Now, I don't know whether you know

but this is a world first -- the TED conferences

go all over the world, all different countries --

this is the very very first time --

normally you take a place name,

normally you take a university name --

this is the very first time a TED

has ever been named after a person

and -- (Laughter) (Applause)

I just wanted to say, it's a fantastic honour.

We mentioned before Sheldon, and I just want to say

there's never yet been a TEDxCooper

so, Sheldon Cooper, eat your heart out.

What we're gonna be looking at today --

yeah, plugging your brains into a network,

what's the possibility

both from a healthcare point of view

and in terms of -- maybe some of you feel quite bored

being a human, quite limited in what you can do

and particularly your brain doesn't perform how it should,

so, what are the possibilities of an upgrade.

We should start tho, on the back of healthcare

but as we gonna see it's a lot more than that

-- implants and things like that.

Class II sounds quite technical.

In fact, what the Class II implants is

for those of you that don't know --

This is a younger version of me,

way back, the last millenium

and my G. P. so this is was all done in the National Health.

And what I'm having implanted is this little device

-- not the thing on the left hand side.

(Laughter)

This is this quaint currency we still have.

The thing on the right hand side --

a radiofrequency identification device.

I had this implanted,

because various people, Peter Cochrane, who's a head

of B. T. research labs was saying,

"In the future we are not gonna need passports,

we are not gonna need credit cards --

What we will have is a little implant under the skin."

But nobody had actually tried it until this particular experiment.

Now what it did for me was, in my doorways --

I'm from Reading University.

Is there anybody else here from Reading?

Audience: Yeah!

Kevin Warwick: Oh, come on! (Laughter)

Anybody else here from Reading?

(Clamor) Yay, there we go!

It needed a bit of warming up there, I think.

In my building, Cybernetic building at Reading,

we've got coils of wire in the door frames.

and if you have an implant of this type

and you walk through the door frames

then current is induced in the [implant],

transmits a singal back to the coils, which are linked

to the computer. And what it did for me was, as I walked

down the corridor, the lights came on, just for me,

walking to my laboratory, the door opened

-- I mean, it's really cool stuff.

Coming in the doors, says, "Hello, Professor Warwick."

All fantastic stuff.

And various people said, "Uh, who's ever gonna want

to have anything like that?" No!

Is anybody here got a cat or a dog

with a chip implanted?

It's all right, you can speak!

Is anybody out there?

You can rest assured, that this was fully tested

on humans before your animal -- (Laughter)

So no need to worry at all.

There's actually a night club -- I know

in the academic world we can't afford those things --

but, there's a night club in Barcelona,

there's another one in Rotterdam,

called the Baja Beach club, and if you go there

they actually send you around the corner

and you can get one of these things --

a smaller version, don't worry it's not that big --

implant it, and then when you go in the night club

you don't have to pay for your drinks directly.

It's automatically charged to your implant.

I'm serious! Try it, try it.

Good advert for the Baja Beach club.

That's implant number 1.

I'm going to flick on to "Regulation"

because some of you may think this isn't going anywhere.

Well, in the United States, they have,

for people with diabetes and with epilepsy,

they can have this thing implanted.

And now, under Barack Obama, the healthcare rules

that you have to have it regulated.

Even with the possibility that you may have to have

one implanted. We'll see where that goes.

But I'm going to take you, right up to date,

to what some of my students are doing.

This is the sort of implant you could try yourself.

This is Jawish, he's one of my students.

I've got three students now, that have had magnets

implanted in their fingertips

for part of their degree courses that they are doing, my students.

(Laughter)

We have to get ethical approval from the university

to do this sort of thing.

And you may notice -- I'm supposed to stay

on this red carpet but I'm going to zip up

for a moment, 'cos you may notice here

the guy who's doing the implant

has tatoos on his arm. That's because he is

a tatoo artist, that's what he does.

And he goes by the name -- this is serious

he goes by the name of "Dr. Evil".

(Laughter)

Now, we have to fill in a form for the university

(Laughter)

that says who is carrying out the medical procedure.

Yeah. I mean, they can be really awkward over it, I have to say.

This is an X-ray of Jawish's fingertips.

You can see the magnets implanted.

Now what we are doing -- now, on the baseball cap

he's got ultrasonic sensors and the output

from those sensors is fed down

to a little coil of wire around the magnet.

And what happens, as an object comes closer,

the current in the coil is changed,

so the magnet vibrates more

the closer an object is, and less

as the object is further away.

So essentially Jawish can feel

how far objects are away. So it's sensory substitution.

Now, Ian Harrison, one of my PhD students with me now,

he's linked up to an infrared sensor.

So he has magnets implanted.

Now, infrarred is like a heat signal.

So what he can do is remotely feel how hot objects are.

So if you can get the audience, you can point,

"Ah, you are hotter than you, you are hotter --"

(Laughter)

I mean, in a temperature sense.

Don't sort of stalk me or something like that, because I'm --

particularly the guys here, I really didn't mean it.

(Laughter)

But, you see, the military aplication for this is immediate.

If you are a soldier and you are about

to go into a room, and you don't know whether

there's anybody there or not,

you can simply push your finger around the corner

and scan, "Ah! There's somebody over there!"

You know exactly where they are, but also

how hot they are, for what use that is.

(Laughter)

This is Ashley and he's doing some work

-- a guy, Paul Bach-y-Rita, originally did this

-- and it's actually sending little stimulating pulses

into his tongue, to communicate in a new way.

This is interesting, because people have never tried

this before. If you actually tried it,

very quickly you'd be able to pick up

and pick up letters and signs --

So it's a new way of communicating.

But the interesting thing is, if he sends

a particular -- let's say, a triangle --

a particular shape, then the person

even if they haven't tried it before,

will say, "Yes, that's a triangle."

But if we ask them

to draw the triangle, then some people will draw it

the right way up, some people draw it upside down

and sideways, all sorts of different dimensions to it.

We are not sure why. It is the routing

from the tongue up to the brain is very very rapid

and people can learn to use it to communicate very quickly.

But there seems to be a particular way that it's wired

that we have a lot to learn about.

So it's one of those things with the research,

you end with more questions than you started with.

Now, some of you -- this is where

if you want to go ahead with this,

it could be dangerous for you now, but it might be something

you want to do when you are technically dead.

So, it's the sort of thing to put, not before, but as I die,

could I try this, please.

And that is, when you think of a robot,

you think of either a computer-controlled device,

or perhaps something that's remote-controlled.

Well, what we are developing are robots with their own brains.

And, what we do -- you see, on the right hand side

of the picture here, is the physical robot.

I mean, typically, because it is a laboratory

and there we use a little robot on wheels.

It has ultrasonic sensors.

just like we saw on the baseball cap.

But the brain of the robot is not a computer.

The thing that says MEA is Multi-Electrode Array

that's all right, you don't have to learn this.

I'm not gonna test you on it later on.

What does it say? (Laughter)

About two people. Yes. All right.

What is Multi-Electrode Array?

What it actually is, is a little dish

on the bottom of which are electrodes.

What we do is take brain cells

from rat embryos, separate them, and then

squeeze them into this little dish, and grow them.

We have to feed them using minerals and nutrients

-- a little pink liquid that is amazingly expensive

in comparison with Lucozade -- oh, advertising again

I shouldn't say it. But it does roughly the same stuff.

And they are kept in an incubator, at 37ºC

That's where they grow. And then we link them up

to a robot body. So the physical body of the robot

is a technological body, but the brain

is a biological brain that's growing.

And what we are looking at, is trying to figure out

particularly how memories appear in the brain.

How it learns and adapts and so on and so forth.

We can see -- witness it learning

simple tasks at the present time.

Importantly, at the moment, the rat brain robot,

as it were, has about 100,000 brain cells.

Where us humans have -- how many brain cells do we have?

Audience: Six.

Kevin Warwick: Six! This is a Manchester United supporter, obviously.

(Laughter) (Applause)

Don't clap on this stuff, isn't scientific!

So, any advance on six?

Audience: A billion.

KW: A billion. I mean, it depends.

Most of us have a hundred billion.

I thought, "No, who counted this?"

Americans say it's two hundred billion,

but that's -- you know -- that's them, obviously.

(Laughter)

For the rest of us is a hundred billion.

So we are talking here of 100,000.

We're now growing these things --

this is the little dish on the left hand side.

That's where they grow. We have to keep it moist

and so on, it can't let it dehydrate.

The right hand side are the electrodes, there you see.

And the neurons grow in there, link up with each other.

It's quite amazing, these brain cells!

You put them down, they've got no connections.

Within a few minutes you can see them putting out

what look like tentacles.