David Eagleman

In short

Podcast Summary: Tetragrammaton with Rick Rubin - Episode: David Eagleman

Episode Overview This episode features David Eagleman, a renowned neuroscientist and author associated with Stanford University. His research delves into brain plasticity, sensory substitution, human perception, and the interplay between neuroscience and the legal system. The conversation explores a range of topics, including the nature of dreams, the malleability of the brain, and the implications of neuroscience on law and personal identity.

Key Themes and Concepts

The Brain as the Core of Identity

Importance of the Brain: The brain is described as the "city center" of human identity, where personality, abilities, and experiences reside.
Consequences of Brain Damage: Even minor damage to brain tissue can significantly alter a person's identity and capabilities, unlike other organs which can often be replaced without changing the individual's essence.

Understanding Dreams

Theory of Dreaming: Eagleman proposes that dreaming serves to protect the visual cortex by stimulating it during sleep, preventing it from being overwhelmed by sensory deprivation during the night.
Dreaming Across Species: Research indicates that the capacity for dreaming correlates with brain plasticity; species with more adaptable brains tend to dream more.

Brain Plasticity and Self-Improvement

Rewiring the Brain: Eagleman discusses how individuals can consciously work towards changing their brains through practice and reward mechanisms.
Long-Term Goals: He emphasizes the ability to sculpt one's own brain by setting goals and engaging in activities that require effort and dedication.

Communication of Science

Transition from Academia to Public Engagement: Eagleman's journey from a traditional academic role to a public intellectual demonstrates the importance of making complex scientific concepts accessible to broader audiences.
Literature and Science: He reflects on the parallels between writing fiction and scientific writing, emphasizing storytelling as a powerful tool for conveying ideas.

Individual Perception and Experience

Variability of Human Experience: Eagleman highlights how different individuals perceive the world uniquely (e.g., synesthesia, color blindness) and how these differences represent alternative realities.
Memory and Identity: He argues that memories shape personal identity, despite their often unreliable nature, illustrating the dynamic relationship between memory and self-perception.

Neuroscience and the Legal System

Center for Science & Law: Eagleman co-directs this center, focusing on applying neuroscience findings to inform legal practices and understanding criminal behavior.
Complexity of Human Behavior: He stresses that a range of factors influences criminal actions, advocating for a nuanced approach rather than one-size-fits-all solutions.

Instincts vs. Intuition

Definitions: Eagleman delineates between instinct (inborn responses) and intuition (developed through experience), discussing how both influence decision-making.

The Role of Technology

Impact on Neuroscience: Advances in technology (e.g., brain imaging) are essential for deeper understanding, though limitations still exist in comprehensively mapping brain activity.

Collective Consciousness

Information Dissemination: The interconnectedness of modern education and instant communication allows for rapid sharing of knowledge and ideas across the globe.

Personal Reflections

Influence of Family: Eagleman reflects on his upbringing, particularly his father's influence as a psychiatrist, shaping his understanding of human behavior.

Conclusion David Eagleman’s insights offer profound reflections on the complexity of the human brain, the fluidity of perception, and the intersection of neuroscience with broader societal issues. His work encourages a deeper understanding of identity, learning, and the human experience while advocating for accessible science communication.

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Transcript

Automatic transcript. May contain errors.

0:03Tetragramatine.

0:24Fundamentally, your brain is where all the action is happening. It's the densest representation of you in the body. And the reason we know this is because if you were to damage part of one of your other organs like your heart or your lung or your spleen or your kidney, you might have some problems as a result of it, but it can get fixed. And in fact, the heart can get replaced entirely. You can put in an artificial heart, you know, and they have these pulseless hearts that just are machines that run the blood through. You don't even pulse anymore. And yet you're the same person. But if you damage even a very tiny chunk of brain tissue, that changes who you are.

1:05That changes your hopes and dreams and aspirations and your capabilities and your ability to recognize animals or see colors or understand mirrors or listen to music or hundreds of other things that we see in the clinics every day. And that's how we know that the brain is the important, dense, three pound representation of you much more than the other organs. So the way I think about it is the brain is sort of like the city center. And yes, there's this communication to the outlying areas, but the city center is sort of where all the action is happening. There are stories of people who have heart transplants and then their emotional lives changed.

1:48There are stories like that and I interpret them to be romantic stories. And again, the reason we know that is because thousands of people get artificial hearts or heart transplants every single year and they're the same person. Obviously, going through a major surgery like that can change you and make you appreciate life in a different way. So you might come out feeling a little different on the other side, but not because it's a different heart. Explain your theory on why we dream. Okay, so it turns out the brain has to take care of all these different senses like vision and touch and hearing and so on.

2:24And it does that by sharing its real estate among these. But what's interesting is that the whole system is incredibly fluid and flexible. Much more than people have ever thought my last book LiveWired is all about this because I'm fascinated by how fluid the whole system is. For example, if you were to go blind, that area that we think of is the visual part of your brain, the visual cortex, that gets taken over by hearing, by touch, by other things like that. Now, the surprise just in the last decade has been how rapidly these kinds of changes can happen. And some colleagues in my Harvard did an experiment where they took normally sighted people and they blind folded them tightly and they put them in the scanner.

3:11And then they measured things like, you know, if touch you on the hand or you hear a note of violin or something. And what's going on in the brain? Well, it turns out that after an hour, they started seeing activity in the visual parts of the brain. So in other words, the person is blind folded not seeing anything, but now hearing and touch is starting to encroach on the visual part of the brain. And it happens much more quickly than anyone thought was possible. And I realized with a student of mine that the visual system faces a problem that is unique to it among sensory systems, which is that our planet rotates into darkness, you know, for half the time, every 24 hours, we're back in the dark.

3:58And in the dark, you can still hear and touch and taste and smell, but you can't see anymore. And so that puts the visual system at a disadvantage compared to the other sensory systems. And so what I realized was the visual system is in danger of getting taken over, of getting its territory encroached upon every single night. And the way that the brain fights back against that is with dreaming, which is just blasting random activity into the visual system every 90 minutes. It just sends in random volleys of activity. And because we are visual creatures, we see. And because we're storytelling creatures, we impose a narrative on top of this.

4:43But fundamentally, it's about defending the visual system against takeover during the night time. And by the way, this happens in all animal species to the best we can measure all animals dream. And it turns out that we were able to demonstrate with our science that the amount you dream has to do with how fluid your brain is, what's called brain plasticity. So if you have a brain like homo sapiens where the whole thing is very fluid and flexible, then you do a lot of dreaming. But if you're an animal that drops into the world and you're essentially pre -programmed, you have much less dreaming.

5:21But that is why we dream to prevent takeover of the visual system. Since the brain essentially rewires itself all the time, are there things we can do purposefully to rewire the brain in a way to make it more advantageous to ourselves? Yes. Yeah. So this is one of the key things is we as humans think at all different levels, including long term thinking and what kind of person would I like to be? And essentially, anytime we take on a task, like, hey, I really want to become good at playing the piano or playing chess or swimming or whatever the thing is, that's what we're doing is we're saying, all right, I'm going to do all the hard work, all the brain plasticity hard work and set my sights on this sort of goal.

6:07The way we do that, of course, is by tying things into reward. There's a lot of reasons something can be rewarding. And it can be rewarding at all different timescales. Like, oh, maybe I get attention from this person over here, or maybe I feel great about myself in this situation, or maybe my mother calls me and says, wow, what a nice job you did or whatever the thing is. So there's a million reasons that we can motivate ourselves. But yes, as the Spanish neuroscientist, Ramonika Hall, who won the Nobel Prize of Century goes, he put it, each of us is the sculptor of our own brains. And this is the really interesting thing about being a species that can think into the future and imagine future versions of ourselves and what we might want them to look like.

6:51And then what steps we have to take to get ourselves there. When did you go from just being a professor to doing outward -facing stuff, communicating with the world instead of just the classroom? Yeah. Well, you know, as an undergraduate, I studied lots of science. That's what I was doing. But I also studied British and American literature. And I, from the time I was a little kid, I always wanted to be a writer. And actually, when I was young, I watched Carl Sagan's cosmos, and it had an enormous influence on me. And in fact, when I was growing up, my parents, instead of saying something like, oh, he's going to be the next president, they would say, oh, he's going to be the next Carl Sagan.

7:31So from the time I was a kid, that was always my, sort of the light on the hill for me, was science communication. My father was a physician, my mother was a biology teacher. Science was always sort of part of the background radiation in the house. And I loved that. But I also really loved communicating it clearly. And so as I became a scientist, I sort of only as knew that was part of what was going to be going on. I wrote my first book, which was a book of fiction called Some, I wrote that starting in my postdoctoral fellowship and published that when I was an assistant professor. You know, that was a type of public outreach, although that was fiction, as I mentioned.

8:13But then I published my first book of neuroscience called Incognito when I was still, yeah, a young assistant professor. What's interesting is that I think things have changed nowadays in terms of public communication of science. But back when I was doing that, I got a lot of warnings from older professors who told me, oh, you better not do this now, you better wait until you're tenured before you publish, because people within the academic world will think you're not being serious enough if you're talking to the public about things. Happily, I think that time is maturing. So we all have a deeper appreciation for that.

8:51But for me, I need to say, my audience when I write is always crystal clear, which is, I know that I'm writing for my 18 year old self. In other words, I'm writing to somebody who I know well, who loves big ideas and is amazed by them. It brings tears to his eyes or her eyes, but doesn't happen to know this particular factor, that story or that framework for thinking about things. And so I get to be the lucky one to tell that kid something that I figured out or I've found in the literature that maybe they don't know, that I know will blow their hair back. How is it different writing, fiction versus writing science?

9:37You know, I've thought about this a lot because I do both. I think they're kind of the same thing, which is to say, literature and science are both ways of trying to understand the world. And the only difference is that in science, there's a very particular pathway, a model that we have for moving forward. You set up experiments and you have to be replicable. And you know, you subject it to the scientific method. Whereas in literature, you can make up a what if, and then you can just go explore it. And it doesn't matter if it's true or not true. But other than that, it's the same thing. It's saying, hey, what if the framework were this?

10:17What if the world was made of that? And it's a terrific way to break ourselves out of the internal models that we have. You know, essentially your brain is locked in silence and darkness. And it's always just trying to figure out what's going on in the world out there. And the fact is we all have an internal model of what's going on out there in the world. And that has to do with, you know, a lifetime of experience teaching you, okay, this is what the world is made out of. And what both good literature and good science do is they say, hey, what if that's not true? What if there's this other model?

10:50What if there's this other way of looking at it? And that's what's so special about both is they get to take you out of your daily life into a different world. And in science, we make progress by leaping to these different worlds and seeing if we can build a bridge there. And if it actually is true, but in literature, we can just explore those islands. How different are our internal models? So different. So this has actually been one of the driving forces in my research, my whole career is I'm absolutely fascinated by how different life is between one person's head and another person's head. So I'll just give you a couple quick examples.

11:33So there's something called synesthesia where it's a blending of the senses. So somebody might look at letters on the page and it triggers a color experience for them. So A is red and B is yellow and C is blue and so on. Different for each synesthet. About 3 % of the population has this. But the point is it's not a zzer disorder. It's just an alternative way that some people see the world. There are many different flavors of synesthesia. You might taste something and it puts a feeling on your fingertips. You might hear something. It causes a visual. Any kind of cross blending you can imagine. We found examples of that.

12:07But the point is it's just one way in which, you know, this person is different from that person. It's different from that person. Having a pretty different experience on the inside or takes something more close to home like color blindness. There's a fraction of people who are colorblind and others who aren't. People who are colorblind often don't even figure that out until much later in life. Just like synesthetes have no idea that other people are seeing the world differently than they are. I've been spending a lot of time in the last years studying things like how clearly we have visual imagery.

12:41So if I ask you to imagine something like an ant crawling on a red and white table cloth towards a jar of purple jelly, you might see that like a movie inside your head. And I don't see anything at all. I'm just it's just conceptual to me. I don't see any picture at all. And that's the spectrum from what's called hyperfantasia to a fantasia. And it turns out that everybody is, you know, spread out somewhere on that spectrum. There's no problem. It's not as though one ended a spectrum as a disease, state, or pathological, or whatever. It's just people have different internal experiences. My wife and I, for example, she has a very loud internal radio as she calls it, which is, you know, she's always hearing her internal voice and having conversations with herself.

13:26And that will often drown things out. I happen to have no internal radio at all. And so I'm just really interested in how different it is from head to head. I also, for 15 years now, I've been running a national law and profit called the Center for Science and Law, which is about where neuroscience intersects the legal system. And one of the fascinating things to me is, again, how different people can be on the inside, because lots of people, millions of people in this country commit crimes. But for all kinds of reasons, and this doesn't give anybody an excuse, but I'm just saying it's very different on the inside.

14:05Some people do it because they're tweaked down on drugs. Some people have mental illness, like a psychosis. Some people are psychopaths, meaning they don't care about you and what's going on with you, and what your feelings are if they hurt you badly. Some people are doing, because they're impoverished, and they need to put food on the table for their family. I mean, there's just, there's a million reasons. And so when a brain shows up in front of the judge's bench, the important part is to figure out what kind of reality is this person having, and what does that tell us about whether he is likely to commit future crimes or unlikely?

14:39And how can we root him through the legal system, instead of imagining that incarceration is the one size fits all solution. It's definitely appropriate for some scenarios. But, you know, what other possibilities do we have there? Tell me something you believe now that you didn't believe when you were young. You know, that is the thing, actually. When I was young, I thought that everyone's eternal life was the same. And so, for example, my father mentioned as a psychiatrist, and he was involved in all of the big mass murder cases in the Southwest. He was a psychiatrist for those. And so, I was with him, I was just a kid, I don't know, maybe 10 years old, I was with him at some party with some other adults, and someone said to my father, oh, this guy who had just murdered several people, he shouldn't get the death penalty because surely he feels terrible for what he's done.

15:36And my father, I remember sort of the surprise on his face when the guy said that, my father said, no, that's not at all how it goes. My father had, you know, deposed this guy and, you know, spent hours, hours talking to him. He said, no, this guy, when he thinks about going out to murder somebody, he describes it as the level of excitement that he had as a child on the night before Christmas. You can't imagine what it is to be this guy, William Wayne Gilbert, and presumably he can't imagine what it is to be you. The lesson of psychiatry is that you can't actually stick yourself in other people's shoes.

16:12And as a child, I resisted that. I didn't believe I thought, surely you can put yourself in other people's shoes. So that is the thing that is a child I thought that I don't believe anymore.

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18:04How much do our memories make up who we are? I would say almost entirely. I mean, there are other things too at a neighborhood level, a cultural level, a moment in time, era level. But who you are locally is all about your memories. Who you believe you are, the kind of person that you believe has done XYZ and knows XYZ and has these friends and these parents and these neighbors and so on. So the scary part about that statement is that our memories are terrible. I mean, they're famously and empirically terrible. You can study this in the laboratory as people have for decades. And memory is a myth -making machine and we're constantly reinventing our past to keep it consistent with who we think we are.

18:53And so the fact that our identity is pinned down to that is quite fascinating. It makes us these sort of weird creatures in time. And one of the short stories that I wrote in my book, some was the story about how in the afterlife God couldn't figure out what age he should make people live in the afterlife because people are so different at different ages. So he splits you up like a prism into all of your different ages. So there's your eight -year -old self and your third -year -old self and your six -year -old self, but it turns out that pretty quickly, the eight -year -olds are hanging out with each other and all the teenagers are hanging out with each other and they don't want to talk with the six -year -olds and so on.

19:38And this is all just to demonstrate this issue about how different we are in time even though we have the illusion of continuity. We always feel like, oh yeah, I'm saying the same person I was. And by the way, we can often look back and say, oh yeah, I really have change from that time point to here. But when people look forward there, especially terrible at imagining change. In other words, you think you're essentially you've arrived and you Rick will be the same Rick is in ten years from now even though of course you won't be. Yeah, considering how much the brain changes, is there some part of us that's unchanging?

20:18Unchanging no. And the reason is, I mean, look, your biology is turning over at such a rapid rate, all the pieces and parts of all the cells in your body are changing out and getting reconstructed. Do you know the myth of the ship of Thesius? Does that ring a bell to you? It's this ancient Greek story about the ship of Thesius pulls into dock and it's there for many, many years and eventually they have to replace this floorboard and then they have to replace that plank and they have to do. Okay, and over enough time, every single piece of the ship has been replaced. So, is it still the same ship of Thesius or is it a new ship?

20:53Well, that's the situation we're in. We have every single part of our bodies has been replaced over and over and over. It's estimated about every seven years you're an absolutely new person than you were biologically. And so, obviously something is lasting across that, but it certainly is not unchanging simply because every moment of your life, you're having new experiences, your brain is changing, it's reconfiguring, you know, the expression you can't step into the same river twice, it's both because the river has changed, but also you have changed. You're not the same person each time you go back there.

21:33Tell me about instinct. How does it work? Yeah, so most of what you think and do in act and believe is generated unconsciously, you don't have access to it or awareness of it or even acquaintance with it. And so, that's most of our lives actually is generated in this way. The stuff that we come to the table essentially pre -programmed with, that's what we call instinct. So, you know, withdrawing from something slithering in the grass, that kind of thing, we come pre -programmed with. Now, the interesting thing is that what Mother Nature discovered with us, Homo sapiens, is this trick of brain plasticity.

22:17In other words, making our brains flexible to such a degree that we drop in the world with, I would say fewer instincts than any one of our animal labors and massive flexibility such that we absorb the world around us. We drop into the world with half -baked brains. So, we're not a totally blank slate. We do have instincts. And in fact, you can do things like, you know, you can stick out your tongue at a newborn baby and the baby will stick its tongue back out at you. And that's incredible because that requires a whole wiring to the visual system and the, you know, then to the motor system and seeing that you stuck your tongue out and sticking its tongue out and so on.

22:57So, it's not that we're coming blank, but we are coming with a lot more blank space than anybody else. And this is what is allowed us to take over every corner of the planet to construct skyscrapers and compose symphonies and, you know, get off the planet to the moon and all the amazing things that we're doing and having podcasts over the internet and so on. It's all because we drop into the world with these half -baked brains and we can, by the time we're, you know, some number of years old, learn all the big discoveries and things about what other humans are discovery -force than we springboard off the top of that.

23:33Whereas, if you're an alligator, you drop into the world and, you know, you're doing the same thing that alligators have done for millions of years. You're, you know, eating, mating, sleeping, and that's it. You're not absorbing anything new. So, yes, we do have instincts, but what makes humans really special is all the stuff that we can absorb flexibly. Can we develop our instincts? Or are they all just inborn? The way that I would define instincts, those are the things that are inborn. You can obviously practice all kinds of other unconscious things. For example, you can become a great soccer player.

24:12So, Rick, I don't know if you play soccer, but if you wanted to, if the motivation were there, if the relevance were there for you, you couldn't become a great soccer player. Now, the first day you go out there, it's all knees and elbows. You have no idea what's going on, but after a year of playing, you're pretty good. You, you have a field sense. You recognize exactly what's going on and why, whatever. So, now, you might call that, wow, I've got a really good instinct for soccer playing. Technically, it's not instinct. What it is is unconscious learning. And it, this comes back to this thing we were talking about earlier about being the sculptor of our own brains, because if you set your mind to, I'm going to become a soccer expert, then yep, that's how you can develop that.

24:50Tell me about our conscious mind, versus our unconscious mind. So, most of the action is happening unconsciously. The conscious brain, my book in Cognito is about this. And what I said, and it is that you can think of the conscious brain like being a broom closet in the mansion of the brain in the sense that most of what's going on has very little to do with it. Here's how I think about it. Think about like the CEO of a giant organization. Like, you know, United Airlines or Amazon or something. If you're the CEO of that, you can't possibly know all the mechanisms of the company. Like there's giant stuff happening.

25:30And you don't know where the tires are coming from, or the cafeteria food is coming from, or what version of the software is loaded on people's computer. Like, you can't possibly know. You have to trust the machinery of the company. And your job as the CEO is to kick your feet up on the desk and wait for the phone to ring. Because that's what the CEO is for is only when something is going wrong when something is unexpected to react to that. The other thing is to do future planning. And that's all the conscious mind is doing too. If something is happening exactly as you expected, your conscious mind is not even involved in that.

26:06It's only when something violates your expectation that you consciously become aware of that. For coffee cup right here. And I reach for it and grasp it. I'm not even conscious of the whole thing. Then I drink it. But if I reach for it and it's not there, then I have to look. I have to suddenly engage my attentional mechanisms and become consciously aware of what's going on to search around for it. But if everything is going as expected, you don't really have to be conscious at all. Take, for example, when you're learning how to write a bicycle. At first, you're really conscious. What am I doing with my hands and my torso and my legs and how am I doing?

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26:43But after you get good at it, which doesn't take that long, it gets burned down into the unconscious machinery of the brain. And you're not even aware of it. Then you don't even know. Then if someone asks you to describe how you write a bicycle, you can't even answer the question. You don't even know the answer. Tell me the difference between things that we learn, like if we learn to drive, usually if you don't drive for a few years and you come back to driving, you can still do it. Bicycle, you learn as a child, you don't do it for a long time. You come back to it, you can do it. But there are other things that we could learn.

27:14And when we come back to it, we can't. Why? Well, interestingly, it turns out there is something in the brain called savings, which always comes as a surprise. So just as an example, when I was a young man, I don't know, probably 23 or something, I learned how to speak a sign language, American sign language, because I knew a colleague of mine who was deaf. And so I learned how to speak a sign language. And then I completely forgot it after she moved away, never used it again for 20 years or something. And then I had an opportunity to learn it again. And when I realized this, oh, more is down there than I thought.

27:49So the speed of getting up to, you know, up to conversational again was much, much faster than someone actually starting at square zero. And this is what's called savings. And we always have that. So for example, people who thought they have forgotten the foreign language, just they actually go back to that country. They realize, oh, wow, I'm actually better than I thought. Tell me about your work habits. You have an unbelievable output of compelling information. How do you manage your life? Oh, I'm always hanging on by one finger. And I have been doing that for my whole life now. So I don't have any particularly good habits on that, except that I just always work.

28:28I just crank all the time. One thing that I have always done is the lazy Susan method of getting things done, which is a term that I've stolen from Walt Whitman. He didn't actually use that term, but he had a lazy Susan in the middle of his table. If you don't know what that is, it's this it's a circular thing that you can turn and you can get different things like the salt and pepper or the forks or what that you know, you turn the thing and rotate whatever to come closest to you. I have a whole bunch of projects on my plate. And what I do is I work on whatever I'm getting the fastest most productivity on.

29:04And then when I start slowing down on that, I spin the lazy Susan and grab another project off. And I get tons of work done on that until I'm slowing down. And then I'm so I'm always able to keep myself close to optimal speed that way. And in some ways, I guess you don't get burned out on any one project because when it starts feeling like you're not making the best use of your time, you move on to something else. You know, exactly. I got to tell you when I was an undergraduate, I had an electrical engineering teacher and I really liked this guy and he told me one day he said, Eagleman, I got to give you some advice.

29:36He said, life is as though you're a lumberjack and you go into the forest. And if you take one whack with your axe and each tree, you're not going to get anywhere. You have to concentrate on one tree and just keep hitting that one tree. And because I really liked this professor, I wanted to take that advice to heart, but I couldn't because it's just not me. I'm not the one tree guy. And so I always felt as a young person that there was something wrong with me that I was doing multiple projects, but thank goodness that I didn't listen to that or couldn't listen to that. And yeah, so that's why I have output on several fronts now.

30:13Do you find that working on a different project sometimes Sheds light on another project that you didn't think it was related, but you see the connections? Absolutely. That's my favorite thing. That happens all the time. I'm working on, for example, you know, so I'm doing this podcast now called Intercosmos and I'm writing an episode and then I realized, oh my god, this is the perfect thing that I just found this piece of data and some paper while working on this episode. That's the perfect thing for this over here. And that by the way, and I'm writing a movie screenplay and that goes belongs right in here.

30:46And oh, by the way, I'm launching a new company. And so that is that piece of data can actually belong over here as well. When I feel really good is when I can double leverage something or triple leverage something. Tell me about your relationship to time. So I've always been fascinated by time because this is a well -worn story. So I'll just mention it very briefly, which is that I fell off of a roof when I was a child and I almost died. I landed on a brick floor with my nose first and broke my whole face badly but lived. And the thing that stayed with me about that whole experience was that it seemed to take forever while I was falling.

31:28It seemed to take a very long time. And when I got to high school and took physics and I learned, you know, I did the calculation, I learned that it was only 0 .6 seconds from the top of the floor. And I couldn't reconcile this. So when I became a neuroscientist, I devoted and I have continued to vote a lot of my time to studying time perception. And I did these experiments some years ago where I dropped people from 150 foot tall tower in free fall. You're falling backwards. And I was able to measure people's time perception by I built advice that set on their wrist and flashed numbers at them in such a way that you could read them at a certain speed but not at a faster speed.

32:09And I was seeing does time actually go on slow motion when you're in fear for your life. And it turns out the answer is no. You can't actually see in slow motion when you're in fear for your life. But you lay down denser memory when you're in a life where that situation you are writing every detail down because fundamentally that's what memory is for. And so when you read that back out when you say what just happened, what just happened, you've got this memory, this memory, this memory. And so what you feel what your brain presupposes is, oh, that must have taken longer than that must have been a five second event because on a normal circumstances, if I have this much memory, it must be five seconds.

32:48So you know, just as a side note, I published this work and it really moved the field forward in terms of understanding that, okay, we don't actually see in slow motion. What happened is occasionally people come up to me and say, hey, I know that's wrong because I, you know, I was in a car accident and I saw the hood crumple and I saw the rear view mirror fall off and I saw the expression on the other guy's face. I know I was seeing in slow motion and I said, okay, so the person on the seat next to you when you heard him screaming, did it sound like he was saying, no, because if not, then time is not running in slow motion and they have to allow that that actually wasn't what happened.

33:23And so yeah, that's been part of my relationship with time and what that led to is a deeper understanding that time, how long you think life is lasting has everything with memory. And the brain only writes things down if they're novel or salient and otherwise it doesn't. So if you're doing the same stuff all the time, then it will seem as though the years are passing quickly because you have no new memory. When you're a child and you experience a summertime, it seems to last forever because everything is new. You've never experienced that. You've never, you know, been in this sort of social situation.

33:58You've never been off to this summer camp, you know, whatever. But when you're an adult, a summer goes like that because you've seen it all before. It's the same old patterns that you are now an expert in. And so the really important thing is to seek novelty to find ways of injecting novelty into your life. This is not to live longer. It's to make it seem as though you've lived longer. This is the important key.

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36:02Do you have any type of a spiritual practice? I would say it's my science and I'll tell you why. I gave it to me years ago called Why I Am a Possibility. And what I described is, look, when you go into the bookstore, you've got the books by the atheists and you've got the books by the religious. And that's it. You've got to choose one team or the other. But I've always felt like from a scientific point of view, all the religious stories, sorry to say, but those are clearly wrong. It's not that the earth is 6 ,000 years old. It's not that the atom was invented from a rib kit. Whatever. Like, those are clearly were past that.

36:48We're not living 2 ,000 years ago and making up stories like that. And on the flip side with the atheism, I'm clearly closer to that side, but I feel like, look, actually, this is a big, complicated world. We don't know what is going on here. And part of the scientific mindset is really having a wide table upon which you accept all kinds of hypotheses and say, okay, look, here's a bunch possibilities. Let's figure out which ones right or wrong. And so when I don't like sometimes when I go and I see these books by the atheists and the books by the religious, I feel like everyone's coming at this with all the certainty saying, I know what the answer is.

37:22And I find that unconscionable because who knows what the right answer is? We are living in a cosmos filled with mysteries. And so I think there's another path. Sometimes people think agnosticism is in the middle, but agnosticism simply says, I don't know. So I defined some years ago this new thing called possibility andism, which is exploring, actively exploring the structure of the possibility space and figuring out, okay, what are we doing here? So maybe the whole, you know, Judeo -Christian, that's like one point in the possibility space. Maybe the idea that absolutely nothing, you know, we're just, we're going to die and that's the end of that.

37:59That's certainly a point in the possibility space. There's lots of other stuff. And we can use the tools of science to figure out the structure of this. And by the way, rule out whole sections of it. And by the way, open up new folds in the possibility space that we didn't even expect. So that's my spiritual practice is just trying to figure out, wow, what is possible here? What was it like growing up with a father who was a psychiatrist? I mean, he passed away four years ago, but yeah, he was just an amazingly smart and empathetic person. He was a particularly interesting guy. He was also a gun dealer and also as a part -time police officer.

38:43And he was also in the Army Reserve. So he was a guy who I guess like me had lots of different careers going on at the same time. I guess as a child, he once said something, I asked him, I said, what exactly do you do as a psychiatrist? And he said something like, well, I listen to what people say. And I think, what are they actually saying? And then I, from then on, I thought, oh shoot, now how, now everything I say, I'm not going to be taken at face value. But anyway, it was wonderful. Have you ever done talk therapy? I actually have not. I've never done, I've never done therapy. I understand from so many friends that it is extremely useful for them.

39:17I'm married and have a wonderful wife and there's a sense in which we help each other out in those ways. Sometimes in battles and sometimes with helping and loving, but one certainly learns a lot about what one's issues are and how to move forward. That way. The relationship. Yes. How often are you surprised in your work? Every day. I mean, if I'm doing it right every day, something blows my mind. And thankfully, we are living in a world now where I would say mostly because of the internet, where you've got access to anything instantly, meaning as soon as somebody makes a discovery on the other side of the world, you know, seconds later, wow, there it is in my inbox.

40:02Here's this amazing new discovery. So I feel quite grateful about that because if we were living in the 1800s, you know, I'd have to wait for a male carrier to come and someone has handwritten me a note saying, hey, here's a discovery about this thing. Just the fact that we have things like Wikipedia or that we can have things like you strap on a VR headset and you can go down to the size of an atom and you know, like move around there, zoom up to the size of the solar system and see things from there. What an opportunity. And by the way, I think this is what's going to make the next generation so much smarter than we are because they get to grow up in this world where everything that human kind is figured out, they have instant access to.

40:47And I think that's the loveliest thing that they've got such a broad diet. I mean, this is different, you know, you and I grew up in a different world and I don't feel like we're that old, but my God, the world is different where we had our home room teacher. And if we wanted to know piece of information, you know, our mother would have to drive us to the library and you'd hope it was there in encyclopedia Britannica, you know, if not, you would thumb through the card catalog and hope there was a book on the thing. But now the second kid wants to know an answer, he says, Hey, Alexa, tell me the answer.

41:20Hey, chat you, he told me the answer to this and they get the answer in the context of their curiosity. So right when they want to know the answer, they get it, which is important because that's when brain plasticity happens when you have the right neurotransmitters there and those right neurotransmitters essentially equate to curiosity, if you're curious about something. And so that's when it sticks.

41:46But given to us and the teacher hoped that some of it, some tiny fraction of it would stick. How much does new technology impact your work? I would say a lot because there's a very real sense in which let's take neuroscience, you know, study the brain, which I'm in. People have had really good theoretical ideas for a long time, but what we're lacking is data. And it's not people don't have theoretical frameworks, but it's really hard to measure things from the brain. Why? Because it's encased in this armored bunker plating of the skull. And it's hard to get in there. And you know, you can't in a human, you know, open up a hole in the skull and see, and even if you had permission or some excuse where you could look inside the skull and see the surface of the brain, that doesn't tell you anything either because brains communicate with this electrical activity.

42:40Every single cell in your brain, you've got 86 billion of these specialized cells called neurons. Each neuron is popping off electrical spikes, which is essentially the language of the brain. It's going, it's popping off these spikes, tens to hundreds of times every second. And you've got 86 billion of these. So, you know, if each spike could be represented by a photon of light, it would be blinding what is going on in your brain every second of your life. And so, you know, if you just look at a brain, though, you can't see any of that. It just looks like a pink jellery thing. So, it has been very difficult to get technology to really look in there.

43:18So, we have technologies like brain imaging. Many people have probably seen things like MRI, which gives an anatomical snapshot or F MRI, which shows the activity, the blood flow that's going on in the brain, which represents where the activity was. But it's very low resolution. I mean, it tells you, there was a blob of activity here that tells you that three seconds ago, there was some, some of the neurons there of these, you know, this cluster of let's say a million neurons, you know, some fraction of them were active, but that doesn't, doesn't tell you much. And on the flip side of that, you've got things like you can put electrodes into the brain and measure what individual neurons are doing, or maybe tens or hundreds of them.

43:58But out of 86 billion, that doesn't tell you much either. So, we're stuck in an era right now where we don't have really good technology. What we need is technology that says, here's the activity of every cell in the brain, all at the same time, then we can get somewhere. Then we'd have whole new classes of theories. There's probably 12 Nobel Prizes to be had there once we get that technology. Is it possible to create that technology? Sure. I mean, it will happen. I hope it happens in my lifetime, you know, like every single technological invention, it's just going to be a matter of lots of other pieces and parts coming together.

44:36And all these things converging and then bang, somebody comes up with it, or probably if it's like most inventions, you know, three or four people come up with it at the same time, once all the adjacent technologies exist and are there to be put together, a bunch of people stick together at the same time. Tell me about collective consciousness, the idea that there's a time for information to come. And there's some connection between all of us that creates that invitation. I would have a slightly less romantic view on that. By the way, every romantic view is a lot of stuff. But in this case, it's just that the puzzle pieces are there.

45:14And there are so many educated people now, as in 100 or 200 years ago, very few people got education now. It's, you know, the standard. And what that means is, and we have more brains than ever on the planet. I know we've got 8 .2 billion brains running around, most of them getting good education. And because the internet disseminates the information instantly, what it means is, soon as those four or five puzzle pieces hit the ground, they're going to be lots of brains that put them together. And so it's just a matter of lots of opportunities, sort of intellectual opportunities there for stuff to happen.

45:49Beyond your fall off the roof, what are other events that you'd say make you who you are? One thing I often think about is my father was a voracious reader. And in our home in Albuquerque, New Mexico, up in the mountains, middle and nowhere, he built these library stacks. So it was just shelves, I've shelves, I've shelves of books. And I spent most of my childhood, obviously, pre -drivers license and pre -internet and so on, wandering those those stacks and reading and reading. And so that for sure made me a big part of who I am. I do wonder currently what it's going to mean for the next generation who has access to that library, but also has a million ways distractions to waste time, the TikTok and Facebook and so on.

46:44So anyway, I think that certainly made me who I am. So I had a great admiration for my parents. And then I went to graduate school and I had my graduate thesis advisor, got him read Montague, I just I had and continued to have such admiration for him. He became sort of like a proxy for the next parent. And he was very hard on me, but that was useful in my life at that time for someone to just break my legs all the time and make me achieve a new level. And so I'm very grateful to him and that sort of experience. I don't recommend graduate school to a lot of people, but for those who do go, it can be super useful because you learn to think at a deeper level by which I mean, if you're even reasonably smart in this world, you get a lot of charity thrown to you.

47:42Like if you say something that's mostly right, people will agree or say like, oh yeah, that's right. But if you get a good graduate thesis advisor who is willing to take the time to just torture you, nitpick, nitpick until everything is 100 % right or backable up, that is a real opportunity that most people never get. And so it's like going through boot camp. So I'm very grateful for that. If you're under pressure, time can strengthen, for example, will that make your work better or worse? Hmm. I mean, look, if it weren't for deadlines, nothing would get done at all. And so that is a necessary part of things.

48:28I would say there's probably an optimal amount of pressure. It's probably you shape curve on that one. Are gut feeling and instinct the same? No. So gut feeling is more like intuition because an instinct again is something you're born with, you know, you can pre -program to the table with, but intuition is something that you develop. It's a type of learning about the world. There are some things we learn where we have imagined like a camera lens that's got a very tight focus. Like when you're learning chess, you have to learn, okay, when I make this move with the rook, this is exactly what's, you know, what it looks like and what happens here.

49:08That's a very tight lens. But we have things with a wider lens, which is, let's say, emotion and in some cases, intuition where we say, look, I don't know why I feel uncomfortable when I walk into this room here, but something isn't feeling good to me. There's nothing magical about it. It's just a wide lens computation about what's going on. You're picking up on some signals that whether or not you can consciously identify it, some thing about the way that person looked over at that person and something about the way the things are arranged and whatever you feel like, wow, this is not the kind of place I want to be.

49:48And we use that intuition all the time to say, hey, I'm going to go towards this. I'm going to go away from that. This is scary. This is wonderful. I mean, certainly in relationships, this is what we do all the time, right? You don't know why you like certain people and don't like certain people or, you know, the person you get married to. Who knows why when you met that person, you felt like, oh my god, you know, birds are singing in the sunlight, whatever. That's all stuff that you're picking up on. Her eyes, her expression, the way she looked at you, the whatever. There's a million things you're picking up on that you could not consciously identify, but with your wide angle lens, that's what's going in there.

50:25And that's what we summarize as intuition. Not gonna glad well had that book called Blink, which was about the benefit of SNAP judgment versus pondering. And the books are a series of examples of like a person who recognized that art piece was a forgery in a museum. Whereas all the other experts, it had all the right specifics for it to be what it was claimed to be. But by looking at it in a moment, a person could tell, this is not true. Yes, but really what that story illustrates is expertise versus, you know, amateurs. And so it's the amateurs who look at the painting and say, yeah, it looks great to me.

51:11But what expertise is, is the years of learning that led to that guy having all that knowledge deep down burned in there that allowed him to look at that and say, something's not right there. That looks like a forgery to me. So I think it's almost the opposite, though, in the book, because all of the experts agree that it's real. And the one differing view was the guy who could look at it and in an instant without seeing any of the backup could tell it was a forgery. So here's what I'd say. I read the book a long time ago and I loved it. I think that story is a good example of, you know, burning down lots and lots of knowledge such that you're able to see like, hey, there's something not right here.

51:54But again, nothing magical about a gut feeling or intuition. It's that that guy had more expertise than the others. So I would just suggest that the others who were called experts were obviously not experts, not at the same level that this guy had the expertise.

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53:41Do you think the more decisions we make, the better we get at making decisions, or is there some point where we've made too many decisions and we start moving down the slope instead of up to slow? There's been a claim in the psychology literature that willpower is like a gas tank that can run low. If you have to make a bunch of decisions and then I offer you some chocolate cookies and even if you're on a diet, you know, a lot of chocolate cookies, you're going to eat them if you've just done a lot of decision making because you've burned a lot of energy. Decisions take energy in the brain and we are mobile creatures that run on batteries.

54:26We have to constantly get food to fund ourselves and so that's the claim is that you can actually get tired and then your decision making gets worse. Is all of the information held in our brain held there physically? Yes, it's all physical. This is the amazing part. So there's many different ways that the information can get held. So for example, if I say, hey, here's six digits that you have to type into this website for your two -factor authentication, you're memorizing that, okay, three, six, nine, two, four, five, and you memorize it and you repeat it yourself. That's being held physically in spikes running around in a loop in your brain.

55:07That's how you memorize that. But the name of your fifth grade teacher, that's stored differently. That's burned down into the structure, the physical structure of your brain. So the first is an example of short -term or working memory. The second is an example of long -term memory. Of course, most of who you are is the long -term memory that you have. What was the address of your last house and so on? Before I asked you that question, that information was sitting there physically, but it was in just thinking of cold storage and then you say, oh gosh, now I need that address. You bring it out and you turn it back into spikes, physical electrical activity, but it is stored there.

55:47There are dozens, maybe hundreds of ways that information gets stored in the brain. The thing that's been most popular in the field for the last 50 years is this idea of changing the strength of the connections, what are called the synapses, between neurons, changing the strength from minimum to maximum and anywhere in between. It turns out you can show in a network of neurons that you can store information that way. But almost certainly that's two cartoonish model to actually represent the biology because way past the connections, you've got a whole universe inside of each cell with changeable parameters and so things are changing all the way down to the genome where you have proteins that glom onto the genome and change the way that other proteins are getting expressed.

56:37So the point is there's lots of ways that you can make changes in the system and all of that is physical and that's how memories are stored. And again, the reason we know that is because someone can get hit in the head and they lose memories or they get, let's say, a stroke and they lose memories that they had or people take a psychedelic drug and they remember some memory that they thought they'd long forgotten or whatever. It's all in there physically. The difference between how a child's brain works versus an adult brain. Yeah. So it turns out that when you are born, you have essentially all the neurons you're ever going to have.

57:15Neurons don't divide and reproduce like many other cells in your body. So you've got, call it, 86 million neurons. But what happens is as a baby, they start reaching out and making connections and trying to find connections with others. And by the time you're two years old, it is super densely connected more so than any other time in your life. And from then on, from about two onwards, it's all a game of pruning. You're actually reducing the number of connections. And what prunes the garden is your experience in the world, what your neighborhood is, what your parents are, what your moment in time is, all of that stuff is pruning it so that you become an expert in how to navigate your world and understand what's going on there with your language that you're surrounded with and so on.

58:01And so that's one of the main differences. Another one is that parts of the brain, you know, sort of develop and come into into place like a polaroid picture developing, the slowest part of the brain is what's called the prefrontal cortex behind the forehead here. And that's the part of the brain that's involved in simulating possible futures.

58:28And size and body of an adult, but not the maturity. And they don't have the capacity to simulate things out. So, okay, well, maybe I shouldn't do that because that wouldn't be a good idea for the following reasons. So the prefrontal cortex doesn't become fully developed till about 25 years old. And, you know, car rental companies know this because they charge you more if you're under 25, they're never going to drive more in an crazy manner. But it's a very interesting set of decisions that we have to make as a society. When do we let people vote? When do we let people drink? What about the death penalty?

59:02You know, the Supreme Court said, okay, look, they finally concluded, if you're under 18, when you committed the crime, we can't execute you. If you're over 18, then you can't be executed. But, you know, the difference between someone who's 17 and 365 days, someone who's 18 and one day, there's no meaningful difference there. It's just the legal system always has to draw bright lines. But this is always a problem in figuring out what to do about the slow development of the prefrontal cortex. Do animals make decisions the same way we do? I think a lot of it is based on some of the same stuff like how do I get to the food, how do I get to the mate, how do I find a safe place to sleep, stuff like that.

59:40But what we have as humans is this whole capacity on top of that to think about ourselves at all these different timescales. I mentioned this before, but, okay, I need to do this bit. Also, what kind of person do I want to be? And also, what will my friends think if I do this? And also, can I advance my career if I do that? And will I do something that gets me in trouble politically if I do that? And will it, whatever. I mean, there's just a million decisions that go into everything because we are social creatures who are embedded in this culture. And we really care for the most part about what other people think.

1:00:16And we navigate our behavior accordingly. There are animal species that are more social than others. But for the most part, animals don't do any of that stuff that I just mentioned. They're just sort of coming up with the best, you know, probable reward and how to get there. Is there anything that's currently being taught in neuroscience that you question whether that's accurate or not? Well, the main thing is when when you look at any introductory neuroscience textbook, it has a picture of the brain and then, you know, put some color on it and it says, okay, this is the visual part of the brain.

1:00:52This is the auditory part of the brain. This is for touches, for decision making, and it's just, as I mentioned earlier, it's a totally fluid system. It just so happens that that's usually how it turns out if you're born with functioning eyeballs and ears and touch receptors and whatever. But boy, it is unbelievably flexible where that can go. So I think there's a real under appreciation.

1:01:19I mean, system that you can plug anything into and it will shape itself around that is quite extraordinary and not the type of thing that I think is talked about upfront in any book and sometimes they put it in the last chapter like, oh, by the way, the brain is very flexible and you can do other things and plug other things in. So for example, one of the things that I started doing in my lab 12 years ago is this idea of sensory substitution, which is feeding information into the brain via an unusual pathway. So it turns out that this was first demonstrated in 1969 in the journal Nature, scientist named Paul Bocchi -Rida, took blind people and he put them in a dental chair and he put this solenoid grid against their back.

1:02:08So imagine these things I can poke in and out. And he set up a camera and whatever the camera saw, they would feel that poked into their back. So if the camera is looking at a face, they feel a face poked into their back and if the camera is feeling looking at a telephone, they feel the shape of a telephone poked into your back and so on. And blind people, he had pretty good understanding what was happening in the visual world just based on what they were feeling on their skin, on the skin of their back, which is remarkable. So about 12 years ago, I started looking into whether I could build sensory substitution for people who are deaf.

1:02:42So I capture auditory information and I built a vest with the students in my lab and it's got vibratory motors all over it. And so the vest is capturing sound and turning into these patterns of vibration based on how much of this high frequency is here and low frequency is in medium and everything in between. And deaf people could come to understand the auditory world this way by feeling the information pushed in through the skin of their torso. So I ended up spinning that out of my laboratory as a company called Neocensory and we shrunk this down to a wristband and the wrist band has vibratory motors around the wrist and this is on wrist all over the world now for people who are deaf or simply getting age -related hearing loss or who have tinnitus, which is ringing in the ears.

1:03:27We have all kinds of things we're doing but the point is it's capturing sound, it's turning things into patterns of vibration on the skin and you can come to understand things about the world that way. And one of the things I've been pursuing for the really last 10 years is can we create new sensors for humans? Can we feed in a totally new kinds of information like infrared light or ultrasonic sound or other things like that and come to understand what is happening in the world just based on what we're feeling pushed into the brain via the skin in this case? How much of what we perceive is what's actually out there?

1:04:03We perceive a very vanishingly small fraction of what's out there. So this isn't just a philosophical claim, you can look at something like electromagnetic radiation, what we call light. In a very narrow range the light that bounces off and hits our eyes, we're able to pick up on that because we have the proper receptors to pick up on that and so that's what we call visible light. That's Roi G bib and that's what we think of is all the colors that are out there. But in fact what we see is actually less than a 10 trillionth of the electromagnetic radiation spectrum. In other words all the light that's out there, only a tiny tiny fraction of what we call visible light.

1:04:41The rest of it is all light but things that we call like radio waves and x -rays and microwaves and cosmic rays. All this stuff is exactly the same stuff as your red, orange, yellow, blue. It's just of a different frequency that we can't see because we don't have the proper receptor sport so it's totally invisible to us. It's not that it inherently has to be invisible because rattlesnakes for example pick up on infrared information because of the structure of their heat pits and honey bees because the structure of their compound eyes pick up on ultraviolet information. Of course we build machines to pick up on radio frequencies or microwave or whatever.

1:05:19It's just that we can't see them. You don't come to the table biologically able to see that stuff. So the rest of it until modern science came along, the rest of it didn't even exist as far as we were concerned even though it's all light. So we're only seeing a very very tiny fraction of the world that's out there.

1:05:41How is rhythm used in the brain? The brain is always trying to predict fundamentally the brain is a prediction machine and so it's always trying to say what's next what's next and so I think the reason brains are so attracted to rhythm is that it says oh good oh I got this I got this every time I'm making a prediction it's coming true I totally got this and so that's I think why we love rhythm so much. Tell me about surprise how does it work? We have an internal model of the world which is you know everything you've built up over every experience you've ever had about okay I got it this is how the world works this is what people do this is what buildings do what dogs do what cars do great and the thing is our internal model is always a little bit imperfect and as a result we get surprised that's what surprise is is where you think oh I got this I can make a good prediction about this whoops that didn't happen then we pay attention to it the brain is fundamentally wired to look for surprise to say whoa that wasn't what I thought was going on so I'm going to attend to that and figure out how to incorporate that into my internal model and understand that a bit better and so that is the key to learning I mean surprise leads to attention leads to writing things down in the brain how do you decide what's going to be a book versus something else you know I have written a lot of books at this point but I am the world's slowest book writer so each book that I write takes probably seven to ten years and what I'm doing is I'm always working on multiple books at once in this lazy Susan method you know I've spent it I'm working on the and I'm dumping everything in the way I write a book is very different than a lot of my colleagues who store to start on page one to make an outline or whatever I don't do that way I just start throwing everything in and the whole thing develops like a polaroid picture but often I guess I'd say always the book ends up being so different from what I originally thought it might be so the way I write books is by a lot of experimentation and much of it doesn't work and I would say it feels very wasteful I mean yeah probably half the words I write end up getting chucked but I think at least for myself that is the process what's happening in us when we have internal conflict my view of the brain is that the right way to understand this is as a team of rivals you have all these different neural networks going on and when we talk about you where you say oh Rick yeah I know Rick Rick's this kind of guy whatever we're really talking about as a whole collection of neural networks with different drives in it and so as an example if I you know I take some creme brulee and I say oh Rick why don't you why don't you eat this it's delicious and maybe say oh uh party your brain says okay well I'm on a diet I shouldn't eat that party brains as well it's a rich energy source got so I just sugarated party brains is okay how about I'll eat it but I'll go to the gym tonight and work out to cancel this out you can argue with yourself you can cuss at yourself you can control you can contract with yourself and the question is who is talking with whom here it is all you but it's different parts of you and we constantly have internal conflict we constantly say oh gosh I really want to do this thing but that's a bad idea oh what if I get caught what if I don't get caught what a list lead to my you know we're doing that with everything in a million small ways all the time and that is because we are a team of rivals I obviously I took that expression from Abraham Lincoln's team of rivals cabinet that he said up he came in as president said I'm gonna make a cabinet of people who disagree with each other and we'll see where we get by having you know consensus derived from this team of rivals and that was very smart idea anyway that's that's what evolution has done with us we are essentially machines that are built of conflict house susceptible are we to group think totally susceptible we are a very social species we are massively influenced by what our community thinks what our era thinks what our country thinks you know what flies at this moment in time you know it's been a popular thing in the last decade to take down statues of people who have some idea that seems distasteful to modern college students and it's a real shame because they have no control over what culture they lived in what era what moment in time they lived in and so what this means if we keep that up is that we're constantly be you know taking down statues because whatever you think now so take a student who feels that they are at the center of exactly what the right thing to think is I guarantee in 200 years your statue will get taken down because people say I cannot believe they did that so you know whatever we are creatures of our moment in time or creatures of group think everybody likes to believe to some degree that they're an independent thinker but one thing you can do I mean you know Ricky and I we haven't talked about this yet but you know you and I are both so obsessed with what creativity is what's fascinating to me about creativity is that you know if you were Beethoven you could have written music that was with different semi -tones or you know used breathing in it or used some kind of other weird drum thing in it okay why do we know that because other people in the world were writing that kind of music and this culture over here that culture there whatever but of course Beethoven's not going to write that because he is a creature of what's going on in Austria at that moment in time just like the person who's contemporaneously writing music over in China is writing a very different style music because that's what music is to that brain and in Nigeria that guy's writing music because that's what music is in that moment we as you would know better than anybody you know live in this extraordinary time right now when because of the internet we get to experience music from all different cultures that gives us such a cool opportunity for new remixes of ideas that people before us never even had the opportunity for what makes a great teacher I think it's just understanding what a person does and does not know and what interests them and so telling a story in a way setting it up in a way that that they will care about the answer and by the way you know one of the classes I teach at Stanford is called literature and the brain because I'm fascinated by this issue that we are so wired for story we love stories as opposed to lists of facts and so I've just been very interested in the fact that first off you want to get any information into the brain you have to cast it in terms of a story and that that really works to get things in there and you know 10 years after you read Malcolm Gladwell's book the part you remember is the story you don't remember the details and you listed something about a brain part whatever doesn't matter but I'm also I'm also fascinated by the fact that our brains even though the way a typical neuroscience textbook will go is say look this is the part of brain that you know sees and hears and touches and you know determines where you are now what's around you but we're so prone to slipping into fantasy so I can pick up a page with these symbols on it and I'm immediately in you know Westros you know doing something game of throws and I am John Snow in that moment and the fact that I've still got the same eyes and ears and nose and fingertips and whatever but I'm now not David Eagle and I'm John Snow and I'm doing something else the fact that we slip into these other worlds so easily is fascinating to me and I don't think that's been well studied what's the hardest part of your job I guess the hardest part is ideas are easy but proving an idea all the way to you know running the experiment and in science this is often you know getting the grant money for it writing the institutional and view board to get the permission to do the experiment to do the writing up the results getting it published you know that's a years -long process often and so it's very worth it and it feels great but sometimes the hard part is that I think of something and I think just occasionally I'll think wow I have an intuition that that might be right but I'm never going to be able to prove that idea because it would take me the next 10 years and it would take getting a $10 million grant and building this machinery that does XYZ and so I feel like that part stinks sometimes to feel like okay I'm reaching out past the curtain of what's known and look I might not be right I mean you know as scientists we're wrong most of the time but occasionally you're right about some idea and I feel like damn I'm never going to be able to show that that's true tell me about conversations you've had with people while they were undergoing brain surgery yeah well the you can be totally awake during brain surgery because the brain is the only part of the body that doesn't have pain receptors and so you can you know you can be poking around and somebody's brain and picking parts out and doing whatever you want and they can be totally awake just like doing anything else they're doing obviously when you when you drill a hole in the skull you know there's pain receptors on the skin there on the scalp and so you have to locally anesthize that but once you're in the brain there's no pain receptors why because mother nature never had to worry about that mother nature never foresaw a situation where someone is mucking around in your brain so patients get neurosurfus all the time for epilepsy for tumors for different sorts of things and you can do experiments with them and talk with them and show them you know here here's a screen of a tablet I want you to point at this and tell me what you see there and that kind of stuff and so the kind of conversations you can have with them are exactly the kind of conversation you can have if they weren't undergoing brain surgery.

1:15:54Could there's anything come up that wouldn't come up otherwise? Yeah well the main thing is if the surgeon sticks an electrode in and zaps some area that might cause a person to let's say laugh and then because the brain is a storyteller you'll come up with some reason okay well why did you laugh? Oh it's because I just thought of something funny things like that or you know there's all kinds of things where you know a certain zapp in a certain place causes a muscle movement or something people will always have a story about why they just did something oh my arm hurt so I was moving it that kind of thing so yes that's what can happen differently during brain surgery is that someone actually does something to your brain down in the hardware that makes you do something and then you retrospectively tell a story about it.

1:16:42So imagine you're stimulating a part of the brain the person moves their arm and you say why did you move your arm and say I moved my arm because it was itching so I decided now does that mean that the place that got triggered is the same as the place where they would feel the itch so they're actually telling the truth do you know what I'm saying? That's a really good question but no in this case you've got a map in the brain of the body and when you stimulate those areas you stimulate the muscles you can track the muscles so if you do it every time it'll contract my bicep every time because it's about the muscle itself is what's getting stimulated there.

1:17:22I see and the story that they would tell would not be that story. Right I mean this is an interesting question if I stimulate someone's bicep over and over and over again maybe it's okay to use to say I think it was tapping me. There are these experiments for example with these split brain surgeries as they're called or someone has an epilepsy that spreads to the other side of the head to the brain and so what these surgeons did some decades ago is cut the superhighway of neurons that connects the two hemispheres the two halves of the brain and the patient came to and the patient seemed fine but it turns out that now they had essentially two consciousnesses each hemisphere was like its own person and so you could communicate to the left hemisphere which has language by writing words over here on the right side because things on the right side get analyzed on the left side of the brain so you could write some words and left hemisphere to understand that the right hemisphere would not understand the words instead it can only understand pictures of things but what you can do is set up all kinds of experiments where you get one side of the brain to do something because you're sending it a message and then the other side of the brain will make up a story about why it's just done that thing because it doesn't have access to what the other side saw so it'll constantly make up stories it's really interesting yes and that's what that's what neuroscience is about I mean this is why I feel like in my entire lifetime I will never run out of moments of feeling in total awe not only about scientifically how does a brain work and how does this come about but you know I and you and Evan we're all we are our brains like it's not like I'm studying soil mechanics or something that's totally separate from us this is us this is you it's the most extraordinary thing that we have ever found in the universe and yet it's us so every bit that we can understand it gives us a little better insight into who we are tetragramatine is a podcast tetragramatine is a website tetragramatine is a whole world of knowledge what may fall within the sphere of tetragramatine counterculture tetragramatine sacred geometry tetragramatine the avant -garde tetragramatine generative art tetragramatine the tarot tetragramatine out of print music tetragramatine biodynamic tetragramatine graphic design tetragramatine mythology and magic tetragramatine obscure film tetragramatine beach culture tetragramatine esoteric lectures tetragramatine off the grid living tetragramatine alt spirituality tetragramatine the canon of fine objects tetragramatine muscle cars tetragramatine ancient wisdom for a new age upon entering experience the artwork of the day take a breath and see where you are drawn

From the publisher

David Eagleman is a neuroscientist at Stanford University and a bestselling author. His neuroscience research spans the areas of brain plasticity, sensory substitution, human perception, synesthesia, and beyond. As the co-director of the Center for Science & Law, he works at the intersection of neuroscience and the legal system, using new discoveries in neuroscience to inform lawmaking. Eagleman also applies his research findings through ventures including Neosensory, a company he co-founded to develop sensory substitution devices. Known for making complex science accessible, he is the writer and presenter of the Emmy-nominated PBS series The Brain with David Eagleman, and he now shares valuable insights on his podcast, Inner Cosmos. A prolific author, his books include Incognito, Sum, and his latest release, Livewired.

David Eagleman’s upcoming events can be found here.

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