 I'm glad to see so many young faces. It is my pleasure today to introduce Dr. Yuriy Chalupa, who is vice president for research of George Washington University, where I'm also serving as a faculty member. And I'm going to be very brief. I just want to say that Dr. Chalupa, for me at least, he basically, the person, the best term I can find for him is that the person who can connect the dots very, very well. So you will hear about his research. And the main topic of his research is to be able to connect certain neurons, certain parts of the sensory system which we have in your eye to certain regions of the brain. And he did it extremely well. And he has many outstanding papers in the most prestigious journal, Science, Nature. He was funded for the studies for many, many years. You can find it online. But as a person who worked with him for the past eight years, this ability to connect the dots, probably mainly I saw as his ability to establish different type of centers within our university. He established as many as eight or 10 different centers either related to science, to autism centers, and different type of connections between completely different type of people who work in psychology, medicine, and physics. But then he makes it works very, very well. So this has been a great success for our university, to have this person who have this vision, how you can take very different expertise and put it together and come up with something new. And because maybe of this, I thought that maybe his next step will be connect dots, not live in the university, but in the country. So I kind of told him that, well, why would you come to Armenia? That might be a good opportunity. So my hope is that that will be your next step, is to connect the dot between George Washington and American University of Armenia. And with that, I would like to give him a speech. First time to Armenia, and it's been a fantastic experience. This is clearly an up and coming university. You have a wonderful president who spent 37 years, as many of you know, at UC Berkeley. I spent 37 years at UC Davis, about 60 miles away, so we have something in common right away. And then I moved on to George Washington University. So this visit came along because about seven or eight months ago, my wife, Tanya, who's sitting here, and I had dinner with Noreen, her husband, and author at a very nice restaurant in Washington DC. And they said, you know, you should come to Armenia and see about the main collaborative arrangement between his wonderful university and the American University of Armenia and George Washington University. And I said, sure. And so one thing led to another. And here we are. And I'm so glad we came because it's really just a fantastic city and a fantastic university. So I'm a neuroscientist. I'm a brain researcher. I don't do any research anymore because now I'm an administrator and I help people at Noreen get grants. But for many, many years, I worked on various aspects of the visual system, pretty good development of the visual system using many animal models. And so before I kind of stop my lecture, I want to tell you, I'm going to give this talk in such a way that I want to assume nothing about the brain at all. So I'm going to just start from very basic things. So it's not going to be a real research talk, which is for specialists. But I want to tell you three basic facts about the brain that I think is absolutely correct and anybody who is in the business of brain sciences would agree to this. And somebody may surprise you and somebody may not. So the first fact is that the brain is the most complex, especially the human brain, of course, is the most complex known and most complex organism in the known universe. There's nothing that approaches the complexity of the brain. And so just to give you some figures, we have on the order of 100 billion neurons, a neuron is a single nerve and nerve cell. And those 100 billion neurons form on the order of 4 to 7 trillion connections in the brain. One neuron can form as many as 10,000 connections. So it's not just a number of neurons and a number of connections that they make with each other, but it's also the diversity of nerve cells. In all other organisms in the body, there are one, two, or several types of cells. But in the brain, depending on what kind of criteria you use, there are hundreds if not thousands of neurons that are very distinct from each other. So for example, the smallest neuron in your brain, the smallest one, is on the order of about 30 microns in size. A micron is 1, 1,000,000,000 of a meter. So you know, it's a meter step. It's 1, 1,000,000 of that. So the smallest one is 30 microns. The largest neuron in your nervous system, the entire neuron, is one meter long. So it goes from something that you would need a very good microscope to see to something you could see just without any kind of problems. So is that a good body? And so the complexity of the brain is due to the number of neurons, the connections among the neurons, as well as the diversity of neurons. So there isn't any kind of thing that's one size if it's all. And neurons communicate in different kinds of ways. The most common form of communication is by electrical signals that go on the neurons. And I'll show you some examples of those. And then between neurons, the communication is typically by the release of a chemical on neurotransmitter. And there are many different kinds of neurotransmitters. But there's also other ways neurons communicate. Some neurons in your brain and my brain communicate electrically. There's an electric connection between them so that the signal jumps essentially across something called gap junction across from one neuron to the other. And the most interesting and the least known way of communication, something has been found now about 20 years ago. The people have found this one Nobel Prize, including somebody I hired. I won a Nobel Prize winners for this. I hired at just Russian University about eight years ago. And that is they communicate by using a gas. A gas, nitrous oxide, is released. So three forms of communication, electrical, chemical, and gases. And different neurons use different types of communication. And that's what makes this more complicated. So that's the first one I want to make. It's the most complex organ in a known universe. I said known universe because we may find some other universe someday that's something more complicated, but so far known. The second point I want to make is that the brain is not a computer. A lot of people kind of think, well, the brain is not at all like a computer. There are many people in Silicon Valley that are using the principles of brain organization, what we know so far, to try to develop all power of computers on that. But a computer works completely differently. So here's one major difference. The processing information of computers is based on electrons flows, which is instantaneous, which is the speed of light. Information in the nervous system, by contrast, is conveyed very, very, very slowly. The fastest neurons in your body and my body send impulses, the fastest ones, at the rate of about 250 miles an hour. That's far away from the speed of light. A good Ferrari and a good racetrack can go that speed. So communication, by nuance, is very slow, but yet we can make. So for example, I just finished reading an interesting book by Gary Kasparov, who this is a chess playing nation, so you know, about his experience about losing to deep blue, the IBM machine. And he talks about how the chess machines, how they work, totally different from the way Grand Masters plays chess. A chess machine will, in one second, look at more than 200 million possible moves, possible moves. Chessmaster doesn't do that. Doesn't say that, let me go, first moves. Just looks at that and instantaneously gets a grasp of the board and realizes what should be done next. But he still he lost. I think I eventually did deep blue. So that's the other point I want to make, that the functions of the brain are not the way the computers are being built today. The third point I want to make is that we have learned more about the brain in the last, say, 20 years than the entire history of the world. And we're learning more and more and more and more. We're learning so much not because the people are smarter doing the work today that we're doing, as I say, 30 years ago, but because we have better and better techniques from molecular biology, techniques from physics, techniques from computational stuff. And neuroscience, brain science, is an extremely collaborative enterprise, probably more than any other field of science. You have psychologists working physicists. You have people that are doing brain imaging, working with people who are studying worms, the nervous system of worms. It's really quite a remarkable thing. And in the United States, there is something called Society for Neuroscience, which encompasses members from all countries. They meet once a year. They'll be meeting this November in Washington. 40,000 people from around the world come. And there are all kinds of people working on all kinds of species and doing things. So we've learned more about the brain in the last 20 years than the history of the world. But in my judgment, we are understanding the brain today where the Wright brothers were, when they first flew a plane about 80 feet in Kitty North in North Carolina. So our ignorance is vast. But because we have learned so much in the last 20, 30 years or so, people have taken what we do know. And we know fair amount not, compared to what we used to know. And they try to promote this in different ways in selling books, in selling programs, and so on. So there are all kinds of things, for example, a field of non-economics. The idea is that you can make, understand economic decisions by people by studying their brain functions. It's a big field that didn't exist five or six years ago. Whether that's true or not is yet to be determined. There's a whole huge industry in America about brain training. Training your brain with all kinds of games and so on. You can see ads on television for this much, $40 a month. We have to send you these programs, and you can train your brain to be better. Who doesn't want their brain to be better? Does anybody here doesn't want their brain to be better? $40 a month, your brain to be better. There are books on raising kids. I saw somebody brought a baby here. What was the baby here? Yeah, OK, great. So one of the things that's really been hot is on how to get more intelligent children. What to do? That's what I'm going to talk about. So you should listen. The parents should listen then. And so the question is, how much of this stuff is hype? And how much of this stuff is real? And unfortunately, in my judgment, most of the stuff is hype. People will do it because they want to make money. America is a capitalist system you may have read in the papers. And especially now in our current.