World’s #1 Brain Surgeon: The Truth About Protecting Your Brain After 40

Ask most people what a brain chip does and they will tell you it reads your mind. Dr. Michael Lawton implants these devices, and he says that is not what comes off them. He is President and CEO of Barrow Neurological Institute in Phoenix, the hospital where Neuralink's first human implant was performed, and he has completed more than 10,000 brain operations and clipped around 5,500 aneurysms. Louisa sat down with him inside Barrow to find out what the electrodes actually pick up, how far the technology has come, and where it stops.

He walks through the surgery itself. The device goes into the hand knob, one small lobule of the motor cortex, where 64 electrodes have already become 108. The threads carrying them are about a tenth the thickness of a hair, so a robot inserts them while avoiding every arteriole on the surface. You'll hear what Nolan Arbaugh, Neuralink's first patient, can now do with a cursor at world record speed, and why Lawton can't keep up with him in a head to head. Then the correction. The data coming off these electrodes is a train of spikes, the same electrical language every neuron in your head is already using, and decoding it tells you whether a person meant to move a cursor left or right. Reading an emotion, or what someone thinks of you, is nowhere close.

The second half turns to the brain Lawton has spent 29 years operating inside. He describes cooling a patient to 15 degrees Celsius and stopping their circulation completely, which shrivels a giant aneurysm like a raisin and opens a short window to repair it. He explains why the hardest cases will still need a pair of human hands, and what he tells trainees who think their craft is disappearing. On brain aging he is direct about what works. He predicts alcohol will be viewed in 20 years the way cigarettes were viewed in the 60s, he takes zero supplements and no peptides, and he says exactly what he can and cannot see when he looks at a living brain on the table.

You'll also hear about Barrow's Mindgenuity Labs and its six mysteries of the mind, why he ranks movement as the first one to fall and consciousness as the one that may never be solved, what he believes consciousness physically is inside 86 billion neurons, and the ground underneath all of it. His sister died of a brain tumor. Louisa's father had a stroke in 2019. Both of them have watched this from the other side of the table.

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*TOPICS DISCUSSED*

00:00 Intro: The Brain Surgeon at Neuralink's First Hospital

00:39 The Guy Who Does the Cases Nobody Else Wants

02:17 A Day in the Life: 5:30am Starts and Three Surgeries

03:20 "Game Tape": Reviewing Every Operation Like an Athlete