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The Current Transcript for September 27, 2016

Host: Anna-Maria Tremonti

STORIES FROM THIS EPISODE

Prologue

[Music: Theme]

SOUNDCLIP

DONALD TRUMP: I was going to say something extremely rough to Hillary, and I said to myself I can’t do it, I just can’t do it.

HILLARY CLINTON: Donald, I know you live in your own reality but that is not the facts.

ANNA-MARIA TREMONTI: It was must watch television, got to cringe politics, and alternately delicious and poisonous electoral jockeying. But what did it accomplish, and how will American voters react? We have two masters of political strategy waiting in the wings to judge and parse last night's Clinton-Trump debate. And Canadian philosopher Mark Kingwell weighs in on the consequences of an election campaign where fact and fiction make a dizzying blur. All of that in just a moment. Also today, Harold R. Johnson says alcohol is killing his people.

SOUNDCLIP

We don't want to talk about it publicly, because we're afraid people are going to point fingers at us and call us lazy, dirty, drunken Indians. I firmly believe that the solution is talking about it.

AMT: Harold R. Johnson is a Crown Prosecutor, Indigenous, he lives most of the year on his trap line. He rejects what he calls the victim, the grief and trauma model, urging a new narrative finding inspiration in those who overcome, rather than thinking there are only those who succumb. Hear his ideas in half an hour. And a lot of people are banking on the power of what you will be able to do with your brain.

SOUNDCLIP

We will have something called brain net which will replace the internet. Brain net will send memories, sensations, feelings on the internet, which will replace the movies, for example, entertainment, even CNN.

AMT: Even CNN, but not CBC Radio. In fact, researchers are connecting human brains via computer and have seen one person's brain move another's body. Forget about the entertainment value, this could help paralyzed patients rewire their brains. But it all comes with ethical issues and we will hear that discussion in an hour. I'm Anna-Maria Tremonti, this is The Current.

Trump falters after early lead in first U.S. presidential debate

Guests: Brett O’Donnell, Mark Kingwell, Celinda Lake

SOUNDCLIP

DONALD TRUMP: You look at the inner cities, and I just left Detroit, and I just left Philadelphia, and I just, you know, you've seen me, I've been all over the place. You decided to just stay home and that's ok.

LESTER HOLT: Mr. Trump--

HILLARY CLINTON: I think, I think, that, I think Donald just criticized me for preparing for this debate. And yes I did. And you know what else I prepared for? I prepared to be president. And I think that's a good thing.

ANNA-MARIA TREMONTI: Well as a spectacle, the first televised debate between Democrat Hillary Clinton and Republican Donald Trump did not disappoint. But with just six weeks until Americans go to the polls, the question is whether either candidate managed to say or do anything to clear a path to the White House. To discuss this I'm joined by two partisan players. Celinda Lake is the President of Lake Research Partners and a leading political strategist with the Democratic Party. She's in Washington DC. Brett O'Donnell is President of O'Donnell and Associates Strategic Communications, a longtime Republican debate coach including for George W. Bush and Mitt Romney. He joins us from Alexandria, Virginia. And Mark Kingwell is a Professor of Philosophy at the University of Toronto. He focuses on social and political theory. And he is in Toronto with me. Hello everyone.

MANY VOICES: Hello. Good morning.

AMT: Lots to talk about, but I want to begin with the Canadian philosopher Mark Kingwell. What are your overwhelming impressions of what you saw last night?

MARK KINGWELL: Well, in some ways I think it was actually disappointing, because there was no spontaneous combustion moment. I mean, you know, people thought that Donald Trump's express train to crazy town would somehow crash and burn on that stage — it didn't really happen. On the other hand, I think he was so out of his depth in a constrained and controlled environment like that, where there were time limits and a moderator who very gently but insistently kept him on track, that he looked like a blustering fool for a good part of the debate. On the other hand, you know, Hillary Clinton I think didn't score a knockout punch. And probably the big takeaway is going to be that the base for both candidates stays relatively the same, and swing voters are not going to be convinced one way or the other by anything that happened last night.

AMT: OK. Well, let's go to the strategists. Brett O'Donnell, if you were writing a headline or a tweet to capture what happened last night, what would it be?

BRETT O'DONNELL: A tale of two debates. The first part of the debate was, I thought, pretty strong for Donald Trump. He seemed to have a relatively good command of the issues and he was on offense. Particularly on the trade issue, which is so important to a lot of voters in the Midwest. He talked intelligently about trade, seemed to focus on jobs, particularly in Ohio and Michigan, told some stories. I thought he was connecting with voters very well. But then in the second half of the debate, Hillary was successful in getting him on defense for most of the debate. Talking about the birther issue, about his position on Iraq, about his apartment buildings, I mean, there were just several moments where she attacked him and he spent long periods of time defending himself rather than turning it into a moment where he could get on offense. And there were lots of opportunities to, but I think that generally speaking, that nothing will change coming out of last night. I think both sides supporters will find things to support in their candidate's performance. And I think that we are pretty much where we started after night.

AMT: OK, and I do have some clip to play. But Celinda Lake, if you were writing a headline or a tweet to capture what happened last night what would it be?

CELINDA LAKE: Hillary trumps Donald with facts instead of fiction, and looking presidential versus raging.

AMT: OK.

CELINDA LAKE: And I think that, you know, in the post-election analysis and the polls, a lot of undecided voters remained undecided. But there were a few that were picked up, particularly women, picked up by Hillary Clinton and there was a gender gap in the debate. And I think the other thing is I think that Hillary had some real opportunities to increase turnout, which is really the game here. The whole conversation about birthers, the conversation at the end about women, both of those will be energizing for turnout. Hillary had a lot more to lose in this debate and she won.

AMT: OK. Well, let's go to our first clip here. It started off with trade. Let's listen to that.

SOUNDCLIP

DONALD TRUMP: You go anywhere you want Secretary Clinton, and you will see devastation. Where manufacturing is down 30, 40, sometimes 50 per cent. NAFTA is the worst trade deal maybe ever signed anywhere, but certainly ever signed in this country. And now you want to approve Trans-Pacific Partnership. You were totally in favour of it, then you heard what I was saying how bad it is, and you said I can't win that debate. But you know that if you did win, you would approve that. And that will be almost as bad as NAFTA. Nothing will ever top NAFTA.

AMT: Brett O'Donnell, you liked the start of that debate on this front.

BRETT O'DONNELL: Yeah, I think that that's an issue that is resonating for him. I think it's one of his two central issues that have caused his candidacy to ascend. I mean, he is talking about the trade issue, talking to Ohio workers, Michigan workers. There's a lot of folks here in the heartland who have lost their jobs, and it is their perception that it’s because of trade. And he was on offense in that moment. He was able to pin NAFTA on her, and then also pin her position, which has changed, on TPP. He was right in that moment when she had called TPP the gold standard, and now has flipped her position because she knows that it's not politically expedient. He needed to use that, not only just to demonstrate their differences on the position, but to demonstrate what kind of a politician that she is. To basically blow with the wind and change, say whatever she needs to do to get elected. I mean, this is one of the biggest things she has changed her position on and it's clear she did it because the primary fight she had with Bernie Sanders. That was a very good moment for Trump.

AMT: Let's just go to Celinda Lake, just specifically on NAFTA, did Donald Trump take it from her?

CELINDA LAKE: I think that she neutralized it. I mean, she was able to say no I am against TPP, that I was thoughtful, I looked at it, I had hoped it would be a better trade deal. And let's remember, in the post-election polls she won on the economy by almost 30 points. So there's a bigger picture here. She was very able in the conversation on the broader economics to bring in his tax policy, to bring in her own father's middle class background versus his wealthy background. So you have to take it as a total, that's how the voters evaluated. And she won the economy last night.

AMT: OK, well in fact, in part of the discussion on the economy, there was another debate that started up and this was a heated moment. Let's listen to that.

SOUNDCLIP

DONALD TRUMP: You know what, it's no different than this. She's telling us how to fight ISIS. Just go to her website, she tells you how to fight ISIS on her website. I don't think General Douglas MacArthur would like that too much.

[crowd laughing]

LESTER HOLT: Alright, the next segment we’re continuing the subject--

HILLARY CLINTON: Well, at least I have a plan to fight ISIS.

DONALD TRUMP: No, no, you’re telling the enemy everything you want to do.

HILLARY CLINTON: No, we’re not.

DONALD TRUMP: See, you’re telling the enemy everything you want to do. No wonder you’ve been fighting ISIS your entire adult life.

AMT: OK, well that did come in what was supposed to be a conversation on the economy. You can hear the moderator in the background trying to keep them on track. Celinda Lake, was at a turning point in the debate?

CELINDA LAKE : It was. And she always dominates when she gets to foreign policy. And I think she was very very fortunate that as much of the debate was on foreign policy, and that was the second half of the debate. She just cleaned his clock on it, and she comes across as sound much more measured, so much more knowledgeable. I think the biggest moment was when she said someone who can be fired up by a tweet should not have the nuclear codes in their hand.

AMT: Mark Kingwell, as you listened to this, what were you thinking? You’ve raised some concerns about the facts, the post-factual era we live in.

MARK KINGWELL: Well, on that count, it was very reassuring, it was a victory for reality based perception. You know, her comment that Donald lives in his own reality was resonant. And then when she was able to marshal various kinds of policy decisions and facts based on her own experience, she wiped the floor with him. And on the other hand, his bluster was simply ineffective in trying to puncture where she actually is weak, on TPP, on the email scandal. He couldn't drive the knife home in those cases. So I think what it showed is that rhetoric of a certain kind of, you know, outrageous sort, interruptions, bullying, contradictions, self-aggrandizement, that works in a rally. But it doesn't work in a debate. And so, for those of us who are fans of rationality, I think that was the victory last night.

AMT: Brett O'Donnell is the bluster ineffective for those who are Trump supporters?

BRETT O'DONNELL: It's not effective for those who are Trump supporters. That's part of the reason they're supporting him, is because they believe he speaks plainly, that he doesn't talk like a politician. That rather, he says what's on his mind. And that's been refreshing to Trump supporters. They think he is outside of Washington and represents all that they're angry about in DC, that, you know, Washington has failed them, they're tired of promises from politicians. Donald Trump flies in the face of all of that and represents that frustration for them. But on foreign policy, you know, that moment on ISIS was a bad moment for Trump, particularly when there's so much to go after Hillary Clinton on. I mean, this is a person and I did think earlier in the debate, he did a better job of litigating the fact that it was her policy in Iraq that actually helped fuel the rise of ISIS.

AMT: So why didn’t he do this, and why did he get into that, sort of why did he start going down that rabbit hole? You have been fighting ISIS your entire life, what was that about?

BRETT O'DONNELL: I think quite frankly, it's because he wasn't prepared for the debate as much as he should have been. And I think that's a problem that folks like us have talked about, that if you don't prepare in a way that's necessary, then when these moments happen, you won't be prepared to handle them. And you saw that time and time and again last night, particularly in the second half of the debate, where he will, you know, took debate on issues that should have been offensive, when she starts talking about Iraq--

AMT: [interposing] So are you telling us--

BRETT O'DONNELL: And her vote on Iraq, yeah. He should have turned to her, as opposed to giving a long winded explanation about why he never supported the Iraq war. He should have just turned to her and said Secretary Clinton, you were one of the leading advocates for the Iraq war before you changed your position. His theme at the beginning of the debate was she is a typical politician who's part of the past, who does things the way that the American people disagree with. And he could have prosecuted that theme throughout the entire debate. Because, you know, Clinton won the second half of the debate by default, not because of a great performance.

AMT: OK. I'm going to stop you there, because we want to keep on going. I've got another clip here. But Brett O'Donnell, that's code for he should have hired you. [laughs] Would have been different, right?

BRETT O'DONNELL: I think so. [laughs]

CELINDA LAKE: Maybe not. [laughs] If he would listen to Brett, it would be different. He doesn’t listen to anyone.

AMT: OK. Let's listen, this is a clip where he talks about stamina.

SOUNDCLIP

DONALD TRUMP: You have so many different things you have to be able to do. And I don't believe that Hillary has the stamina.

LESTER HOLT: Let's let her respond.

HILLARY CLINTON: Well, as soon as he travels to 112 countries and negotiates a peace deal, a cease fire, a release of dissidence, and opening up new opportunities and nations around the world, or even spends 11 hours testifying in front of a congressional committee, he can talk to me about stamina.

AMT: Celinda Lake, as you watched that what were you thinking?

CELINDA LAKE: I was thinking that he, one of the things is that Donald Trump can't let go of things that are no longer issues in people's minds. And that's the health issue. Certainly it was a bad period when she was stumbling on that video. But people think she does have stamina. People think it's neutral on health. And I thought she gave a great answer. The other thing that I want to address when you talk about his blustering style and his style in general, yes, it reinforces Trump's supporters, but there's a real gender component too. And one of the other groups it alienates is women. Women can't stand the braggadocio, women, e interrupted her 51 times last night, in one 25 minute segment, he interrupted her 26 times and women can't stand this style. And he reinforced all the things that women don't like last night. He tried to get it under control, he was in control in the beginning, but he can't stay under control. And he was virtually raging in the middle, in an incoherent fashion trying to defend himself, when as Brett said, he should have been taking it to his opponent. I mean, that's just debate 101.

AMT: Mark Kingwell wants to jump in here.

MARK KINGWELL: Well, I think the point is obvious. The lack of stamina is just code for you’re a woman. This is the rankest misogyny and it's the same thing that he denied about, the birther thing, which he kept going on for so long that it wasn't racist. Of course it's racist. So, you know, let's call what is happening what's happening. And it was said before, well, you know, his blustering style plays as authentic, or, you know, speaking to the heartland. Well, that's BS, because he could say anything and the base would not move. He is at that point now, where whoever the supporters are, you know, he could start reciting the moon is made of green cheese or it's made of my orange hair and people would still say yeah that's fantastic. So, it's really important I think, when we get to the stage of debates, when it's come down to these two candidates, that we actually say, you know what, who can, you know, say something that makes sense, something that's coherent and might even be able to follow through on it.

AMT: Well, Brett O'Donnell, what do you think of what Mark Kingwell is saying? Brett, are you there?

BRETT O'DONNELL: Hello.

AMT: Yeah. What do you think of that?

BRETT O'DONNELL: Well, I mean, I don't think that he could say anything and his base would rally around him, but I do think that he could have had a chance to reach out into that undecided. You know, there's a lot of undecided voters still. There were voters who came to that debate. The reason it was probably the most watched debate in televised history last night is because I do think voters have a lot of questions about both of these candidates. And he missed an opportunity last night to reach some of those middle voters, by assuring them that he was confident on all of the issues. And I think that was the opportunity lost. And I think the other thing was he missed an opportunity to really get after Secretary Clinton and point out some of her flaws, which could have also helped sway the audience. I mean, she, if you look at her performance, her performance last night is nothing but a long string of talking points strung together in a speech. She's very good at prose, but lousy at poetry. Very good at talking to the heart.

MARK KINGWELL: I'm not even sure what that means, but can I just jump in? This is a false equivalency, to treat these two people as if they're on the same playing field is already a mistake. And this is what we've been conned into and made to feel is normal over the past nine months. Donald Trump has been gas lighting the entire country and the entire world, making us all feel crazy, because he's crazy. And so, when a debate actually happens--

BRETT O'DONNELL: I think that's a reasonably slanted and unfair assessment of Donald Trump.

MARK KINGWELL: Well I don't think it's unfair, it's slanted, but it's not fair. If you look at what's happened at, what has actually been said--

BRETT O'DONNELL: [interposing] People are frustrated--

MARK KINGWELL: [interposing] Excuse me sir, you're interrupting me just like Donald Trump did.

AMT: OK, you know, well let’s--

BRETT O'DONNELL: People are frustrated, the one thing he did was he rightly, Trump rightly [unintelligible]

MARK KINGWELL: Interruption is not an argument sir.

AMT: OK, well, the fact is these two people are both going to be on the ballot in November--

BRETT O'DONNELL: [interposing] And neither is your rationality.

AMT: Celinda Lake, do you want to weigh in here on accuracy. And there were a lot of organizations fact checking last night.

CELINDA LAKE: Well, Donald Trump does live in an alternative reality. And the fact, I think last night he pushed it. One of the things that's really frustrating, and I think it frustrated 17 Republicans and it certainly frustrates the Democrats right now, is that Donald Trump gets away with a lot of non-facts. There are a lot of things that people don't pick up on or they don't care, they excuse because they say he's not a professional politician. But he got away, he tried so many things last night and pushing so many things, and I think one of the more telling things was when he was blaming her yet again for something else, and she said OK let's just blame me for everything. And he said OK let's do that. And it's like, are we in junior high here? Or are we having a presidential debate? And what happens when you take that attitude to our foreign allies or our foreign enemies. So I think that all this by commentary saying, you know, he can say your policies have failed and that's the origin of ISIS. But then when he always has the zinger that undermines him at this point, when he said you’ve been fighting this your whole life.

AMT: We've heard that, yeah, we’ve heard that.

CELINDA LAKE: No, ISIS hasn’t existed your whole life.

AMT: OK, we have to leave it there. Thank you both for weighing in. And Mark Kingwell, you've got 10 seconds to give us the final philosophical thought on these guys.

MARK KINGWELL: Well, like I said before, I think that what this shows is that when you have reasonable constraints and people who are forced to actually bring things to the mat, arguments and facts went out. And that's good news for those of us who have felt that this campaign has gone off the rails into some kind of post-factual universe. Actually, it was a spectacle, but it was a rational one.

AMT: OK, we have to leave it there Celinda Lake, President of Lake Research Partners, a leading political strategist with the Democratic Party. Brett O'Donnell, longtime Republican debate coach President of O'Donnell Associates. They're both in the Beltway. Mark Kingwell is a Professor of Philosophy at the University of Toronto. You know you have lots to say on this. Go to our website cbc.ca/thecurrent and weigh in, or find us @TheCurrentCBC. Stay with us, this is The Current.

Indigenous people need to tell their stories of sobriety, says lawyer

Guests: Harold R. Johnson

ANNA-MARIA TREMONTI: Hello, I'm Anna Maria Tremonti and you're listening to The Current.

[Music: Theme]

AMT: Still to come there are some disruptive technologies Uber, AirBnB, that leave entire industries forever changed. And then there's the disruptive medical technology that could forever change your own idea of who we are. We'll hear about some breakthroughs in the meeting of mind and machine in about half an hour. But first, the bottle and the damage done.

SOUNDCLIP

To see a house full of drunken Indians consisting of men, women and children is a most unpleasant sight. For in that condition, they often wrangle, pull each other by the hair and fight. That sometimes 10 or 12 of both sexes may be seen fighting each other promiscuously, until at last they all fall on the floor one upon another, some spilling rum out of a small kettle or dish which they hold in their hands, while others are throwing up what they've just drunk.

AMT: That historic journal entry from the fur trader Daniel Williams Harmon dates back to the early 19th century. Yet here in the 21st century, the author and lawyer Harold R. Johnson includes it in his new book about Indigenous people and alcohol. The anecdote shows just how long the pernicious stereotype of the so-called quote, drunken Indian has been with us. But Harold R. Johnson includes that uncomfortable anecdote for another reason, precisely because it's hard to hear. It's difficult to talk about alcohol and the hardships it still causes many Indigenous communities today, and yet it's a subject Harold R. Johnson approaches with experience as a Crown Prosecutor in Treaty 6 territory. And with the conviction that the first step forward must meet to acknowledge hard truth. He's a graduate of the Harvard Law School. He's a member of the Montreal Lake Cree Nation. His book is entitled Firewater: How Alcohol is Killing My People and Yours. Harold R. Johnson joins us from Saskatoon. Hello.

HAROLD R. JOHNSON: Good morning Anna-Maria.

AMT: Why does this story, as you call it the quote, dirty lazy drunken Indian story, have so much power even today?

HAROLD R. JOHNSON: It's never gone away. It has been a constant, since first contact through the residential school era, all through colonialism. It is still being repeated. We've internalized it, made the story our own. Our own people believe the story. I had a kid on one of the reserves tell me just a couple of years ago that to be a real Indian you have to drink.

AMT: Hmm. Well, I want to talk about the people in your community and your community is Treaty 6 area in northern Saskatchewan, right?

HAROLD R. JOHNSON: That's correct. The Woodland Cree signed an adhesion to Treaty 6 in 1889.

AMT: And how many people in the Treaty 6 community roughly?

HAROLD R. JOHNSON: I’m estimating about 20, 25,000 people.

AMT: OK, because you write specifically about people in your community. What do you hear from people in that community, the Treaty 6 community, about how they view their relationship to alcohol?

HAROLD R. JOHNSON: I had an elder give me a call when he heard that I was starting to work on this and he wanted me to know about drinking in the La Ronge area. He told me that back in the forties and fifties there was some drinking, sometimes an Indian would sell their treaty rights so they could legally go in the bar. And sometimes other Indians would ask them to buy beer for them. But it was a sometimes thing. I checked with other elders and that seems consistent. This first elder told me that real drinking didn't start until 1966 with the opening of the Anglo-Rouyn mine north of town. And the miners came to town and had a party on the reserve 24 hours a day, seven days a week. And the entire purpose was to get Indian women drunk. There was another party going on at the same time, the smoke jumpers, and again they only invited women to their parties. And the elder told me that if any man showed up at those parties, there was usually a fight so they just quit going. There was a third group of people preying on Aboriginal women at that time, the American tourists were flying in on private planes. They didn't bring their families with them but they brought the hard liquor. That's where people remember seeing rum and whiskey and vodka for the first time. If you want to destroy a people, you destroy the women first.

AMT: You have calculated the rate of alcohol related deaths in your community. What have you found?

HAROLD R. JOHNSON: My estimate is one in two. And it's based on the leading cause of death in my territory right now is injury. So that's car accidents, ski doo accidents, drownings, stabbings, shootings, beatings, house fires, suicide, freezing to death. And we know that that's all alcohol. The second leading cause of death is heart disease and we know that binge drinking causes heart disease. And all those guys my age who didn't shut it down or continue to binge drink are now falling over dead of heart attacks. And the third leading cause of death is cancer. And we know that alcohol causes all sorts of cancers. Add to that children who don't get proper nutrition because their parents are drinking. Add to that alcohol and FASD, and add to that alcohol attacks the immune system and people who drink too much have what is referred to as failure to thrive. Put all of those together, and my estimate is one in two. And I'm afraid that that estimate is low. I was in a community last winter, it's a community of 880 people. A minister stood up at the meeting and said we had 66 funerals here in 2015 and 60 of them were because of alcohol.

AMT: Hmm. But those are your calculations, are there numbers available like that? Has anyone looked at this, like, the way you did?

HAROLD R. JOHNSON: I can't get the numbers. I'm trying to get the numbers. We know in justice, where I spent a lot of time that 95 per cent of the people who come to court were intoxicated at the time of their offense. But when you look at the numbers, alcohol is so natural, normal and necessary in our society that people don't write it down. It's not recorded. You look at the police records and you can't find that number there because the police don't write it down because it's so normal. The same thing in health care.

AMT: And you make the point in your book that it's just assumed that at an arrest or at an emergency health--

HAROLD R. JOHNSON: Yes.

AMT: How has alcohol affected you and your family?

HAROLD R. JOHNSON: I've buried two brothers. I’ve buried many relatives. I'm not speaking figuratively, I’ve dug graves. My father died when I was eight years old. He died of a heart attack. I have two childhoods. My father and mother didn't drink in the first eight years of my life. There was rarely any alcohol in our home. My father died, circumstances changed. Alcohol became much more prevalent in the second half of my childhood.

AMT: You've outlined theories about how Indigenous people can move forward and away from alcohol that is killing so many people. You talk about victim, grief, and trauma models and you have a problem with them. Take me through. You’ve got a couple of models, let's start there. The victim, grief, and trauma models. What have you observed and what are you thinking?

HAROLD R. JOHNSON: So this victim's story, to tell us that the reason that Aboriginal people are in the situation that they're in is because of a history of colonization, that it’s because of residential school, that it’s because of government policy, that it's all of these things that are outside of our control are killing us. Placebo and nocebo. We know placebo, if I give you a sugar pill and tell you that this is medicine and it's going to make you feel better if you take it, 35 to 50 per cent of people experience a reduction in symptoms. The same thing occurs with nocebo. And in this case I give you a sugar pill and tell you that it's poison and it’s going to make you sick. And if you take it, you're probably going to get sick. That's the power of story. So a nocebo story, and that's what it is, is the story that heals you or kills you. I'm not saying that residential school wasn't real. That was real, that happened, but we can't fix it. We can't go back and change residential school and to be told these stories over and over again is just making it worse.

AMT: Well there's another example to use. The widely held understanding that alcoholism is a disease. What problems do you see with that?

HAROLD R. JOHNSON: We keep being told that alcoholism is a disease. When you check into it, disease is a metaphor for what they're seeing, it's not like smallpox. Smallpox killed many of us, alcohol is killing just about as many now. But alcohol doesn't work the same as smallpox or TB. I see alcohol more like a repetitive strain injury. You use it too often, too much and you injure yourself. It changes the way that you look at it. If addiction is a disease, then there's nothing I can do about it. It's God's will that I got it. If alcoholism is an injury that I did to myself, then I can change it. If I tell myself, if I do this too often and too much I can hurt myself, I might change the way that I drink. It's in the story that we tell ourselves.

AMT: Is the key problem you see in Indigenous communities actually alcoholism or is it binge drinking?

HAROLD R. JOHNSON: It’s binge drinking. What I saw in the courts was 15 to 20 per cent of the people who came to court were obsessive compulsive drinkers. 80 to 85 per cent of people who came to court just drank too much that one time and did something really stupid, up to and including committing an atrocity. If we're looking just at addictions, we're looking at just a small portion of it.

AMT: Well, and I want to take a little further look into the justice system, because that's the other model. You talk about the law enforcement model of how drunkenness or alcoholism is treated by the system. Talk to me about what you see?

HAROLD R. JOHNSON: If we go back in the common law, we find a statement that says He who killeth while drunk, sober shall hang. So we've got lots of experience with alcohol and crime, and I am still prosecuting people who got drunk and killed each other. The justice system is a complete failure. It is not going to solve our problems with alcohol. And that is our major problem.

AMT: And you see those cases where people get drunk and kill each other, but you see other cases where people misbehave because of drunkenness and then have the book thrown at them, am I correct?

HAROLD R. JOHNSON: That happens. I was talking with a defense lawyer a little while ago and we were talking about murders and alcohol and I asked them how many murders have you defended where alcohol wasn't involved? And he remembered one. And as a prosecutor I could remember doing one that didn't involve alcohol. And we were walking away and he said, but with regard to sex assault, I don't remember any, and I don't remember any either. With sex assault, it was always alcohol was involved.

AMT: And so how do you think the justice system needs to change to deal with that?

HAROLD R. JOHNSON: There is a model out of South Dakota called 24/7 that needs to be looked at a lot more closely. That 24/7 program out of South Dakota, if you are on an order for driving under the influence or domestic violence involving alcohol, you are required to attend at a police station twice a day, once in the morning and once in the evening, and blow into a breathalyzer. If you fail to show up or you have alcohol in your system, you go to jail automatically for up to two days. So immediate detection, immediate consequences. The breach rate for both failing to attend and for having alcohol in the system is less than 1 per cent. I would love to see a breach rate of less than 1 per cent. So it works. And what's really amazing about the 24/7 program is the Rand Institute went and studied it and they found that there were positive health results. The death rate from alcohol in South Dakota is down because of the 24/7 program. And they were able to show that because each county went into the program at different times, so they're able to trace it across the state. If we could do that in Canada, where it probably going to require legislative change.

AMT: And you're speaking, of course, as both a crown prosecutor and a member of the Indigenous community, thinking this could actually move something forward.

HAROLD R. JOHNSON: Maybe we could do something positive with law.

AMT: Well, let me ask you. Has there been enough discussion in your community about the problems caused by alcohol?

HAROLD R. JOHNSON: No, we're trying to open up the conversation. Let's talk about it. Let's bring it out into the light and talk about it. It's really hard for white people to talk about Indians and alcohol, because the fear that someone is going to point a finger at them and call them racist. The opposite occurs in my community, where we don't want to talk about it publicly, because we're afraid people are going to point their fingers at us and call us lazy, dirty, drunken Indians. I firmly believe that the solution is in bringing it out and talking about it. And the people will find the answers. I'm not offering a whole bunch of solutions. I'm not going to go and tell my people you have to do a, b, c, and things will get better. We've had people come into our communities forever telling us how to do things and having solutions for us. And then they leave and the solutions don't work. The solutions will come from the people, but we have to have a conversation first.

AMT: Well, so how can we talk about the problems caused by alcohol in Indigenous communities without falling into the trap of racist remarks, or the again, the quote, the drunken Indian stereotype. By being honest, just courageously going forward and talking about it. We don't have to use race as part of it. What I'm seeing in northern Saskatchewan is that the severe problems started in 1966. So this happened on my watch, this is in my lifetime that it's changed. There's a history of alcohol in white culture that goes back thousands of years, the same problems exist in white culture. I've seen statistics that say that 25 per cent of deaths worldwide are because of alcohol. So this isn't an Indian problem. It's amplified in my communities, but it's not our problem.

AMT: And why are you speaking out?

HAROLD R. JOHNSON: Because nobody else is. I don't want to talk about this. I've got a whole bunch of things I'd love to do. I'd love to be writing fiction. I'd love to be trapping and fishing and doing all of the things that I really enjoy doing, but nobody else is talking about it. And if we don't talk about it, it's just going to continue and I'm just tired of digging graves.

AMT: In your book you include a letter from an author and an Indigenous law professor by the name of Tracey Lindberg, talking about sobriety and her own sobriety. Let's listen to her reading parts of that letter.

SOUNDCLIP

TRACEY LINDBERG: I stopped drinking about 25 years ago. Until then I engaged in what was quite likely binge drinking. My relationship with booze began in grade eight. Boys with licenses picked up girls without and gave us alcohol. My first drink was vodka. By the time I went to graduate school, I was drinking or bingeing two days a week. By the time I was practicing law, three days a week, at least. In the practice of law and as the only Indigenous person in the firm that I worked for, alcohol became the lubricant through which I could unpeel my layer of Other and become one with the firm. It was me and I made a choice and the choice was to make friends through boozing with them. I made a decision because I love to drink. I made a decision because I needed to drink. This I knew was going to get harder and harder to do as time went by. This I also knew was a choice at that time, a luxury, the choice to stop. But in the future it might not be something I could stop. So I stopped. I continued going to ceremonies, I felt good. I quit drinking entirely. I felt better. And I had to learn how to socialize. I'm still not good at it without alcohol. Had to learn to hug without alcohol. Had to define and parse my spare time without alcohol. I do miss the denizens of the bars I haunted. Do miss that easy drunky friendship amongst drunken strangers. I miss the excitement of music in small rooms, yelled conversations and weird semi-hallucinatory observations. The nation that I work with never required that I quit. I quit because they don't drink. Because I wanted no one to have to pay my way in ceremony but me. Because I wanted to be a sober advocate for them, because I wanted to be free. Freedom is walking away and doing better. I'm free.

AMT: That is Tracey Lindberg reading her own words. Harold R. Johnson, why is it important to hear her story?

HAROLD R. JOHNSON: We need all of the artists to tell sober stories. We need to bring back all of the Wisakedjak and [unintelligible] stories, all of those traditions, in a way that helps people to change the story that we tell ourselves.

AMT: So in other words when you have so many people who are not drinking, they need to share that so others can know that?

HAROLD R. JOHNSON: There's a statistic that's rarely mentioned, 35 per cent of Aboriginal people in Canada don't drink at all. We are completely abstinent, but we are silently sober. I am trying to encourage those silently sober to speak up. Show what it's like to walk a sober life.

AMT: And you also suggest the idea of sober houses. How would that work?

HAROLD R. JOHNSON: This is something that came out of our discussions last winter. What we learned when we're asking questions, what was the hardest part about sobering up? We were told, I lost all my friends or I found out who my real friends were. And we take people out of our communities and we send them off to detox centres and rehab centres, and they come back into the communities and they come back to the same house, the same families, the same situation. And we have a success rate of about 2 per cent. If we had a sober house and you put a sign on your door, people walking by would see the sign and it be similar to the block parent idea. It would be a safe place to go. Someplace where there was no drinking, no pressure to drink. You could just play cards and visit and watch television and be amongst sober people.

AMT: And then give each other strength.

HAROLD R. JOHNSON: We turn our communities into treatment centres, we didn't have to send people away.

AMT: You tell the story of a man who begged you to put him in jail, because he wanted to stay sober. He couldn't find any other way. I've known him for a long time and I've frequently asked the judge to send him to jail, because it was pointless to put him on a probation order or any order that required him to not drink. And if he wasn't drinking he wouldn't cause any trouble. I'd see him around the communities, I'm the crown prosecutor, but he'd come up and shake my hand and talk to me. Once he told me, he was really proud he says I'm scheduled to go in for rehab. And I didn't see him for a while and then I saw him one day in front of the post office and he came up and asked me to send him to jail. Because he'd been to rehab and he came back to the communities and he fell in with his friends again. And he was drunk, and he knew that if he didn't stop drinking he was going to die.

AMT: So if there was a sober house for him to go to, he would have been OK.

HAROLD R. JOHNSON: He's doing better now.

AMT: Mm.

HAROLD R. JOHNSON: He's found sober friends to be around.

AMT: You have put your job as a crown prosecutor on hold temporarily for a project in two northern Saskatchewan Indigenous communities. Tell us what you're working on.

HAROLD R. JOHNSON: I'm on a special project with the deputy ministers of Saskatchewan to create community alcohol management plans and to socialize a concept of sobriety. I have three women behind me. My wife Joan, Carla Frohaug and Sue Carriere, and with three strong women behind me I can't fail. I am the voice and they do all of the work and all of the research. And we've created a community alcohol management plan for those communities. It belongs to them. It's not ours, it's not the government’s. We talk to people, we talked to as many people as we could in creating the plan. We tried to hold community meetings, but it didn't work. Every time we scheduled a community meeting, the building we were using would be required for a funeral or a wake and quite often those funerals and wakes were for people who died from drinking. So we had to change our strategy, we created surveys, and we knocked on doors. We talked to churches, we talked to sweat lodge keepers, and pipe carriers and anybody who would talk to us.

AMT: And what were you asking them? What should we do about alcohol?

AMT: And what would they tell you?

HAROLD R. JOHNSON: 100 per cent of people said that alcohol was a problem in our communities. About 95 per cent said that it was getting worse. They would like to see changes to government policy. They're telling us that we need to restrict supply. That there's too many liquor stores and they're open too long. There was support for increased taxation on alcohol. A lot of lives could be saved by just increasing the tax by 2 per cent. There's no single answer.

AMT: You have written this book as a conversation among Indigenous people and you say that non-Indigenous people are welcome to listen. What do you want those of us who are not Indigenous to think about or do when we listen to you talking about this?

HAROLD R. JOHNSON: Mm. That’s hard. You are not responsible. Don't feel guilty about it. Speak honestly about it. Talk about your own issues with alcohol. Be part of the conversation.

AMT: Where do you want this conversation in your own community to go then?

HAROLD R. JOHNSON: I don't know where it's going to go. All I know is that it's not going anywhere if we keep silent about it. I have no way of seeing the future. I just want my people to have hope and that we change our story and that our story becomes one of hope. It's the hopelessness that I see killing everybody.

AMT: So again, if the narrative changes and more people talk about it, there's more hope than everyone being silent.

HAROLD R. JOHNSON: That is my dream.

AMT: Harold R. Johnson thanks, thanks for your ideas and for sharing them with us today.

HAROLD R. JOHNSON: And thank you for having me on Anna-Maria. It has been an honour.

AMT: Harold R. Johnson, Crown Prosecutor and the author of Firewater: How Alcohol Is Killing My People and Yours. He joined us from Saskatoon. If you want to share your thoughts on the conversation about alcohol and Indigenous people visit our cbc.ca/thecurrent. Click on the Contact link and send us an email. You can find us on Facebook or tweet us @TheCurrentCBC. And if you're joining us partway through, download the podcast cbc.ca/thecurrent, find our podcast there. Coming up next, putting our minds together to solve some big problems. We'll hear about the neurotechnology that is linking different people's brains together. I'm Anna-Maria Tremonti, this is The Current on CBC Radio One.

[Music: Extro]

How brain-machine connections can help paraplegics move again

Guests: Miguel Nicolelis, Karen Rommelfanger, Ariel Garten

ANNA-MARIA TREMONTI: Hello, I'm Anna-Maria Tremonti and this is The Current.

[Music: The Disruptors Theme]

AMT: So far this season, our project The Disruptors has shone a light on several brainy people setting out to disrupt the world. Today is a little different. We're looking at work that could disrupt the way we use our brains and ultimately disrupt our very sense of self.

SOUNDCLIP

So if everybody wants to take a moment and slip on your Muse. We're going to choose a two minute long session, and any sound environment you want. So in today's meditation, like every Muse session, you're going to hear the sound of your mind when you meditate. When your mind wanders, you're going to hear the weather pick up [wind blowing]. And as you come back to focused attention you're going to quiet the weather [water flowing]. Just pay attention to the breath coming in and out, right at the tip of your nose. When you're ready, you can press begin. [wind and water sounds]

AMT: Well, are you ready for that kind of technology. The Muse as it's called, is a headband that reads your mind or your brain activity at least, its sensors measure the electrical activity in your brain and send the data to your smartphone. We dropped in on a group meditation session with employees of Interaxon, the Toronto company that manufactures that device.

SOUNDCLIP

VOICE 1: You can open your eyes and take a look at your data. How is that for you, what came up?

VOICE 2: I feel very calm and I actually did really well, I got 18 birds. So it was very successful today.

ARIEL GARTEN: Hi my name is Ariel Garten, I'm one of the co-founders of Interaxon. We make Muse, the brain sensing headband. So what Muse does is it helps you meditate. It helps you actually hear the sound of your own mind during your meditation, and the metaphor we use is your mind is like the weather. So when you're thinking, distracted, worried, you hear your brain as windy. And as you come to a state of clear focused attention, you quiet the winds. When you're very very quiet you hear birds. So Muse is a clinical grade EEG with sensors on the forehead and behind the ears. So what we’re reading is your brainwaves, and it's used by over 120 different research institutions. So it's now this slim, slick, really beautiful little device that you can slip on your head and do real neuroscience research with, or you can walk into a Best Buy and pick up next to the Fitbit, or the heart rate monitor, or any of the other standard wearables that you have.

[breathing sounds]

ARIEL GARTEN: So our mind is a very mysterious place. Our brain, you know, governs our entire experience of life. What we think, what we feel, what we hear, what we smell. But we have really no mechanism to access it. So we wanted to make a tool that absolutely anybody could use. That could help them actually interact with their mind. And so what we see is your active mind. We don't specifically see if you have a negative thought, but we teach you to know when you're in that place where you're, you know, stuck in your head and that's not so productive, and what you can do to come out of it and come back into the present moment. You can learn not to engage in the thoughts of, oh no what if, you actually end up living a very happy, very pleasant life.

AMT: Well, commercial products that read brain activity such as the Muse are proliferating on the market. It's even possible to play virtual games using only your brain signals. But compared with what's happening in lab research, that is really just the tip of the iceberg. There are labs connecting human brains together via computer and they've already accomplished a feat that's hard to wrap your mind around. Having one person's brain move another person's body, albeit in very small ways. As to where that's leading, some envision a brain net that's like a series of brains, human or animal, all connected and working together. Any and all of these avenues of research have the potential to redefine what our brains do and to disrupt the idea of where I ends and you begins. Miguel Nicolelis is a Professor of Neuroscience at Duke University. He also runs a lab in Sao Paulo, Brazil. And his latest research paper looks at connecting paralyzed patients to machines to rewire their brains and help them move again. I should mention that Miguel Nicolelis has no connection with the company we just heard from or any other company working on commercial applications for this research. And we have reached Dr. Nicolelis in Sao Paulo. Hello.

DR. MIGUEL NICOLELIS :Oh hi, how are you doing?

AMT: I'm very curious, so I'm glad to have you with us. Thank you. Can you describe your study with paralyzed patients?

DR. MIGUEL NICOLELIS : Well, this is the first clinical application in a large scale of an idea that we pioneered in 1998 at Duke University of creating what we call brain machine interfaces. These are computational interfaces that allow brain activity to be routed directly to virtual, mechanical or electronic devices so that the subject who is generating this brain activity can move this device just by thinking. The study we just published showed that when you have a population of chronic paraplegic patients, someone who had not walked for more than a decade in some cases, you can use brain machine interfaces not only to restore mobility through artificial devices like robotic exoskeletons, but you can also trigger a partial neurological recovery of functions, motor, sensory, visceral in these patients.

AMT: So you had eight paralyzed patients, am I correct.

DR. MIGUEL NICOLELIS : Yes, correct.

AMT: So their brains were connected to the machines, what did they have to do?

DR. MIGUEL NICOLELIS : Well this is what we call a non-invasive brain machine interface. So they have to wear like a swim cap in which we had tiny electrodes that can record from the surface of the scalp, electrical brain activity. The patients had to learn how to use this brain activity to control a variety of motor actuators. We started with an avatar body of themselves where they trained, and then as they became proficient with the system we basically got them into robotic walkers. So they learned to walk again by literally imagining that they wanted to move and sending this voluntary motor desire to a machine that could enact that will.

AMT: So they weren't able to walk on their own, but with the help of the exoskeleton or they were able to move their limbs with their brains?

DR. MIGUEL NICOLELIS : Well, some of these patients actually recovered the ability to voluntarily move their limbs without the brain machine interface. They couldn't sustain their body, but when you have them up right and you give them body support, they actually some of them could move both of their legs. After two and a half years of training, at this very moment now, all these patients are being upgraded from complete paralysis to partial paraplegic.

AMT: That sounds extraordinary. It's a small group, what does it mean?

DR. MIGUEL NICOLELIS : Well, it’s a proof of concept. And is something that nobody had seen, even in small groups after a year and a half, the chances of a spontaneous recovery or rehab induced recovery is very slim. And yet, we are talking about patients that were paralyzed for 11, 13 years and they recover significant amounts of movement and sensitivity so.

AMT: Now how do you know it was the brain machine connection and not hours of physical therapy and training that changed the brains and allowed that movement?

DR. MIGUEL NICOLELIS : A lot of people have done hours and hours of physical therapy and never shown any recovery. Our patients themselves have done hours and hours and years of physical rehabilitation and never shown any type of recovery.

AMT: And now, you're also working to connect patient brains via computers to healthy human brains. Can you tell me about that?

DR. MIGUEL NICOLELIS : Well, that's a very preliminary study that is based mainly on animal studies that we did at Duke University, when we connected two or three monkey brains and the animals collaborate mentally to move a virtual reality arm. So they had to actually combine or synchronize their brain activity to achieve a common task. We realized that perhaps we could adapt this brain net paradigm to training of quadriplegic patients, and that's what we're doing here in Sao Paulo, because we know that in the beginning of the training, particularly in patients who have been paralyzed for a decade or more, and in which the brain is literally erasing or forgetting what is to walk and what is to have lower limbs. And the patient has to control these avatar to walk on a soccer field, and at the end of a walk, kick a soccer ball. That's the exercise, the virtual exercise that they have to learn. And all these movements have to be controlled by brain electrical activity. Now what we're doing is to combine the brain activity of the patient with a contribution from a physical therapist. So the physical therapist is also imagining to move that avatar. In the beginning and the physical therapist contributes more than the patient, and as the patient starts learning what has to be done, their contribution goes down down down, to a point in which only the patient controls the avatar.

AMT: What excites you about all of this?

DR. MIGUEL NICOLELIS : Brain is the greatest mystery of the universe, as far as we can tell, because it defines our human condition. The greatest endowment that we ever got from natural selection. And technology here is just a detail, it’s just experimental tool. But it turned out that once you connect a brain to a machine, and the brain maintains control of what can be done with technology, this is different from, you know, everything that we see around us in society out there in which technology is taking over humanity. And people think that all our problems are going to be solved by introducing technology, that's not what I'm talking about here. What I'm talking about here is use technology to help us understand better how the human brain works. What people don't realize is that we are not talking about not even in the distant future, of downloading someone's thoughts, emotions, memories, and passing that to another subject, that in my opinion is very unlikely to happen ever.

AMT: OK, well I'm glad you brought that up because I've got a clip here that I want you to respond to. This is the CEO of Facebook Mark Zuckerberg. He has spoken on several occasions about his interest in brain connection technology. Listen to him in a Facebook live question and answer session that took place in June.

SOUNDCLIP

MARK ZUCKERBERG: You know what I think we're going to get to at the end of the line past VR, is a world where I think you're going to be able to just be able to capture a thought, right? What you're thinking or feeling. In it's kind of ideal and perfect form in your head and be able to share that with the world in a format where they can get that. There are all these ethical questions about how you do that well, and how you give people power so they can do this in a way that they want. But I think it's something that, you know, 50 years from now may not be a crazy thing to think about.

AMT: Miguel Nicolelis, how do you see it?

DR. MIGUEL NICOLELIS : You know, he may be a very good salesman for Facebook but I don't think he knows much of neuroscience to make that claim. In fact, that claim may scare a lot of people. I don't think we can even talk about that now, because we don't even know how to define a thought, let alone our emotions or our memories. We can transmit motor information, simple motor information, some sensory information, but above that the kind of processing that goes on in our brain is beyond the capability of the typical digital machines that we know, computers.

AMT: Well, and he mentioned ethical questions around brain connecting technology. What moral quandaries do you consider when doing this research?

DR. MIGUEL NICOLELIS : Well, 99 per cent of the time I'm doing this research with rats and monkeys, so I think there are too many moral questions at that point, provided that the animals are cared for and are very well treated, as they are. Of course, I'm writing a whole book about the brain and how modern society may be tampering and influencing the way we think and the way our brain evolves. So I think about that all the time. And I also think about what would happen when these technologies that we are creating in the lab get out on the streets. But again all the debates I had participated in with neuroethicists and other philosophers, and people who think deeply about these, I think in all these debates we've got a consensus that as long as you are doing this for medical reasons and you’re doing this to explore potential therapies, there are no ethical qualms on it.

AMT: Do you worry about commercial ventures wanting to leap onto the research you do for those medical purposes and commercialize it for, like, to do something with it that you didn't intend?

DR. MIGUEL NICOLELIS : Oh, absolutely. In 2004, we already had a proof of concept in humans, the brain machine interfaces would work. Months later, there were companies popping up in the United States trying to rush this technology into, you know, to make money. And that damaged not only the field, it damaged the investors or the company. And he almost destroyed the whole dream of using brain machine interfaces to help patients. So when I see companies claiming all sorts of things, I cringe because I know that this is not where we started this field for. And I also, just to finish, I am very concerned about the potential military use of this technology. Weaponizing the brain is not a good idea in my opinion, and it could be terrifying. In the beginning of the 2000s there was a movement to help the veterans to regain mobility and I participated in an effort to do that. There was initial intent to use these for medical purposes. Lately, I don't know, I have seen calls for applications that are not anymore related to medical or clinical work. And the moment we depart from that line, certainly is not for me, I'm out of it. And I would urge anybody in this field to be out of it too.

AMT: Can I just clarify why when you say weaponize the brain, how would how would you even do that? The weaponzing.

DR. MIGUEL NICOLELIS : Well we used to brain machine interfaces to control weapons.

AMT: OK.

DR. MIGUEL NICOLELIS : To increase the range, lethality and the scope of what can be done. And that's an ethical concern.

AMT: Miguel Nicolelis, it's really interesting to talk to you. Thank you for taking the time.

DR. MIGUEL NICOLELIS : My pleasure. Thank you for the invitation.

AMT: Miguel Nicolelis, Professor of Neuroscience at Duke University. He also runs a lab in Sao Paulo, Brazil. That is where we reached him. Well, when we talk about disrupting the way we use our brains with these emerging technologies, there is clearly a lot of promise. But as you just heard there, the ethical questions around these disruptions are especially important. Karen Rommelfanger is a Neuroscientist, a Neuroethicist and Director of the Neuroethics program at Emory University. She's also part of the neuroethics working group of the US government's brain initiative, looking at the ethics of brain research. And she joins us from Atlanta, Georgia. Hello.

KAREN ROMMELFANGER: Hello.

AMT: Well, you've been listening in and we're talking about Miguel Nicolelis, his predictions and the promise of brain connecting technology. Where do you see this technology going?

KAREN ROMMELFANGER: There is a lot of exciting stuff brought up with Ariel Garten’s work and also Nicolelis’ work. I often hear this, the scientist’s perspective that science is kind of always good unless it goes into a non-science realm. And I don't think that we can and, you know, he also said he would step out of the conversation if we start talking about using these technologies for the military. There’s a problem with that, because we expressly need those scientists who are involved in those technologies to be advocates or to be stewards of that work and to be speaking about how that those technologies might be used. There are a number of issues, I mean, within his particular domain, I think it's really interesting to think about particularly in the brain net situation, where he's talked about a healthy brain rehabilitating a brain of a person who's been paralyzed for a long time. There are two parties involved in that situation. And while we talk about the benefits of rehabilitating the person with the paralysis and increasing their neuroplasticity, we don't really know what happens to the healthy person in that situation. I mean, it assumes that this is a shared activity that somehow only impacting one brain. And I don't see how that could be possible. In some of the studies with brain to brain interface, there's some interesting questions too, about how, while it seems innocuous, this is a non-invasive device two brains, so far for the brain to brain interface, have just been connecting to play a game for instance. We don't know how the people who participate in those studies leave that situation. Do they feel a certain kind of selfhood that's been changed? Are there reverberating effects for them that last beyond the experiment? And I say that because we already know with virtual reality, that people who participate in virtual reality games can change their behaviours in the real world even after performing in virtual reality.

AMT: Well earlier we heard about the Muse headband and from Ariel Garten, co-founder of Interaxon, the company that makes it. She has also founded the Center for Responsible Brainwave Technologies to develop ethical standards for consumer brain connecting devices. Listen to her, she's explaining here what she wants companies to consider as they sell such products.

SOUNDCLIP

For us it’s important that your privacy is yours and you always get to choose what you do with your brain data and what you don't. It's important when you go to create any piece of technology, you want to make sure that the applications that are being built are very well validated, that if you say that it's doing something it really is, that you've had, you know, its efficacy demonstrated by scientific partners that are outside of yourselves. I get frustrated when people get excited about technology for technology's sake like, oh we can do this really cool thing. It's like, that's great, technology is an amazing enabler for humanity and our human experience and enhancing it in all sorts of ways, but we can't lose sight that the important thing is the human not the technology.

AMT: Karen Rommelfanger, what kinds of issues do you think the Center for Responsible Brainwave Technologies needs to look at when developing ethical standards?

KAREN ROMMELFANGER: Yeah, I'm familiar with the privacy policies of Muse and I think they actually are leaders in their special care and attention to data privacy. I think that's critical actually, and the two things she offers is not only that they will protect the information, but you as a participant or a consumer can own your information, and at any point you can take that information back and stop participating.

AMT: What's the danger there. If you don't own your information, who might?

KAREN ROMMELFANGER: That's a good question. I mean, it could be her company or it could be if the company tanks whoever buys the company next. And so, the problem is is that it seems like right now it's just a fun biofeedback game. And maybe it is, it's a wellness tool. But in the long term we're developing more and more technologies that record more and more fine grained information about the brain and our analysis tools are becoming better, and that could be used in ways one may not want to be used. So they could be something that ends up being incorporated somehow in a medical record, or in a record that is accessible to future employers. Many of these wearable headsets are consumer technologies that are used for wellness aren't technically health. That said, the hope is that maybe they will help you with your health in some way. And some of these technologies may even be able to detect symptoms prior to a disease's’ onset. Right now in the US, we have a rule that you can't prevent someone from getting insurance because of a pre-existing condition. But we actually don't have rules against a pre-existing pre-existing condition, something prior to that.

AMT: Really interesting. So also we think of our mind as a defining feature of our very self. How much do the mind and the physical organ of the brain intersect in this sense?

KAREN ROMMELFANGER: We don't really know what the mind is. We certainly can't really define that with a neuro scientific tool. I also say this from my experience as a neuroscientist, recording at the most granular level of individual cells in an alive brain, that during that recording it was very apparent to me that this is not where a thought is and this is not the mind. Mind is really a social construction and the definition of that differs across countries. In Western countries, you hear this discussion of the individual and that somehow is equated to the mind. But in other cultures, their defining terms are even different. So in Japan there's a term kokoro, and that's really the interweaving of the mind, body, and spirit. You wouldn't separate those things.

AMT: Devices such as Muse connect our brains to computers. But if we go to the next level and connect our brains to other brains, what could that do to our concept of self?

KAREN ROMMELFANGER: The good question there is how is that actually different than the way we connect to other brains now? So you and I are right now we're having this conversation and this conversation is changing my brain. So we already have actually an indirect connection, and I'm not sure that right now at least, connecting two brains is really going to be more effective than the way we talk to each other now. What I worry about is that with this focus of changing our brain and worrying about how we might gain control of our brain just to have more happiness, a better life, more connectedness with others, is that we lose out on other ways that we can become more connected with others in the world. Turn inward to be more connected with the world kind of seems like it's the opposite of what we should be doing.

AMT: And Professor Nicolelis’ work also found that brains actually changed when connected to machines. What are the implications of that?

KAREN ROMMELFANGER: In situation with brain machine interface, the thought is perhaps that these technologies are enabling people, certainly people who are paralyzed. What I wouldn't want to forget is that disability exists in two different places. I mean, we could say that disability is within the physical body, but a lot of the way that disability is lived is facilitated by the environments around us. So the question is if you're in a wheelchair, for example, and you're in a place with no stairs, are you as disabled? We forget that there are ways to change our environment and our social infrastructure to support those who are disabled. So I wouldn't want to start going to the point where we think that we can't help facilitate people to be who they are without a device.

AMT: Important to think about it. And I wanted to ask you about the idea of a brain net or that organic computer. Who would be held responsible if a brain net, a group mind makes a bad decision?

KAREN ROMMELFANGER: [chuckles] That's a really good question and I think it wouldn't be clear. I mean, it depends on I guess what the enacting body is, you know, is there a brain net and then one person's body in the end is the ultimate delivery of that action. This was brought up earlier in military context and certainly connecting two brains to make decisions in high stakes situations, like where someone might be killed is something to think about. How might we have better accuracy and not kill innocent people? Might we make better decisions or might we be more succumbing to the weaknesses of other people's cognition if we say that we're connecting these brains? And I don't think that that's clear. Is the technology going to remain a tool for us? Is it going to turn into a tool that helps us realize ourselves? Or does it become a collaborator in the end? And are there going to be interventions or abilities in place with these technologies so that we can be aware of all times what's happening, or we can intervene if something is going to happen that we don't want to. So let’s say a group of brains are working together to try to decide on a target. And one of them decides on the wrong target. Is there a way, still in that process, that one person can prevent the target from being shot, for instance?

AMT: Why do you think so many are so fascinated by communicating directly through our brains, rather than talking to each other?

KAREN ROMMELFANGER: There is a certain novelty to it. We are social beings and we want to be connected. And I think we all struggle to be connected and these technologies present a new exciting way to do that. And I think the idea of being able to touch somebody really far away, touch someone's thoughts far away is an exciting appeal.

AMT: Karen Rommelfanger, thanks for your thoughts on all of this.

KAREN ROMMELFANGER: Happy to be here.

AMT: Karen Rommelfanger, she's a Neuroscientist, Neuroethicist, and the Director of the Neuroethics program at Emory University. And we reached her in Atlanta, Georgia. That's our program for today. Tomorrow, I'll be speaking with Maureen Dowd of The New York Times, Pulitzer Prize winner. She's got lots to say on Trump and Clinton, so wait for her for tomorrow. Finally today, when I spoke with Harold R. Johnson earlier about his book Firewater, he had high praise for a program in North Dakota called 24/7. That requires problem drinkers to check in at a police station twice a day. The BBC's Catrin Nye had a tour of that program a few years ago, so we're going to leave you with part of her report. I'm Anna-Maria Tremonti Thanks for listening to The Current.

SOUNDCLIP

CATRIN NYE: Good morning.

VOICE 1: It is a dollar a test, and I’ll have you blow steady until you hear it click. And then you can stop.

CATRIN NYE: The reading was zero. What does that mean?

VOICE 2: That means that you've passed our test and that you're free to leave and go out and go to your job or go to your family, whatever you have planned for your day.

CATRIN NYE: I did have a glass of wine with my dinner last night, why is it that didn't show up on there?

VOICE 2: Certainly because the alcohol in your system from last night until this morning had time to dissipate. We know that in the program that because of the testing times, people will still take advantage of those times to consume alcohol. What is good about the program is that somebody who would normally consume a 12 pack of beer may only consume two or three beers, because they know all they have to be in here to test the next day or that evening.

CATRIN NYE: Well let's say I didn't pass.

VOICE 2: Catrin, what we’d have you to do is we’d have you have a seat here in our lobby and we would make you wait 15 minutes and then you'd come back to our desk and our tester would retest you. Still fail and then we would take you to our intake area.

[breathalyzer sounds]

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September 27, 2016 full episode transcript

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