To The Best Of Our Knowledge; Future Faces

It's to the best of our knowledge. I'm Ann Strainchamps, today, Future Faces. The NSA has been collecting thousands of photos of faces every day as part of their new facial recognition surveillance, turns out your face is more unique than your fingerprint. Government agencies and private companies are now racing to develop new programs to find and identify faces. Natasha Singer covers facial recognition for the New York Times. I think people don't know how widely it's being used and the fact that they are subject to it. So for example, the majority of departments of motor vehicles in the United States now when you get a new license and they take your photograph, they're also doing facial recognition. They're making what's called a face print. And if you're on a major social network like Google Plus or Facebook and you have uploaded photos, then Facebook has a feature called tag suggestion where you can name a person in one of your photos and it will suggest, you know, when they reappear in other photos, it will suggest a name tag for them. A face print is like

a mathematical code of the topography of your face. It's not a photograph, right? It extracts the facial landmarks and calculates a code for them. And so once that's done, it can be used to identify people in subsequent photos. Photographs or in stills from videos. How good are these face prints? I mean, are they as full proof at identifying people as a fingerprint? It depends on the algorithm. Some are quite good and some are not very good. Facebook came out a few months ago and said that they were developing a system that's not in commercial use yet called deepface where their algorithm is much more powerful. In some cases, you know, face recognition tends to work best if the photograph from which the face print is made is somebody sitting looking forward into the camera not smiling. But what Facebook folks have done is they've been able to calculate how to make a side angle of a face into a 360 degree model of a face. And therefore no matter what

angle your photograph is at, they will be able to make a face print. Don't you think there's something kind of creepy about that? I mean, it feels like no matter where I go, I could be identified. It does feel creepy and invasive, but we're not at the point where we are walking down the street. And every camera we pass is taking images of us and sending it to some database that makes a face print and identifies us. The concern is we might be moving towards that and is that what we want as a society. We'll give us a picture of what's what's already out there. I mean, you checked out some commercial applications that are already on the market. There's an apartment building in Manhattan using facial recognition software, right? Yes. So traditionally, face recognition has been used for security purposes. Face recognition is used like an identity card to allow you access to secure areas. But now it's beginning to go into residential complexes and this place in New York has installed face

recognition instead of security guards or punch codes at the downstairs entrances to the apartment buildings. And then when they are out shopping and come home with their grocery bags and walk up to the entrance to their building, there's a camera that sees them. And if they are a known person, their name will come up on a screen in the security office and the door will automatically unlock. And I watch this happen. It's an Israeli company and the guy who is the chief executive happened to be in New York and we went there and he enrolled in the system right in front of me. So it didn't already know him. He was a new person for the system. And then we went outside and walked up to a building. And their system is a multi -level biometric system. It doesn't just do face recognition. It also recognizes what they call behavior, which is the gate, the speed at which you move, the pattern at which you move. And it took a couple of seconds the first time for it to recognize him. But by the second time, it recognized him when he was much further away. It wasn't really even near the door yet. Wow. And just unlocked. Now that same software from the apartment building is also I think being used in a school in

California? Yes. They have a pilot project with a private school in California, which was concerned about some of these mass shootings. And they wanted to have a system, a security system, to keep out unwanted interlopers. And so the kids, you know, instead of that old school ID have been face printed. And if they're there before 8 a .m. in the morning, when the school day starts, the doors let them in. And if they're late, the doors do not let them in. So much for being tardy. Right. I mean, so there is this aspect of behavior modification or manipulation that can come with face recognition. And the thing about this apartment building is you enroll. You know you're enrolling. It's not covert. The concern is that it could also be used covertly. And therefore you might be kept out of certain places. Or you might be stalked. Or you might be, you know, peacefully and legally protesting some government action. And the concern is will the

government start face printing everybody? And will you be discriminated against without even knowing it? Or will you simply be surveilled? And will that chill the way we behave in public? Or to discriminate between people, didn't you tell me that some casinos are already using facial recognition software? Yes. Some casinos are and some stores are. And in Europe, there's a pilot project in hotels. And in casinos, it's used to identify VIP customers for special treatment. You want to know who they are, the instant they walk in the door. But it's also used to identify pick pockets, card counters, people they don't want in casinos. So this raises the question of, you know, is the facial recognition software that foolproof? I mean, what if it makes a mistake and identifies you as a pick pocket and you're escorted out of the building when you did nothing wrong? Yes, that's one of the concerns. And what recourse will we have if we are misidentified? There are all kinds of

possibilities for face recognition, some of which as a society we may not want. And this is not unusual, innovation often happens before we as a society decide what we want to do and input rules. First their cars, they run people over, then we get speed limits and traffic lights. Right. And it sounds like we're at the stage of beginning to look at some of the ways facial recognition software is being used. And there were some reports in the New York Times just recently that the NSA is also using facial recognition software, which stands to reason identifying people is a lot of what they do. But of course that raises questions, is face matching being used by the government for some kind of mass surveillance? Do we know? We know that different agencies are using face recognition for different purposes. My colleague James Ryzen, that's the article you're referring to, wrote about a document in the Snowden cache that indicated that the NSA was intercepting millions of images a day from social networks,

from emails, from other communications of which 55 ,000 were facial recognition quality. But that's a day. That's 55 ,000 faces a day. A day. And the idea, you know, James Ryzen reported is that the NSA is using it as another tool to identify and track terror suspects. Many of those people whose faces are being collected would likely be foreigners. But domestic agencies are also using it. The FBI is building a huge facial recognition database. And because Department of Motor Vehicles are doing face recognition, what's happening is some police departments across the country are working with the DMV. And when they get a suspect, an image of a suspect that it's unknown, they say to the DMVs, can you run this suspect through your system and see if you find a match? And that's also in charted territory because the DMV database, the majority of people are law -abiding citizens. You know, that's a new territory. Well, if it makes people safer, maybe that's not such a bad thing. I mean, you profiled one of the pioneers of

facial recognition software, this physicist, Joseph Attic, and he said to you, it has saved lives and solved crimes. Can he point to or can you point to live saved crimes solved thanks to facial recognition software? A lot of that, if it's true, is done by intelligence agencies. And so I can't give you specific examples, and he couldn't give me specific examples. But we do know with DMVs, they've prevented identity fraud. Because they've done face recognition on so many people, if somebody comes in and has your name and birth date and tries to get a license. With your information, the face recognition system is going to return a message to the clerk saying, this is a new face. This face doesn't match the face on this license, this is fraud. So face printing brings with it some clear benefits and some also kind of scary downsides. At the moment, there are no federal laws that govern face recognition. Have any been proposed? There's a division of the Commerce Department, the

National Telecommunications and Information Administration. And they are holding meetings in which consumer advocates, civil liberties experts and industry folks are sitting together. They are trying to work out a voluntary industry code of conduct for the commercial use of face recognition. But it will not be a law. The question is really fundamentally, what is a face print? Is it just like a photograph and everybody should be able to do it? Or because your extracting biometric information is that more like a DNA sequence or a fingerprint that's unique to you and needs to have special protections? So having explored all of this, I'm curious when you speculate where facial recognition software could go, what do you imagine? I imagine that our mobile devices will unlock by seeing our face, that your phone will be able to identify your moods, that it will be making recommendations to you

partly based on your face. We will be marketed to based on our facial expressions. I think that there's some people who will find that extremely convenient. And the question is for the people who don't want to participate, will you be allowed not to participate? Natasha Singer is a reporter for the New York Times Sunday Business Section. So if you want to protect your privacy when you're out on the street or online, what do you do? Photographer Adam Harvey has been working on one DIY solution. Sarah next caught up with him. My project is an exploration of how to use hair and makeup styling in order to block or shield face detection software so that you would appear very bold and avant -garde to another human, but you're invisible to machines. I've seen some pictures on your website of models using some of the techniques you came up with and they do, they look really fashion forward. Yeah, the inspiration behind the project came out of being concerned about what will happen with party photos in the

next decade. So if you're out having a good time at a party in 10 years time, those photos become valuable data points for visual mining algorithms. How can we prepare and protect ourselves against those future algorithms and do so in a way that also celebrates the creativity and the non -conforming rules of fashion. Fashion is always about staying one season ahead of trends, counter surveillance is about staying one season ahead of the algorithms. It's an interesting work around in order to beat it. Could you describe your first design, your first stab at trying to stump the algorithm? Oh wow, the first one I worked with a professional hair stylist and developed this design that was based on a tribal aesthetic. But what I discovered is that tribal makeup, it accentuates features of the face. I had to kind of chip away and slowly fuse a London boom box

aesthetic with the tribal makeup and maybe a little bit of cyberpunk. So what do those mean for those of us who are not in the world of fashion? Well, the London boom box scene is a very eccentric style with a lot of decorations hanging off your face, bold makeup styles. Tribal makeup, I'm referring to almost covering your face entirely in makeup with a lot of dots and streaks and natural colors. After that first tribal design flopped, it sounds like, what did you try next, what did it look like? Well, then I developed a software application so I could draw and see how the results were changing when I draw a thin line here and a thick line there. And really a lot of the thin lines just kind of blur into the shape of the face. So it required these broad streaks of makeup. Algorithms don't expect people to have really funky avant

-garde styling. So like in one of the pictures I saw on your website, there was a woman with a big four lock of blue hair coming out of her really short blonde shag over half of her face and then on the cheek that was exposed, there was a big black square kind of out of place. That look was developed the block wide array of face detection software including some industrial grade security software. And the reason that it works is because you have a symmetry, you're changing the elliptical shape of the forehead and blocking the nose bridge area. Did you stump the industrial grade software with that design? It stumped them all. I'm guessing that most of the facial recognition software that's out there is proprietary so you wouldn't be able to call it Facebook and ask them for specs on their algorithm say, how did you figure out how the programs work? Now there is a lot of development in the face detection and recognition industry billions of dollars. There is one program and it's an open source toolkit

for a computer vision. I was able to look at this code and reverse engineer it enough in order to understand the face that the algorithm looks for. For example, a face has symmetry and an algorithm will look for that symmetry. A face has a dark area underneath the eyes and you have a light area on the cheekbones. The next step is to do the opposite. So you take an area that's light and you make it dark and you take an area that's dark and you make it light. You're basically creating an anti -face. More advanced algorithms look for micro features. The small curvature around the bottom of your nose, the edge of your lip, the edge of your eye, sometimes even the texture of your skin. Well, if you set out originally, which I think is such an elegant proposal, to make a face that is still visible to humans but not to machines, it sounds like with these higher end algorithms to bend them off, you're kind of left with

nothing more than a mask. Well, I think there is a solution and a mask is the obvious answer. But it's not the one that I'm interested in. I'm interested in creating a new way of dressing ourselves, which is appropriate to the environment that we live in. People are collecting your data or exploiting your data. And you can modify your dress and prevent that. It's an aesthetic, a functional aesthetic, and displaying a disguise like this also shows that you're aware of your environment. Well, and we should point out that you're an artist. I do wonder how much of this you see as perhaps eventually a product line or if you are creating this work primarily to challenge us all to think about surveillance and privacy more. One goal is definitely to raise awareness, but I don't think that's enough.

I think the project can grow in the only way for it to grow would be to get more people involved, programmers involved, hair stylists involved, make -up artists involved, and get people to generate their own looks. If you were to offer a mask for somebody to wear, a computer vision profile could then figure out that mask. If everybody has their own look and their own style, becomes exponentially difficult for an algorithm to lock on to that style. We know that there are major organizations and companies working on better and better identification algorithms. It seems like a few artists, yourself included, and privacy advocates are working on countermeasures. I'm wondering whether there is actually a kind of privacy arms race happening right now. Yeah, there is a little bit, but I think it's very heavily weighted to our disadvantage. The technology that's being developed, it's amazingly sophisticated. I don't want to sound like a defeatist, but

after seeing some of the new defense sensors that are being developed, I think I had a little bit of a reality check that it's going to take a lot more than hair and makeup to be able to truly defend privacy. Sarah Nick's talking with Adam Harvey. You can see images from his CV dazzle project on our website, that's ttbook .org, and coming up, the story of a face transplant. All of the tissues, the skin, the muscles, the underlying fat, the nerves, the tongue, the teeth, everything has to fit just like a puzzle. I'm Anne Strange -Champs, and this is to the best of our knowledge from Wisconsin Public Radio and PRI, Public Radio International. One future that most of us face is seeing someone in

the mirror we don't quite recognize. When did we get so well not young? Here's Donna McNeil's story about her face. I have the kind of face that is best described as all American, a non -descript, nothing extraordinary, nothing that distinctive face. But certainly pleasant and even in a white face, white with freckles. There is a story in my family that I think I was three and I was outside playing in a photographer walked by the house and asked if he could take my picture. And I sat on my father's knee and that's the first sort of formal portrait that

arrived into the world based on somebody responding to my beauty. So that sort of started a family myth and then socially and in school, I was Valentine Queen or Winter weekend Queen or the sweetheart of fraternity. And even during college, I worked as a model and during that time I was also asked if I would participate in a beauty contest, it's a mysterious contest. And I did and I won that contest. I was kind of amused. I guess I felt I was a little bit lucky but I didn't think I was an exceptional beauty certainly never, not then, not now. What happened after this upbringing in the 50s was feminism in the 60s.

And I do remember I was at Syracuse University and I one day decided I'm not married wearing any makeup, I'm not putting on nice clothes, I'm just going out as I am. It was a very radical thing at that time, it may not seem so now but it was and for me to sort of wipe the eyeliner off was incredibly radical act. And I don't think I was alone in that and I walked across campus and nobody recognized me. I said to myself, I'm the same person, it was regulatory for me actually. And I soon enough learned that you better gain some substance because whatever people are affirming out in the world, that will go away at a certain time. The wrinkles didn't start to

appear or at least I didn't notice them until late 40s, early 50s. And the little ones that were there I rather liked. I was continually in the business of wanting to be taken seriously. And I thought, you know, bring on the gray hair and wrinkles because then I won't just be a wind up toy. So I was celebrating them initially. But then when the skin crepes and you know the wrinkles deep in, I take a good hard look every day, you bet I do. And I'm hyper critical about it. And you know like every woman in these days where you can get plastic surgery and you can change your face, I push it and pull it around and go, oh if only. And I lament a little bit and then I go, you know, quit it. Just quit it. It's okay. Your life edges on your face and you are who you've been throughout

the years. This society just doesn't like old things. You know, it's tough. It's interesting I've been encouraged a lot lately to return to modeling, especially since the marketing companies are realizing that, you know, having women my age with my wrinkles and my gray hair in a marketing campaign can work to their advantage. So far, I continually am asked to play the grandmother, which is fine with me. I'm happy to be a grandmother. But I'm waiting for that to turn a little bit for women who are in their 60s and 70s and 80s to be seen as singularly beautiful for exactly who they are and to be understood as people of value and integrity and substance and worth. Commentator Donna McNeil. So what if you don't get the

chance to age normally? What if by birth or by accident your face looks nothing like what one of those facial identification algorithms might recognize. There's an emerging option for people with severe facial disfigurements and that's facial transplant surgery. The first one took place in France in 2006 and since then about 30 people have undergone what is a grueling procedure. In 2012, a team at the University of Maryland Medical Center attempted the most extensive face transplant yet. Steve Paulson asked the lead surgeon, Dr. Eduardo Rodriguez, about meeting his patient, Richard Norris. A note for some of you, it's a little graphic. The first time he met was in 2005. I had received an inquiry from his mother to see if I would be willing to take on his case. She mentioned a little bit of the type of injury that he had sustained, the types of procedures and ask if I would be willing to take on his case. In the first time

I met him, he came in wearing a baseball cap as he traditionally did for a number of years. A surgical mask to cover his face. All you could see was essentially his eyes. His original injury was from a gunshot wound to the face, right? That's correct. A self -inflicted shotgun injury accidental shotgun injury in 1997. He was initially treated at one of the main institutions in North Carolina and then had a number of additional procedures in Virginia. That's when they reached the end of the road and they got to me. What did he look like once he took off his mask? He was missing his nose, did not have any upper and lower lips. The opening of his mouth aperture was very constricted, almost like the size of a belly button. He could barely speak, did not have any bony support to the midface and did not have any bony

support to the lower jaws. He had a very, very small face compared to what you would consider a normal appearing face. Obviously the face is absolutely crucial to our life and to how we interact with other people, how we are seen by other people. How did Richard's disfigurement affect his life up until then? I think most of these patients, they undergo an injury and they just want to get fixed up and get back to their normal lives as they saw it before their injury. But what Richard realized that life that he knew was pretty much gone as he attempted to try to go back to his routine what he found was that people were staring at him. And then he tried to conceal what it was that people were staring at. So he covered himself with a mask and even with the mask what he found was that more people were interested what was behind the mask. So then he went on to conceal himself from society as much as possible. And it became very difficult for him. He wore almost

like a ski mask that people wear in high altitude skiing to keep their face warm that goes over their nose and their mouth. And on a number of occasions he walked into convenience stores and at the convenience stores they felt that it was a heist. The police department would be called and he went through this a couple of times and he was incredibly embarrassed and that's why he really almost became a reckless avoided social interaction as much as possible. His life as he knew it had dramatically changed. And despite all the surgical procedures that he had performed he would look at pictures of him before the injury and he realized that he wasn't anywhere near that appearance that he had before his injury. So seven years later after that first meeting with him you and a team of doctors performed a marathon face transplant operation. What did you do? We spent a number of years working on him and obviously we weren't getting to the level of appearance and a function that he desired. And he had asked about facial transplantation for a while

and only and and something like what only 30 have been done around the world to this date. I mean this is this is not a common operation by any means. That is correct and when Richard was asking we were probably in the number of the teens. There really wasn't a tremendous amount of foundation and research. We didn't really understand how long these face transplant would last and it was a big challenge because until that point there had been a number of transplants that have occurred. The majority were soft tissue some inclusion of bony segments but it wasn't the majority. And we wanted to give him teeth. He didn't have teeth for 15 years. He needed a portion of his tongue. So all these complement of tissues the full face with the eyelids, the nose, the lips. Nothing of this magnitude had ever been performed. I mean this is astonishing what you're saying. You're saying you didn't just give him a new face. I mean you reconstructed the the infrastructure of the face. I mean this is astonishing. That's absolutely correct and that at times requires going back to the demolished state and building from

you. If this were to fail the patient would likely be much worse off than he was prior to the surgery. So this is high stake surgery. And so not only did you have your patient here I mean you also need a donor face as well. How does that work? We work with an organ procurement organization that is identifying patients that meet our specific criteria. And that criteria is defined by blood type. We try to look at specific markers within the blood that will match the recipient as close as possible to limit the amount of rejection. Keep in mind all patients will have rejection because these are individuals that are genetically mismatched that have totally different DNA. But we try to control that as much as possible by matching these patients as close to possible as we can. So that involves blood work. And on top of the blood work we try to look for patients that have similar characteristics. That means the color of their skin, the dimensions of their skeleton. We even try to match the color of their hair and

their eyebrows so that we can blend everything in. Does the face of the donor have to resemble the face of the person who is going to get the new face? It doesn't necessarily have to. But when you take a donor face and you put it on the recipient, it's a very unique blend of both individuals. So take me to the day of the surgery. I mean this surgery which lasted how long? How many hours? We worked for approximately 36 hours. 36 hours for this one surgery. For this one surgery. Wow. It's a lengthy procedure but the way it happens we had identified the donor. Richard got flown up from Virginia. We have an elite team of surgeons where we practice this operation on cadavers and we simulate this exact operation 15 times before we actually do this. So we know exactly what step to do. Everything is timed and rehearsed to the T. We have to remove everything very carefully. We have to identify the nerves that will move the face. The nerves that will provide sensation to the face to define the muscles.

Make precise skeletal cuts on the jaws of the face so that it fits the recipient face perfectly. Once we finish that donor dissection, at that point we've reached a point of essentially irreversibility. The point of no return where we actually remove the face of the recipient. The face that he in Richard's case had lived with for 15 years. And everything is prepared to accept this new face which is coming with all the tissues, the skin, the muscles, the underlying fat, the nerves, the tongue, the teeth. Everything has to fit just like a puzzle. What was the hardest part of the surgery? For me I think the biggest concern was if this face were to fail. That I knew that at this point had made Richard worse than he was before he entered that operating room. So when your face, the facial aligrafts doesn't take or it doesn't work.

Now we're looking at a pretty sizable wound in the face and although we can temporarily cover it and care for it, it's a difficult problem to be facing. What did you think your odds of success were going into this surgery? I always told Richard and I told my team and I go despite everything that we trained. The possibility of failure is limitless and I wanted to make sure that he and his family had complete clarity that this had never been performed in the history of medicine and that the risk was tremendous. So how did it go? Thank God, perfect. But I'll tell you. Once we connected the blood vessels and we see this face that was a white sitting in a cooler, we come pink. You could almost hear everyone in the operating room cheering, but we still have another 18

hours of work to do. So we connect all the blood vessels to face, pinks up, stabilize the skeleton, we fix the teeth, we fix the jaws, we put all the heart, we're all the screws, all the plates, we reconstruct the internal lining of his mouth, we suture the palate, put the tongue together, connect all the nerves and we get them out to the recovery room. Now we got to wait for him to wake up. Now the biggest challenge for me, when he asked me for a mirror, is that going to be what he expected? So on the second day when he was more awake, he wanted to look, he desperately wanted to look. And the moment he looked, I will tell you there was not a dry eye in that room. He just stared and he touched his lips because he hadn't had lips in 15 years. And he just looked at me and hugged me and fact me. It was a pretty emotional moment. Oh, I can imagine. Wow. But he couldn't smile. Right. I mean, it takes actually years to develop the ability to smile.

We expected recovery time on him to be fast and sure enough, we actually biopsy the tissue every week to make sure there are no signs of rejection. And very early on, I couldn't biopsy him without local anesthetic because it bothered him. He didn't shave because I didn't want him to shave to irritate his face. He goes, Dr. Rodriguez, I really want to shave because I hate when my hair grows long underneath my neck and in itches. And I went, my God, you know, he has sensation in his skin from the facial hair growth. And he could smell finally. He couldn't smell for all those years. He could not smell for 15 years. Wow. And he was walking outside, we would take him for a routine physical therapy walks outside of the hospital. And he's walking outside and they're mowing the lawn. And he just pauses and he's looking at this lawnmower and he's smelling fresh cut grass. And he goes, God, I haven't smelled that in so long. All these things that we take for granted, every discovery for him

was just an incredible milestone. And it was wonderful to watch all of that happen before us. And now when we fast forward the clock and you look at him now, I think for me, the greatest accomplishment, and I think for all of us, is to see this individual who came into our clinic in 2005, concealing his face, not wanting to talk, and that now he will walk into a room full of people and he will put his face right up against yours and talk to you as if he were just another average person, really a remarkable accomplishment to see what he's undergone through from a psychological standpoint, from a self -esteem and confidence standpoint is just amazing. Does he look much like he did before he had his accident? I mean, he's a lot older now, of course, but do you see a resemblance there? You know, I'm biased because I was a surgeon and did this, but I'm going to say he looks better when you... And I will say he

gave such a remarkable speech at a gift of life gala where we honored the family that not only donated his face, but donated all the other organs and all these family members were there. And I took a photograph of Richard and his block tuxedo with the block tie and his hair is combed back. He looks like a movie star, and obviously my disclosure is an unbiased, but he looks remarkable. So given your first hand observation of all of this, I mean, what do you conclude about the connection between personal appearance and identity? It's a great question. When these patients with severe disfigurement look in the mirror, they do not see normalcy, they do not see that individual who looked like before the injury. So all these issues, all these concerns, all these potential identity crisis that we thought would arise, haven't been the case. We've not seen this in 30

patients. What we've seen is that patients actually improve and feel that they're normal and they can interact. When he looks in the mirror and even his family tells him, it's Richard. It looks like Richard, an older version of Richard, and it's what they see. And that's exactly how Richard sees himself. Eduardo Rodriguez is chair of the Plastic Surgery Department at NYU's Langone Medical Center. You can hear an extended version of his conversation with Steve on our website at ttbook .org. Coming up, a dangerous idea. And with World Cup fevers sweeping the globe, we take a look at just what that sport means in Brazil. Soccer is one of the central areas in which Brazilians have worked out what they think the nation is and who, in fact, is part of it. I'm Ann Strangehamps. It's to the best of our knowledge from Wisconsin Public Radio and

PRI, Public Radio International. We're going to have a great time. Dangerous ideas.

Hi, I'm Dr. Michio Kaku, Quantum Physicist, author of The Future of the Mind. And one dangerous idea is if one day we have a disc called the Connect Home with all our memories, all our personality traits on it, we could, first of all, create a library of souls. You will go to the library and download the thinking of your ancestors. You'll be able to perhaps have a conversation with somebody like an Einstein, somebody like a Roosevelt, historical figures, and all their thoughts and emotions are encoded on discs created on a library, a library of souls, whereby you can talk to your ancestors. And for that matter, once you have their personality and memories on a disc, why not bring them back to life? Why not create an avatar? Why not create an exoskeleton, by which you will not only talk to Einstein, but have dinner with him? I came to this idea, the fact that one day

we'll have a library of souls by going to the neighborhood library and seeing these biographies and these audio tapes. But I said to myself, why stop with an audio tape? One day, decades from now, we'll have a Connect Home with all the memory circuits of a living person, and in that case, why not bring that person's memory back to life? And so that your family tree, instead of simply being an empty tree, will have discs whereby you can talk to your ancestors and interact with them and understand why they made certain decisions which affected your life. And for that matter, politicians may want to talk to a Winston Churchill. I wouldn't mind talking to an Albert Einstein to get insights, what were they thinking about when they did their historic deeds? And believe it or not, the technology to create this is coming very fast. Already, the Connect Home project is being funded to the tune of over a billion dollars by the European Union and by the United States. We can already map most of the circuitry of a mouse, and the mouse brain is about 1 % that of the human brain. However,

let's face it, it'll take many decades to come, but the ultimate goal behind this may be some form of immortality. A tape recording in some sense lives on even after you die, but it doesn't encode your awareness, your understanding, your memories of yourself. One day, we will have all of that encoded on a disc called the Connect Home, which is now the focal point of European and American brain science. In the same way that the human genome changed all of medicine, the Connect Home could change all of neuroscience, psychiatry, and psychology. In other words, it could change everything. That's physicist Michio Kaku with his dangerous idea. What's yours? Drop us a line on Facebook or Twitter, the handles TT Book 1. And now it's time for our minds. And like some of you, Steve Paulson's got World Cup Fever. With the protests across Brazil, which is hosting the games, he sat down to talk with Roger Kiddelsen about

his new book, The Country of Flour. Soccer is the national game. It is the one by which Brazilians measure their success in the world. Even the people who say on the street that they don't like soccer, they want the team to win. So I have to ask what I think is a very mysterious question. Why are Brazilians so good at soccer? Well, there's no one definitive answer the simplest way of looking at it. And possibly the truest is just that so many of them devote so much of their time and energy to it. It's an easy, cheap sport to start playing anyway. They play it everywhere. The real origin of Brazilian skills. Just kids playing on bumpy sand lots in the middle of cities or out in the countryside. So there's kind of a myth about soccer in Brazil. It's sort of like, you know, this is what the kids in the favelas play in bare feet and a select few become soccer heroes in their country. Absolutely, and it's a powerful myth. And it's why I wanted to write this book as to examine myths

like that. As I studied the careers of 14 major stars, I had a lot of trouble because there's some repetition in their lives. A lot of them do, in fact, come from favelas. So there is some truth to it, but it is also very much a myth created in the 1930s by journalists and scholars. Probably the most famous of them was a sociologist named Gilberto Ferrelli, who wrote just a newspaper article called Milato Football in 1938. And basically his argument was that Brazilians had a very unique way of playing. And it came from the racial mixture, and particularly from the African contribution to the culture. But this is fascinating, though. I mean, you're saying that the racial history of Brazil is tied in with the soccer history. Absolutely. Soccer is one of the central areas in which Brazilians have

worked out what they think the nation is, and who, in fact, is part of it. Brazil is essentially a mixed race nation. And people of African descent gave this sort of special rhythm, or ginga, that provided a Dionysian element to Brazilian soccer, and to Brazilian music, and dance, and the arts more broadly, and, you know, to Brazilian culture. Well, and soccer in Brazil is often referred to as the beautiful game. I mean, there's a certain style that Brazilians are supposed to play with. I mean, there's flair, there's athleticism, there's incredible skill with footwork, with dribbling, and all of that. I mean, it's not sort of boring, plotting soccer. Does that tie into this racial myth that you've been talking about? That is the racial myth. In fact, that's the way that it's incarnate on the fields. Those who know Brazil will confess that Brazilians don't tend to play that way that much anymore, and they haven't really

since the 1980s. There was a big debate in the 1970s and 80s about how Brazil should play. One was called fuchibalachi, or art soccer, and the other one was called fuchibalforsa, or strength soccer. And obviously, the art is that style, truly beautiful to watch. On the other hand, though, in the 70s and 80s, there were those who wanted to modernize the game, the Brazilian game, based on organization, discipline, and physical strength. I think of the Germans playing soccer, exactly. And that debate raged for those decades. After that, though, things reached a kind of synthesis. And since then, Brazilians tend to play with a great organization, but they have a few players who they hope will bring that old -time organic, authentic Brazilian flair to the game. A real star, someone who's born with this

ability to improvise, and again, bring all those, essentially, half of Brazilian traits into his game. To skip ahead into this year's World Cup, of course, Brazil is hosting. I'm assuming there is a lot of stake for Brazil as to how this World Cup goes. There's a lot of stake in any number of ways. Brazil's only hosted the World Cup one other time in 1950. Brazil were the heavy favorites. And yet they lost to their neighbors, Uruguay, in the finals, 2 -1. And several spectators were said to have died of heart attacks on the spot. And it was really a loss that continues to haunt Brazil. But in 2014, what's at stake is not just what happens on the field, but really what happens around the fields. But are they really objecting to Brazil hosting the World Cup? I mean, this is a soccer mad nation. It is a soccer mad nation, and

two things are simultaneously true. The Brazilians are tremendously excited to have the World Cup in their country. And they are furious with the way that it's been done in a highly anti -democratic way. And it really has seemed that it's not been the Brazilian people, but it's been FIFA, the international governing board of soccer, incahuts with Brazilian politicians and multinational corporations, who've been deciding how $15 billion has been spent. And they've spent all this money to bring things up to FIFA standards. And they've changed several laws, some of which seem to be breaks with Brazilian constitution, as concessions to FIFA's demands. FIFA demands that the so -called zones of exclusion be set up around each of the stadiums. Meaning that they're going to try to keep out certain people? They want to have control over all business, and really, over law and order within this circle around

each stadium. So if you get 1 .4 miles away from a stadium, you're going to basically be leaving Brazil and entering some strange kind of FIFA land. And in the construction of these many stadiums, FIFA has demanded certain kinds of plans that have led the government to remove entire communities, mostly poor communities. So you're saying that soccer remains highly political, even in today's world, in Brazil? Absolutely. And having not only the 2014 World Cup coming, but then two years later, the Summer Olympics, this has provided a huge stage for anyone with complaints, but it's also given them new reasons to complain. Okay, well, to get back to the game itself, you are a scholar of Brazil. You're also an American living in the U .S. Who are you rooting for in this World Cup? I always root for Brazil. I do want the U .S. to do well, and if they wanted, I would be shocked.

But the teams come a long way, and I think things are going in a very good, healthy direction. We're not quite a world power yet. Any guesses as to what will happen? I think Brazil is a slight favorite, and the Argentines do look frighteningly good, and do the Germans. Italians don't look good, but they never look good, and it's precisely when they don't look good that they tend to do well in the World Cup. I'm hoping that some underdogs will come out and have a good tournament, just shake things up a little bit. If one of those teams is the U .S., that's all to the best. Roger Kiddelsen's book is called The Country of Football. To the best of our knowledge comes to you from Wisconsin Public Radio, Zarynx produced this hour, with help from Raymond Tungacar, Doug Gordon, and Charles Monroe Cain. Our theme music comes from Steve Mullin, from Walk West Music. Carole Owen is our

technical director. Steve Falson is our executive producer and resident soccer fan, and I'm Ann Strangehamps. Thanks for listening. Thank you very much.