Does your martial arts training inform your work?
Martial arts is actually how I got into science. I started martial arts when I was 13. Very rapidly, I got fascinated with the whole idea of what the body can do. So I became interested in human movement, and then how the nervous system works, and I ended up with a Ph.D. in neuroscience.
Both your new book, Inventing Iron Man, and your first book, Becoming Batman, use superheroes to explore science. Why this approach?
A number of years ago I started doing a lot more public outreach stuff. I really started becoming acutely aware of how little people know about how their bodies work. Most people have a vague understanding of their car that vastly outstrips what they know about their own bodies. When I started thinking about educating the public, I thought: Lets start with something that we both understandlets talk about Batman. Now we have a common meeting place where we can talk about the human body. If you learn about how Batmans body works, you also learn about how your own works.
What aspects of science can you explore with Iron Man?
Lets imagine that this Iron Man suit of armor like you see in the movies actually exists. How would you be able to control that, and how could a human being actually interface with that technology? If you really want it to work the way you see it, and not be some kind of shuffling, slow-motion Frankenstein version of Iron Man, it actually has to be a neural prostheticconnected to your nervous system. We have to think of the Iron Man suit of armor as a brain-machine interface. That takes it to a different level.
What are the implications of such a machinebrain interface?
We dont think about the crazy things that may happen to our bodies if we use a suit like Iron Mans. A number of years ago, it was shown that you could get a monkey to use a robot arm to feed itself an orange. But whats going on in the monkeys brain as a result of using that stuff?
Your brain has these sort of maps, sort of organizations of neurons that represent the different systems of your body. You have these maps all the way through development. What I really puzzled a lot over while writing the book is, what would it do to your brain to add something to the maps that are already there? Would you forget how to use your body when you took the suit off? We dont know the answer yet.
How far off is Iron Mans technology?
Well, think about prosthetics. I bring up the example of the South African sprinter [and double amputee], Oscar Pistorius, and one of the things I want people to think about is what human performance is and how people can change it. You think about somebody who has lost two lower limbs, you put them in the category of not being able to achieve peak performance. But you provide this simple technology in the form of the blades he wears for his lower limb prosthetics, and he can actually run better than an able-bodied person. I think thats kind of a wild way to think about changing performance with technology. But of course with Iron Man, were taking this idea of technical application about as far as it will go.
In your book you talk about some inventors who have begun to essentially approximate pieces of the Iron Man suit.
Iron Man has a suit that amplifies his abilities, so hes able to lift more [for example]. I talked to the inventor of the HAL [Hybrid Assistive Limb] suit, Yoshiyuki Sankai. He created this exoskeleton that can amplify your arm and leg strength by about a factor of ten. His big application was that he wanted to see his technology used to improve peoples lives. So if youve got somebody who has had a spinal cord injury or weakness after a stroke or something, his technology could be used to restore their function.
Iron Mans suits make him strong, protect him, and enable him to fly. Is there anything that wouldnt be great about having one of these?
I wanted to talk to people who use suits all the time. So I interviewed a couple of astronauts from NASA and the Canadian Space Agency. One, David Wolf, has the longest time doing space walks of any astronaut. He said theyre 100 percent locked into the moment, because their situation is so extremely dangerous. One thing that one guy told me was, "Its the most hostile environment that anyone could ever imagine anywhere. And if you make a mistake, if you tear your suit, theres nobody that can help you. You have to be locked in to what youre doing."
The other thing they talk about is that wearing those suits is pretty horribly uncomfortable, and you can hardly wait to get them off. Thats one of the things we dont think about when were thinking about Iron Man.
If the technology of Iron Man became a reality, is there anything that could go wrong?
Were thinking of it from the perspective of, "Im going to use the suit of armor." Well, it can use you too, because its connected to you. Its a two-way street. Lets say you have this Iron Man suit, and a whole bunch of electrodes are implanted in your brain. What it means, then, is that maybe now we can take control of the suit and the connections to your brain to control you. Thats a possible problem that we ought to think about a little bit when were creating this stuff. Obviously, were nowhere near at the stage of the Iron Man suit, but all this technology is sort of heading that way.