David Eagleman: What Neuroscience Reveals About Your Brain and Human Nature | Human Behavior | YAPClassic

Yeah, fam. I have really exciting news after almost eight years of running this podcast.

I finally was nominated for an I heart podcast award, which is like the Grammys of podcasting.

I'm heading up against the diary of the CEO acquired earn your leisure and all these amazing

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love the show and you want me to win, the best way to help me is to write me a five star

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I also was nominated for an indie pack award. It's the first ever independent podcast

and creator awards that's also happening in a couple weeks and I was nominated for the

best business and entrepreneurship podcast. I'm competing against ice coffee hour and

a number of awesome shows. And again, if you want to help me win these awards, please

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on our YouTube channel. I hope to take home these wins and thanks again for supporting

the show. What's up, yeah, fam. Today, we're unlocking the archives for a powerful app

classic that will completely change how you think about your brain and reality itself.

We're rewinding to my conversation with Dr. David Egoman, Stanford neuroscientist, best

selling author of live wired and a true pioneer in brain science. David has dedicated his

career to studying how our brains construct from our experience of the world, from time

perception and dreams to neuroplasticity and sensory expansion. In this episode, we explore

why time can feel like it slows down, why dreams may just be your brain's screensaver,

and how humans could one day develop entirely new senses through technology. This episode

was so cool. It totally changed the way that I see my own mind. And I know you're going

to love this one. So sit back, open your mind and enjoy this fascinating chat with Dr.

David Egoman. Welcome to Young and Profiting Podcast, David.

Thank you. It's so great to be here.

I'm super excited. I love to learn about the brain and so do my listeners. We've had

a handful of episodes on the topic with renowned experts like Dr. Caroline Lee, Dr. Daniel

Aiman, Jim Quick, and a few others. But I feel like we've still only scratched the

surface on the topic. There's so much to learn about the brain. So David, let's open

up this conversation with some background on your childhood. You had an accident when

you were eight years old, where you fell 12 feet from a roof. So tell us about that accident

and how it influenced you to then learn about time perception years later.

Yeah. So I slipped off the roof and I ended up breaking my nose on the on the brick floor

below. But the thing that really struck me about it was that it seemed to take a long

time to fall from the roof. And so I was thinking about Alice in Wonderland as I was falling

and how this must have been what it was like for her. And you know, it felt like lots

of time as I felt. And later when I got to high school and I took physics and I learned

D equals one half a T squared, I realized, wow, the whole fall took place in 0.6 of

a second. And I couldn't reconcile that. I couldn't figure out how those, how it had

seemed to have taken so long. So I got really interesting perception. I grew up. I became

a neuroscientist and I've studied a lot about time perception in my laboratory. And

so one of the experiments I ended up doing then was dropping people from 150 foot tall

tower backwards and free fall. And they're caught by a net below. And I measured time perception

on the way down. And I made a series of discoveries there. Essentially the bottom line is we don't

actually see in slow motion. Instead, it's a trick of memory when you're in a life-threatening

situation. You're laying down really dense memories such that when you read it back out

and you say, what just happened? What just happened? It feels like it must have taken a very

long time. Yeah, that's super interesting. So essentially, it's the way that we're perceiving

time. It's not that time actually slows down. Our brain has evolved to perceive time in that way.

And it turns out that we're perce- the whole world is sort of like an illusion in that sense.

Can you talk to us about that? Well, that's right. I mean, there's a sense

of what you're never perceiving time directly. You're always living at least half a second

in the past. So it takes right photons hit your eyes or air compression waves hit your ears

or whatever, you know, I touch your toe. And those signals have to travel along nerves, which

are very slow. I mean, thousands of times slower than, you know, electronic signals travel

on your computer. So it takes time for this stuff to move around in the brain, get to different

places in the brain, and then it has to get stitched together with other senses. And by the time

all of this gets done and you're served up a conscious perception of what happened,

the events already long gone by that point and you're living in the past. So

and by the way, I've been pursuing a hypothesis that taller people live farther in the past

than shorter people because it takes longer to get all the signals there. So anyway,

yes, we're never perceiving time directly. And when you are thinking back on an accident situation,

you are, you know, you're probing your memory. You're saying what just happened a moment to go.

And so all you're ever perceiving is your conscious perception. Now, by the way, of course,

your body can do things much faster than that unconsciously. Like when, you know, your foot gets

halfway to the brake when you realize a car is pulling out of the driveway ahead of you.

That happens before you're consciously aware. You become aware by the time your foot's already

on the move. So your brain can do lots of things that way, you know, when you're hiking with

friends and you find yourself ducking out of the way of a tree branch that's swinging back towards

you before you even realize that you're ducking, you know, that kind of stuff can happen. But as far as

our conscious perception of the world, that's always an old story. So, so, so interesting. So,

I mentioned that I'm going to try to talk about the future in a lot of our conversation. And so,

you may not have the answer, but I'm curious. I'm sure you've thought about it. Humans hate to wait,

especially as, you know, we get more technologically advanced. You know, we don't even like to wait for

our files to download on the computer, right? So, do you think there's going to be some sort of a

future where we can manipulate time in that way, where we feel like we're at least not waiting?

I don't think so, actually, only because the human brain is enormous compared to, let's say,

of fly a house fly brain. The reason it's really hard to swat a fly is because the signals

are moving along the neurons in a fly brain exactly the same speed that they're moving with us. But

it can get across the brain and do everything it needs to and get to the motor system of the fly

really quickly because there's just not that much territory to cover. In contrast, the human brain

is enormous. You have to cross vast swathes of territory with these signals to get stuff to

happen. So, there's a sense in which we are always going to live in the past. Happily,

technologically, things have sped up a lot. It's always struck me so funny the way that we,

when something speeds up, we say, oh, I never realized I could save time there and then you can

never go back. But often, we don't realize there are ways that we could have saved time.

Like, for example, if somebody invents something where you can wash all your dishes or wash all your

clothes, you know, like in one second and then the thing's done and unloaded automatically,

you would say, oh, great, I'm never going back. But, you know, we do washing machines and laundry

machines now and it doesn't bother us too much. Yeah. So interesting. So, one concept that I think

is really important as we start to get a foundation of your work. And I think a lot of my listeners

are really beginners, right? I think a lot of the terms that we're going to talk about in this

episode are going to be brand new terms. And one of them is this concept of, um, well, right?

I'm well. I think that's how you pronounce it. Yeah. Yeah. That's it. It sounds German, right?

So, so basically it's this concept that our environment is perceived differently, like from human

to human, right? We all are perceiving the world similarly, but differently at the same time.

And so I'd love for you to explain that concept to us. Cool. Well, the easiest way to think about

the umu belt is that, you know, looking across the animal kingdom. So, you know, for a tick, for

example, um, all it can detect is temperature and body odor. That's that's it's only signaling

mechanisms. And so it's world is built out of that or for the blind echolocating bat. It's world

is built out of these, you know, um, echoing sound signals, you know, it lets out a chirp and it

gets an echo back. And that's how it figures out the three-dimensional structure of the cave it's

flying through or for the black coast knife fish. Um, it's just detecting it. It has electrical

fields around it. And it's detecting when that gets, you know, perturbed by let's say a rock or

some predator there. And those are the only signals that it has that it can pick up on from the world.

And so, uh, that's this concept of the umu belt, which is, um, you know, that's how it constructs

its reality. And what I've always found interesting is that presumably we all, you know, every animal

species accepts its reality as the entire reality out there because why would you stop to ever

question or think that maybe there's something beyond what what you can detect. Um, but what you

said is is also correct. And this is actually the topic of my next book, which is the difference

from human to human has been fascinating to me just as one example. Well, an easy example is

colorblindness, right? So let's say this person's colorblind, this person's not there actually seeing

the scene differently. And we now know that a small fraction of women have not just three types

of color photoreceptors in their eye, but four types, which means they're seeing colors the rest

of us aren't seeing. And um, or takes something like synesthesia, which is, um, where you, you know,

someone let's say looks at letters or numbers and it triggers a color experience or where they

taste something and it puts a feeling on their fingertips or they hear something and it causes a

visual for them. There are many forms of synesthesia, but the point is it's not a disease or a

disorder. It's just an alternative perceptual reality and different people, you know, like three

percent of the population has the anesthesia and others don't or something that I've been studying

a lot lately is, um, what's called hyperfantasia or at the other end of the spectrum, a

phantasia, which is how you visually image something. So if I ask you to imagine an ant crawling

on a tablecloth towards a jar of purple jelly, for some people that's like a movie in their head,

they can see the whole thing. Other people, it's just conceptual. There's no picture there at all.

So the first group is called hyperfantasia, the second group is called a phantasia. And it turns

out that across the population, everybody is smeared way out here. And so although we would assume

that everyone has mental imagery that's like ours, in fact, everybody's totally different with

this stuff. So this is, this is what I've been spending my time writing about lately is the

differences between humans, extremely fascinating to me. Yeah. And I feel like there's so many ways

we can go. I'm going to do my best to try to navigate this conversation in a way that I feel like

we'll really lock in the most important things for my listeners. So I feel like I do want to stick

on the topic of animals. I think this is really interesting. You eluded to it before that, you know,

as humans, we experience things that are normal to humans are five senses, but then some like a

dog has this amazing experience with their nose and smells, right? And all of these other animals

senses that we can't even imagine what that would be like. And so help us understand what are

the different senses out there that humans are essentially missing out on? Well, okay. So almost

all animals have a sense of smell that's so much better than ours. And I don't know if you saw

my Ted talk, but I did this example of, you know, really imagine that you are a dog. Imagine

you've got this long snout with 200 million scent receptors in it. And everything for you is about

smell and you've got these wet nostrils that attract and trap, you know, scent molecules and you've

got floppy ears to kick up more scent. Everything for you is about scent. And what it would be like if one

day you looked at your human master and you thought, what is it like to have the pitiful little

nose of the human, right? You might imagine erroneously that they're sort of this missing, you know,

black hole of smell. And we all realize we have this missing smell. But of course, we're all trapped

inside of our own umvelt. And so we think, oh, yeah, I've got a great umvelt. I'm detecting everything

out there. We don't realize typically that there's so much that we could be sensing. Now lots of

animals have magnetoreception, which means they're picking up on the magnetic field of the earth.

And that's how they navigate. That's how they know north and south. So insects, birds, they've all

got this. Um, turns out cows have good magnetoreception as well. Um, there's, you know, some

animals see in the infrared range. So rattlesnakes, for example, they have these heat pits and they're

picking up on infrared radiation. Others like honey bees see in ultraviolet range. Um, these are

things that are just totally invisible to us. We don't pick this up at all. And I've been studying

this for many years because I'm fascinated by the idea that there may be things that animals are

picking up on that we can't even get, we're not even going to know for the next, you know, 50,

a hundred years when someone realizes, oh my gosh, it turns out, you know, antelope are picking

up on this thing that we didn't realize was the thing. So, um, when, when you really study the

biology across the kingdom, you find that there's lots of information out there and we are extremely

limited. And I think this is a very counterintuitive thing to think that your biology actually

constrains your perception of reality. Yeah. It is mind blowing to think that like animals are

having a totally different experience than you are. And you could be, I could be sitting here,

there might be sounds that are going on that I don't even hear right now and you don't even hear

right now, which to me is just so crazy to even think about. We're so set on this is the way that

the world is that we never stop and actually think about these things. Oh, yeah. And in terms of,

by the way, sounds. Yeah, there are lots of animals that hear in what we call the infrasonic

range and, um, and the ultrasonic range. So, so, you know, we hear from the details no matter,

but, you know, from 20 hertz to 20,000 hertz. Don't worry if you don't know that, but, you know,

it's just that's the range of human hearing, but there are animals that are communicating way

above that and having conversations all the time, lots of insects and frogs and whatever.

And elephants are communicating at the ranges below that. They're feeling it with their feet in

the ground. They're feeling these bumps and so on and signals from other elephants and it's

totally invisible to us. Do all animals and humans have we evolved our senses based on our environment?

Yeah, that's exactly right. The reason that we see in this very narrow range that we call visible

light is precisely because that big ball of fire in the sky, the sun is optimally giving, you

photons that bounce off things on our planet's surface in that range. In other words, lots of

stuff doesn't get through the atmosphere, so it wouldn't be useful for us to pick up on many of

these other ranges. And so, yeah, we pick up on stuff that's super useful to us.

Yeah, and then I guess we just evolve and start to focus on certain senses that are more

helpful than others, which I guess is why humans really focus on vision and hearing, I think,

more than other senses. That's right. Now, it's not clear, for example, why we have lost so much

skill with smell, but everything is constrained. So, if you're getting better at this and you're

devoting more real estate in your brain towards vision, then you're going to lose some real estate

in smell, for example. And so, somehow when everything balances out, we've ended up exactly as we are.

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of Financial Services. So something else that I found really fascinating when I was studying

your work is this idea that we all have these different senses. All the animals have different

senses, but the material of our brain from my understanding is very similar, at least with primates

and mammals, right? To me, I thought that our brains would be totally different. I mean, humans

have took over the world, right? So we think we're really special, but in fact, our brain

is made up of the same thing. So talk to us about that. That's right. Well, both statements are

true. I mean, we are really special because our brains are running algorithms just slightly

differently. And I can talk about that why we have taken over the whole planet compared to all our

brethren in the animal kingdom. But yes, it's all made of the same stuff. If I showed you a brain

cell, a neuron from a human, a horse, a cow, an insect, a squid, you couldn't tell me what's,

I mean, they all look the same. They're doing exactly the same thing. It's just a cell that has

these things that these sort of roadways that come off of it. And we give them fancy names. And

they have, you know, but it's just a cell. It's just, you know, trafficking proteins around and

putting receptors there and spinning out chemicals. And it looks exactly the same across the animal

kingdom. And so all that we're doing, all mother nature is doing, I should say, is, you know,

just wiring this up in different ways. Yeah. So I think this is a great place to kind of get an

understanding of plasticity and live wiring and the difference between it. So you called your book

live wired. And you could have called it brain plasticity, but you called it live wired for a reason.

So talk to us about the distinction between plasticity and your concept of live wired.

Yeah. Brain plasticity is what we term this in the field. And this just means, you know,

the ability of the brain to reconfigure itself. So neurons, the cells in the brain are spending their

whole lives, you know, plugging and unplugging and seeking and finding other places and changing

the strength of their connection with other neurons. Each neuron connects to about 10,000 other

other neurons. And this changeability is what we call plasticity. I call it live wired nowadays,

live wiring because plasticity feels to me just a bit like an outdated term. In the sense that

this was coined about a hundred years ago because people were impressed by plastic manufacturing.

And the idea with the material plastic is that you mold it into a shape and then it holds onto

that shape. And that's what's useful about plastic. So the analogy to the brain that people saw

was, oh, you know, you learn the name of your fifth grade teacher. And all these years later,

you still remember that name. So it's like the system, you know, got molded by the information

that came through. And it held on to that information. And so that, you know, stands is a very good

analogy. The only thing is with 86 billion neurons constantly changing every moment of your life,

reconfiguring, it seemed to me that plastic was maybe a little too milk toast to term for it.

So that's why I'm using the term live wired because what really opens up when we start studying

this in depth is an entirely new way to think about this and to build technologies moving forward.

And that's one of the things I'm going to be doing, speaking of the future of the brain,

is building live wired devices. So instead of being something like, you know, a phone which,

you know, becomes outdated and eventually the technology is not good enough and you just throw it

out because it's, you know, a layer of hardware with a layer of software on the top. What if you could

build something like a brain that is constantly reconfiguring and learning and getting better with time?

Yeah. So from my understanding, neurons are essentially fighting with each other for relevancy.

This is the framework that I put forward in the book. Is that the right way to think about the

brain actually is like a Darwinian competition where each neuron is fighting for its own survival.

And when you look at single cell organisms, they're spinning out chemicals as a defense mechanism.

And when you look at neurons in the brain, they're doing the same thing. It's just that we call those

neurotransmitters and we say, Oh, look, you're passing information along. But I don't think that was

the intention. I think it sells all fighting for survival. And in one of these, you know, amazing

bizarre biological, you know, results you get a human brain out of this. But yes, you know,

many of the neurons in your brain die. And what you get, you know, in your first two years of

development is this massive overgrowth of all these things growing like a garden that's going nuts.

And then from about the age of two onward, all you're doing is you're really pruning the garden.

You're taking things away. And cells all of your body actually have this way of committing suicide.

It's called apoptosis where, you know, it's not that they're dying because of injury or something

and releasing inflammatory chemicals. It's that they're saying, Okay, I'm done here. And they fold

up shop and they carefully killed themselves. And so this is a majorly important part of how

the brain develops. Yeah. And so we're born with a certain amount of neurons. They're making more

connections. And I'm trying to get more information about this because I want people to understand

like how senses work and why somebody who's blind, for example, can hear really well. And how

those neurons actually can be, I guess, reutilized for something else because neurons need to stay

relevant. Yeah. Okay. So that's exactly right. So it turns out that in the brain, no territory lies

follow. Everything is going to get used. And so we think about this area at the back of the head.

We think of that as the visual cortex. But yes, if you go blind, it's no longer the visual cortex.

It gets taken over by hearing, by touch, by memorization of words, by lots of things because it's

perfectly good territory. Now the territory I'm talking about is called the cortex, which is the

outer wrinkly bit of the brain. And the cortex is, we have more of it in relation to our body size

than anybody in the animal kingdom. This is sort of the magical stuff that makes this really good

at what we're doing. So it turns out that cortex is a one trick pony, which is to say,

it's not that this is fundamentally visual and that's fundamentally auditory and for touch and

for controlling the motor system. But instead, any of it can trade off with any other of it. And so

the really special thing with humans being live wired is that we drop into the world half-baked

and we absorb everything around us. That's how you absorb your language, your neighborhood,

your culture, your parents, your way of acting, your way of acting in the 21st century. In other

words, if you were born with exactly your DNA 1,000 years ago, you'd be a really different person.

If you were born 10,000 years ago, exactly you with the same DNA and you ended up in the world 10,000

years ago, you'd be totally different in terms of your cultural beliefs, whatever weird, you know,

animistic religion you believe in, whatever kind of thing is appropriate for you know,

burning people at the stake or whatever or how you hunt a lion or stuff like that. You would just

be a different kind of person. And this is because we, you know, we absorb the world around us and

this is what I flagged a little bit earlier. What separates us from our closest cousins and the

animal kingdom is that most animals are still dropping into the world essentially pre-programmed. So

if you drop in as a goat or an alligator, you essentially know, okay, here's how I, you know, eat,

mate, sleep, whatever. And that's it. And you're doing the same thing that goats did 10,000 years ago.

When you drop in as a human, you in your first several years essentially get to learn

everything that humans have discovered up until now. And then you springboard off the top of that.

And that's what has led to the success of our species. We've taken over every corner of the

planet. We've gotten off the planet. We've invented the internet and quantum computation and so on.

Precisely because we're, but we're not starting from square one every time, but we start from

where humans have already gotten. Yeah. I think this is such an important point. So essentially,

what you're saying is that we're born and you kind of use the analogy of a computer very often.

We're born with all these software packages that unpack at certain timelines. For example,

the puberty software package that impacts around 13 years old for everyone. But at the same time,

we're supposed to interact and be social animals and absorb information, right? So what happens

to people or children who don't get a chance to absorb information? Yeah. So happily these

examples are rare, but they're very heartbreaking, which is sometimes you find a child who's had such

neglect and abuse that they haven't had all the normal input. So mother nature is taking a gamble

when she drops a half baked brain into the world. She's assuming, okay, well, you should get all

the normal language and love and touch and interaction with other humans. And occasionally,

you'll find a child who's locked up by their parents and they're not talked to and they have

terrible cognitive development. They just don't develop correctly as in they can never get language.

They don't even know how to chew. They can't see very far. Yeah, it's just a half baked brain

that never gets cooked all the way. And they have real IQ deficits. It turns out there are these

things in brain development called critical periods. And one of those is if you don't get enough

exposure to language, lots of language in your first several years, you can never get language.

So often these children are rescued at some point and a whole horde of psychologists move in and

give them lots of love and lots of training and language and things like that. But it turns out

it's too late. You just can't even teach language at that point. And to me, like, you know, as somebody

who's not a brain scientist or anything like that, I thought that the brain was supposed to be

plastic, you know, this idea of plasticity. So is it true then that there's certain parts of the

brain that just cannot keep, I guess, changing or adapting plasticity diminishes with age. And it

doesn't do it smoothly. It does it with these sort of punctuated moments. So you've got, yeah,

these critical periods for lots of different things. So for example, learning language you have to

do in the first, let's say four or five years, if you're not exposed to language, you just can't get

it. But but but but other things like let's say accent. If you move to a new country before the

age of 13, you typically won't have any accent in, you know, in the new country. But if you move

after the age of 13, it's very difficult to to sonically morph into that culture, you'll always

retain an accent. So I use in the book an example of Mela Kunis and Arnold Schwarzenegger, both of

whom were born outside of America, but they, you know, Mela Kunis moved here when she was seven

from Ukraine. She'd never spoke in English before, but she doesn't have you can't tell that she

has any accent to her American English, but Arnold Schwarzenegger moved here when he was 20. And so

it was too late for him to get rid of his accent. So anyway, the point is there are many critical

windows that happen here with learning. That said, there are many things where you retain

plasticity your entire life. So for example, your body as controlled by your motor system and your

sensory system from your body, this is plastic your whole life. You can learn how to, you know,

kite board or parachute or do any you can learn all kinds of new stuff. Take up a pogo stick if you

want at any age, but things like your visual system that gets less and less plastic with time

because it says, okay, I got it. This is what the world looks like and it sort of hardens into place.

So interesting. So I'd love to get your breakdown of how it actually works to

here or see like what's the mechanics behind that and if you can go over your Mr. Potato Head

model. Yeah, well, so it turns out that we've got these sensors like our eyes, which are these two,

you know, spheres in the front of your skull that pick up on photons and they have chemical

reactions. They pick up on photons and they send electrical signals back into here into the darkness

of the brain and you've got your ears which are picking up on air compression waves and they have

it's a very sophisticated little machine and it breaks frequencies of sound down into different

areas and it sends spikes into the darkness of the brain and so on and it turns out that

I mean, this is the weird and wild part is that we sort of feel like, oh yeah, I'm just,

I'm just seeing the world. It's like I'm piping light into my head and I'm piping sound into my head

but that's not it at all. Your brain is locked in silence and darkness and all it has are these

billions of neurons sending electrical signals around and that leads to chemical signals and that's

it. And so all of this is a construction of the brain, what you're seeing, what you're hearing

and this is a very wild and deep thing to get your head wrapped around but anyway, that's just the

biological truth of it and so my Potato Head model that I proposed a little while ago was that

it actually doesn't matter how you get the information into the brain as long as you get it there,

you can send information through a very unusual channel and as long as the information gets there,

the brain will figure out what to do with it and so this was first shown actually at the end of

the 1800s where some experimenters took someone who was blind and they had a little photo detector

that would detect light and they turned that into patterns of vibration on the head and the person

could essentially come to see via patterns of vibration on their forehead and you know this is

this is so unusual to think about sight that way and then I'll mention in the 1969

another scientist put blind people into a modified dental chair which had this little grid on the back

and it would sort of poke you in the back in various ways and and he set up a video camera and

whatever the video camera was seeing you would feel that poked into your back so if it was a

face or a square or a coffee cup or a telephone you'd feel the shape of that poked into your back

and and blind people got really good at being able to see the world this way and so it turns out

it doesn't matter how you get the information in there the brain will say oh I got it that's

correlated with something out there that's useful and I'll figure out how to perceive it.

Hmm really really interesting stuff so I know that you've been using skin in a really unique way

and now you have a product or wristband where you're actually helping deaf people can you tell us

about that. Yeah so I got interested in my lab many years ago about this question of could we make

sensory substitution for people who are deaf could we feed in the information that would normally

going to the ears via a different channel and there are actually two hundred and twelve different

reasons you can go deaf genetically and and most of these are not you know something that you can

do anything about at the moment so so what I did first is I built a vest with vibratory motors on

it and the vest capture sound and turns that into patterns vibration on the skin so sound is

broken up from high to low frequency which is exactly what your inner ear is doing and then that's

going you know on your skin and up your spinal cord and into your brain and deaf people could learn

how to hear this way so I gave a talk on this at head and then and then I spun this alpha my lab

as a as a company called neocensory and we ended up shrinking the vest down to a wristband and the

wristband does the same thing it's capturing sound and it's turning that into patterns vibration

on the skin and deaf people can come to to understand the auditory world around them like oh that's

somebody calling my name that's the doorbell that's a baby crying it's a dog barking things like

that and and so we're on wrists all over the world now lots of deaf schools lots of individuals

wearing this and it's been so gratifying to take something that's a theoretical neuroscience

idea and move it all the way to you know product that's that people are using every day yeah it's

really awesome what you're doing and so I'd love to understand how long does it take for someone to

get these vibrations and then eventually have them mean something yeah so the answer is

it's a linear increase so people just get better and better each day so on day one we test people

after they've been wearing it for the first 10 minutes or so and they're slightly above chance

on being able to recognize certain sounds but then through time over the course of weeks they just

get better and better and better and the really wild part is that by about let's say four months

people will describe it as hearing so I'll say look when the dog barks and you feel vibrations on

your wrist do you think okay wait I just felt something what is that it must be something you know

maybe there's a dog out there so they say no I just hear the dog which sounds crazy except that's

what you're that's what's going on with your hearing you feel right now like you're just hearing

my voice out there even though it's all taking place in your head you've got spikes running around

and you think oh yeah that sounds like Eagleman's voice and then you attribute it to some source

outside of you but that's what it becomes when you're listening through the wristband

yeah and from my understanding this is called qualia right and it's

yeah qualia is the term we use for the private subjective experience we have of something for

example colors don't exist in the outside world there's just different wavelengths of

light of electromagnetic radiation and and but we perceive it as oh that's red that's green that's

you know fuchsia whatever and and that's that's a qualia that's a private subjective experience we

have of what's going on out there even though it's really just spikes in the dark so then would

you say that humans eventually could have a sixth or seventh sense that just feels natural to us

so that's what I've been working on for for a while now which is given that all these other animals

have other kinds of things they can pick up on what does it mean if we feed in that information

and the answer is yes we can absolutely have six cents maybe many more we don't have any idea yet

what the limit is on that but the idea is what can we pick up on you know computationally or with

any machine or whatever and then feed that into you so for example you know something I've been

very interested in is perceiving infrared light so you can set up we've you know set this up with

the wristband very inexpensively five bucks you set up these infrared millimeters they're called

they're you know just picking up on infrared light and you can walk around and feel the temperature

of things around you and you know I can as I'm walking through a parking lot I can feel which cars

have been parked there for a while versus which have just arrived in the last 20 minutes because

you know because the engine block is a totally different temperature but it's just something I know

as I'm walking through I'm just feeling that information where if I come across two chairs

I can tell which chair was more recently sat in because there's still a temperature signature on

and so on there's a million things about this that you know one can just come to perceive a new

sense but you can have much wackier things we've done we actually have 70 projects in in progress

if anybody's interested go to neosensory.com slash developers and you can see our blog of all

these different projects we have so you know stock market or or you know feeling social media

with your skin or you know firemen or blind people or people with prosthetics or you know there's

just there's a million different projects we have where we're feeding in new data streams and you

can come to to have a perception that one of the things we've been doing is for drone pilots where

you feel the pitch y'all roll heading an orientation of the drone on your skin so it's like you're

becoming one with the drone you're it's like you stretched your skin up there where the drone is

and pilots can become much better at flying drones this way in the fog and in the dark and in fact

right now I'm working with a couple of young engineers in in Ukraine to to implement this

um for their for their defense

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okay so I want to switch back to what we were talking about a little bit earlier when we were

talking about our senses or our neurons sort of fighting for their territory because I want to get

into the concept of dreaming I think it's super interesting and I want you to explain why we actually

dream so this is hypothesis that my student I came up with some years ago which is the fun if you go

blind as we mentioned earlier if you go blind that territory or visual cortex gets taken over by

neighboring kingdoms of data like hearing and touch but the surprise neuroscience is how fast

this can happen so some colleagues might have harvested this experiment where they took normally

cited people and they blindfolded them and they put them in the brain scanner and what they found

to their surprise is that after about an hour they could start seeing activity in the visual cortex

when you touch somebody or when you play a sound for them you're actually seeing the visual cortex

start responding to that and what that means is that this takeover process can start happening

really fast because essentially everything in the brain is wired up to everything else you know there's

these very long distance connections such that everything has you know roadways to get wherever it

needs to get and so somehow the this takeover starts after about an hour so what we realized was

given the rotation of the planet um you know this causes a real problem for the visual system because

you end up in the dark for half the cycle and and obviously the thing of interest here is evolutionary

time before we had lights which is just the last you know nanosecond of evolutionary time where we

had lights or even fire um most of most of our history it's been extremely dark at nighttime and

that means your visual system is disadvantaged during the night you can still hear and smell and

taste and touch during the night but you can't see and so we realized the problem is the visual

system needs some way of defending itself against takeover and that is what dreams are about

so every 90 minutes you've got these very ancient circuits in your midbrain that just blast

random activity just into your visual cortex that's the only place that's hitting is just primary

visual cortex and every 90 minutes just blast random activity in there and so dreaming is the

brain's way of defending the visual cortex against takeover it's essentially a screensaver

so um we we published this and we we studied 25 different species of primates and looked at how

plastic they are in other words you know um humans are extraordinarily you know adaptable and

plastic in their brains and that means they're at higher risk of the visual cortex getting taken

over whereas other primates like the gray mouse lemur it's called um it happens to be very let's

call it pre-programmed where it you know hits adolescents fast and there's had a walk fast

and we ends from its mother fast and all this stuff reproduces fast and um and and and so we looked

at how how much dreaming there is and it turns out humans have lots of dreaming to prevent takeover

to the visual cortex whereas other you know less flexible animals um have less dreaming because

they just don't need it as much yeah so so if I have this right basically our visual neurons are

being active at night and dreaming even though we're not actually seeing anything in our head those

same neurons are basically working so that they can keep their territory so that they can stay

relevant in the brain that's exactly right yeah it's so interesting and you say that you actually

hate dreaming and you feel like I've heard you say you think dreams are meaningless and you feel

like it's sticking your head in a night blender when you go to sleep so I'd like to understand

why are like why are dreams meaningless then because a lot of people make up these stories like I

can tell the future with my dreams and things like that but you say that's nonsense yeah it's just

random activity what what happens is you know the synapse is the connections that are hot during the

day are the ones when you blast random activity in there those you know tend to be the the stories

that could activate it so you know if I'm thinking about my you know my boss who said this to me

or I'm thinking about this big thing that I have to do tomorrow then it's likely that that's going

to come up in my dreams but but you know we all know dreams are just they're so weird in their

plot lines and because the brain is a natural storyteller we end up imposing narrative and by

the way when you wake up and you tell somebody else to your dream you're doing a whole nother layer

of imposing narrative on it because even just saying it out loud you have to sort of make things

make sense but but truthfully it's just random activity and it's kind of like a Rorschach blot if

you just look at some random blob of ink you know can you see things that you think are relevant to

your life and you say oh yeah that looks like yeah this is sort of a blob that's telling me that

I should go change careers and whatever we can do that with our dreams as well it's just random

activity and you can say yeah that you know I really thought of something here whatever but yes it's

all it's all random activity and what we do is we impose meaning on it yeah and I say

yes some of us do I mean I've done it I think a lot of people try to make dreams just like magical

experience right and I feel like so much of the human experience can be pretty silly in this way

so I'd love to talk about the intersection between you know science and religion you've

been studying the brain and I feel like you probably have a very unique perspective on the world

I mean it's parts about our brain and our life is still really mysterious right we don't really

know how consciousness exactly works still and so there is mystery and sort of magic to like

still because we don't understand everything but you know I'd love to understand what what you

feel about all this now my general feeling on it is the world is full of mystery the amount of

stuff we know in science and have written down in big fat textbooks is a tiny fraction of what's

going on out there actually I wrote an article in the discover magazine back in 2004 called

10 unsolved mysteries of neuroscience and they're still unsolved I mean we are in deep mysteries

all around us and yeah take consciousness I mean consciousness somehow you put together all

this physical stuff of the brain and you experience qualia as we talked about you know experience

pain and the beauty of a sunset and the taste of cinnamon and you know the smell of lemon pie and

all these things that we experience but we have no idea how to build pieces of art we can't build

you know with transistors a computer and say oh yeah it's enjoying this you know even though I'm

laughing at this YouTube video that I'm watching the computer presumably is just moving around zeros

and ones and not entertained by it but somehow our brains we we think we're just made of cells and yet

we are feeling so there's lots of mystery around us to my mind the best way to tackle these mysteries

is the scientific method and this is so new for humans I mean this is really just the last few

hundred years that we've kind of gotten this right essentially since the Renaissance about doing

science which is just it's nothing but a method of saying okay we're gonna lay out our hypotheses

on the table and we're gonna do careful experiments we're not gonna fool ourselves into

into believing something unless there's evidence that supports it and so to my mind that's

the way to tackle it now the issue is we have a world full of religions there are 2,000

different religions on this little planet that we're on and the part that's always struck me

is crazy is that people are willing to fight and die for their version of their religion there's

a real lack of intellectual humility there obviously if one religion were true we might expect

that it spreads around the world and everyone says oh yeah that one seems pretty right but obviously

they're all made up and and when you look at stuff like you know Judeo-Christian Islamic religion

you know it has this idea that the earth is 6,000 years old well you know I mean the Japanese

were making pottery 7,000 years ago and people were writing on caves 30,000 years ago and so on

so you'd have to explain how they got there before the I mean it's so it's so goofy this idea of like

Adam and Eve and creation and so on it's so clearly incorrect that there's absolutely no

reason to believe in in this religious story but I have felt that it's difficult to say given

the amount of mystery that we face to say okay well we've got this all figured out and so you

know it's it's a it's a cold universe and there's nothing but deterministic physics and so on

we just don't know enough to say that that may well be the case we just don't know enough to pretend

that science has it all figured out and so I call myself a possibility and that means

I'm interested in the possibility space in other words this is the scientific temperament

you're saying what could be going on here how how did we get here what is our purpose here if any

the what is what is happening around here and the best way to tackle that is with the tools of

science which means anything gets to be on the table at first and then we use the tools of science

to rule out particular things like that the earth is 6,000 years old

and we use the tools of science to open up new folds in the possibility space that we hadn't even

thought of before but but the idea is the scientific temperament always allows lots of hypotheses

on the table and then we gather evidence to weigh in favor of some of those and you know and

against others and and that's what I think we should be doing that's what I call a

postabilianism and I actually presented this in a TEDx talk many years ago and and I got hundreds

of emails right afterwards from people saying hey I think I'm a possibility in two and it became

this worldwide movement there were newspapers and articles that people sent me from India from Uganda

from whatever Facebook groups sprang up and and now 11 years after this original talk there's

so much activity about possibilityism and I'm so happy about this because I feel like there wasn't

a position that people could take if they happened to feel the way I did about this you know the only

thing that was available is to say okay either I'm religious and I believe what my parents and my

culture told me or I mean I'm a strict atheist on the other end of the spectrum where I think nothing

interesting is going on here there's nothing else in the universe to understand or you would

call yourself an agnostic which means I don't know that's all agnosticism means is not knowing

but possibility and possibilityism is a much more active thing of saying hey we're going to go out

and explore the possibility space and shine a flashlight around this and try to figure out what's

going on and I feel like this is so positive for mankind I feel like it could really help solve a

lot of the self-inflicted issues that we have as people yeah yeah to this day it's every time I see

religious conflict it just blows my mind I mean you know the whole history of Europe was really

to fight over the last 500 years was defined by fights between the Catholics and the Protestants

I don't mean fights I mean killing like murdering and you know it feels like you look at this

stuff and it's it's so goofy and yet this is the this is the history that we have been surrounded

with and still have to deal with in a lot of the world I feel like I think I'm I think I'm correct

and looking at the world now in 2022 and thinking okay we're we're maturing a bit at least much of

the world is maturing out of this idea of okay this particular ancient religion that I was taught

is the truth yeah but anyway I hope that's right let's talk about the feature a little bit I want

to talk about your your book live-wired right much of the world and how we view it is very much like

hardware and software and so I'd love to have you help us imagine what a feature could be like if

live-wired was put in the picture in addition to this hardware and software yeah yeah I mean

so this can be my next so I'm running three companies right now but this is going to be my next

one is called live-wired because I'm really interested in building this I mentioned this before I

just feel like the way we think about building all our technology now and the way that everything

is set up our factories are set up and our education system is set up is okay yeah you make a hard

word layer and then you put software on top of it and that's been a great idea and it's been

super successful but it's just not the way that biology ever does anything and biology can do

extraordinary things that that you know that computers cannot and as I mentioned earlier you

know computers are obsolescent from the day they come off the factory so I'm you know and I'm

very I'll give an example which is the Mars rover I can't remember the spirit of curiosity one

of them anyway you got up to Mars they did an extraordinary job rolled around the red planet and

you know saw lots of stuff but then it got its right front wheels stuck in the Martian soil

and it couldn't move out of there and it died okay contrast that with what happens when a wolf gets

its leg caught in a trap the wolf choose its leg off and then figures out how to walk on three legs

it's not that it was pre-programmed to walk on three legs just figures it out it figures out how

to make that happen because it is driven by you know motivations it wants to get to food to water

back to its pack and so on so just you know figures out how to run its body differently

and wouldn't it be great if we could build a billion dollar Mars rover if we're spending all

that money and effort on it if it could just you know saw off its wheel and then figure out how to

operate in a different way so this is the idea of live wiring and and it's still the case that

almost everything we program and the robots we build and the Mars Rovers we build are all totally

pre-programmed this is what your body looks like this is how you're going to operate it as opposed to

letting it operate like a human infant where it has to figure out its body I mean imagine building a

robot that flops around for years and eventually crawls and eventually learns how to walk that's

the kind of thing we need to do if we want it to be flexible and live wired and so I'm very

interested in the possibilities I think the the future is going to be much more biological than

the way we do it right now which is we build hardware machinery that is inflexible yeah and

so my next question for you is what's the difference between live wired and AI because from my

understanding AI is supposed to be self you know it learns and can adapt so I'd love to understand

the difference there yeah I mean the thing about AI can do very impressive things but it's still

not nearly as good as a kid you know a five year old five year old can walk into a room navigate a

very complex room you know between the couches and under the table and whatever can can find her

way to food and put food in her mouth can socially manipulate adults can do all these things AI

is really stupid in comparison to that it's very good it's extraordinarily good at for example image

recognition or categorization of things but it can only tackle problems that are discrete and

rule based so for example AI is great at chess and it go it's beat the world champions at that

but that's only because that's a constrained rule based system that doesn't have anything outside

of it and the real world is nothing like that and so by the way you know even though people often

think oh my gosh AI can do anything it's taking over everything you can't even do any sort of

you know strategy based video game where you're running around with a gun and you're having to do

strategies where I can't it can't do well at any of that stuff um so that's the the difference

is that a live wire child can figure out all kinds of things in the world AI can only do these very

basic things right now yeah and this makes me feel good because I think all of us are really

worried about AI we're we're told to get worried about it right we're sort of fed this so as

somebody who studies the brain do we have anything to worry about I mean eventually we eventually

might but certainly not right now certainly not right now I mean you can just you know turn the

computer off I mean there's a there's um yeah it's it's it's still doing what it is told as in hey

I want you to absorb a billion pictures of cows and horses and then get really good at being able

to to determine the difference between you so so what it does is it trains on a training set of

let's say billion images where it's labeled okay this is a cow this is a horse is a cow and then

it's it's extraordinarily good better than human at discriminating cows from horses but in real life

we don't have training sets with billions of examples um we don't have that lecture you have to

learn everything on the fly all animals do you have to learn the world on the fly and get good at it

and this is where we outshine AI um by a long way okay my last question to you on the future and

then we'll round out this interview is really about how you imagine mankind in the future in

terms of our brains in terms of maybe live wired materials tell us about how you imagine the

future knowing all that you know yeah it's gonna be pretty different um I mean for one thing we'll

be much better at um actually being able to measure what's going on in the brain so for example

you know right now our best technology is called functional magnetic resonance imaging FMRI

you stick somebody the brain scanner and you can tell sort of crudely where the activity is

happening in the brain and you know we make all kinds of theories and we do you know I've written

hundreds of papers on this topic but but the fact is it's a crude technology what we really need to

understand how the brain is working is to be able to see the activity in each one of the 86 billion

neurons in real time and they're each chattering along you know 10 to hundreds of spikes per second

we're nowhere near that kind of technology but eventually we will get there and that will generate

a completely different kind of understanding of how the brain actually works we're still missing

really most of how the brain is actually doing what it does and when we get to that point we'll be

able to read and write um you know from the brain into the brain and that's gonna change everything

right now the brain is really locked in this armored bunker plating of the skull and we can't

do much with it except for you know I can read your and I can try to read your intentions and you

mind by our words and by our behavior but it's pretty limited so there may be in the distant future

you know straight brain to brain communication which is a very different sort of bandwidth of

of communication um so that's one thing I think another thing is that we'll be experiencing completely

new senses it'll just be trivial for everybody to experience you know whatever infrared and

stock market data and uh what's going on on social media you know these things will just be

you know like like getting eyeglasses for a kid um we'll have all that um so I think we have more

in common with our ancestors of five thousand years ago then we have in common with our descendants

of a hundred years from now wow that is powerful awesome David well I end this show with two

questions that I ask everyone and then we do something fun at the end of the year with them so

you're right at the end with us um what is one actionable thing are young and profitors can do

today to become more profitable tomorrow seek novelty so the key is doing things that you're

not already good at because that's how you exercise the brain and build a stronger brain is by

doing things you have not done before okay so challenging your mind learning new things

and what is your secret to profiting in life relationships it's uh all about other people

the the brain has an extraordinary amount of its circuitry devoted to other people in making

models of them and understanding them and I think one of the key things in life especially now

during our polarized era is to really try standing in the shoes of other people especially people

that you're disagreeing with and try to understand the world from their point of view awesome

that's awesome you know that was one of the biggest themes this year is everybody was talking

about relationships so very cool David where can everybody learn more about you and everything

that you do um eagleman.com awesome well thank you so much for your time thanks great to be here