• Interview "Within a few decades we can read the human mind"

He was barely 14 years old when his father gave him The Tonics of the Will , the work in which Santiago Ramón y Cajal proposes rules and advice for young researchers. And Rafael Yuste (Madrid, 1963) was fascinated by that book. He read it and reread it almost obsessively and still retains it in his New York office. «It was an inspiration to me. It came to me when I was looking for what to do in my life, ”says the researcher and father of the great US project to decipher the human brain.

He is the son of a pharmacist and a lawyer who knew how to irrigate a talent for science that has led Yuste to be one of the world's most clairvoyant scientists. Perhaps, the closest Spanish researcher has the key to the door that leads to the future . "That spirit that Cajal had is a flame that I still carry constantly," he says in a conversation during a recent visit to Madrid.

What will the world be like in three decades? I hope that in 30 years we will understand how the brain works. That we have reached a general theory that explains how the brain's neural circuits generate the human mind. It will be a historic moment. I don't know when it's going to happen, it may be tomorrow or maybe in 29 years. But it will be a time similar to when they discovered the double helix of DNA. Neurobiology is like a great puzzle, but we are missing a piece that makes all the others fit together.What will that piece allow us to understand what a thought is, what is memory, what is imagination, what is perception, how emotions work ... It will be like a new rebirth, humans are going to understand each other for the first time. We are a mental species. Understanding how the mind works is going to be the new humanism, the rebirth 2.0. We will understand who we are. And this will have repercussions in all social and human spheres, in education, in philosophy, in politics ... and also in medicine. It is similar to what happened to the field of genetics behind the human genome. ...It is very similar. We are trying to decipher the brain code, just as geneticists deciphered the genetic code and were able to read the book of life. We want to do the same in the brain. We have about 80,000 million neurons in our brain, which are being activated and inactivated in a way that we cannot decipher, but in those connections the human mind is written.And how will the future change? It will lead to the development of a new technology , neurotechnology, which will allow to decipher thoughts and alter them. We can change mental activity and behavior. That is essential to help patients with schizophrenia, Alzheimer's ... but it can also lead to manipulate brain circuits in healthy people. We enter a new world. We have to know very well what we want and what can be done and what not before we start. We are entering 'A happy world' ... This comes straight ahead. Human behavior is generated by the brain and we do not understand it, we cannot change it. But when we understand it we can change the human mind. Doctors can help a mentally ill person. But imagine a company, like Elon Musk's Neuralink, that wants to increase people's cognitive abilities, intelligence, and intelligence. Society must reflect now and define what species we want to be and what should be done and what should not be done. I understand that this "now" is not capricious. Do we need to define a neuroethics already? Yes, I am stuck in this up to the neck. Years ago we began to warn of the lack of ethical regulation of new neurotechnologies. I am working with the Republic of Chile to amend the Constitution and protect against these potential abuses. We call them "neuroderechos". It is a human rights issue, whose universal declaration has not been touched since 1948 and has to be updated. Chile may be the first country in the world where these neuro-rights are protected in the Constitution. How far can they go now? We can decipher the thoughts a person is having when watching a video projection. And the big technology companies are already getting into this, last year they already invested 100 million dollars and this year they will be three times more. What they want is brain data. They already have us signed with what we buy or with what interests us, but imagine that they can have direct access to what we think ... The first of our neuro-rights is mental privacy. We want brain data, neurodata, to be treated with the same rigor as organ donations. You cannot trade with an organ. And we don't define ourselves by our kidney, but by what we think. Could you escape the controls, as did the Chinese scientist He Jiankui with the first two transgenic girls? Technically it is possible. Science goes ahead of society. But the model is that of the Hippocratic oath of doctors. At any time, in any political regime and anywhere in the world, doctors are there to help you, and nobody thinks that this manipulative power of the human body can be used for another purpose. How can the US president be convinced to invest 6,000 million? of dollars in a project like yours? President Obama wanted to leave his mark on history, just as Kennedy went down in history as the president who sent the man to the moon. I wanted to do something big, historical ... Among other 200 ideas, we sent our request to develop methodology to read the activity of all the neurons of a brain. And he liked that idea. They called us six times over a year and a half to tell our ideas at the White House. Obama chose us as his star project ... although we found out watching the speech of the nation's state on TV. Weren't you informed that he had been selected? The White House is like a one-way street, you send them all the information they request, but they never answer you anything. But they carried it impeccably. In all these meetings there was not a single argument that was not to help Humanity. Did you talk to Obama? No, always with your team. We saw Obama 20 minutes when he came to make the final presentation. Are you learning Basque ... Why? I find it fascinating. Even as a child, when I learned that in Spain a language was spoken that was not spoken anywhere else in the world, I was fascinated. It is very possible that the missing piece to decipher the human brain is in the grammar of language. It is an intuition, but it is possible that the brain uses a kind of internal mathematics to function. Do you really think that the key to deciphering the human brain could be in the rules of languages ​​such as Basque? I think so, but I could not Establish direct relationship. We may have here [the head is pointed] a tool capable of computing in a very powerful way. And it is possible that what humans have done with language is to use these rules to formalize communication. And that is not an algorithm? Scientists are mathematicians. It may happen to us as the character of Molière, the bourgeois gentleman who realizes that throughout his life he has been speaking in prose. Biologists are mathematicians, although we don't know it.

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