Episode 12: Earl K Miller on Cognitive Capacity, Multitasking, and Wisdom

Oh, you are in for a treat! In this episode I go back to my neuroscience roots with Earl K. Miller, professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Earl studies the neural basis of executive brain functions, the ability to carry out goal-directed behavior using complex mental processes. We talk about learning, memory, and cognitive capacity. How wisdom is our brain encoding our experiences into principles, categories, and concepts using data compression. How sleep and anesthesia are similar and so very different, both invoking full-brain oscillations but one producing memories and the other amnesia. We dig into executive function, multitasking, switching costs, and sensory overload, and how these are manifested in autism, attention deficit disorder, and depression. What is interruption in this milieu? Listen in to find out! For more about We Interrupt, please see our website at www.weinterruptthis.com for show notes, links, and other episodes.

Episode Transcript

(00:02):
One of my favorite forms of interruption is sudden insights,
new ideas to get your conscious mind out of the way and let the unconscious mind do its thing without without interruption.
Then your unconscious mind will interrupt your conscious mind and say,
hey,
I have a new new idea.
Oh,

(00:23):
you are in for a treat.
In this episode.
I go back to my neuroscience roots with Earl K Miller,
professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
Earl studies
the neural basis of executive brain functions,
the ability to carry out goal-directed behavior using complex mental processes.
We talk about learning, memory, and cognitive capacity.

(00:44):
How wisdom is our brain encoding our experiences into principles,
categories, and concepts using data compression.
How sleep and anesthesia are similar and so very different,
both invoking full brain oscillations,
but one producing memories and the other amnesia. We dig into executive function,
multitasking,
switching costs, and sensory overload and how these are manifested in autism,

(01:08):
attention deficit disorder and depression.
What is interruption in this milieu?
Listen in to find out! Earl I am super thrilled to be talking to you today.

(01:34):
I've mentioned to a couple of my colleagues who are also trained neuroscientists and they were like,
oh,
you're talking to Earl?
Oh,
that's so nice to hear.
Thank you.
Thanks so much for taking the time to talk to me today.
I wanted to start this and just,
you know,
a lot of times we go straight into the science.
I'd like to learn a little bit more about you as you.
How did you originally get interested in neuroscience?

(01:56):
Oh.
Do people really care about me?
Personally?

I do.
OK.
That's nice. How did I get into neuroscience?
I was a pre-med major at Kent State University,
my undergraduate alma mater, and I wanted to apply to medical school and somebody gave me advice.
Oh,
you should work in a research laboratory,
get some research experience.
And I volunteered to work in a research neuroscience research laboratory.

(02:17):
And I still remember to this day,
the very first experiment I did,
I was recording from the hippocampus of a rodents and I,
you know,
you,
you,
you play the electrical signals through an audio speaker and I remember hearing the pop of the,
of the neurons.
I thought this is the coolest thing I've ever seen in my life.
And I think that's the moment I said,
no,
no medical school.
I want to become a scientist.
Of course,

(02:38):
my,
my mother sat shiva but you know,
she got over it.
That's pretty funny.
I had a
similar kind of experience, except I had an advisor who said, Laure you are much more "why" motivated than "what" motivated. You need to go into research and don't do pre-med.
So that's how I started my journey myself.
Why don't you tell us your title and where you work?

(02:58):
OK.
I am the Picowar Professor of Neuroscience at the Picowar Institute for Learning and Memory and Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
There you go.
That's a mouthful.
And you've been there for what,
over 20 years now,
correct?
28 years,
28 years,
almost 30 I was gonna say almost 30 ...

(03:18):
You're,
you're all well.
So back in 2001,
which is about when you started there,
maybe a little before that,
right?
1995.
Yeah.
So I was just finishing my neuroscience postdoc.
And as it turns out,
your now classic paper with Jonathan Cohen came out that year.
So I don't think I read it because I was like,

(03:39):
I'm out of here.
And I read it since then.

I read it since then.
Yes,
I've read it since then.
And so it is on integrated cognitive control.
And so I'm curious over the last 20 to 30 years,
how, from your perspective,
have the tools changed and evolved for studying brain function?
Oh,
dramatically.

(04:00):
I mean,
back when I was a graduate student in the 1980s,
we thought about the brain in a very piecemeal fashion.
We,
we studied individual neurons,
we talked about the function of individual neurons,
we talked about the function of individual brain areas.
And now we think about the brain in a much more holistic integrative dynamic way.
And part of that is,
is technology.

(04:20):
I mean,
we didn't have the tools to do what we do now,
which is study thousands of neurons,
even millions of neurons simultaneously.
We were kind of limited to studying them one at a time.
But also,
you know,
neuroscience as a field isn't really that old.
And when you,
when something as complex as the brain,

you have to begin by studying its parts.
And then once you start figuring it out,
once you've got the parts to some degree -- and that work is still ongoing,

(04:44):
we saw them not even close to figuring out all the parts of the brain or figure out the brain on the level of the parts.
But once you start getting enough information about the parts,
you can begin putting them together and start to figure out how the parts work together.
And that's where,
where we are now. As a grad student in the early nineties.
At that time,
I remember as an undergraduate,
this idea of being able to study visually what's going on in the brain was like,

(05:07):
really,
you're,
you're a nutball.
And then within three or four years after that,
we had the first calcium dyes where you're actually able to study real time flows of,
you know,
calcium in inside cells.
And as I was leaving the bench,
people were just starting to use three photon microscopy to study things.
And now you can actually target gene transcription to particular cells with,

(05:31):

little visual things you can track in those cells,
which is just so amazing,
the different things we can do.
Now,
plus you've got single cell imaging and you've got the much better computer processing power than we had even 20 years ago.
So changes,

(05:51):
that's part of it back when we had like,
you know,
slow computers.
We can only study like electro activity in the brain spiking from single neurons,
actual potential electrical impulses from single neurons.
We only could process on one channel at a time because computers are slow.
Now,
we have,
we can process 1000 channels simultaneously.
And as a result now we kind of,


(06:12):

the,
the neuroscience has sort of shifted that. It has shifted from studying the brain in individual parts,
individual neurons,
brain areas.
And now we're focused more on the emergent properties how all these things add up together.
There's a lot of things going on at the emergent level that you cannot see at the level of the brain's individual parts.
We're going to talk a little bit about this idea of signals on top of oscillations.

(06:33):
But I don't want to get ahead.
OK.
One of the things you've written about -- and I do want to say your writing is awesome.
There are so many times when I go back and try to dip back into neuroscience and I get through the abstract of the paper,
I'm just like,
I'm done with this paper because I feel like what's going on has been obfuscated by the language used to describe it.

(06:54):
So you have just a wonderful way with words to make what you're doing accessible but not dumbing it down.
So thank you so much! You are welcome.
Well,
I would say,
I actually like to say that I'm good at dumbing things down because I need them dumbed down for me.
But you,
it just,
it's,
it's wonderful to read.
So one of the things that you've written is that -- and I think this is a quote,

(07:15):
"The basic element of the thought is a group of neurons that are active together, and that such an ensemble,
this group can form a perception,
a memory, or an idea."
So this is at the same time,
it's both beautiful but also perhaps a little,
it almost feels ultra reductionist.
It's like, how can you say an idea is this kind ensemble of neurons firing.

(07:39):
So I'm wondering if you can just talk about that image and how it strikes you and how you came up with that language to talk about it.
Well,
the idea of an ensemble hardly begins with me,
I mean,
that's a long history of long history of neuroscience.
And the idea is that ensemble is a unique group of neurons or pattern of neurons that corresponds to every thought action,
memory perception that we have.

(08:01):
And that's going to be true to some degree because all of our thoughts,
perception,
memories and actions come come from our brain.
So there's something that's producing that.
But the big question is what really is an ensemble and the ensemble,
which is not as easy to answer.
And the original idea was an ensemble was an actual physical network of neurons that are connected together.

(08:23):
And that unique physical connected network is what form forms an ensemble.
But the whole premise behind that is the is the way we used to think about the brain in,
in the 20th century.
And that is every neuron has one function,
every neuron does one thing.
So you put together a unique combination of neurons and you have an ensemble.
But now it's becoming,

(08:44):
it's become completely obvious that neurons don't have single functions.
The functional in the brain isn't individual neurons.
They are collections of neurons.
And the reason is because individual neurons have a property that we call mixed selectivity.
They don't just do one thing.
They're multifunctional individual neurons doing different things in different contexts.
They're like the utility player in a baseball team,

(09:06):
they can do different things at different times.
If you go back to the same context,
they'll do the same thing,
but they'll do different things in different contexts.
And what that means is those individual neurons are not part of one ensemble.
Like the way we used to think,
they're part of multiple ensembles,
they're shifting their ensemble membership depending on the context or the function function at hand.
And that's really kind of a radical,

(09:26):
radically different way of thinking about the brain.
Yeah,
for sure.
And I think one of the things your lab has been instrumental in doing is talking about,
what is it that helps set the context.
And one of the things you talk about is this idea of local electrical fields or oscillations in the coordinations of these ensembles that create these flexible computational spaces that can form,

(09:47):
break apart, and reform without changing that anatomical component.
Can you talk about,
you know,
when we talk about local electrical fields and oscillations,
I mean you talked about this a little bit,
how do these oscillations differ from direct neuron to neuron communication?
So the way again,
the way we used to think about the brain was that neurons have a physical connection.

(10:09):
They have an axon going to a dendrite,
and you have a synapse there and then the synapse can have a strong weight or a weak weight and you have electrochemical transduction and that's how neurons communicate.
But all this electrical activity neurons are doing is creating these electrical fields,
they're creating these fluctuating electrical fields and the electric fields have,
have an influence. They are what electrical fields are.

(10:30):
They're,
and oscillations are,
they're essentially,
they're the brain itself organizing itself.
Now,
imagine this,
imagine,


imagine a stadium crowd,

watching a football game or whatever and the crowd starts doing the wave.
Right.
So that is the,
this crowd self organizing itself based on a couple of simple rules,
like stand up when the person on the left of me stands up and sit back down again.

(10:53):
And from those simple rules and these local interactions,
stadium crowds can create this organization.
Now imagine what your your your brain can do with that principle.
And that's what we think these these electrical fields and oscillations are doing is they're allowing the brain to organize itself,
creating this organization that the brain brain can then exploit to do real brain function.

(11:13):
So we've got local electrical fields,
right?
But we also know that multiple areas of the brain are involved in different parts of cognitive processing.
You've got parts of the brain that process auditory stimuli,
parts of the brain that process,
you know,
some parts of emotional stimuli,
motor activity and all these other things,
right?
And so there's this idea of local fields,
there's this idea of oscillations,

(11:34):
which are perhaps a little bit more broad.
One of the things you've mentioned is this impact of networks,
right?
This system of roads with these oscillatory synchrony as traffic,
right?
And there's also some more recent papers that are talking about the impact of actual brain anatomy -- the shape of the brain -- on function,
right?
And so you have some,
you've done some interesting work looking at both electrical fields,

(11:57):
the perhaps less local oscillations that are coordinating different parts of the brain.
But I wonder if you kind of put those pieces together for us,
We've got this lump of,
you know,
four of whatever pounds of stuff between your ears.
How do we think about the actual shape of the brain in helping us manage and monitor information processing and information flow?

(12:17):
Yeah,
that,
that's a great way to go into it is that is that we used to think of that anatomy was destiny in the brain.
If two neurons are connected up or 1000 neurons are connected up,
they will influence one another.
And if one neuron gives off electrical impulse and it's connected to another neuron and that snaps has a strong,
it's what we call a strong weight,
it has a big influence.
Then the second neuron will fire.

(12:37):
That's the way the brain works.
And you multiply that times hundreds of millions of neurons and you get peace,
love and understanding,
you know,
and I'm not here to say that the anatomy isn't important, or
that these connections aren't important.
No. They are fundamental.
They are the basic stuff,
your operations of your brain extremely important.
If you don't have that,
you don't have these connections and these synapses,
you have nothing.
Ok.
But what this electrical activity creates,

(13:00):
it creates something on the,
this emergent level like this crowd doing the wave.
That's what these oscillations and brain waves are.
And they also create that, and that turns around and has an influence back,
back,
back on the spike.
So we used to think of anatomy as being destiny.
And now we think of anatomy as being possibility.
Anatomy is like the road and highway system in the brain.
It says where traffic could go.

(13:22):
But what,
what your thoughts are is where the traffic actually does flow from moment to moment.
And we think these patterns of oscillatory resonance
these,
these synchronized brain waves,
that's what helps direct traffic.
Got it.
I'm just gonna read one of the things you've wrote, that "we propose that the role of synchrony is to chemically carve an ensemble from a greater heterogeneous population of neurons which ultimately endows thought with flexibility."

(13:47):
Yeah.
So think they think about how and so,
you know,
it takes a long time to wire your brain together and change the synapses and change whether they're,
they have a strong influence or weak influence.
It takes time to do that.
And that's your brain laying down the road and highways where the traffic could flow.
Thought doesn't happen that slowly, thought is very flexible.
You think moment to moment,

(14:07):
I'm responding to what you're saying,
you're thinking of thought.
Human cognition,
especially intelligence, is flexible thought.
So where does that flexibility come from?
The flexibility come from?
You can't rewire the brain moment to moment,
you can't change how the brain is wired up; that takes time.
And you can't,
you have this overall anatomy coming together and how do you gate things,

(14:30):
just by using anatomy alone?
You would need like a gazillion gates on a gazillion synapses in order to make it work by anatomy alone.
But now you have this infrastructure that,
that represents the the potential of what the brain can do.
And then the your brain creates these electrical fields and now these electrical fields influence one another.
Now you have a way of actually hooking things together,
making some neurons talk, forming networks, that's in a flexible format because it's happening in this electrical field level.

(14:57):
And that's the thing about resonance patterns -- that they're stable until you break them apart and they form a new resonance pattern.
That sounds like an ideal substrate for,
for flex,
flexible,
flexible thought,
You know,

it has to work because single neurons fire when their membrane potential,
there's a they have a membrane and you look at the electrical potential across the membrane and when they reach a certain value,

(15:22):
the neurons fire,
right.
Well,
the electrical potential across the membrane is highly influenced by the electrical field that the neuron is in.
So if you influence that electrical field,
you're gonna influence the ability of the neuron to spike and give off electrical activity.
That kind of level of processing, this influence on the higher level is going to be,

(15:46):

it works both directions.
The underlying spiking creates the electrical fields and the electrical fields turn around and can sculpt the underlying neural activity.
It has to work that way.
That's basic physics.
It's basic electromagnetic theory.
Got it.
So as you mentioned,
humans can quickly adapt and change our thoughts and behavior,
right?
To adjust to these constantly changing demands of our world,

(16:06):
right?
So at the same time,
--and this is one of the things you're very well known for -- our ability to process multiple pieces of information,
our cognitive capacity is limited.
And so you talk about,
in one of your wonderful papers,
our ability to multiplex, and you liken it to mental juggling. From your perspective,

(16:27):
what seem to be the factors limiting our ability to multiplex?
Yeah.
So that's,
that's a key question for cognition and consciousness.
I mean,
it's a very interesting and curious fact of the brain that you can store a lifetime experience in your head in latent format.
But the moment you express it, at least express it,
in a,
in a way that is accessible to conscious thought, all of a sudden,

(16:48):
we're very single minded.
We only can think about one or two thoughts at most simultaneously.
So why is that?
The short answer is,
I don't know.
But we have some ideas about that, that because of these oscillatory dynamics.
So the way,
the way to think about these brain waves is,
when neurons are synchronized together,
when they're oscillating,
I'm waving my hands as if you could see it on the podcast.

(17:09):
But when neurons oscillate together in synchrony,
when they hum together in synchrony,
that means they're going from excitable states to quiet states.
Excitable states and quiet states simultaneously.
And when two sets of neurons are an excitable state simultaneously,
one can give off these electrical impulses.
And since the other one is an excitable state,
it can be influenced by electrical impulses.

(17:29):
Now,
if you turn that around and say,
now you get the neurons out of sync of one another, where they're out of phase of one another,
they're they're anti phase.
Now they can't talk to one another because,
when one is giving off these electrical impulses,
which are influences the other ones in a quiet
state and can't hear it.
So the idea is that,
you know,
neurons that hum together temporarily wire together.
And what that suggests is that the brain is operating by these synchronized rhythms and your brain is not continuously analog processing of data.

(17:57):
What is it's squirting packets of information in these oscillatory cycles around the brain.
Now,
if that's the case,
if conscious thought depends on
my brain generating these these coupled electrical influences,
coupled oscillations and
and synchronized activity,
That means all the information for the current contents of my thought have to fit into one wave and that's a natural limitation right there.

(18:23):
And if you know something about how the brain works,
and I know you do, neurons are getting excited,
then they go into a refractory period where they're
not excited, when they're in a down state.
So that means there's only like half a wave in which you have to do all the processing.
So that's

that's another limitation.
So when you think about it that way,
it kind of makes,
that's really how conscious thoughts happen, is getting your brain - all the rhythms - synchronized and on the same page.

(18:47):
That means you've got to fit all the contents
for any given moment of thought in the half a half a half a wave,
right?
And I think it also depends on what an increment of thought is.
What is that spike?
What is,
what is carried,
what is that information that's carried in that packet for want of a better word.
So,
so much of it.
So I wanna,
I wanna kind of poke at this a little bit,

(19:08):
right?
So much of your work on this idea of working memory has been based on visual processing. Animals,
looking at something and then recording,
you know,
and you're measuring different aspects of the animal's response to that.
And one of the things that,
that's really,
really neat is that humans (as animals) are able to process information in their left and right visual fields independently,

(19:30):
which makes sense.
I mean,
I live in an area of the world where there's lots of deer and it's really nice to be able to see a deer over here before it hits this visual field and realize I need to slow the car down,
so I don't hit this animal
and it doesn't hit me.
So you've got almost like this two areas in the visual cortex,
right?
Two areas that you can process working memory left and right.
So your brain -- just for your listeners out there --

(19:51):
vision,
your brain splits vision down the middle,
everything on the right side
of your vision,
if you're looking, everything on the right side of your vision goes to the left side of your brain,
everything on the left side goes to the right side and it's not by right or left eye,
it's each eye so you can cover one eye.
It,

it's the same thing,
right?
Yeah.
So you're right.
I mean,
when I was in,
we knew we knew about the visual system back before I was born.

(20:14):
When I was in graduate school,
we learned,
no,
well,
somehow,
the visual system is split in the sensory cortex,
the back of your brain,
it splits vision down the middle.
But somehow way up in the front of the brain where all the cognition happens,
prefrontal cortex and working memory, it gets united.
Somehow the visual field gets united.
We did a series of experiments,
I think in 2007,
we published a paper where we actually tested this and it turns out no,

(20:35):
that's not true.
It,
it remains split even at the highest levels of the cortex.
And first,
I was like,
whoa,
that can't be right.
And we actually went to a meeting where we talked about cognition,
cognitive capacity.
And people said,
how can this be true?
We've been studying working visual,
working memory for decades now and no one's ever reported this.
And I said,
have you looked for it?

(20:56):
And since then people have looked for it and they found it,
you know,
and in retrospect,
you're right,
it makes perfect sense because if you imagine we evolved,
we evolved in this environment where we have to constantly look after predators and prey and stuff like that,
you're processing something on one side,
you want to leave the capacity on the other side completely free so that you can notice if a tiger is about to leap out at you,

(21:17):
for example.
So it makes makes perfect sense.
But now we're,
we're looking at it now,
we're,
we're asking the other question.
Well,
that may be true.
But if I'm playing Frisbee and the Frisbee crosses from my left to right,
I don't notice the split there.
So how does the brain unite these things?
And we're,


we've done a few experiments and we're starting another series of experiments where we're looking at this and it,

(21:38):
it looks like as if the brain uses these rhythms,
the the the two hemispheres synchronized together in order to get the two halves of the brain on the same page and transfering the information back and forth.
Wow! That's really interesting.
So you have focused largely on visual stimuli and processing of visual signals.
Yeah.
What I said about right versus left is less true for other modalities.

(22:00):
It's true for somatosensation and motor. Audition,
it's not quite the same because your brain needs to process both sides because you want to know what direction the sound is coming from,
it hits your one ear before the other and your brain uses those timing differences.
So, audition is much more coordinated, but vision,
somatosensation,
motor,
it's split down the middle as if you're all what's called a split brain patient.

So I guess my question is looking at working memory (22:22):
is working memory different for these different modalities.
Well,
in terms of the right versus left,
I'm gonna say yes.
In terms of working memory in general,
I'm gonna say no.
We've done work on,
we've looked at the auditory processing too.
And others
have done work on somatosensation:

(22:44):
how do you remember, holding working memory, the frequency of a vibration at my fingertip.
People have done studies like that. And you see the same kind of neural mechanisms and processes going on whether it's vision or audition or,
or somatosensation.
OK.
So you're still looking at a limited amount of information that you can store in working memory,

(23:05):
but irrespective of which sense
that you're processing.
Yeah,
that's right.
So the mechanisms for working for working memory in general seem to be relying on the same mechanisms,
but you can feed it different types of information.
I live in a family with a lot of a ADHD tendencies.

(23:25):
So executive control is near and dear to my heart.
And as we're talking about this idea of,
you know,
how do we process working memory?
How do we focus?
How do we lose focus?
How do we multiplex. All of this to me is like,
oh my,
this is my life! To be able to manage focus!
I'm wondering,
you know,
for those people who don't have the kind of "in the soup" experience of ADHD,

(23:51):
can you talk a bit about executive control?
You've spent a large chunk of your career studying prefrontal cortex.
Could you talk about what executive control means.
Well,
one way to,
to begin with that is,

examining what executive control isn't.
So, reflexive reactions to the environment are not executive control.

(24:12):
If I throw a rock at your head,
you're gonna naturally duck out of the way. Your brain is wired up to duck out of the way of looming objects.
Simple creatures can swim towards food
or swim away from light.
They're just reacting to the environment.
Humans have something called executive control which allows us to not just respond to the environment but to
take control of our own thoughts and actions and actually act on the environment. What executive control is,

(24:36):
it's the,
it's a set of functions that allow us to predict goals,
predict things we want to achieve that aren't in the immediate environment and then come up with plans and means and make that come about.
So it's literally our ability to wrest control of our brain from the outside world to its own internal control and use that to direct our,
our,
our thought and action toward towards goals.

(24:58):
So what really interests me?
Well,
so many things interest me about what you do.
But I'm thinking about this idea of local electrical fields; of maybe not so local oscillations;
this concept of,
you know,
interbrain communication affected by oscillations, and local control and this idea of executive functioning.

(25:19):
Could you talk a bit about your thoughts on what might be happening in an ADHD brain when we talk about not having the same level of executive function.
Because for example,
an ADHD person can have intense capability of focusing but also incapability of focusing depending on the environment,

(25:42):
depending on the context.
And so for me,
there's so many really interesting parallels at the kind of tiny level that you're studying things at,
and this kind of meta level that we humans live in.
We've completed a series of studies over the past 10 years,
not completed,
they're still ongoing,
but we've conducted a series of studies over the past 10 years that indicate that that your brain uses two different frequencies of these oscillations to process bottom up -- what we call bottom up information--

(26:07):
which is sensory inputs flowing into your brain; and top down information,
that's the control signals coming from the front of your brain.
So the sensory signals come into the back of your brain and they get,
they get processed and,
and transmitted forward in your brain to the executive part of your brain,
which is the front part of your brain,
the prefrontal cortex.
And we have now really quite a substantial amount of evidence showing that this trafficking of sensory information from the back of the brain to the front of the brain is taking place -- the information is riding on these higher frequency,

(26:37):
so-called gamma waves, 30 to 40 hertz and above.
That's a high energy state of the brain because it's transmitting sensory information.
And that goes from the back of the brain,
to the front of the brain on these high frequency gamma waves.
But the top down control signals allow the brain to control and regulate its own thoughts, flow in the opposite direction from this executive part of your brain back to the rest of your brain.

(26:58):
So it could be the puppet master, telling the rest of the brain what to do.
And we think these top down signals are,
are being transmitted not by the higher frequencies like sensory signals,
but by lower frequencies like alpha and beta,
that,
that range more like 15 to 25 or 30 Hertz.
And we have a substantial amount of information showing that if you look at bottom up versus top down sensory information versus executive control,

(27:21):
it's higher frequencies versus lower frequencies.
So we think that normal cognition is the balance between these two processes,
right?
If you think about it,
your brain cannot process all the information that's flooding into your senses
right now.
You have a flood of information coming in and you're only really aware of a small fraction of it.
And if you were more aware of more of it,

(27:42):
you would have sensory overload,
which is the kind of thing you see in autism.
OK.
And that's extreme on the end of this distractability
spectrum.
So we think this could be explained by an imbalance in these frequencies.
If you have sensory overload,
it's because the higher frequency gamma waves are overwhelming
the lower frequency alpha beta waves,
the sensory information is overwhelming the top down signals that control it.

(28:07):
So we're now starting another series of experiments where we're seeing if we can actually restore the balance between the high frequencies and low frequencies and restore normal cognition,
normal focus and normal,
you know,
basically create and then cure sensory overload by first unbalancing these waves,
getting the low frequencies and high frequencies to unbalance
so the high frequencies dominate; and then using electrical stimulation to then strengthen the control signals,

(28:32):
the lower frequencies, and bring them back into balance and restore normal cognition. In this land of neurodiversity that we exist in,
we always have these challenges when we talk about "normal".
gGrowing up with this and having kids growing up with this as well,
is this idea that I've heard over and over again, that ADHD can also be a superpower.

(28:52):
There's "restoring normal cognition" -- and I'm using air quotes for people who can't see my hands on the podcast--
I understand that for me as well as others,
sometimes the lack of focus can really be a good thing, and sometimes it can be a really wonderful
popcorn-super-creative-opportunity for people.

(29:14):
And so I'm,
I'm almost wondering, what you're talking about is understanding those gradations of,
of context, gradations of focus, can almost provide anyone an opportunity to experience these different ways of being and thinking. I didn't mean ... when I said normal cognition,
I didn't mean like there's one set point,

(29:34):
everybody has to be at this point.


There's a range,
you know,
and like sometimes it's good to be more open and more receptive.
Sometimes it's good to be more focused.
Now,
imagine we can sort of push around these brain waves so we can actually move people around that range and they could change their level of focus depending on the demands at hand.
One of the things that I keep coming back to, is this idea of,

(29:58):
of learning. You talk a lot about working memory.
I don't know how much you do in the area of learning.
I'm wondering,
yeah,
I,
I have not read all of your papers.
I'm sorry, there's a lot there!
You've talked about multiplexing, and how we really can only hold so much stuff in our working memory at a time.
I'm wondering how much of this is,

(30:19):
is hard encoded and how much of this ... is there is a potential for learning?
And I understand there's frequencies and there's only so much signal you can store in a frequency.
But I also wonder,
you know,
can we make the signal smaller in some ways and fit more stuff on a waves.
I don't know.
And so I'm just,
this is a bit wacky,
but I'm wondering what your thoughts are.

(30:41):
What have you seen?
What have you heard?
What are other people studying?
What are you studying with respect to the ability to learn and sharpen, maximize, whatever, our capabilities of focus,

the ability to store more information on a single oscillation.
Yeah.
So we talk about the amount of information we could store on a single oscillation.

(31:02):
What we're talking about is cognitive capacity.
How much information could you hold in mind at any given moment?
And that varies from person to person.
It's very steady for a long time and it changes with age.
It starts out low when you're young, and gets larger
when you're an adult, and when you get to be my age,
it starts dropping back down again. And this varies from person to person. As far as we can tell that's not very trainable.

(31:23):
You can't really increase somebody's capacity,
But, people can learn to deal with it better.
They can learn strategies and methods to deal with that,
that limited capacity.
They can learn techniques for focus or techniques for things that allow them to make maximal use of the capacity they have.
And actually,
that's one of the things that wisdom does.

(31:44):
So,

if you think about it,

when you,
when you reach a certain age,


as you grow up,
as you get older,
you get,
you get more and more knowledge,
you get more and more experience and what experiences we built these high level concepts and principles,
right?
So I have a,
I have an idea in my head of what justice or injustice or fairness is,
right?

(32:05):
And I've gleaned that from a lifetime of experience,
not only by myself but seeing others.
And now I have this concept called, let's say justice.
And that one word,
that one concept, applies to a whole bunch of different situations.

So wisdom (32:19):
developing these,
this knowledge,
these high level principles that we develop over a lifetime,
they're the ultimate form of data compression in your brain.
Your brain evolved this ability to develop principles,
high level principles,
categories,
concepts, as a way of compressing data.
And now that the data is compressed,
I can think about fairness and justice without having to think about every single time I was,

(32:43):
I was treated fairly or unfairly or justly or unjustly.
I can think about them at this higher level.
And I've now compressed all these experiences into,
into a small packet.
And that's how your brain deals with this limited capacity.
So it varies from person to person.
But people start out at a very low,
relatively low cognitive capacity when they are children.

(33:03):
When your brain fully matures around the mid twenties or so, you reach your full cognitive capacity. And then when you reach about 60-65, which I'm starting to push now,
your capacity drops back down to childlike levels.
And that sounds bad.
However,
my aged adult brain has all these high level concepts and principles,
all this knowledge I can draw on, so we can compress data more effectively than a younger brain.

(33:27):
So my cognitive capacity is dropping,
but my wisdom is increasing so I can deal with that better.
Interesting.
So one of the things that got me started on talking about interruptions and we're gonna get to this and actually,
I'm jumping ahead.
But one of the things that got me started on interruptions, is this idea of it almost is like applying wisdom in groups.
How can we effectively listen to one another in a group of people who may have very different circumstances,

(33:53):
contexts,
information that they're bringing into the group.
And I have this perhaps perhaps wacky idea that one of the things that would be really neat to be able to do is to be able to listen to people talking at the same time and processing that together.
So we didn't have to sit on our hands to wait for somebody to finish.
But we can allow people to have overlapping conversations or perhaps layered communications.

(34:19):
There is kind of the visual stimuli of watching people in the group and there's the auditory stimuli and of course tactile as well.
From your perspective with working memory,
you've talked about wisdom,
you've talked about our capability of,
of really we can't change working memory very easily through training.
How realistic does that kind of thing sound to you?

(34:42):
It's very difficult to,
to increase cognitive capacity as as I mentioned.
But you can,
if you get practice at things,
you,
you can process information more effectively.
So you know,
for example,
if you're learning to play an instrument,
musical instrument,
everything you do,
you you're having to think about every little movement you make and that's taking up a lot of cognitive capacity.
But with practice,

(35:02):
you get better and better at it.

So now things go into muscle memory,
what we actually call procedural memory.
They go into muscle memory.
So now you can run off these things automatically without conscious thought.
And now you just freed up that -- because when we talk about cognitive capacity about conscious capacity.

Now that things are muscle memory - procedural memory,
they can be run off automatically and no longer

(35:22):
take up some of that cognitive capacity,
you just freed up cognitive capacity.
And that's an example from the motor system,
you know,
learning to play an instrument.
But this is true of any skill you,

you learn. As you get better and better at it,
some of the stuff becomes more automatic,
becomes less cognitively taxing.
And now you freed up some cognitive capacity.
So I'd say with enough practice,
you,
you're not gonna increase your capacity per se,

(35:44):
but you're gonna,
with practice,
you can find more effective ways of,
of,
of dealing with the capacity you have got.
All right.
So moving on then. From your perspective,
I mean,
I've heard a number of things you said that to me sound like interruption,
right?
This idea of these different oscillations helping to suppress or augment carrier waves in the brain,

(36:09):
right?
So how would you in your context define interruption?
How would you define interruption?
I,
I think I need that first.
I mean,
what kind of interruption are we talking about?
Like I interrupt you when you're speaking,
are we talking about disrupting society or science?


I mean,
I'm thinking for you,
it's in the context of thinking about working memory.

(36:29):
How do we process thought?
So many times I interrupt myself thinking or I'll get distracted and go over here... From your point of view as somebody who studies processing of signals in the brain,
I'm wondering if you might consider those kind of lower frequency and higher frequency oscillations as a way for the brain to in essence interrupt itself and allow some signals to get through and suppress others from getting through.

(36:58):
Oh,
sure.
Yeah,
I think I know what you mean.
So,
I mean,
one of my favorite forms of interruption is sudden insights,
right?
New ideas.
You know,
when we talk about thinking and decision making.
We were just talking about consciousness,
but a lot of stuff happens below the level of consciousness, outside of consciousness because of this limited cognitive capacity.
Think about it this way.

Do you ever play poker?

(37:20):
Yeah.
I'm terrible at poker.
Yeah, I'm not so great at it either.
But when you,
when you're making a decision,
should I raise,
should I fold?
Should I,

call,
you're taking a lot of factors into account. You're taking in the recent history of the game,
the person,
you know,
the cards you have, the cards they have.
That is way too much information for your brain to process consciously because it's just too much.

(37:40):
But below the level of consciousness,
your brain has these like statistical look up tables almost, where it has all this information,
right?
And your unconscious mind often makes decisions based on all these factors
that's too much for your conscious mind to process.
Then it,
it sends that information to your brain as a sudden insight,
a gut feeling or a sudden insight.
So oftentimes when people are good at poker,
you'll say to them,

(38:01):
well,
why did you do this?
Why,
why did you call me?
Oh,
I just knew you were,
you were bluffing.
What they're doing is ---it's nothing about consciousness.
Consciousness is often the story your brain made up to explain what it just did.
So that decision happening is a gut feeling on the unconscious level and then you make the decision and your brain goes,
oh I made it for this reason.
But a lot of that is kind of a,

(38:21):
a bit of a fable.
But I mentioned that because that's one of my favorite forms of interruption. Because sometimes I have my,
my best insights,
my best thoughts,
my best new ideas, when I'm not thinking about something. I do a lot of preprocessing,
I read,
I think about some of these problems,

bothering me.
How am I gonna solve this?
And then,
and a lot of people have this experience,

(38:41):
this occurs to you when you're falling asleep at night or in the shower or you're doing something else, and all of a sudden -- boom!
And that's because sometimes you,

your conscious mind,
it keeps going down the same ruts over and over again.
You know what I mean?


You get entrained in the same lines of thought.
But if you get your conscious mind out of the way and let the unconscious mind do its thing,

(39:01):
without interruption,
then your unconscious mind will interrupt your conscious mind and say,
hey,
I have a new new idea! And that's almost like wisdom manifesting,
right?
The ability to almost unpacketize that information you store,
decompress it and allow that to express in the unconscious.
Gut feelings are real decisions.
They're not,
they're not just guesses.

(39:23):

They're not just guesses.
Yeah.
So,
thank you.

I love thinking about it that way.
Another thing you talk about is the idea of switching costs.
You're talking a little bit about this right now.

(39:44):
I mean,
there's switching between conscious and unconscious.
There's also switching between two forms of two things,
two ideas. Multitasking.
Right.
Yeah.
So we're coming back to this multiplexing,
multitasking.
As I was researching this concept of interruption,
there is all kinds of research out there.
Some of it,
with more evidence than others, talking about switching costs.

(40:05):
And some saying that oh,
interruption is really wonderful because as you said,
it kind of shakes you out of a rut that you might be in and it's really helpful and others saying that interruption is awful and it takes you x number of seconds to get back on the train.
And so I think both of these are right,
but they're generally posed in opposition to each other.
It's like the right thing at the right time.

(40:26):
It's like the right thing at the right time.
Exactly.
Now,
if you're trying to like work and get a task done,
you're much better mono tasking than multitasking because people cannot multitask,
they think they can,
they cannot.
Because what you're doing is task switching.
If you're trying to do two tasks,
I should define a task,
people often say,
well,
I can walk and chew gum at the same time,
walking and chewing gum are not tasks. Tasks are things that are cognitively demanding that require thought.

(40:50):
So if you are doing two tasks that

are cognitively demanding,
you're not actually doing them
at the same time.
You're switching back and forth between them. And you don't notice this because your brain is doing this juggling task, going back and forth between tasks.
You don't notice this because it would be jarring for you to be consciously aware of this.
But your brain is doing it.
And every time your brain switches from one task to another,
something called switch costs -- your brain slows down.

(41:12):
It takes a little pause to reconfigure and when it reconfigures from one task to the other, mistakes get made,

First of all,
your brain has to backtrack to figure out where it left off, and then mistakes made and you've got to have error correction.
So people,
they invariably perform worse when they try to multitask versus mono task.
And this has been shown in numerous,
numerous,

(41:33):
numerous studies.
And what's interesting is that people who think they're really good at multitasking,
if you take them to the lab and test them,
they're actually really bad at multitasking.
They,
they're really distractable. And what it is,
it's a bit of a rationalization.
Your brain is really good at rationalizing things and deluding itself.
What it is, is people who say they can multitask,
well,
people who say they like to multitask.

(41:54):
they are people who are easily distractible,
have,
have more trouble focusing.
So they rationalize it by saying,
oh I'm,
I can't help but do this.
So I must be good at it.
But if you take and you take those people in the lab and you test them,
it turns out they're actually not good at it.
They're actually on the low end of the spectrum of it.
They are just more distractible and their brain is rationalizing their desire to multitask with the delusion that they're actually good at it,

(42:16):
but they're not.
No one is good at it.
When there's,
when you say they're bad at multitasking,
what does that mean?
How do you measure badness at multitasking?
Well,

one simple experiment is,
I give you two tasks,
I say you do task one,
then you do task two and you look at how fast you get two tasks done


(42:37):
and how well you perform.
Then you have another situation where they're actually trying to do the two tasks and must switch back and forth.
People invariably are slower and do worse when they're trying to multitask than mono task.
Got it.
I mean,
I know from experience,
I mean,
I multitask when I get distracted, as you say.
But I also have found,
for example,
doing spreadsheets and financials, I shut my door,

(42:59):
Do not come and bother me because I have to get deep in the
well,
and if you distract me now I have to get back deep in the well,
on this darn thing.
So,
yeah.
Interesting.
So there's a simple test people can do.
And I think there's a video of me doing this online where you say take a piece of paper and divide it in half. On the top half of the paper
write:

(43:20):
"No one can multitask well."

Then on the bottom half...
So, how many letters
is that?
Like what?
I don't know,
I'll make up a number, that's like 17-20 letters.
So you haven't read the top,
top of the page.
No one can multitask.
Well,
then have them write on the bottom of the page
12345678,

up to 20.
Right?
No problem.
People could do it fine.
Now you now do the same thing but switch from letter to number.

(43:43):
So I-1, wait,
sorry,
there was no 1.

N-1 O-2....
And now people are terrible at it.
They slow,
they make mistakes.
If you can multitask.
Those two situations should be equal.
If you do,
you should be just as fast as switching back to 14 letters and numbers as you were doing them separately.
But no,
you,
you actually see,

(44:03):
but they struggle with it.
I mean,
they actually physically struggle with it.
You can see them,
you know,
screwing up their face.

This is really hard. And they make mistakes.

So that's a simple test.

If people could really multitask,
you should be able to switch back and forth in writing the numbers and writing the letters equally well
as doing them separately. And you can't.
Yeah.



It reminds me when,

(44:24):

you write "red" in pink and then you try to have somebody read the word and they say pink instead of red,
right?
Because they're,
they're trying to figure that out.
So 25 years ago,
back in the day when I was still at the bench,
I was studying neuron-glial communication. And at that time,
that was like the edge.

(44:45):
I didn't catch that.
Neuron to glial communication.
We were kind of raising glia up from these support garbage cells in the brain to actually an integral part of how we think about neuronal signaling.
And so yeah.
And so I've also worked in a sleep research group and using these whole brain electrical oscillations to track sleep states.

(45:06):
I love what you're doing because it kind of brings two of these things together for me.
Maybe they aren't together for you.
But you're now studying this electrical coupling between neurons.
You've talked about gap junctions in your work, and neuronal-glial interactions, and these local electrical fields.
When you study sleep,
you're looking at different frequencies to understand sleep states,

(45:27):
et cetera.
What is the relation between the oscillations you're looking at and the oscillations that people study in sleep. Maybe that's not something you've looked at,
but I'm curious if,
if something about the oscillations that you're studying may have implications for what sleep is actually doing for us.

(45:47):
Oh,
I'm glad,
glad you asked that.
So,
because we're interested in cognition and consciousness,
I'm doing a series of studies with my colleague,
Emery Brown here at MIT. Emery Brown is an anesthesiologist in addition to being a neuroscience professor.
And we're trying to figure out why anesthesia makes you unconscious.
It may be disturbing to know, because anesthesia has been around for over 100 years or more,

(46:08):
but medical doctors don't really know why it makes you unconscious.
They just knows that it does.
And there's been this tacit assumption that it kind of just shuts your cortex down. Your cortex just stops functioning.
That's not what happens at all.
Right now,

normally,
when you're awake and alert and you're processing information,
there's a lot of high frequency chatter going on in your brain because there's all these oscillations and these engrams forming and the networks synchronizing together and then unsynchronizing form their networks.

(46:33):
So you see a lot of high frequency chatter in your cortex.
But when,
when you're anesthetized, your brain,
all that high frequency stuff goes away, and your brain,
your cortex is dominated by these low frequency one Hertz -- one time,
a second -- slow oscillations.
That's what happens
when you're
under anesthesia.
And we looked
at one drug, propofol,
which is a common anesthesia;
and we're now looking at other drugs,

(46:55):
and this is all preliminary stuff.
But it seems that any drug that produces unconsciousness introduces this low frequency one Hertz component.
Wow,
that's cool.
But that's the same thing that happens when you go into slow wave sleep.
Right?

But so why is sleep different from an anesthesia?
Well,
we've been studying this phenomenon called traveling waves.
These oscillations in your brain,

(47:16):
they're not like a jump rope that is going up and down in place.
These waves are moving around,
they're traveling around your cortex,
they're literally traveling across,
across your cortex.
One of the differences between sleep and anesthesia could be explained by these traveling waves.
There's,
there's studies linking memory consolidation with what's called rotating traveling waves, where the waves don't just go back and forth.

(47:37):
They actually rotate around like in a spiral.
And there's been studies in sleep,
for example,
showing that you get,
you get these sleep spindles where where they occur
in phase with
with these rotating waves.
And that's highly correlated with how well people remember and retain information the next day.
How well they remember the next day.
So the idea is these rotating waves are producing

(47:59):
they're creating plasticity to your brain by something related to what's called spike time independent plasticity.
The rotating waves are a good way to set up neurons in different spike timing relationships
in order to get them to wire together.
One big difference between sleep and anesthesia, is anesthesia causes amnesia.
If I give you a general anesthetic,
you forget things that happened minutes before you got the anesthesia.

(48:21):
Whereas sleep does the opposite.
Sleep is memory consolidation.
You remember better after sleep.
It's the exact opposite.
One thing found in anesthesia studies is that these normal rotating waves that are associated with memory consolidation, when under anesthesia,
anesthesia un-rotates the waves,
they stop rotating,
They stop,
they start traveling back and forth.
So these rotating waves are important for this spike time independent plasticity in order to produce long term memories in your brain.

(48:47):
If you take away the rotations,
you no longer have any plasticity.
Now,
that's a bit of speculation.
We haven't studied sleep and anesthesia together,
but that's the next line of investigation.
Wow.

Wow,

I almost want to go back into the lab.
Almost,
almost,
not quite,
almost.


(49:07):

I think just ... with so many of the new tools now ... and being able to study the whole piece of this...

I have one last parting question,
which is a big one.
And of course,
in today's age,
we can't have a conversation about neuroscience without talking about artificial intelligence.
So just bear with me here. What does all this mean for human-machine learning?

(49:27):
We've talked about,
you know,
some of the things that come up or this idea of oscillations as a form of spatial computing,
which is essentially what you've talked about just now,
right?
These rotating oscillations is a way of forming and encoding memories.
That's right.
We have a new theory,
we just published this year called spatial computing where what these waves do is they form patterns that allow the brain to do computation.

(49:49):
Yeah.
And so in tech land,
right,
they call spatial computing augmented reality,
which is.. It's a
totally different concept.
Yeah.
Right.
It's a totally different thing.
And I think that's important to note when you talk about spatial computing yourself,
it's not the same thing as putting on a pair of ocular glasses with
a visual stimuli coming in.

(50:09):
The other thing I just wanted to mention is a paper I just read yesterday over lunch, and this idea of an artificial neural network generating some of these oscillatory behaviors and interacting with activity going on in a mammalian brain.
And this idea of being able to send signals from an artificial neural network to a mammalian brain and back and forth where this neural network can actually pick up the signals that have been processed in a mammalian brain and take it forward.

(50:39):

I don't know if you've looked at this?
I read this and I was like, whoa.
It's a technique. We use things like machine learning and stuff to decode these complex properties in the brain.
But you know,
the,
there's a thing that there's a big difference between the way AI is done and neural network models are done and the way the brain does things. And so AI,

(51:01):
they,
they,
they often say we're being inspired by what the brain does in order to develop artificial intelligence.
But they're still kind of stuck in the 20th century when it comes to their understanding of the brain.
They're still thinking about connectionist models ,
where it's spiking and synaptic connections and you strengthen or weaken connections.
Your brain is doing that too.
And it's,
it's very,
very important.
Fundamental

(51:21):
as I mentioned,
like I'm not gonna say that its not extremely important.
However,
your brain is also doing all this other stuff.
It's creating these electrical fields and these oscillatory dynamics.
And that's,
that's,
that's a big part of brain function.
So when people are,

are say they're using the brain to inspire neural network models or AI,

(51:42):
they're only really getting in knee deep into what the brain is actually doing because there's a whole lot of stuff the brain is doing --

these,
these emergent properties,
these oscillatory dynamics,

these,
these synchrony patterns that people are just not using it all in AI,
or neural networks
That makes me feel happy too.
The neural networks aren't doing everything that we humans can do.

(52:09):
This idea of rotating waves as a way of encoding memory and the interaction between sleep and memory consolidation--
but also just overall our ability to use these local fields,
not just the connections,
right?
Not just the roads,
but the traffic
as you say,
down the roads, to think!
Your brain,
your brain is generating all these phenomena at this level, what we would call the emergent level,

(52:31):
you know.

And there's a reason why it's there, and it's not there just for the fun of it.
The cyto-electric coupling hypothesis I think is pretty exciting because it shows that
these brain waves,
are not just like influencing the ongoing thought,
it's actually tuning up the actual infrastructure of the brain on the molecular level.

And that's the kind of thing ... I've gotten two responses (52:49):
well,
that's crazy! Or,
Wow,
that makes so much sense now that I think about it! And when you get those kind of responses,
you're like,
yeah,
we're on the right track.
We're on the right track.

And I think a lot of it is just kind of pushing,
pushing the science forward, through--
Sometimes it feels a little wacky -- but then saying this is what I think is happening and then figuring out a way to construct experiments to test that.

(53:12):
You've read Thomas Kuhn,
right?
You know, about the structure of science.
You know,
that's what science is like. Scientists, in the end,
they're kind of traditionalists in the end. I shouldn't be so glib about it because look,
science needs to be traditional in some sense.
You can't just accept any new idea when it comes in.
They have to prove themselves.
But scientists, like anybody else,
they tend to be more resistant to change than is good for them.

(53:34):
Yeah,
a lot of what I do has to do with
culture,
cultural change,
organizational culture.
And,

a lot of that is also done in the science and research community.
And I would have to say that how scientists work,
how they organize each other and their societies is incredibly conservative and it can be a little frustrating.
But to your point,
a lot of this is based in the scientific method:

(53:57):
Show me!
Show me the evidence that would indicate that I should change or do something differently than I'm doing now.
So,
but it's funny when things change,
people forget what it was like.
So 25 years ago,
I first presented this idea of multifunctional neurons,
mixed selectivity neurons.
And I was,
I was giving a talk, and a Nobel Prize winner who I shall not name said to me after my talk,

(54:17):
and he goes,
you're just being stupid.
You can't figure out what these neurons are doing.
That's what the problem is.
Why don't you go back to the lab and try to figure this stuff out. So its now 25 years later, and this idea of multifunctional neurons,
it's in the textbooks now.
And,
when I lecture graduate students and I tell them about that,
they go,
people really used to think that way?
That's stupid.

(54:39):
Can I ask you another wacky idea,
wacky question?
So,

in my family,
we also have a lot of depression,
right?
So ADHD and depression,
it's an awesome combination.
Let me tell you.
And so in depression,

there's a lot of people who use these 5-HT reuptake inhibitors,

which is in my head based on this idea that we're gonna affect how one neuron talks to another neuron.

(55:01):
And that's gonna help depression.
I don't know if you've studied depression,
but in my head,
I keep thinking,
oh,
this idea of the local electrical potential seems like such a more interesting way to think about and potentially treat depression, than
you know,
messing around with
serotonin reuptake.
Sure.
I mean,
you can help neurons communicate.

(55:22):
I mean,
I'm not an expert on depression or
neurochemistry.
But yeah,
I mean,
this is one of the reasons why I'm studying this, is we were really hoping to have therapeutic uses of,
of non invasive electrical stimulation to try to change these patterns, change these brain wave patterns,
change these balances.
I wrote an opinion piece with this guy named Alec Widge for the Journal of American Medical Association, where we say that that's the next frontier we've got to explore.

(55:47):

We've got to figure out how to harness these brain rhythms in order to improve brain function.
Thank you, Earl,
for taking this chunk of your afternoon to share time with me,
and explain what's going on with your part of Neuroscience.
I learned a lot.
My pleasure anytime.

Thanks Earl!

Bye.
Thank you.
Bye.

(56:12):
Thank you for joining us.
For more about We Interrupt.
Please see our website at www.weinterruptthis.com for show notes,
links and other episodes.
And you can contact me on Twitter @HaakYak to recommend topics or speakers for the series.
This podcast was produced on the traditional lands and waters of the Menominee, Potawatomi and Ojibwe peoples.


(56:34):
I pay my respects to Elders past and present and to emerging and future Indigenous leaders.
It is a gift to be grounding and growing this work within these beautiful forests and waterways.
Thank you to Emma Levinson for her artwork featured on our website Segue music is Library by MagnusMoone licensed from Tribe of Noise BV.

(56:55):

And intro/extro music is Bartok’s "Melody with Interruptions", played by Alan Huckleberry for The University of Iowa Piano Pedagogy Video Recording Project.
The podcast image is a public domain lifestyle CC0 photo from rawpixel, Free city at night.