last summer, you saw a number of our interns. And so we have a pretty, uh, good internship program this summer, we're going to have seven interns and each one has its own, uh, or her own unique project. And so, uh, and every, every, I think it's every two weeks, they, they publish a little piece about, uh, bringing people up to date with what's in their lab notebook. What are they, what are the experiences working on? What are the, like the struggles they've had and then what progress have they had, you know? And so you can see, uh, there like last summer was the robo scorpion and we had some, uh, flies doing the optogenetic stuff. And we had a, a four channel cyborg cockroach and, uh, we're looking at circadian rhythms. And so these are all, uh, being updated. And then some of those actually turned in, those have graduated into, uh, our, our, our page now, as you'll see a few of those experiments that from last summer that have made it into the, into the production version.

Chris Gammell: Yeah. That's that, that, uh, that, uh, that, uh, that I remember, I remember the scorpion specifically because I'm, I'm not a bug person. Like I, I'm quite afraid of bugs in general. So, uh, do you guys have non bug projects? I mean, is it mostly, is that kind of just

Dave Jones: all the human stuff? Yeah. That's the, uh, we can see the things you can't, we can't like, uh, even non-invasively record from, from, from, like for anything with a backbone, you need to have a special, uh, license from the, from the government. So we don't, we don't do that. So we work, uh, with invertebrates, uh, and we work with, with humans that, that can give you,

Greg Gage: uh, permission to do so. Yeah. Right. So again, so we've talked a lot about neurons in this, uh, podcast, uh, because it is just so compelling. And I also want to add to Greg's point that it's not really taught in high school, but it's neuroscience is just so interesting to humanity. You have this thing in your skull. How is it working? How is it who I am? And neuroscience is, it's sort of this model discipline that combines biology with electrical engineering. Um, that just, it's, it's, it's, whenever Greg or I enter a high school, we really don't have many problems keeping the students' attention. Um, so, uh, we, we'd love to see it being taught more and that's, that's what we're working

Chris Gammell: on. Yeah. Um, I, uh, I, I always see it, even though I always cringe when I see it on Reddit, because it keeps getting repeated over and over. Uh, it is interesting. The brain is the only

Greg Gage: organ that is named itself. Uh, yeah. Oh yeah. The other one, that one I actually like, the one I don't like is the, if the brain were easy enough to understand, we wouldn't, you know, we wouldn't be complex enough to try to understand it.

Chris Gammell: Right. Exactly. Yeah. It folds back on itself. Yeah. No, it is really interesting. And I think it has big implications. Uh, you know, you mentioned the, uh, Greg, I think you mentioned the, the neuros, the neurological disorder, like 20% have that. Does that include like depression and stuff like that as well? Is that, is that kind of in that, that piece of, of the 20%?

Dave Jones: That never comes from the World Health Organization. People have pointed out, uh, some, some neuroscientists were, uh, complaining about that statistic, but that, that statistic is, is true. But, uh, what they were saying is that over the, if you look at, uh, every person's life, uh, that the probability of having a neurological disorder is much, much, much, much, much higher than 20%. So 20% is at any given time, 20% of the world has it. But they're like, if you look at, uh, Alzheimer's and these other forms of dementia, that probably because we're curing a lot of these other diseases, the probability that you're going to have some type of a neurological disorder in your life is like much, much, much higher,

Chris Gammell: like an 80% or higher. Yeah. So my question related to that is, is, uh, you know, you know, I've, I've had friends and family and, you know, like, uh, affected with neurological disorders. And it seems like all of the, the current cures or not even cures, but just treatments are always very pharmacological. They're just chemical drugs and helping with that kind of thing. Are there, are there inroads into things that are affecting the actual, the, the impulses and the, the electricity as well, or is it, is it always with those neurotransmitters like SNRIs, SSRIs,

Greg Gage: that kind of thing? Oh, yeah. Uh, we, we're, we're not really in this space that much, but we have colleagues from grad school that are working at the NIH and a new, a new word that has been floating around our industry is called electroceutical, where you can treat diseases with a stimulation of various pathways. So deep brain stimulation is kind of the success story where a very specific part of your brain has died for reasons that are still being investigated. And this leads to this lead, the substantia nigra, uh, which some of the listeners may know, unfortunately, because of its involvement in, uh, Parkinson's disease, but we can stimulate, yeah, Parkinson's, we can stimulate the subthalamic nucleus and it can alleviate some of the symptoms. And some people, some other scientists have found stimulation of other parts of the brain can, uh, serve as, uh, can, uh, alleviate depression. A grad student colleague of ours, uh, uh, a postdoc named, uh, Mark Lemkooey, uh, was using it to treat as a, some, did some experiments on treating obesity in rats using stimulation. So it is very much, um, in the consciousness of our industry to use electrical stimulation to perhaps treat some things. That's interesting. Yeah. So actually,

Chris Gammell: a former guest, uh, Ben Krasnow, I remember cause he was on YouTube and he was talking about how he used to do, he used to work on deep brain. And then I don't know if you've ever seen this video, but he actually took, he took a 600 amp, like cable strap, made it into a big coil and he triggered his own brain, which was ridiculous. And you know, that's what his YouTube channel is all about, but you see him like almost snap his own neck with a, with like reacting to it. But yeah, that's, that's, that's, that's actually what I was thinking about is the deep brain stuff with the magnetics. So.

Dave Jones: Yeah. That's funny. Cause cause yeah, people, people have asked us, can you build your own TMS machine? Yeah. And I always said you couldn't. I didn't know you could.

Chris Gammell: Yeah. No, no, no. I'll post, I'll post the YouTube link. It's, it's nuts. It's really nuts. Cause like, you see him jerk. I mean, it's just hitting the motor, motor cortex. He was targeting that, but like, like he literally could have snapped his own neck. I'm pretty sure. Like just from like the, I don't know. Like it looked like it from maybe not actual, but it looks kind of scary. So I, uh, yeah, that, that's, but that's very interesting that that is, that is as a treatment option because you know, like, like, yeah, Parkinson's is a huge, huge, uh, and it seems like it feels like it's increasing. Maybe it's just that it's more, more in the spotlight these

Greg Gage: days, but I don't know. Yeah. It's just that's, um, the, the, the, the, the disease, because it affects a small part is, uh, deep brain stimulation is something that can help. But there's other diseases like Alzheimer's where your cortex is just slowly rotting away due to the amyloid plaques. And as far as I know, um, you know, there's no really deep brain, brain stimulation techniques that can alleviate that types of dementia. Right. Yeah. Yeah. TMS. So

Chris Gammell: TMS is like kind of like a, like a targeted, very targeted approach, like a laser style almost,

Greg Gage: but internal. I think we're getting, we, I was speaking about deep brain stimulation, which is DBS, which is where they actually stick electrodes in your brain. TMS is where there's a coil, uh, outside your head that delivers kind of a, I wouldn't even consider it very focal. Um, you know, maybe on the order of centimeters and I'm not an expert on this, but, uh, a blast of electro, uh, electromagnetic stimulation that can activate your motor cortex or your auditory cortex. Oh, okay. Okay.

Dave Jones: Or disrupt, yeah, disrupt the network underneath it.

Greg Gage: Yeah. Yeah.

Chris Gammell: But yeah, that, that stuff in general, like I, like I look at that stuff and I'm just like, that's, that's nuts. Like, I know that that's not your, your eyes is, uh, like all of this stuff. Like, it's just like, it's so outside of my, my realm. I'm really glad you guys are doing the, uh, the, this kind of introductory, I mean, it's introductory, but it's also, it seems like you're, you're kind of going deeper. So, so what is your, I mean, you guys are doing research research, though, too, right? I mean, are you publishing that kind of thing?

Greg Gage: Oh yeah. Yeah.

Chris Gammell: Yeah. So what, what are some of the, what are some of the research areas that I think you've mentioned some of them in, in, in this, throughout this, but what are, what are some of the ones that you're most excited about?

Dave Jones: Yeah. So the, the papers that we've published so far are mostly about the devices and their effect, uh, in the, in the classroom about sort of the more educational based research papers. Uh, one of the issues about publishing in, in sort of peer reviewed journal articles for, uh, sort of, uh, research that sort of discovers a new part of the, uh, uh, how the brain works is the ability to identify the types of, uh, neurons or the, the actual pathway that you're recording from. That's been difficult. So Tim has been working on a way to do some staining. So we can actually, uh, maybe inject and, and, and sort of stain what the neurons are. Uh, but there are other sort of anatomical things. And so I mentioned before about the, uh, the grasshopper and this, and this DCMD neuron. So we can actually identify that particular neuron from its waveform. We know that it's, it's, it's signal noise is much, much higher and it responds in a very, very, uh, patterned way to, to different types of stimuli so that we, we can sort of test at the beginning of the experiment. This is the neuron that we want to do. And now we can start to ask some interesting questions about how that, how that neuron behaves. And so we can look at, uh, for example, um, you can do some experiments to see what is the, like, like how close to the actual, uh, coming towards the insect you have to be, you do, is that to be like, is it, if you're off by 10 degrees or by 15 degrees? Uh, so if you actually start to collect that data, that's actually a published result. That's something that's interesting, uh, to science. You can ask that question. Uh, and you can do that with really, really, uh, cheap things. You can use it with an iPad and just, uh, you know, just a spiker box. That's

Greg Gage: really all you need to do these types of experiments. Oh, that's good. Yeah. And also, um, in the lab, uh, here, uh, Florencia, um, is working on some anemone experiments. So maybe some of the listeners, after listening to this podcast, we'll open up their biology textbooks and read the chapter on neuroscience if, if Greg and I and you did our jobs well enough to spark more interest in it. Um, but you'll see in that, in that chapter on neuroscience that they'll talk about the difference between, um, neural nets and, uh, and centralized nervous systems. And when they're talking about the organization of the nervous system with a brain or ganglia, uh, they'll also talk about another alternative neuro nervous system that anemones, sea cucumbers and medusas have, and they don't actually do not have any centralization. They just have a loose neural network scattered around their body. And, and I remember when I was in college and I was reading about, about, uh, you know, the chapter in the neuroscience on neuroscience and my biology textbook, I said, Oh, that's really interesting, but it'd only be a paragraph. And then as I became a professional neuroscientist, you know, Greg and I sort of realized that that paragraph is, is, is a paragraph, not because they were trying to save space. That paragraph is a paragraph because there's literally very little known about how the nervous system of a, of a Medusa that Spanish about a, how do you say it? A Medusa? Um, what are those things that float in water that, that shine lights? Jellyfish. Okay. Jellyfish. So jellyfish, um, man, awards, right. That's another name. Yeah. Jellyfish and sea anemones. They just have loose neural networks. So there's only a few papers published on these things. And so Florenza, who works for backyard brains has been, uh, among other things, caring for an, uh, an enemy tank that we invested in. And we tried our first recording on Friday where we built a suction electrode and we didn't get anything. We didn't get anything. But we're totally, we tried to suck an an enemy tentacle, uh, into the suction electrode. And it was mostly noise. Um, just if we even just figure out how to get stable recordings and an enemies, that is something that is not really well known. I mean, that would be a publishable world on its own, right? And also from the education part point of view that these animals that just have loose neural nets and there's really nothing known about them, that this is actually, if we, if this project is successful, we'd be contributing to, you know, doing some really interesting science as well as improving that little crappy paragraph that's in the textbooks.

Chris Gammell: Right, right. Yeah. No, that's, and I, I bet the, uh, undersea type stuff, especially because it's hard to access and there's so much like variety in, in, in, uh, in the different creatures down there that you could probably find a lot of stuff like that, like on, on, undiscovered and untriggered.

Greg Gage: So, wow, that's really cool. Yeah. Yeah. Greg spends a lot of time, um, at the Marine Biological Laboratory in Woods Hole. Um, and that, that is famous for really advancing neuroscience, because of various odd marine creatures that have had nervous systems that have lent themselves to easy investigations, such as the squid, such as the horseshoe crab and, uh, some others that,

Chris Gammell: you know. Oh yeah, the horseshoe crab is the one with like the magic blood, isn't it? Isn't it like

Greg Gage: the blue magic blood? Oh yeah, yeah, that's, yeah, yeah. Something about detecting bacteria that,

Chris Gammell: that's not really, um, I think I've read that as well. Yeah. So, uh, so Tim, so why, why Chile? I mean, uh, maybe, maybe we, we didn't quite say that, but you're down in Chile right now. Greg, you're up in Michigan, I think right now. I'm in Cleveland, uh, and ever, correct? And ever, yep, yep, yep. Uh,

Greg Gage: so, so why Chile? Uh, we, uh, received a fellowship from the Chilean government approximately three years ago from a notable, uh, entrepreneurship program called Startup Chile. Uh, and so we moved here, Greg and I moved here in January of 2012 and we received two rounds of funding, um, from Chile. Uh, so Chile is mostly known for exporting copper and salmon and kind of vegetables. It's got a, a central valley similar to California that's rich in agriculture, but they're not really technology exports like California. So imagine California without technology and that's, that's sort of what, you know, Chile is like. Um, so the Chilean government used some of the, the copper resources, uh, of their country that, you know, the, the mining companies to pay a tax on and a small percentage on that went to an entrepreneurship program, basically an immigration program for technology companies to come to this country and start their branches. And so, um, we were interested in growing in Latin America. So we kind of used, uh, this grant to start operations here and we're, it's pretty cool. We, we were the first members of the first makerspace in Latin America. So we were co-founders, not co-founders, the first members, um, of the first, uh, makerspace. And that was in Santiago and that's where Greg and I worked for about a year. And we recently received the Santiago makerspace. Okay. Yeah. The Santiago makerspace. Straight, straight forward. Uh, yeah. And so that's where we, it's got, it's kind of catchy. Yeah. So we were, the startup Chile program, uh, which is not, not surprisingly given the entrepreneurship climate we live in is mostly software based companies, but as a hardware company, Greg and I kind of needed a space to work in where we could bust out our soldering irons, where we could do our animal experiments, uh, that have access to laser cutters and 3d printers, kind of the tools that, you know, kind of part of the hardware lab. So we met a, one of the more famous entrepreneurs in Chile, who's from Argentina named Tabrucio de la Corcova or some, something crazy. And he's an awesome dude. Um, and he underwrote, uh, the makerspace because his video game company in Chile was acquired by a Japanese company. So he wanted to kind of give back to the community. And so we worked there and that was, that was a great experience. Some of our inventions on humans were developed there. Greg did a lot of his work on the human EMG spiker box. There are first 3d printed products were invented there. The manipulators, the first versions of the microscopes, uh, the human, human interface. A lot of that work was done there. And we just recently received funding again from the, uh, business operations government, uh, wing of the government. And we, with the, their funding, we've been able to build a lab here. So now we have a lab with people working and it's really exciting. Um, so what we're doing in the United States is important. Uh, we're introducing high neuroscience into high schools and universities, but here in Chile, if, if someone wants to study biological signals, I mean, there's maybe two labs, you know, one at the university of Chile and one at, you know, the university of conception and backyard brains. So, uh, it's really exciting to be able to offer, you know, an entire country, almost the ability to do neuroscience in an easy way. And so we're doing a lot of the only thing about Chile is that, um, uh, raw materials are kind of hard to get. So I was definitely gonna ask about that. What's the, what's the DigiKey shipping time down there? I mean, if I want to pay the fastest I can get something to Chile, um, is a week. So if Greg, Hey Greg, I really need that circuit board or I need that thing from DigiKey. We can, I remember we had some cables shipped to Chile and that was $3 worth of cables and it was $250 and it stayed in customs for three days. I had to pay a tax on that customs and then arrived and it finally arrived. So after, after enough time being here, we've been able to kind of figure out, plan ahead and we don't really do that anymore. But that's, uh, that's really the biggest issue is, uh, the, the thing about being in America, uh, and being an inventor in America is that I remember one time I was working on a Roboroach on one of Greg's designs and I realized I was out of capacitors and this was on a Friday night at seven, at seven o'clock. And DigiKey has that 8 PM Saturday morning shipping deadline. Yeah. And so I ordered it at before 8 PM and then I continued working until three o'clock in the morning on something with a 3d printer. And so I didn't get up to, you know, to maybe 10 or 11 and I opened my door and the capacitors were there.

Chris Gammell: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. We're totally, totally spoiled about that. I mean, like,

Greg Gage: I mean, I just, that is just amazing. I don't know how that works. I mean, I just, I don't, God bless you America. Right. And it's coming for, it's always coming from Minnesota too,

Chris Gammell: which is the other crazy thing. It's like logistically. Yeah. And that's not even,

Greg Gage: that's not even developing country versus first world country type stuff. I mean, when we've been in Europe in first world countries, you can't, you can't get things that fast, even in first or other first world countries. So that's, that's the, there's the, there's a talent here and there's a hunger here and we've been able to invent here, but the biggest downside is raw materials. It's just, you've got to plan ahead. And scientists have told me that that's the hardest thing because they might be in their lab and they'll be inspired, but then they realize that it might be a month before they get that thing they need. And then by then, yeah. So, yeah. So I, so you guys are planning,

Chris Gammell: I mean, that, that, that is very encouraging that it sounds like the program worked if you guys have opened a lab down there too. So that's good. Yeah. Yeah. So, so you had mentioned that last thing I'll mention, cause I know we're kind of, we're kind of getting up there in time now. You guys have mentioned the, the human to human thing. And then Greg, you did, you did a Ted talk

Dave Jones: that just was released. So what, what was this all about? Yeah. So I didn't know actually to give a Ted talk. So I went to the conference on this, on this fellowship and then someone didn't have a visa, couldn't get into Canada. And then the day before they asked me if I wanted to give a talk, but Tim and I give these demos all the time. So it wasn't, it wasn't too far of a stretch to kind of put something together at the last minute. And so the, the, the talk was all right. I mean, it's like with anything that's under like a very, very constrained time pressures and stuff like that. I wish it could have been a little bit better. I wish I would have had like them not look at each other. Cause these are all the, the criticisms are coming back is like, oh, well the other one student is looking at the other student. So of course he's going to move his hand, but actually when we do it normally, we just make the other person look away. But right. Right. Right. One time that you did it, it's not like that, but, but it's actually been, it's been interesting. So what, so the talk I, I wasn't sure the talk was going to go online, but then when it, they just sent me an email the day before they go, by the way, your talk will go online tomorrow.

Chris Gammell: By the way, you're going to get one and a half million views.

Dave Jones: Okay. And so the, the, the interesting thing about it is that when we, we've done stuff before, like Ted talks before with like cockroaches and Tim and I did one on the Robo Roach. And the, the, the, the emails we get from people normally that we, like a lot of our stuff hit a nerve and they, and they, and they, it either people love it or they hate it, or they, they want to tell you something about it. And a lot of times it's about like, you know, how would you like if a cockroach does that to you, that type of stuff. But on this talk it was a completely different. So we got, we were flooded with email. We're still getting them today. And they're, and it tells you about the sort of the desperate situation we are in, you know, in 2015 in, in treating neurological disorders, because I mean, people are writing in that have loved ones with, you know, various things from dystonia to, to, you know, any name it they're, they're writing in on about it, asking if this could be used for them with it, because their doctors have not been able to help them at all. That maybe what I saw you do up there on that stage, maybe that could somehow be used to, you know, to treat this disease. And so it's kind of sad. And so we're, we're responding as fast as we can, you know, that we, to, if we know some information about like the people that are doing, because there are people that are out there that are looking at, you know, electrical ways of helping, you know, in different types of medicine, but that's not us. Tim and I are not medical doctors, you know, we're, we're neuroscientists. And it's, it's kind of funny that this, this demo is compelling because you see another arm move and it's, and it makes you think, it's a little bit, a little bit showman-y because it's, it's not really as, you know, it's not like I could copy someone's brain signal and make that arm of like, if I could record from like a ballerina and then play it back on Tim, and he would also be able to do these turns. You know, it's not quite like that. That'd be sweet. If only, someday Tim, someday. We're kind of hitting on our nerves, like something that, that, but this is, this is what, this is one of the clever things that, that Tim does is that he, like, if you talk about the dividing roles of the company, Tim is always out there, like, like way far ahead. Like he just thinks about things completely different. And I absolutely love it. And he showed up, this is about a year, about a year and a half ago with this idea of this, of this human to human interface. And what he figured out was that the Ulmer nerve makes this, this, this fairly distinct motion within your hand, and that you can record the EMG and someone else doing that. So you can, it creates this perception almost that one hand, it truly is. One hand is controlling the other because the brain is sending the electrical signal to the muscle and it's causing the Arduino to then kick on a relay to causes the stimulator to work. But I think the, the effect from, from a person sitting in the seat and just watching that is like, holy shit, you know, he's controlling that. Like one guy is actually controlling another person. And it's like, he's like, then the imagination starts rolling. Yeah, exactly. And so, I mean, we try to downplay, I mean, we try to explain very scientifically what's going on, but you can't sort of stop people with imagination for just running away with it. And so, it's anyway, that's, that's the up to date till now is we have, we have, like actually the other, the other aspect we got is we got a number of people that are physical therapists that really want to, like they, they've been using these tens devices for awhile. But they never thought about hooking it up to like a, like another arm that works. And so, we've got some, a number of physical therapists that have contacted us and they're, they're purchasing kits to do some experiments to see if, if actually flexing one side of the muscle and then stimulating the other side in the same person would actually be helpful for their therapy. So, it's kind of a, yeah. So, like who knows? And like, they kept talking, I was like, have you patented this? I'm like, no, you can, you can have that one, mate. That one's free. Yeah. Yeah. Right.

Chris Gammell: That's nuts. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So, it would be like, kind of like mirror box therapy, like, like training themselves kind of idea, like for plasticity and that kind of idea.

Dave Jones: Yeah. That's the idea. I mean, yeah. And, and, and you could, I mean, like you don't actually have to hit that, that old, I mean, tens devices are used just to simulate the muscle, right? So, you can, you can put the tens anywhere. Our, our, our employees like to stick them like on their tongues or on their eyes and do weird stuff. But I don't recommend that to your, for your listeners. But the, but you could, you could imagine that if you had it on one leg and you, and you squeeze one leg, the other muscle on the, on the opposite leg that you could actually get that to work. So, it never, and we did that just to test it sometimes, but never really thought about that as an occupational therapy or a physical therapy type of device, you know. But who knows, Tim, maybe that's a, do you know, back in the future, an insect company, you know? Yeah. Right. Right. That's all they do. Like Nokia. Nokia. Yeah.

Greg Gage: Wow. Yeah. Yeah. Thanks, Greg, for those words. That's kind of you.

Chris Gammell: It's, I mean, it's, yeah. And, I mean, I think that you guys are doing awesome stuff. What, what is, what else is in the future for you? I mean, that's probably my last question. What is, what else is, what do you, what do you really want to do longer term? Is it just kind of continue education or do you want to make more products or all of the above?

Greg Gage: Like, like I said, Greg and I started just neurons and cockroaches and the, we just, we're slowly tracking down almost every single electrical signal that a living creature generates. And so that's kind of where we're going. We want to make more interfaces. We have released a, a EEG, a simple EEG device. And there's a lot of EEG stuff out there. But normally they don't really push the educational route. So we've been wanting to kind of improve that, kind of, kind of offer something different. And continuing to be a fully functional invertebrate neuroscience lab. And also just continue the, the hustle of running a business, of making ourselves sustainable. You know, we want to see everybody prosper. We want, you know, we want to see inventions ship out the door and people who worked in those inventions to have good salaries. And that's kind of where in, in between just the, the invention side of Backyard Brains is also just the hustle that you're in as well. Cause I think you have, I guess, an education consulting business. Yeah, yeah.

Chris Gammell: I have a course where I teach people electronics. That's right.

Greg Gage: Yeah, yeah. So just the hustle of keeping it, uh, keep, keep, keeping it going. And, uh, Greg has some ideas as well. So I'll let him, uh, add to a few months.

Dave Jones: Yeah. And that's the, uh, the kind of the goal of when we started the company is to sort of self-fund our own research lab. And so I think over the past few years with our, with our summer program, it's, it actually is, is come into fruition. Now we actually, Tim and I both have our own, uh, research labs. We have, uh, students come in and they, and they learn and we actually produce, uh, papers. And so, uh, the future is wide open. And the interfaces is, is going to be the next big thing. And Tim's working onto a lot of cool stuff down there with, uh, robotic hacker hands. They're going to be able to hook up from multiple areas around the body. The, uh, the, the idea of, of creating like these optogenetics and these, and, uh, and who knows what the next generation, the next generation of, of neuroscience tools are come out of the brain issue. It would be, but our goal will be to take whatever is up there in the ivory towers of universities and sort of rip it out, uh, reinvent it again through kind of the maker spaces and sort of make it available for the general public. And people in K through 12 and, and people who are just interested in how, uh, how the brain works to be able to have access to the latest and greatest tools.

Chris Gammell: That's awesome. I totally, I'm totally on board with that, uh, with that, with that, with that ripping process. Okay.

Greg Gage: And maybe in 30 years, Greg and I will invent that remote voltage pointing thing. If that doesn't work. Yeah, yeah, exactly.

Chris Gammell: There's, there's, there's a retirement plan. It'll be called the amp power device. There you go. Yes. Discussed. Discussed your first. Well, uh, thank you. Thank you both. Both of you, both of you so much. Uh, you know, it's, it's been really amazing hearing about this stuff. People can go to backyardbrains.com anywhere else that they should be looking. The Ted talk. We'll have all these links. Of course you get, you guys are on Twitter as well.

Greg Gage: Yeah. At backyard brains and also backyard brains.

Chris Gammell: Yeah. Okay. Great. Well, thanks for being on the show.

Greg Gage: And, uh, thanks so much, Chris. We appreciate it. This is a lot of fun for us to talk to a fellow gear head.

Dave Jones: Yeah. And actually Tim and I never really get to give talks together and it's really, it's refreshing and it's cool. I miss you, dog. I miss you too, man.

Chris Gammell: Well, we hope, we hope we will hear you guys again, again soon with a podcast or something similar. Sounds good. Thanks. Take care.

Dave Jones: Bye-bye.

Speaker ?: Thank you.