 They follow him for life. It's called imprinting. Once they imprinted on him, never changes. Can't change it. It's imprinted. And here he is swimming with these, you know, ducks. I think he's the mother duck, like that, okay? So we know, you know, this is a critical period. And it really is very sharp in these ducklings. But now we use the term optimal period because we know that certain things are learned at different times. And there are multiple optimal periods depending on the kind of learning. So for example, let me say like language. You know who this is? This is Henry Kissinger and the brain. No, the Russian ambassador. And let me see, so let me see if I have a recording. So Kissinger and his brother came to the United States in Germany. And his brother is three years younger than him. Has absolutely no accent at all. But Kissinger came when he was nine or ten. And you know the way he talks, but I'll play you to you anyway. Let's see this here. Hello? Yes, Henry. How are you? Good. We're delighted to see you, the trade minister, you know, through the way you come in, from my to my office. Oh, north. Okay. Through the lobby. Yes. To your... Yes. And that's through the northwest gate. Yes. Okay. And I've also mentioned the issue of that principle. And I think we can handle it in the way you and I discussed that. Okay. Could I already report it? Yes. Okay. Okay. So you heard the accent, right? And so his brother, three years younger, no accent at all. So I was taught in the upper division of the graduate class when I was at UC Davis about neurobiology. Microphone. Microphone. Sorry. I was teaching a class to many pre-med students who were about to graduate called Developer on Neurobiology. And I was trying to make this point about, you know, the language, the sensitive periods, and so on. And I said, let me play you this recording of Henry Kissinger. So I played this recording and I was looking at me. I said, how many of you know how many Henry Kissinger is? Fifty kids in the class. One, raise your hand. Still alive. I just met with Trump recently. They don't even know who he is anymore. That just shows you, you know, you think your power is forever. Next generation, you know, wasn't alive when that day was like, they don't know who you are anymore. So just remember, you know, being famous is feeding. Okay. So, and by the way, in spite of what we know about upper-media periods, in America, language is not taught until high school. You know, just the opposite of what they say. Be sure to teach again from kindergarten on. There are some exceptions like the Spanish emergencies and so on. Next thing is something that I think is really important, but is not taken into consideration in the educational system. Individual differences do matter. Anybody who has had children, more than one child, knows that each child is an individual. They learn different things at different rates. Some things they learn very well. Some they don't. And the educational system, at least in America, treats everybody the same, you know, and so on. So here's a cute slide showing you my individual differences. Okay. That is Willie Shoemaker, who is a horse jockey. One more successful in history, and that's Will Chamberlain, the basketball player. See, so they're two human beings, two men, but very different in the size and other ways and what they could do. And to appreciate this, I'm going to show you this. This is a post-mortem human brain. And you look at this, right, and what you see here are these kind of groups like this. See here. Those are called salsae, and then you see these things above it over here. Those are called gyroid. So this is the left brain and the right brain. Front is there, back is there. Now, if you just look at this a little bit, same brain. The two sides of their brain are not anything like identical. I mean, for example, let's just pick something here. Look at this area here. See that? It goes all the way like that. These gyros. Here, it's like that. Any other things in here like that you could see. This area here is still under that. But an area back here is very different here. It's like this, like so. What people don't appreciate is that our brains are as different as our faces. If you could expose the brain to every person here, they would be more different than our faces. So when a neurosurgeon has to identify an area of the brain, he or she cannot look at this and say, okay, here's the somatosensory area. Here's the motor area. Here's the language. They can't do it because the surface morphology, just surface morphology is so different from individual to individual. So what has been developed and is still used, was developed many, many years ago, a technique by a Canadian neurosurgeon called Wilford Penfield is in the operating room, when they want to remove a tumor that's on the surface of the brain, one of the things they're very careful about is where's the language area? Because if you remove the tumor in the French language area, you have what's called aphasia, a language disorder that could be for life, could be. So what Penfield determined is this. The opening of the skull over the area where the tumor is is done on the general anesthesia. And then the local anesthesia is infused in the cut bones. The patient is taken off the anesthetic, wide awake. And what he would do then is hold the probe in an electrode and deliver a brief electrical stimulus to an area around the tumor. And the reason he did that is he wants to know what kind of function does that evoke. So he's stimulating a light, an area that needs a vision. The person will see a little visual flash. If you're stimulating an area with addition, the person will hear a sound like that. And what he would do is then take a little sterile piece and put that right in the brain and have number one, and somebody would write one, does this and that, stimulate over here, two, and so on. What's interesting is you can evoke a visual sensation. You can evoke a auditory sensation. You can evoke stinging of the skin, if anyone has stinging on his skin. You can evoke movement, but you don't evoke spontaneous speech. So when the brain is stimulated, nobody says, pa lao, it doesn't happen. So how do you know what the auditory or what the language area is? Well, what he did was has the patient come count backwards. For example, 199, 98, 97. When he stimulates his language area, there's a phasic arrest. The first thing goes 96, that's a language area. And nobody really knows what that is. But you don't get spanked. Nobody all of a sudden starts singing something. That doesn't happen. So the reason they do these pentails things still use today. The reason they do it is because the brains are so different from person to person. Just a gross topography. Forget about the details. Just a gross topography. More different than the faces in this room. So it stands to reason that the functions should be different. And so that you should use specialized methods to cater to the particular proclivity of an individual when you're trying to educate him or her or to train them in something. This is an interesting friend of mine and works in the visual system, David Williams. So he has a method of taking the human eye and imaging the three different rods. The rods, I'm sorry, three different cones. Those are the ones that are processing visual information. Green, red or blue. And so here is two retinas of identical twins. The same exact area of the retina. Same exact area. And what you do is when you see this, you can just see how different it is. This twin has a lot more green than this twin. The pattern is just very different. It'll be like other aspects of the thing. So even something at the periphery, like how the photoreceptors are organized, is very different from one individual. Even though they're genetically identical. Okay, so the visual differences do matter and the challenge is how to figure out the learning paradigms that suit the visual best. And I have two more to show you. So the next one is try employing multimodal stimuli when introducing new materials. So most cells in the brain, when they have sensory cells, they're thought to respond to vision or addition or skin sensation or smells and all that. Today is known that the majority of cells in the brain, in particular areas of the brain, respond to multimodal, more than one sensation. And my best friend, a guy called Barry Stein, at Wake Forest University, did a lot of work in this area. So try to organize tasks so there's convergence of sensory input. And let me share an example from work he's done. So this is a recording from one neuron, one neuron in the brain, where it is not important. And he presents a visual stimulus to this neuron and the neuron fires about two action potentials. Two action potentials. Stimulus comes on one. Same neuron, he presents an auditory stimulus. Like that. Here's one action potential. Now, same cell, he presents both the visual stimulus and auditory stimulus. Look at that enhancement of responses. Many, many neurons show this kind of convergence thing. If you're using multimodal stimulation, that is not just visual, not just auditory, but both, you get a much better response, a more attentive organism and so on. And so sometimes it makes sense, you know, when you're reading, you're learning to read out loud. So you see the thing visually, and you hear it as well. And there are many other kinds of tasks that use multimodal stuff. And then the last one I want to show you is that it's important to present information in a context that makes sense to the neuron. It's also going to be a movie. I don't know if it's going to be work. So this is something, you know, in the Kasparov book I mentioned, he states in the early chapter that there are more people that play chess at a very high level in Armenia than any other place in the world. So I thought this is a good example. This is from a, I mean, for chess plays it's going to be trivial, you know, on what it shows. But this is done by a study at MIT in cognitive neuroscience. And what it shows is how context is really important to performance. So this is a guy who's a, I think he's about 1900 on a scale. That's pretty good, right? Yeah? Okay, huh? I'm reading 1900 and he, what? Depending on which scale. Oh, okay. Kasparov had the highest in history, was 28 something. So I think around 2000 is just...