The Redwood species seems to exist in another kind of time not human time, but what we might call Redwood time.

A Redwood is a fractal. And as they put out limbs, the limbs burst into small trees, copies of the Redwood.

To us, when we look at a Redwood tree, it seems to be motionless and still, and yet Redwoods are constantly in motion, moving upward into space, articulating themselves and filling Redwood space over Redwood time, over thousands of years.

This is the realm of the Coast Redwood tree.

And that's what we're doing at the Redwood Neuroscience Institute.

They stop before a redwood trunk marked with historical dates.

If a portion of a Redwood is rotting, the Redwood will send roots into its own form and draw nutrients out of itself as it falls apart.

Redwood time moves at a more stately pace than human time.

Steve Sillett, when he was a 19 year old college student at Reed College, had heard that the Redwood forest canopy is considered to be a so called Redwood desert.

And maybe about here, about 30 feet, is the diameter of a big Redwood.

The Eastern Hemlock tree has often been described as the Redwood of the East.

Down the coast here in California, the redwood forest grows to 40 stories tall.

Even so, about four percent of the primeval Redwood rainforest remains intact, wild and now protected entirely protected in a chain of small parks strung out like pearls along the north coast of California, including Redwood National Park.

But curiously, Redwood rainforests, the fragments that we have left, to this day remain under explored.

I'm going to ask you to imagine what a Redwood really is as a living organism.

We're going to show you what the diameter at breast height of a big Redwood is.

But then you enter the Redwood canopy, and it's like coming through a layer of clouds.

We're looking at the very top of Gaya, which is thought to be the oldest Redwood.

And yet, when you look at the base of a Redwood tree, you're not seeing the organism.

And if we had Redwood like biology, we would have six layers of people on our hands, as it were.

That is to say, at that time it was believed that there was nothing up there except the branches of Redwood trees.

What they're doing in the Redwood forest canopy soil hundreds of feet above the ocean, or how they got there, is completely unknown.

This three dimensional map of the crown structure of a Redwood named Iluvatar, made by Steve Sillett, Marie Antoine and their colleagues, gives you an idea.

Steve Sillett and Marie Antoine are the principal explorers of the Redwood forest canopy. They're world class athletes, and they also are world class forest ecology scientists.

And with a friend of his, he took it upon himself to free climb a Redwood without ropes or any equipment to see what was up there.

Think about this tree, rising upward into Redwood space, 325 feet, 32 stories, an individual living organism articulating its forms upward into space over long periods of time.

She passes that virus on to baby, and it takes a really, really, really long time as the redwood trees for that serious meme to get out of our operating system.

She passes that virus on to baby, and it takes a really, really, really long time as the redwood trees for that serious meme to get out of our operating system.

Redwood rainforest is incredibly difficult to move through, and even today, individual trees are being discovered that have never been seen before, including, in the summer of 2006, Hyperion, the world's tallest tree.

But they made it to the top, and what they found was not a Redwood desert, but a lost world a kind of three dimensional labyrinth in the air, filled with unknown life.

Ants are not known to occur in Redwood trees, curiously enough, and we wondered whether this ant, this species of ant, was only endemic to that one tree, or possibly to that grove.

He climbed up a small tree next to this giant Redwood, and then he leaped through space and grabbed a branch with his hands, and ended up hanging, like catching a bar of a trapeze.

In recent historic times, about 96 percent of the Coast Redwood forest was cut down, especially in a series of bursts of intense liquidation logging, clear cutting that took place in the 1970s through the early 1990s.

They also have a feature thickets of huckleberry bushes that grow out of the tops of Redwood trees that are technically known as huckleberry afros, and you can sit there and snack on the berries while you're resting.

If we had Redwood like biology, if we got a touch of gangrene in our arm then we could just, you know, extract the nutrients extract the nutrients and the moisture out of it until it fell off.

Most of you know me from my Palm and Handspring days, but I also run a nonprofit scientific research institute called the Redwood Neuroscience Institute in Menlo Park, and we study theoretical neuroscience, and we study how the neocortex works.

When Steve Sillett gets up into a big Redwood, he fires an arrow, which trails a fishing line, which gets over a branch in the tree, and then you ascend up a rope which has been dragged into the tree by the line.

You've now got tools such as Strava and Fitbit for tracking your health, but where's the Fitbit for your company? said Jim Barnett, co founder and chief executive of Redwood City start up Glint, whose software analytics tools are used by companies to measure employee engagement.