Can You Pass This Financial Quiz?

Plus, is a Brain Computer Interface in your future?

Ric Edelman: It's Friday, January 19th. Coming up on today's show Brain to Computer Interfaces and how this technology is going to help us cure everything from depression to Parkinson's. Yesterday, I told you of a new working paper by professors at the American College of Financial Services and William Paterson University that says accredited investors, the wealthiest, most experienced investors in the country are at big risk because of cognitive decline. If you missed the show, we've got the link to it in the show notes for you.

How's your current level of financial knowledge? Maybe you knew a lot before, but if you're suffering from cognitive decline, you don't know a lot anymore. And one of the things the study found is that accredited investors who are in decline don't know that they're in decline.

So let's take a financial literacy quiz. Let's see how you do. I've got 15 questions for you. Add up your results as we go along. I will give you the answers as we go.

Question 1. Net worth is equal to:

1. Total assets
2. Total assets plus liabilities or
3. Total assets minus liabilities.

The correct answer is C; total assets minus liabilities.

Question 2. Which of these is likely to pay the highest interest rate?

1. A savings account
2. A 6-month CD or
3. A 3-year CD.

The correct answer is C; three-year CD. 

Question 3. Savings accounts and money market accounts are most appropriate for:

1. Long- term investments like retirement
2. Emergency funds and short-term goals
3. Earning a high rate of return.

The correct answer is B; emergency funds and short-term goals.

Question 4. On which type of loan is interest never tax-deductible?

1. Home equity loan
2. An adjustable-rate mortgage
3. Personal vehicle loan

The correct answer is C; a personal vehicle loan.

Question 5.  Which type of mortgage lets you qualify for the highest loan?

1. A fixed-rate loan
2. An adjustable-rate loan
3. A reverse mortgage

The correct answer is B; adjustable rate.

Question 6. The benefit of diversification is that it:

1. Reduces risk
2. Increases return
3. C reduces tax liability

The correct answer is A; reduces risk.

Question 7. Which investment should a young investor buy if they're willing to take moderate risk to get above average growth?

1. Treasury bills
2. Money market funds
3. Balanced funds

The correct answer is C; balanced funds.

Question 8. The main advantage of a 401(k) plan is that it:

1. Provides high return with low risk
2. Has tax benefits
3. Provides a well-diversified mix of investments

The correct answer is B; has tax benefits. 

Question 9. When you buy an insurance policy that has a higher deductible, the premiums will be

1. Higher
2. Lower
3. The same.

The correct answer is B; lower.

Question 10. For a young person, which insurance policy provides the most coverage at the lowest cost? Is it:

1. Term life
2. Whole life
3. Universal life

The correct answer is A; term life.

Question 11. Suppose you have $100 in a savings account, and the interest rate is 2% per year. After five years, how much will you have in the account?

1. Exactly $102
2. More than $102
3. Less than $102.

The correct answer is B; more than $102.

Question 12. Imagine that you have a savings account earning 1% per year, and inflation is 2% per year. After one year, will you be able to buy:

1. More than today
2. Exactly the same as today
3. Less than today?

The correct answer is C; less than today.

Question 13. This is true /false. Buying a single company stock is safer than a stock mutual fund. True or false?

The correct answer is false. A stock mutual fund is safer than a company stock.

Question 14. Which asset has paid the highest returns over every 20-year period in the last 100 years?

1. Savings accounts
2. Bonds
3. Stocks?

The correct answer is C; stocks. 

And our final question.

Question 15. Another true or false question. If interest rates fall, bond prices rise. True or false?

The correct answer is true. When interest rates go down, bond prices go up.

So how did you do? There are 15 questions here. My attitude is if you didn't score 90% or better, you should not be managing your own money.

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Exclusive Interview: Sumner Norman, CEO of Forest Neurotech

Ric Edelman: You know, the future is just so exciting. And let's face it, can be a little bit intimidating, a little bit scary. And one of the fields that I think accomplishes all of those above adjectives is neurotechnology. This is the science of monitoring and treating neurological and psychological conditions, psychiatric conditions. And we're talking about building devices that either read from the brain or send information to the brain, and to help us understand what all that means and how real is this? How much of it is science versus science fiction? I'm very happy to bring on to the program. Sumner Norman, he's a PhD in the CEO of Forest Neurotech. Sumner, great to have you with us here today. 

Sumner Norman: Thank you so much for having me. Excited to talk about it. 

Ric Edelman: So let's just explain to everybody the concept of what you and others in your field refer to as BCIs, brain to computer interfaces. What on earth is that? Tell us. 

Sumner Norman: Well, it can sound really intimidating at first, but actually, it's a fairly simple concept. At its core. Your brain is active all the time, whether you're sleeping or going about your day interacting with other people. And as it does that the neurons that fire in your brain produce small chemical and electrical signals. It's possible to detect those signals using neurotechnology, different forms of hardware, and then read them out to a computer. Now we can talk about the specifics of how that gets done. There are many ways in which you can do that, but what the core of a brain computer interface is, is to interpret those signals from the brain and then use them to control an external device or provide feedback directly to the brain. And so you can imagine people with paralysis that are unable to move now, able to take that information directly from their brain, control a robotic arm or a cursor on a screen that's a brain computer interface. 

Ric Edelman: What exactly is it doing then? 

Sumner Norman: It's an interface. So very much like any other interface that we all use every day, a keyboard or a mouse, you could say on some level a keyboard is detecting your thoughts, but that's only through your willful volition of your ability to move your fingers, to strike the keys at the right time and place, and to get those thoughts into a computer system. A brain computer interface (BCI) is very similar. It still requires a great deal of volition. It also requires a great deal of training, perhaps even more so than a standard keyboard these days, although we would like to get that down to be a much more intuitive and natural interface in the long run. 

Ric Edelman: So it takes a while for someone who's paralyzed to be able to get that robotic arm to move in the given direction that they want. 

Sumner Norman: Yeah, it depends on the specifics of just how much control you want. The nice thing is that the learning curve can be fairly forgiving, so you can give more control to the robotic arm. Perhaps it already has a preplanned trajectory, and all you need from the participant is the willful intention to go pick up the glass of water, or whatever their goal might be. And that's a much more simple and naturalistic way of interacting with the BCI. And as you mentioned, if you really want to train up, then you could actually start to do fine, dexterous movement that's being decoded in real time. That requires a great deal more practice and training, both on the participant side, but also on the side of the BCI. The BCI is also learning more about the brain as you use the device and as you train it. 

Ric Edelman: Now you've described examples of the brain sending information to a device. What about the device sending information to the brain. 

Sumner Norman: Yeah. So this is actually a much longer history in the field to actually put information into the brain. Deep brain stimulators have been around for decades. And our ability to stimulate the brain goes well back into the 1940s and 1950s and perhaps even further back than that in animal models. But in those cases, it's rather crude. And what we're able to do today, I kind of liken it unto smacking the side of a TV and hoping that it works a little better when it gets fuzzy. It's we can reset the circuits. We can kind of knock the brain out of any sort of maladaptive state that we think is associated with that person's particular neurological condition, the ability to do very fine control, to write in memories or specific thoughts or actions. That's still quite science fiction. 

Ric Edelman: So give me those two sets of examples then. Practical application of the technology in the two different directions, from the brain to the device and then backward from the device to the brain. 

Sumner Norman: Yeah, from the brain to the device. These days, the most promising applications are in neuroprosthetics of the motor system and the visual system, and then kind of tangential offshoots from there. So I'll get to that in a second. So for people, again, with paralysis, people with late-stage forms of ALS or spinal cord injury, their ability to move is really breaking down outside of the brain. So this could be happening at the first spinal cord injury patient at the neck level, for example, may not be able to move anymore, but their intention, their willful intention to move, and the neural representation of that in the brain is still right there. If you can simply detect that intention at the brain level and effectively skip over the injury with your BCI to either reanimate the limb with electrical stimulation, or to use an exoskeleton robot or a cursor on a screen if they just want to type to a loved one. Things like that. That is the most advanced form of BCI these days. So we call that a motor neuroprosthetic. This is already being commercialized. So this has been developed in the academic space since the 90s. And I believe the first implantation in humans was in the early 2000. And now we're seeing groups like Neuralink, which is Elon Musk's company, is creating a commercial form of BCI, developing a very advanced technology format. But ultimately, it's this same application we've been doing for decades, giving people that can't move that ability back in at some level. The other area that's quite interesting is vision. 

So the ability to stimulate the visual areas of the brain, you can create these, what we call phosphenes. They look like little flashes of light as a percept. So the person that might be blind, the visual part of their brain is still active and functioning just fine. Perhaps if you can stimulate the brain in the right patterns and places, you can actually recreate some simulation of vision. It's still rather crude again compared to what an able-bodied person would see, but that is a really exciting area and one that, again, is under commercialization efforts. Now, Neuralink isn't the only one doing this. Groups like Paradromics out of Austin, Texas and Blackrock Neurotech out of Salt Lake City are also doing this. There are other formats that you don't have to go deep into the brain. Groups like Precision Neuroscience are setting electrodes right on top of the brain. So it's a little less invasive, easier to put in, and enables really exciting applications. One that I think that's really exciting coming down the road is speech. So the ability for people who have lost their ability to speak due to a neurological injury or disease, to then actually literally create that speech in their head and willfully try to speak. But when that's blocked again at the body level, the brain level, we can read that out and recreate it. And there are some really fascinating. I can't tell you how many times I've seen the demonstration. It's still kind of puts me in awe that a person can effectively speak directly through a speaker and their brain. 

Ric Edelman: And are you referring to people who are paralyzed or people a step further who are comatose?

Sumner Norman: So both. In fact, I don't know that I'd say comatose, but I would say locked in patients. So in late stages of ALS, you can actually get to a point where you effectively cannot communicate with any form of your body. Remember, speech is a form of motor system in the brain. I'm moving my tongue and my larynx, and my lungs are pumping, and all of this has to happen in a beautiful kind of concert, a very carefully orchestrated motor activity. When you lose that ability due to a breakdown of the nervous system like ALS, your ability to speak is lost, but your ability to. And you and your desire to share your thoughts with others isn't. And so that's where BCI can come in. 

Ric Edelman: You mentioned the word invasive a couple of times. What is the physical connection of this? Are we talking about brain implants requiring surgery or are we talking about electrodes stuck on your scalp. 

Sumner Norman: Yeah, I'm mostly talking about invasive forms because those are the kind of highest fidelity, highest performance. That's not to say that there aren't any noninvasive forms of BCI, but we've seen a rich history, decades long, of invasive electrodes implanted into people's brains. In fact, there are hundreds of thousands of people implanted now with deep brain stimulators. Those are primarily used to treat the tremor that's associated with Parkinson's disease or essential tremor. And that's been a very successful application of a neurotechnology. And that one is particularly invasive. It's a very long electrode that goes all the way down into the middle of the brain and requires usually two holes in the skull to put one in from either side. So extremely invasive and yet very successful for people who that's their last resort. 

Ric Edelman: Are you assuming that these invasive technologies will become less and less invasive? 

Sumner Norman: That is the hope, yes. So right now, the most invasive forms of technologies are the highest performing technologies. But there are many, many efforts to make them less and less invasive. If you can, for example, fit in electrodes through the bloodstream, put them in a catheter. A group called Synchron out of Australia and New York is doing this with some success. They're in clinical trials now. That's another form of BCI where you don't need to actually open the skull at all. It's limited in its performance compared to some of these more invasive techniques. And that's where some other newer technologies come in. My group at Forest Neurotech were developing ultrasound-based implants, so these are much less invasive than putting electrodes deep into the brain. In fact, this would sit right inside of the skull and then allow you a very large field of view. So you could actually see huge portions of the brain with a single implant rather than electrodes, which you're only seeing tiny, tiny portions and usually a single neuron at a time. 

Ric Edelman: Well, let's expand on this theme because it is your work in the area of ultrasound that initially piqued my curiosity and why I wanted to chat with you today, because I've been doing quite a bit of work with focused ultrasound and the focused ultrasound foundation, and I've had those folks here on the podcast a couple of times. And that area of research is really fascinating to me, and I haven't been aware of the depth of work that is combining these two areas of neurotechnology with focused ultrasound. So let's elaborate on that. Begin by telling us a little bit more about forest Neurotech, the company you are the founder and CEO of your PhD is from Caltech, I believe. 

Sumner Norman: I was in my post-doc at Caltech for about six years developing this technology. Yes. 

Ric Edelman: And so talk about Forest Neurotech and what it does, what your goals are with that company.

Sumner Norman: So we aim to be an innovative neurotechnology company. We are developing a minimally invasive ultrasound based whole brain computer interface. And that whole brain is really what differentiates us from the existing technologies that are out there. 

Ric Edelman: And so now let's help people understand this ultrasound connection, because I think we're all familiar with ultrasounds. Most of us have had one at one point or another. You lay on a table, and they put a device on your belly, and you get sound waves sent in, and it's like radar kicks back the images so that the doctor can see what's going on. It's painless, it's noninvasive, and the results are instantaneous because you're just looking at the images on a computer screen. So talk about how ultrasound fits in with the work you're doing in neuroscience. 

Sumner Norman: So ultrasound really has been undergoing a change. It's almost a victim of its own success. It has, like you mentioned, a 50-year long history of being a beautiful point of care technique where a doctor can non-invasively look inside the body and see what's happening in real time. That's a phenomenally successful technique. However, that means that there has been less innovation over time. But with the advent of faster computing, better ultrasound physics, and sequences, we are starting to realize that ultrasound holds a lot more potential than maybe many had realized. And so, over the past decade or so, we've seen efforts to use it for new modalities. And in one in particular, in 2011, our collaborators out of a group in Paris in Keltner's group actually used ultrasound by pulsing it very, very quickly and then recording that those backscattered echoes, you can start to differentiate what echoes actually are coming from the movement of red blood cells versus the slower movement of tissue. And if you can differentiate that filter it out, you can actually detect blood flow. Why do we care about blood flow? Well, it turns out that as neurons in your brain are active, they use metabolic resources like oxygen, and that oxygen has to come from somewhere. 

It's resupplied via the bloodstream. And so when neurons are active, you see a change in blood flow. This is exactly how functional MRI works. They're looking at oxygenated versus deoxygenated blood flow. And the way that oxygen interacts with magnetics allows them to see that in our case, we can see the change in these scattering ultrasound waves as blood flow changes in the brain. And that allows us to detect down to incredibly precise spatial resolutions what's happening down to about 100 microns in some of the studies we were running at Caltech. Now that's about the width of a human hair, and about 800 times the volumetric resolution of what you get with MRI. So being able to see brain activity down to that kind of precision means you can start to pick out all sorts of different things that are going on in the brain with a lot of sensitivity, and simultaneously across multiple brain areas all at once, thanks to that wide field of view that we get. 

Ric Edelman: And so what do you think are going to be the benefits of being able to scan the entire brain with the technology you're building? 

Sumner Norman: Yeah, that is the big question and that is one we aim to find out. So we have some sense of what it's going to be good at. But let me share an anecdote of why I think this is so important. So when you implant electrodes, which we've done multiple times at Caltech, and other groups have done this as well, you have these incredible demonstrations of paralyzed people who are able to interact with robotic arms and things like this. And it's really fascinating. And yet, despite this technology having existed for decades, we have not been able to treat the most impactful neurological dysfunction and disease in our society so far. So these are things like depression, anxiety, neuropathic pain, OCD, bipolar disorder. All of these neuropsychiatric and cognitive conditions have a few things in common. The circuits and systems that underlie them in the brain are spread very widely. They're very unlike the motor system, which is very small and localized. These are kind of spread all over the brain. They also change very slowly over long periods of time. A depression state can evolve over months and years, unlike motor, which is happening moment to moment, and they change between people. So this really highlights the need for an interface, a fundamental change in the way that we interface with the brain, that allows us to see all of those circuits and systems and do that in a way that's stable over a long period of time. We have never seen what these psychiatric and cognitive disorders, while a person goes about their daily lives, we've only seen a snapshot and a scanner or with an electrode in a hospital. This will allow us to actually view these as the person goes about their life. And you see these changes through time. And that's why we've actually structured our organization as a focused research organization. So we're a nonprofit group where we actually will develop the technology. And we're working in collaboration with a host of researchers and clinicians that are going to be testing this across a wide range of indications. And this will allow us to learn a great deal about these things that so far have been so difficult to study. 

Ric Edelman: I'm a little bit relieved to hear that you say it's on a nonprofit level. And the reason I say that, not because I'm opposed to a for profit approach, but what you're describing strikes me as incredibly academic in nature, which of course, by definition doesn't have a profit motive. So talk about why you're doing this as a nonprofit as opposed to doing it in academia itself. Why are you not a professor at Caltech? 

Sumner Norman: Well, we certainly did some of this work in academia, so I don't want to shortcut that. Without the work at Caltech, I don't think any of this ever would have come forward or it would have taken longer, or, you know, maybe another group would have done it, but that was pivotal. However, you also run into the limitations fairly quickly again. Ultrasound has this long history of being a point of care system that was developed with a very particular end goal in mind, to be used kind of anywhere in the body on any particular person, any different organ. So it's very robust, but it's also requires these big, chunky probes that are connected to a giant scanner and a big screen, and you need an ultrasound technologist to read it. And that is not what we're doing. We're viewing the same part of the brain again and again and again and again. We're not changing. We're not moving. We're looking for this very particular signal that uses a very different type of ultrasound sequence than what you would use in the hospital. And so we ran into this bottleneck of the technology itself could take us so far in the scientific discovery, but the ability to shrink that entire scanner down into something the size of a coin that could fit inside of the head. 

So we can look at these brain states over long period of time in humans. That's a massive engineering challenge. So this starts to look a little bit like the Human Genome Project, for example. Very focused goal and map the human genome. For us, it's measure the whole human brain with a single piece of technology. It's very engineering intensive. So it's not, you know, a trainee, a PhD trainee is not going to create massive silicon manufacturing supply chain to, to create this one device. So it's very engineering heavy. It's expensive, which means that it's kind of outside of the scope that a traditional NIH grant might be able to do. A group called Convergent Research, that we worked with, has recognized this gap where you have commercializable technologies, a clear path towards commercialization and revenue. And then you have academic technologies which have clear benefit for humanity. And then this chasm in between, where you need a huge amount of engineering resources to unlock a scientific bottleneck that once you do it, you will unlock potentially many, many companies or an entire field of research. And that much like the Human Genome Project did that for genome sequencing, which we now see everywhere. We would like to do that for measuring and stimulating the human brain. 

Ric Edelman: And so talk about your funding. 

Sumner Norman: So we unfortunately have not announced that just yet. What I can say is that typical focused research organizations, which is again, the structure that we are, have been funded between 30 and 70 million for anywhere from a 4 to 6-year roadmap. And I think that we fit well within the bounds of a typical focused research. 

Ric Edelman: Organization and the kinds of funders that you're getting money from, these I'm assuming, are not venture capitalists because you're a nonprofit. There's no return on their investment. So is it coming from grants from governments or nonprofits or foundations or academics, that type of resource? 

Sumner Norman: So far, the majority of funding that's come from philanthropic donations. So these are groups that are interested in the advancement of science and technology. 

Ric Edelman: Wealthy people looking to support your work? 

Sumner Norman: Yes, for the most part. That being said, there has been some foundation support. I believe there's been some interest in government support as well. 

Ric Edelman: We're talking with Sumner Norman. He is a PhD and the CEO of Forest Neurotech, a nonprofit organization building brain computer interfaces. Give us your vision of the future. What is it you're hoping your technological innovation will lead to, and when do you think that might become reality? 

Sumner Norman: Well, there are something like 21 million people in the US alone that live with some treatment resistant, meaning they failed all of the drugs available to them form of neuropsychiatric or cognitive disorder. The big ones are depression and neuropathic pain. My vision of a future in the short term is that neurotechnology can address that gap. My vision of technology in the long term is that we actually see a future in which we don't talk about people being treatment resistant to drugs, but instead being treatment resistant to the neurotechnology itself, and only then resort having to resort to bathing the entire central nervous system in small molecules. 

Ric Edelman: And define short term versus long term.

Sumner Norman: Within the period of our focus research organization, which is roughly five years, we aim to have many of the first in human results that show these different biomarkers for different neuropsychiatric and cognitive disorders. First, evidence of neurostimulation being able to perturb those brain states and ideally, push them towards more adaptive and healthy brain states, and a version of the device that is immediately commercializable. So in the future, another company can pick up this technology, spin it off, commercialize it, support it, manufacture it, get it to people, patients who actually need that help. So that's on that kind of five-year time scale. On the ten-year time scale, I would imagine this being fully commercialized, if not some version of exactly our technique, something very similar like it. We're not the only ones working in this space, but I do believe that within that ten-year time span, we will see neurotechnologies addressing a major, major unmet need in the neuropsychiatric and cognitive space. 

Ric Edelman: Well, now you know why you're listening to The Truth About Your Future, because that's what we're talking about. And the future is coming a lot faster than I think most people realize. If you're talking about five- and ten-year timelines, that's pretty exciting. If you want to learn more about the work that Sumner is doing at Forest Neurotech, we've got a link to his website in the show notes, as well as an opportunity for you to be able to reach out to him if you've got any further questions. And if you're one of those wealthy philanthropists, I'm sure Sumner would love to hear from you as well. Sumner, thank you so much for joining us on the podcast today. Best wishes with your continued success with your research. 

Sumner Norman: Thank you so much, Ric. It was a pleasure being here. 

Ric Edelman: I'm Ric Edelman. See you next week. 

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