Dr. Michael Levin — Reprogramming Bioelectricity, Updating "Software" for Anti-Aging, Treating Cancer Without Drugs, Cognition of Cells, and Much More (#849)

Dr. Michael Levin (@drmichaellevin) is the Vannevar Bush Distinguished Professor of Biology at Tufts University and director of the Allen Discovery Center. His background is in computer science and biology, and his group works at the intersection of developmental biophysics, computer science, and cognitive science. He is primarily interested in how intelligence self-organizes in a diverse range of natural, engineered, and hybrid embodiments. Levin has been developing a framework for recognizing and communicating with unconventional cognitive systems.

Applied to the collective intelligence of cell groups undergoing morphogenesis, these ideas have allowed the Levin Lab to develop new applications in birth defects, organ regeneration, and cancer suppression. His lab also produces synthetic life-forms (e.g., Xenobots and Anthrobots) that serve as exploration platforms for understanding the source of patterns of form and behavior in a wide range of natural, artificial, and hybrid embodied minds.

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Dr. Michael Levin — Reprogramming Bioelectricity, Updating “Software” for Anti-Aging, Treating Cancer Without Drugs, Cognition of Cells, and Much More (#849)

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Transcripts

SELECTED LINKS FROM THE EPISODE

Connect with Dr. Michael Levin:

Personal Blog | Lab Website | Thoughtforms Life Podcast | YouTube | Twitter

Films & Documentaries

Companies, Organizations, & Schools

Key Concepts & Terms

Bioelectricity

Regeneration & Development

Aging

Cognition & Intelligence

Computing & Information

Philosophy of Mind

Other Scientific Concepts

Research & Experiments

Cases of Unconventional Information Flow Across the Mind-Body Interface | Mind and Matter (Clinical case review of normal IQ with minimal brain volume with Karina Kofman.)
Classical Sorting Algorithms as a Model of Morphogenesis: Self-Sorting Arrays Reveal Unexpected Competencies in a Minimal Model of Basal Intelligence | Adaptive Behavior (Research showing simple algorithms perform additional computations beyond their programmed function.)
The Effect of Experimenter Bias on the Performance of the Albino Rat | Behavioral Science (How researchers influence their subjects.)
Neuropharmacological Dissection of Placebo Analgesia: Expectation-Activated Opioid Systems versus Conditioning-Activated Specific Subsystems | The Journal of Neuroscience (Fabrizio Benedetti’s research supporting his claim that “Words and drugs have the same mechanism of action.”)
Normalized Shape and Location of Perturbed Craniofacial Structures in the Xenopus Tadpole Reveal an Innate Ability to Achieve Correct Morphology | Developmental Dynamics (Tadpoles with scrambled facial organs self-organize to normal frog faces.)
Regenerative Adaptation to Electrochemical Perturbation in Planaria: A Molecular Analysis of Physiological Plasticity | iScience (Flatworms rapidly adapting to toxic environment by changing ~12 genes.)
Researchers Reveal Bioelectric Patterns Guiding Worms’ Regenerative Body Plan After Injury | Tufts Now (Demonstrating that bioelectrical pattern memories can be rewritten.)
There’s Plenty of Room Right Here: Biological Systems as Evolved, Overloaded, Multi-Scale Machines | Biomimetics (Pondering the points of polycomputing.)
Transmembrane Voltage Potential Controls Embryonic Eye Patterning in Xenopus Laevis | Development (Creating functional eyes in non-eye locations through bioelectrical signals.)

Medical & Therapeutic Applications

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What Most Has My Attention Right Now — Credible (vs. Bogus) Vagus Nerve Stimulation with Kevin J. Tracey, MD | The Tim Ferriss Show #824
Philip Goff — Exploring Consciousness and Non-Ordinary Religion, Galileo’s Error, Panpsychism, Heretical Ideas, and Therapeutic Belief | The Tim Ferriss Show #805
Professor Donald Hoffman — The Case Against Reality, Beyond Spacetime, Rethinking Death, Panpsychism, QBism, and More | The Tim Ferriss Show #585
Dr. Martine Rothblatt — A Masterclass on Asking Better Questions and Peering Into the Future | The Tim Ferriss Show #487
Erik Vance — The Magic and Power of Placebo | The Tim Ferriss Show #194

People

TIMESTAMPS

[00:03:18] The Body Electric: A Vancouver bookstore discovery that launched a career.
[00:04:19] Bioelectricity 101: Your brain uses it to think; your body used it before you had a brain.
[00:06:05] The lesson learned by scrambled tadpole faces that rearrange themselves.
[00:08:51] Software vs. hardware: The genome is your factory settings, not your destiny.
[00:11:43] Two-headed flatworms: Rewriting biological memory without touching DNA.
[00:16:20] Seeing memories: Voltage-sensitive dyes reveal the body’s hidden blueprints.
[00:20:12] Three killer apps for humans: Birth defects, regeneration, and cancer.
[00:24:27] Cancer as identity crisis: Cells forgetting they’re part of a team.
[00:25:40] The boredom theory of aging: Goal-seeking systems with nothing left to do.
[00:30:09] Planaria’s immortality hack: Rip yourself in half every two weeks.
[00:31:27] Manhattan Project for aging: Crack cellular cognition, everything else falls into place.
[00:33:47] Giving cells new goals: Convince a gut to become an eye.
[00:37:42] Must mammalian mortality be mandatory?
[00:40:25] Cross-pollination: Why biologists would benefit from programming courses.
[00:47:15] Does acupuncture actually do anything?
[00:50:57] Placebo as feature, not bug: Words and drugs share the same mechanism.
[00:55:06] The frame problem: Why robots explode and rats intuit what matters.
[00:59:41] Binary thinking is a trap: “Is it intelligent?” is the wrong question.
[01:07:46] Minimal brain, normal IQ: Clinical cases that break neuroscience.
[01:08:45] Super panpsychism: Your liver might have opinions.
[01:13:48] The Platonic space: Bodies as thin clients for patterns from elsewhere.
[01:15:24] Keep asking “why” and you end up in the math department.
[01:23:07] Polycomputing: Sorting algorithms secretly doing side quests.
[01:28:24] Power scaling for the future and avoiding red herrings for understanding machine minds.
[01:34:06] Sci-fi recommendations.
[01:37:24] Cliff Tabin’s toast and Dan Dennett’s steel manning.
[01:41:21] Parting thoughts.

DR. MICHAEL LEVIN QUOTES FROM THE INTERVIEW

So what I tried to show in that talk are some examples by which the living tissues—for example, flatworms that are cut into pieces and every piece has to figure out: ‘How many heads should I have?’ ‘Where do the heads go?’ ‘What should the shape of my face be?’ these kinds of things, that, in fact, they do know… And the way they know is because they store memories. And, maybe not shockingly, although it’s certainly shocking to a lot of folks, the way those memories are stored is in an electrical network that is very similar to the way that we store our goal-directed behavioral repertoires in our brain and that these things are widely spread. And so regeneration, cancer suppression, and cancer repair and remodeling, birth defects and birth-defect repair, all of these things are extensively using electrical pattern memories, and we now have a way to rewrite those pattern memories.” — Dr. Michael Levin

“I always say to people, ‘On your laptop, if you want to go from Photoshop to Microsoft Word, you don’t get out your soldering iron and start rewiring. It’d be laughable if you had to, but that’s how we used to do it. In the ’40s and ’50s, you programmed a computer by pulling and plugging wires, but you don’t do that anymore because it’s reprogrammable. And that’s what the biology is.’” — Dr. Michael Levin

“The name of the game here is communicating with the cells. This is not about stem cells or gene therapy or scaffolds made of nanomaterials. Those are all tools that might be useful, but the real trick here is to communicate to a group of cells, what do you want them to build? And that’s what the bioelectric code is all about; it’s about communicating to the collective, to the cellular collective.” — Dr. Michael Levin

“We can detect incipient tumor formation and we can prevent and normalize tumors after they form … not by killing the cells with chemotherapy but by electrically reconnecting them to the group such that they can form, again, a memory of what they’re supposed to be doing.” — Dr. Michael Levin

“Just imagine this standard Judeo-Christian version of Heaven. Let’s say you, your pet snake, and your dog get to Heaven. Everything is great, there’s no more damage, there’s no decay, nothing is damaged, everything is great, everything’s fantastic. For the next trillion years, what happens? The snake may be fine doing snake things for every day, is the same as every other day, may be fine. The dog? Not sure. Probably okay chasing rabbits on the farm, you know, may be fine for forever, basically. The human, though, what do you think? What are the odds that a human cognitive system can be sane for an infinite… Okay, I’ll keep myself busy for the first 10,000 years, maybe 100,000 years, but a billion years in, are we still sane? What happens?” — Dr. Michael Levin

“If you make a circle of cognitive things and living things, I think cognition is wider than life. I think cognition predates life, and I think it’s bigger than life.” — Dr. Michael Levin

“It’s entirely possible that, in these AIs, the thing we have forced them to do, which is to talk, and the thing that we’re all obsessed about, or the things it says, could be a complete red herring as far as what kind of intelligence is actually there. What does it want? How do we communicate with it? The verbal interface that we’re all sort of so glued in on might not be the interesting part of that equation.” — Dr. Michael Levin

“This field of diverse intelligence combines artificial intelligence and engineering and cybernetics and evolutionary biology and AI and exobiology and the search for alien life. All of these things are, together, asking, ‘What are actually the common threads of being an agent, no matter what your origin story—whether you were designed or evolved or engineered or whether you were made of squishy proteins or whether you were made of silicon or something else.‘” — Dr. Michael Levin

“If you’re like a five-year-old and you do that thing where you keep asking ‘But why? But why?’—if you keep asking ‘But why?’ long enough, eventually, you always end up in the math department.”— Dr. Michael Levin

Want to hear another episode with a pioneer of bioelectric medicine? Listen to my conversation with neurosurgeon and researcher Dr. Kevin Tracey, in which we discussed stimulating the vagus nerve to tame inflammation, treating rheumatoid arthritis and autoimmune disorders without drugs, the FDA-approved SetPoint Medical device, credible vs. bogus vagus nerve stimulation approaches, the inflammatory reflex, auricular therapy, heart rate variability, the connection between depression and inflammation, and much more.

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Hélène Peyroux

11 days ago

I found this incredibly fascinating. Probably the most fascinating podcast I’ve seen. I can’t wait to see what we find out in the future. I love Sci Fi and Fantasy and I think this was as enjoyable as reading those and more real. Thank you for sharing your knowledge and thinking.

G.G.

6 days ago

Absolutely mind blowing, thank you for sharing this conversation! Dr. Michael Levin is a brilliant and expansive thinker, and it was refreshing to hear his perspective on intelligence. I love how open his mind is, how he’s willing to consider possibilities that most people would call insane, and yet– he’s discovering that some of these possibilities are grounded in science. Wow. I was very moved by this episode and I’d love to hear more content like this. Two highly intelligent people in conversation, translating cutting edge science into language simple enough for the layperson to comprehend. Thank you Tim for introducing us to Dr. Levin’s work.