The Next Step Toward Understanding The Nature Of Intelligence - EP 49 Sebastian Seung

**Sebastian Seung** (0:00)
What's very interesting about the fly connectome is that some of it already is readable, it's decipherable. And I like to quote, again, I'm originally a physicist, so there's a famous quote of Einstein, subtle is the Lord, but malicious he is not. Okay, and so what Einstein meant by that is that, the universe is hard to comprehend, but it's not like God was evil and tries deliberately tried to make it hard to comprehend. But when you're working on the connectome and you're struggling to trace every path of every wire in the brain, you're thinking, man, God is really mean.
But then when you start to look at the result in the fly brain, then you think, wow, God is not so mean after all, some of this is comprehensible.

**SPEAKER_2** (1:13)
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**Ashlee Vance** (1:42)
Welcome to the Core Memory Podcast. This is Ashlee Vance and I could not be more excited today. We're with Sebastian Seung. Sebastian, how are you?

**Sebastian Seung** (1:52)
I'm great. It's fantastic. I don't visit San Francisco area very often, but just driving the 101 and seeing the beach on one side, and then the mountains on the other really makes your heart go to your throat. Yeah. Well, then you hit the traffic and then.

**Ashlee Vance** (2:07)
That is the downside. Well, I'm glad that we got you out here. This is a special treat. I'm sure lots of people listening will know who you are already, but for those who don't, you are one of, if not the world's expert on the Connectome, which we're going to explain to people as we go through this. But you're a professor of computer science and neuroscience at Princeton. And have this wonderfully distinguished career. You wrote a bestseller, a bestselling book about the Connectome. Last year, you gained a ton of attention with a special issue in nature for doing a full Connectome of the fly brain, so this full map of the fly brain, and this was like a massive scientific milestone. And then you've also been in an industry, you were the head of research at Samsung, I think, right? Yeah, and so you've had kind of this academic career and worked in an industry. And then we're breaking some news of the podcast. You have a new venture, a startup, and so we're going to dive into that. I love breaking news on the show.

**Sebastian Seung** (3:20)
Great to be here, Ashlee. I'm excited too.

**Ashlee Vance** (3:23)
Okay, well, why don't we... Okay, we're going to be talking about the connectome a lot. So I feel like we should define this for people. And I'm sure, again, a lot of people listening will know what the connectome is, but I could not think of a better person on planet Earth to explain the basics of the connectome for those who might not be familiar with it.

**Sebastian Seung** (3:45)
Right, well, as everybody knows, a brain is a network of neurons that's been known since really the end of the 19th century. But a connectome is a detailed map of the connections between the neurons in a brain. And so if you think about the flight maps in the backs of airline magazines, if you replace every city by a neuron and every flight between cities by a synaptic connection, that could be your mental image of a connectome. Except that your map would be a hundred billion cities and thousands of flights per city. So it definitely wouldn't fit in the back page of the airline magazine.

**Ashlee Vance** (4:25)
Yeah. I mean, so this is a subject I got interested in, I want to say about 15 years ago, which is the first time I ran into you and your work. And back then, there was a lot of excitement, but also doubters around how valuable this would be. So it often gets compared to the genome in the sense of, we're going to create this map of this very important part of the human body, in this case, the brain. We're going to show all the neurons, all the synapses, all these connections. I think we did The Worm 40 years ago.