David Eagleman

So this was not an original idea for us, except to try this on the wrist. And it works equally as well.

For people who are blind, for example, there are a few different approaches to this. One is called the brain port, and that's where, for a blind person, they have a little camera on their glasses, and that gets turned into... little electrical stimulation on the tongue. So you're wearing this little electro-tactile grid on your tongue and it tastes like pop rocks sort of in your mouth.

Blind people get pretty good at this. They can navigate complex obstacle courses or throw a ball into a basket at a distance because they can come to see the world through their tongue, which if that sounds crazy to It's the same thing as seeing it through these two spheres that are embedded in your skull.

It's just capturing photons and information about them, figuring out where the edges are, and then shipping that back to the brain. The brain can figure that out. There's also a colleague of mine that makes an app called Voice. It uses the phone's camera and it turns that into soundscape. So if you're moving the camera around, you're hearing, you know, it sounds like a strange cacophony.

But it doesn't take long, even for you as a sighted person, to get used to this and say, oh, okay, I'm turning the visual world into sound. And it's starting to make sense when I pass over an edge or when I zoom into something, the pitch changes, the volume changes. There's all kinds of changes in the sound quality that tells you, oh yeah, now I'm going to close something. Now I'm getting far.

And here's what the world looks like in sound. Coming up after the break. There's really no shortage of theoretical ideas in neuroscience, but fundamentally, we don't have enough data.

What they're doing is they're putting electrodes into the brain to read from and talk to the neurons there.

That is correct. Everything we've been talking about so far with sensory substitution, that's a way of pushing information in and non-invasive. And what Neuralink is, you have to drill a hole in the head to get to the brain itself, but then you can do reading and writing invasively. That actually has been going on for 60 years now. The language of the brain is electrical stimulation.

And so with a little tiny wire, essentially, you can zap a neuron and make it pop off, or you can listen to when it's chattering along, going pa-pa-pa-pa-pa-pa-pa-pa. There's nothing actually new about what Neuralink is doing, except that they're making a one-ton robot that sews the electrodes into the brain. So it can do it smaller and tighter and faster than a neurosurgeon can.

And by the way, there are a lot of great companies doing this sort of thing with electrodes. As people get access to the brain, we're finally getting to a point, we're not there yet, but we're getting to a point where we'll finally be able to push theory forward. There's really no shortage of theoretical ideas in neuroscience.

But fundamentally, we don't have enough data because, as I mentioned, you've got these 86 billion neurons all doing their thing, and we have never measured what all these things are doing at the same time.

So we have technologies like functional magnetic resonance imaging, fMRI, which measures big blobby volumes of, ooh, there was some activity there and some activity there, but that doesn't tell us what's happening at the level of individual neurons. We can currently measure some individual neurons, but not many of them.

Be like if an alien asked one person in New York City, hey, what's going on here? And then tried to extrapolate to understand the entire economy of New York City and how that's all working. So I think we're finally getting closer to the point where we'll have real data about, wow, this is what

thousands or eventually hundreds of thousands or millions of neurons are actually doing in real time at the same moment. And then we'll be able to really get progress. I actually think the future is not in things like Neuralink, but the next level past that, which is nanorobotics.

This is all theoretical right now, but I don't think this is more than 20, 30 years off, where you do three-dimensional printing, atomically precise, you make molecular robots, Hundreds of millions of these. And then you put them in a capsule and you swallow the capsule. And these little robots swim around and they go into your neurons, these cells in your brain.

And from there, they can send out little signals saying, hey, this neuron just fired. And once we have that sort of thing, then we can say non-invasively, here's what all these neurons are doing at the same time. And then we'll really understand the brain.

Plasticity is the term used in the field because the great neuroscientist or psychologist actually, William James, coined the term because he was impressed with the way that plastic gets manufactured, where you mold it into a shape and it holds onto that shape. And he thought that's kind of like what the brain does. The great trick that mother nature figured out

What we have now is EEG, electroencephalography. And there are several really good companies like Muse and Emotive that have come out with at-home methods. You just strap this thing on your head and you can measure what's going on with your brainwaves. The problem is that brainwaves are still pretty distant from the activity of 86 billion chattering neurons.

An analogy would be if you went to your favorite baseball stadium and you attached... a few microphones to the outside of the stadium and you listened to a baseball game, but all you could hear with these microphones is occasionally the crack of the bat and the roar of the crowd. And then your job is to reconstruct what baseball is just from these few little signals you're getting.

So I'm afraid it's still a pretty crude technology.

The fact is, if you felt good at some moment in your life and you sat around and tried to reproduce that, I think you'd do just as well thinking about that moment and trying to put yourself in that state rather than trying to match a squiggly line.

I think that's right. I mean, there's also this very deep question about what kind of feedback is useful for you. Most of the action in your brain is happening unconsciously. It's happening well below the surface of your awareness or your ability to access it. And the fact is that your brain works much better that way. Do you play tennis, for example? Not well. Or golf? Golf I play. Okay, good.

So if I ask you, hey, Stephen, tell me exactly how you swing that golf club. The more you start thinking about it, the worse you're going to be at it. Because consciousness, when it starts poking around in areas that it doesn't belong, it's only going to make things worse. And so it is an interesting question. about the kind of things that we want to be more conscious of.

I'm trying some of these experiments now, actually using my wristband, wearing EEG and getting a summarized feedback on the wrist. So I don't have to stare at a screen, but as I'm walking around during the day, I have a sense of what's going on with this. Or with the smartwatch, having a sense of what's going on with my physiology.

was to drop us into the world half-baked. If you look at the way an alligator drops into the world, it essentially is pre-programmed. It eats, mates, sleeps, does whatever it's doing. But we spend our first several years absorbing the world around us based on our neighborhood and our moment in time and our culture and our friends and our universities.

I'm not sure yet whether it's useful or whether those things are unconscious because... Mother Nature figured out a long time ago that it's just as well if it remains unconscious. One thing I'm doing, which is just a wacky experiment, just to try it. The smartwatch is measuring all these things.

We have that data going out, but the key is you have someone else wear the wristband, like your spouse wear the smartwatch, and you're feeling her physiology. And I'm trying to figure out, is this useful to be tapped into someone else's physiology? I don't know if this is good or bad for marriages. What a nightmare.

But I'm just trying to really get at this question of these unconscious signals that we experience. Is it better if they're exposed or better to not expose them? What have you found empirically? Empirically, what I found is that married couples don't want to wear it.

In my book, Incognito, the way I cast the whole thing is that the right way to think about the brain is like a team of rivals. You know, Lincoln, when he set up his presidential cabinet, he set up several rivals in it and they were all functioning as a team. That's really what's going on under the hood in your head is you've got all these drives that want different things all the time. So

If I put a slice of chocolate cake in front of you, Steven, part of your brain says, oh, that's a good energy source. Let's eat it. Part of your brain says, no, don't eat it. It'll make me overweight. Part of your brain says, okay, I'll eat it, but I'll go to the gym tonight. And the question is, who is talking with whom here? It's all you, but it's different parts of you.

All these drives are constantly arguing it out. It's, by the way, generating activity in the same parts of the brain as listening and speaking that you would normally do. It's just internal before anything comes out.

We absorb all of that such that we can then springboard off of that and create our own things. There are many things that are essentially pre-programmed in us. But we are incredibly flexible. And that is the key about live wiring. When I ask you to think of the name of your fifth grade teacher, you might be able to pull that up, even though it's been years since you saw that fifth grade teacher.

Well, this might be a good reason for you to keep pursuing possible ways to tap into your brain data. And by the way, it turns out that the internal voice is on a big spectrum across the population, which is to say some people like you have a very loud internal radio. I happen to be at the other end of the spectrum where I have no internal radio at all. I never hear anything in my head.

That's called anendophagia. But everyone is somewhere along this spectrum. One of the points that I've always really concentrated on in neuroscience is what are the actual differences between people traditionally that's been looked at in terms of disease states? But the question is, from person to person who are in the normal part of the distribution, what are the differences between us?

It turns out those are manifold. So take something like how clearly you visualize when you imagine something. So if I ask you to imagine a dog running across a flowery meadow towards a cat, you might have something like a movie in your head. Other people have no image at all. They understand it conceptually, but they don't have any image in their head.

And it turns out when you carefully study this, the whole population is smeared across the spectrum. So our internal lives from person to person can be quite different.

So I've spent about 25 years now studying synesthesia, and that has to do with some percentage of the population has a mixture of the senses. They might look at letters on a page, and that triggers a color experience for them, where they hear music and that causes them to see some visual, or they... put some taste in their mouth and it causes them to have a feeling on their fingertips.

There are dozens and dozens of forms of synesthesia, but what they all have to do with is a cross blending of things that are normally separate in the rest of the population. And what share of the population has these patterns? So it's about 3% of the population that has colored letters or colored weekdays or months or numbers. It's big. It's interesting. I wouldn't have thought it was so big.

The crazy part is that if you have synesthesia, it probably has never struck you that 97% of the population does not see the world the way that you see it. Everyone's got their own story going on inside, and it's rare that we stop to consider the possibility that other people do not have the same reality that we do. And what's going on in the brain?

In the case of synesthesia, it's just a little bit of crosstalk between two areas that in the rest of the population tend to be separate but neighboring. So it's like porous borders between two countries. They just get a little bit of data leakage, and that's what causes them to have a joint sensation of something.

I suspect it's the latter, which is to say everyone loves pointing out synesthetic musicians, but no one has done a study on how many deep sea divers have synesthesia or how many accountants have synesthesia. And so we don't really know if it's disproportionate among musicians.

So typically, as you said, it's totally idiosyncratic. Each synesthete has... his or her own colors for letters. So my A might be yellow, your A is purple, and so on. And then what happened is, with two colleagues of mine at Stanford, we found in this database of tens of thousands of synesthetes that I've collected over the years, we found that starting in the late 60s,

But somehow there was a change made in your brain and that stayed in place. You've got 86 books. billion neurons. Each neuron is as complicated as a city. This entire forest of neurons, every moment of your life is changing. It's reconfiguring, it's strengthening connections here and there. It's actually unplugging over here and replugging over there.

there was some percentage of synesthetes who happened to share exactly the same colors. These synesthetes were in different locations, but they all had the same thing. And then that percentage rose to about 15% in the mid-70s.

What we had always suspected is that maybe there was some imprinting that happens, which is to say, there's a quilt in your grandmother's house that has a red A and a yellow B and a purple C and so on. But, you know, everyone has different things that they grew up with as little kids. And so it was strange that this was going on.

The punchline is that we realized that this is the colors of the Fisher-Price magnet set on the refrigerators that were popular during the 70s and 80s and then essentially died out.

And so it turns out that when I look across all these tens of thousands of synesthetes, it's just those people who were kids in the late 60s and 70s and 80s that imprinted on the Fisher-Price magnet set, and that's their synesthesia. And then as its popularity died out, there aren't any more who have that particular pattern.

It does increasingly, yes. How should we teach? I think the next generation is going to be smarter than we are simply because of the broadness of the diet that they can consume. Whenever they're curious about something, they jump on the internet, they get the answer straight away or from Alexa or from ChatGPT. They just get the answers and that is massively useful for a few reasons. One is that

When you are curious about something, you have the right cocktail of neurotransmitters present to make that information stick. So if you get the answer to something in the context of your curiosity, then it's going to stay with you. Whereas you and I grew up in an era where we had lots of just-in-case information. What do you mean by that?

Oh, you know, like just in case you ever need to know that the Battle of Hastings happened in 1066, here you go.

That's exactly it. And so, look, you know, for all of us with kids, I know you've got kids, I've got kids, and we feel like, oh, my kid's on YouTube and wasting time. There's a lot of amazing resources and things that they learn on YouTube or even on TikTok, anywhere. There's lots of garbage, of course, but it's better than what we grew up with.

When you and I wanted to know something, we would ask our mothers to drive us down to the library and we would thumb through the card catalog and hope there was something on it there that wasn't too outdated.

My mother was a biology teacher and my father was a psychiatrist. And so they had all kinds of good information. I'm just super optimistic about the next generation of kids. Now, as far as how we teach, things got complicated with the advent of Google. And now it's twice as complicated with ChatGPT. Happily, we already learned these lessons 20 years ago.

And so that's why I've started to feel that the term plasticity is maybe underreporting what's going on. And so that's why I may have the term live wiring.

What we need to do is just change the way that we ask questions of students. We can no longer... Just assume that fill in the blank or even just writing a paper on something is the optimal way to have them learn something. But instead, they need to do interactive projects like run little experiments with each other.

And, you know, the kind of thing that you and I both love to do in our careers, which is, OK, go out and find this data and run this experiment and see what happens here. That's the kind of opportunities that kids will have now.

Like every curious person trying to figure out what we're doing here, what's going on, it just feels like there are two stories. Either there's some religion story, or there's the story of strict atheism, which I tend to agree with. But it tends to come with this thing of, look, we've got it all figured out. There's nothing more to ask here.

There is a middle position, which people call agnosticism. But usually that means, I don't know, I'm not committing to one thing or the other. I got interested in defining this new thing that I call possibilianism, which is, to try to go out there and do what a scientist does, which is an active exploration of the possibility space. What the heck is going on here?

We live in such a big and mysterious cosmos. Everything about our existence is sort of weird. Obviously, the whole Judeo-Christian tradition, that's one little point in that possibility space, or the possibility that there's absolutely nothing and we're just atoms and we die. But there's lots of other possibilities. And so I'm not willing to commit to one team or the other evidence.

So that's why I call myself a Possibilian.

How do you describe the book to people? I call it literary fiction. It's 40 short stories that are all mutually exclusive. They're all pretty funny, I would like to think, but they're also kind of gut-wrenching. And what I'm doing is shining the flashlight around the possibility space.

None of them are meant to be taken seriously, but what the exercise of having 40 completely different stories gives gives us is a sense of, wow, actually, there's a lot that we don't know here. In some of the stories, God is a female. In some stories, God is a married couple. In some stories, God is a species of dim-witted creatures.

In one story, God is actually the size of a bacterium and doesn't know that we exist. And in lots of stories, there's no God at all. That book is something I wrote over the course of seven years and became an international bestseller. It's really had a life to it that I wouldn't have ever guessed.

Some, actually, I chose because, among other things, that's the title story. In the afterlife, you relive your life, but all the moments that share a quality are grouped together. So you spend... three months waiting in line and you spend 900 hours sitting on the toilet and you spend 30 years sleeping. All in a row. Exactly.

It is organized around the senses, but the interesting thing is that the cortex, this wrinkly outer bit, is actually a one-trick pony. It doesn't matter what you plug in. It'll say, okay, got it. I'll just wrap myself around that data and figure out what to do with that data.

And this amount of time looking for lost items and this amount of time realizing you've forgotten someone's name and this amount of time falling and so on. Part of why I used the title Sum is because of the sum of events in your life like that. Part of it was because Cochito Ergo Sum. So it ended up just being the perfect title for me, even if it did lose a couple of readers there. Yeah.

Essentially, these artificial neural networks took off from a very simplified version of the brain, which is, hey, look, you've got units and they're connected. And what if we can change the strength between these connections? And in a very short time, that has now become this thing that has read everything ever written on the planet and can give extraordinary answers.

But it's not yet the brain or anything like it. It's just taking the very first idea about the brain and running with it. What a large language model does not have is an internal model of the world. It's just acting as a statistical parrot. It's saying, okay, given these words, what is the next word most likely to be given everything that I've ever read on the planet?

And so it's really good at that, but it has no model of the world, no physical model. And so things that a six-year-old can answer, it is stuck on. Now, this is not a criticism of it in the sense that it can do all kinds of amazing stuff and it's going to change the world, but it's not the brain yet. And there's still plenty of work to be done to get something that actually acts like the brain.

I suspect so, because there are 8.2 billion of us who have this functioning in our brains. And as far as we can tell, we're just made of physical stuff. We're just very sophisticated algorithms. And it's just a matter of cracking what that algorithm is.

The big textbook that we have in our field is called Principles of Neuroscience, and it's about 900 pages. And it's not actually principles. It's just a data dump of all this crazy stuff we know. And in 100 years, I expect it'll be like 90 pages.

It turns out that in almost everybody, you have functioning eyeballs that plug into the back of the head, and so we end up calling the back part of the brain the visual cortex. We call this part the auditory cortex, and this the somatosensory cortex that takes in information from the body and so on.

We'll have things where we put big theoretical frameworks together and we say, ah, okay, look, all this other stuff, these are just expressions of this basic principle that we have now figured out. Do you pay much attention to behavioral economics? Yes, I do. What do you think of it? Oh, it's great. And that's probably the direction that a lot of fields will go is how do humans actually behave?

One of the big things that I find most interesting about behavioral economics comes back to this issue about the team of rivals. When people measure in the brain how we actually make decisions about whatever, There are totally separable networks going on. Some networks care about the valuation of something, the price point.

You have totally other networks that care about the anticipated emotional experience about something. You have other networks that care about the social context, like what do my friends think about this? You have mechanisms that care about short-term gratification. You have other mechanisms that are thinking about the long-term, what kind of person do I want to be?

All these things are battling it out under the hood. It's like the three stooges sticking each other in the eye and wrestling each other's arms and stuff. But what's fascinating is when you're standing in the grocery store aisle trying to decide which flavor of ice cream you're going to buy, you don't know about these raging battles happening under the hood.

You just stand there for a while and then you say, okay, I'll grab this one over here.

Oh, gosh, no. And the reason is because we've got all these billions of brains running around. What that tells us is it has to be pretty simple in principle. You got 19,000 genes. That's all you've got. Something about it has to be as simple as falling off a log for it to work out very well so often, billions of times.

So what you learned back in high school or college is correct most of the time, but what it overlooks is the fact that the brain is so flexible. If a person goes blind or is born blind, That part of the brain that we're calling the visual cortex, that gets taken over by hearing, by touch, by other things. And so it's no longer a visual cortex.

I do now.

The same neurons that are there are now doing a totally different job.

Turns out the kid will be just fine. You can be born without half the brain or you can do what's called a hemispherectomy, which happens to children who have something called Rasmussen's encephalitis, which is a form of epilepsy that spreads from one hemisphere to the other. The surgical intervention for that is to remove half the brain.

You can just imagine as a parent the horror you would feel if your child had to go in for something like that. But you know what? Kid's just fine. I can't take my laptop and rip out half the motherboard and expect it to still function. But with a brain, with a live wired system, it'll work.

So it turns out that blind people can make all kinds of sounds, either with their mouth, like clicking... or the tip of their cane, or snapping their fingers, anything like this, and they can get really good at determining what is coming back as echoes and figure out, oh, okay, this is an open space in front of me. Here, there's something in front of me.

It's probably a parked car, and oh, there's a little gap between two parked cars here, so I can go in here. The key is the visual part of the brain is no longer being used because for whatever reason, there's no information coming down those pipelines anymore. So that part of the brain is taken over by audition, by hearing and by touch and other things.

What happens is that the blind person becomes really good at these other things because they've just devoted more real estate to it. And as a result, they can pick up on all kinds of cues that would be very difficult for me and you because our hearing just isn't that good.

That is exactly right. This was my colleagues at Harvard. They did this over the course of five days. They demonstrated that people could get really good at, there are actually a number of studies like this. They can get really good at reading Braille. They can do things like echolocation. And the speed of it was sort of the surprise.

But the real surprise for me came along when they blindfolded people tightly and put them in the brain scanner and they were making sounds or touching the hand. And they were starting to see activity in the visual cortex after 60 minutes of being blind.

REM sleep is rapid eye movement sleep. We have this every night, about every 90 minutes, and that's when you dream. So if you wake someone up when their eyes are moving rapidly and you say, hey, what are you thinking about? They'll say, well, I was just riding a camel across a meadow. But if you wake them up at other parts of their sleep, they typically won't have anything going on.

So that's how we know we dream during REM sleep. But here's the key. My student and I realized that at nighttime, when the planet rotates, We spend half our time in darkness and obviously we're very used to this electricity blessed world, but think about this in historical time over the course of hundreds of millions of years, it's really dark. I mean, half the time you are in blackness.

Now you can still hear and touch and taste and smell in the dark, But the visual system is at a disadvantage whenever the planet rotates into darkness. And so given the rapidity with which other systems can encroach on that, what we realized is it needs a way of defending itself against takeover every single night. And that's what dreams are about.

So what happens is you have these midbrain mechanisms that simply blast random activity into the visual cortex instantly. every 90 minutes during the night. And when you get activity in the visual cortex, you say, oh, I'm seeing things. And because the brain is a storyteller, you can't activate all the stuff without feeling like there's a whole story going on there.

But the fascinating thing is when you look at the circuitry carefully, it's super specific, much more specific than almost anything else in the brain. It's only hitting the primary visual cortex and nothing else. And so that led us to a completely new theory about dreams. We studied 25 different species of primates, and we looked at the amount of REM sleep they have every night.

And we also looked at how plastic they are as a species. It turns out that the amount of dream sleep that a creature has exactly correlates with how plastic they are, which is to say, if your visual system is in danger of getting taken over because your brain is very flexible, then you have to have more dream sleep.

And by the way, when you look at human infants, they have tons of dream sleep at the beginning when their brains are very plastic. And as they age, the amount of dream sleep goes down.

At the moment, there are 19 papers that have cited this and discussed this. And I think it's right. I mean, look, everything can be wrong. Everything is provisional. But it's the single theory that is quantitative. It's the single theory about dreams that says not only here is a idea for why we dream, but we can compare across species and the predictions match exactly. No one would have...

suspected that you'd see a relationship between, you know, how long it takes you to walk or reach adolescence and how much dream sleep you have. But it turns out that is spot on.

Given that all the data running around in the brain is just data and the brain doesn't know where it came from, all it knows is, oh, here are electrical spikes, and it tries to figure out what to do with it. I got really interested in this idea of sensory substitution, which is, can you push information into the brain via an unusual channel?

Originally, we built a vest that was covered with vibratory motors. and we captured sound for people who are deaf. So the vest captures sound, breaks it up from high to low frequency, and you're feeling the sound on your torso. By the way, this is exactly what the inner ear does. It breaks up sound from high to low frequency and ships that off to the brain.

So we're just transferring the inner ear to the skin of the torso, and it worked. People who are deaf could come to hear the world that way. So I spun this out of my lab as a company, Neosensory, and we shrunk the vest down to a wristband, and we're on wrists of deaf people all over the world. The other alternative for somebody who's deaf is a cochlear implant, an invasive surgery.

This is much cheaper and does as good a job.

It's actually just vibratory motors. So it's just like the buzzer in your cell phone, but we have a string of these buzzers all along your wrist. And we're actually taking advantage of an illusion, which is if I have two motors next to each other and I stimulate them both, you will feel one virtual point right in between. Hmm.

The human brain is about three pounds. It's locked in silence and darkness. It has no idea where the information is coming from because everything is just electrical spikes and also chemical releases as a result of those spikes. And so what you have in there is this giant symphony of electrical activity going on, and its job is to create a model of the outside world.

And as I change the strength of those two motors relative to each other, I can move that point around. So we're actually stimulating 128 virtual points along the wrist.

Great question. It started off where we were doing a lot of training on people. And what we realized is it's all the same if we just let it be organic. The key is we just encourage people, be in the world. And that's it.

You see the dog's mouth moving and you feel the barking on your wrist, or you close the door and you feel that on your wrist, or you say something, you know, most deaf people can speak and they know what their motor output is and they're feeling the input.

And by the way, that's how you learned how to use your ears too. You know, when you're a baby, you're watching your mother's mouth move and you're hearing data coming in your ears and you clap your hands together and you hear something in your ears. It's the same idea. You're just training up correlations in the brain about, oh, this visual thing seems to always go with that auditory stimulus.

For the first few months, you're hearing it on your wrist. You can get pretty good at these correlations. But then after about six months, if I ask somebody, when the dog barks, do you feel something on your wrist? And you think, okay, what was that? That must have been a dog bark. And then you look for the dog. And they say, no, I just... hear the dog out there.

And that sounds so crazy, but remember, that's what your ears are doing. Your ears are capturing vibrations of the eardrum that moves through the middle ear to the inner ear, breaks up to different frequencies, goes off to your brain, goes to your auditory cord. It's this giant pathway of things. And yet, even though you're hearing my voice right now inside your head, you think I'm somewhere else.

And that's exactly what happens irrespective of how you feed the data in.

So tinnitus is a ringing in the ears. It's like beep. And about 15% of the population has this. And for some people, it's really, really bad. It turns out there is a mechanism for helping with tinnitus, which has to do with playing tones and then matching that with music. Stimulation on the skin. People wear the wristband. It's exactly the same wristband, but we have the phone play tones.

And you're feeling that all over your wrist. And you just do that for 10 minutes a day. And it drives down the tinnitus. Now, why does that work? There are various theories on this, but I think the simplest version is that...

your brain is figuring out, okay, real sounds always cause this correlating vibration on my wrist, but a fake sound, beep, you know, this thing in my head, that doesn't have any verification on the wrist. And so that must not be a real sound.

So because of issues of brain plasticity, the brain just reduces the strength of the tinnitus because it learns that it's not getting any confirmation that that's a real world sound. Now, how did you figure out that this bracelet could be used for this? This was discovered by a woman named Susan Shore, who's a researcher who discovered this about a decade ago.

She was using electrical shocks on the tongue. And there's actually another company that spun out called Lanier that does this with sounds in the ear and shocks on the tongue. They had an argument that they think it had to be touched from the head and the neck. And I didn't buy that at all. And that's why I tried that with the wristband.

The conscious brain is a broom closet in the mansion of the brain with very little access to what's going on. There may be free will, but it's going to be a small player if it's there.

So the information that you would go out into the world to seek, the mission that you run, depends on who's ascendant at that moment. That's for sure. Okay, fine.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. By which I mean, you've got all these, you know, all these, let's call them personalities under the hood. You know, it's interesting because I think I, maybe I dial it back one step from personality. You've got different neural networks that want different things and we can measure these. Just give an example, which is,

You know, when you're making a financial decision about what you're going to buy, you have certain networks that care about valuation. They care about the price point. And they're thinking, okay, how much is that worth? How much is that worth? Why? So on. You have completely separate networks in front of the lobe that care about the price. predicted emotional experience.

Let's say you're looking at two restaurants that you're trying to choose between. So you're making a simulation of what you see. Oh, that's going to be delicious and good. That one's not going to be so good. You've got other networks that care about the social context. As in, what do my friends think of this? Is this cool or not so cool? All these things, you've got this and more.

They're all battling it out under the hood. Yeah. And they're all trying to steer the ship of state. And when you make a decision... it's because of the vote of the neural parliament. So what's interesting, I do want to get at this because

Your view of a collection of personalities where one of them is dominant and my view of a team of rivals is slightly different in this way, which is that, you know, there's this battle going on and you reach these sort of consensus things, just like in a parliament where different groups will collaborate and coordinate and say, okay, look, you know, two out of three think this and so we're going to go for that restaurant.

Yeah, I think that's exactly right.

Almost.

Yeah, great. I mean, the thing is, when you look across the animal kingdom, you find these rivaling networks everywhere. So just as an example, you take a mouse, you put it in a maze, and you put cheese at the end, and you can put a little harness on the mouse and measure how much he's pulling towards the cheese.

Then what you can do is switch it where instead of a piece of cheese, you have an electrical shock at the end. and you can put the harness on and measure how hard he pulls away from the electrical shock.

Now what you do is you put a piece of cheese and an electrical shock at the end of the thing, and the poor little mouse gets stuck halfway and turns and turns and turns at exactly the place where the two vectors cancel out, which is to say he's running both networks. He gets the cheese and avoids the shock, and he gets stuck there in the middle. You see this across animals.

The approach avoidance conflict. Yeah, exactly. It's the conflict part. Okay, take another example. The stickleback is a bird that will attack things that are red. And if you give it something, what's that? Fish. Oh, fish, right. Yeah. No, wait. Stickleback? Stickleback gull. Wait, what's the? Oh, it's a bird. It's a gull? It's a bird, yeah. Okay, because there's a stickleback fish too. Okay.

Yeah, this is a bird. I'm 99% sure I got the name right. Stickleback gull. Okay, okay. Okay, it'll attack things that are red. It will sit on anything that's egg-shaped. It'll sit on it. So if you put a red dot on an egg, it'll both sit on it and attack it at the same time. Okay, what these represent are rivaling networks, right?

Okay, here's where I think the role of consciousness is, is in mediating this. And this is what we've gotten better and better at. And so when we have rivaling networks in a novel context... Well, that would be a novel context, right?

And now here's the thing, rats and cats have cortex, but what we have that they are not so good at is the ability to mediate well, such that we don't get stuck in the middle of the maze, but we can make a decision about, we can actually weigh in and say, okay, you know what? I'm not going to get stuck with these two networks. I'm going to decide on something.

This is what I think consciousness is about. It's the higher level abstraction that allows you to say, okay, look, This isn't something that's automated. This is, you know, this is a new situation I'm in. I don't know what to do here. And then the CEO, you know, gets called up. And yeah, there's like a large, you take a large company, the CEO can't possibly know what's happening in the company.

There's, you know, 100,000 employees, right? Yeah. The CEO's job fundamentally is to wait for the phone to ring and say, hey, there's trouble here. There's something going on that we don't know what to do. The CEO makes a decision. And also, of course, to do future planning. Yes. Consciousness is essentially about that.

Yeah, that's right. That's right. And so I think what I suggested in Incognito is that maybe we can look at the way that animals resolve conflict or don't, like the poor rat that gets stuck in the middle, and we can use that as at least a rough metric for the degree of consciousness that an animal has. Because the assertion there is that...

You know, consciousness allows you to mediate these things and figure out a path forward there.

Yeah. The difficulty with the consciousness question, of course, as we know, is there's no single spot in the brain that is consciousness. And so when I think about rivaling networks, I tend to think about them rivaling directly with one another. You're, of course, totally correct that For example, visual attention can amplify certain things.

It's like coming from visual cortex, you can pay auditory attention to something or something like that.

Exactly, but I have to confess that we just don't know what... What consciousness is, where does consciousness live in that? I mean, we can talk about visual attention, auditory attention, and so on, but where's this? It's not like an extra bit that just pays attention consciously. So that's still a bit of a mystery. Yeah, yeah.

Yeah. Well, what it's for, of course, is what you said at the beginning, which is the way that we go on missions into the world. You know, if I'm looking for the red object, then I find the red object. If I'm looking for the thing that looks like a broom, then I find that in the crowded space and so on. So visual attention is what allows us to parse the world

in a way that's aligned with our mission, that what we're trying to answer in that moment.

I did. Yep, it's on brain plasticity, which is really my favorite topic. It's about how brains absorb the world around them and adapt to them. And the interesting part about this is that we are the only species that is

That's exactly right. So the unconscious brain, which is most of what's happening... It's all about speed and efficiency. So if you look at, for example, this study has been done with playing Tetris. So you take a bunch of people, male and female, of course, left and right-handed, and you teach them to play Tetris.

So when they're first learning, they're amateurs, their brain is on fire with activity as measured functional magnetic resonance imaging. So you're measuring their brains. After they become good at it, the activity shrinks and shrinks. Right. It's less and less. I did this. I competed against this 10-year-old world champion cup stacker. So he takes these cups and stacks them.

It's this routine that you do as quickly as you can. I had never done it before. So we both wore high-density EEG caps, electroencephalography, and we looked at what was going on. Of course, my brain was on fire with activities. I was trying to figure out what the heck to do. But he, practicing four hours a day on this, His brain is essentially quiet while he does this incredibly rapid routine.

So it's exactly right. The job of the brain is to take novel things and say, hey, if this is relevant and I need this, I'm going to burn it down into the circuitry so I never have to think about it again. Like bicycle riding. When you're first learning, you're paying attention to your torso and your legs and you don't know what you're doing.

When you get good at it, then you can text on your phone, you can talk to someone while you're biking, because it's now part of the machinery of the brain.

as plastic as we are so you know you see a zebra get born and in 45 minutes it's running around or a dolphin is swimming after a few minutes of being born but if you see a homo sapien get born they're not doing it as quickly and the reason is mother nature essentially came up with a different trick with us where she drops us into the world half-baked and we absorb the world around us our language our culture

Exactly.

Oh, nice. Oh, I like that. Yeah, yeah. Yeah, that's exactly right. And what's interesting, by the way, I talked about this in the Brain Plasticity course and in my book, LiveWire.

What's interesting is that given who you are and what you've already packed down into your machinery, that determines what is relevant to you for the next thing, such that there's a million things you could learn or could pay attention to at every moment, but you're only going to... take on those things that are relevant to you and push them down into the unconscious brain as a result.

And we know, for example, the acetylcholinergic systems are involved in this process, which is to say they tag relevance. They say, hey, this is something that means something to you for whatever reason, who knows, but you really care about stamp collecting or genealogy or artwork or whatever it is that you care about.

And so then you go on these missions from the world and you take stuff in and you start burning that stuff down and it means something to you, whereas the rest of the stuff just goes.

Yeah, so you've got these acetylcholinergic systems that say, hey, this is important. I want you to initiate plasticity here. And by the way, these systems, just like dopamine actually, broadcast all around the entire brain. So the dopamine system is involved in saying, hey, that was better than expected. I wasn't expecting that to happen. You get a positive burst of dopamine.

If, in contrast, you're expecting reward and you don't get it, you get a decrease in the amount of dopamine. You have a little baseline going on. Absence of an expected reward is technically a punishment. Exactly right. Yep. And so that's what the dopamine system is for, saying, oh, better than expected, worse than expected.

But acetylcholine is what happens when you're saying, I want to make plastic changes to the system. Let me just give you an example. Yeah, yeah. An experiment with mice, and they have to learn how to reach through a narrow slot to grab pellets and whatever. And they get better and better at it. And the parts of their brain that are involved in this task actually grow in their real estate.

Okay, now you take an equivalent set of rats, you give them an acetylcholine blocker. They do exactly the same number of trials they're doing the thing, but they don't get better and their brain doesn't change. They don't ever get better at the task. They're not faster at doing it because they don't have the plasticity available to them anymore. Because you need the acetylcholine.

all, you know, we take everything that's happened before us and we springboard off the top of that. And this is the reason why Homo sapiens has taken over the planet and been so successful because we, unlike a horse that's essentially living the same life that horses have for, you know, for generations, we are living different lives every time. So that's what brain plasticity is about.

By the way, something that, of course, we know is all of the neuromodulators and neurotransmitter systems, these are all working together in a very complicated dance. So, you know, dopamine is involved in saying like, hey, that was, you know, good, bad, better or worse than expected. But acetylcholine is the thing that says, hey, let's make plasticity available here.

Yeah, it's interesting because there's so many acetylcholine blockers that are used in animals for things, but I don't know what the emotional experience is for a human on that. My guess, if I were just pulling something out of a hat, would be that they just feel like they don't care about this particular thing.

This doesn't answer the free will question though.

I don't know. I don't know. Good question. But just, you know, I'm trying to think through what it would feel like. Imagine that you were trying to learn a new sport that you haven't played. You know, pickleball, let's say. So you're... And we're both learning the sport at the same time. And for some reason, it's really relevant to us.

But if one of us got acetylcholine blockers, my assumption would be that we feel like, we just don't care about this thing. You know, I'm more interested in what's going on over there or something. We wouldn't particularly care.

Okay, so you talked about, we had a bit of... Sorry, let me just give another example of that. Okay, so when somebody gets a stroke, and let's say they get a stroke and they lose the function in their left arm, their left arm's mostly paralyzed, and they can do things with their right hand. Well, so the way that you need to operate to get the left hand working again is,

Do you know what they do clinically? So what they do is what's called constraint therapy. This is the single best move. You take the right hand, which is working well, and you pin it down. You strap some of it so that they're forced to use their left hand. Necessity. Yeah, exactly. Necessity. That's the relevance. So now I want to get the sandwich to my mouth. I have to use the left arm.

I need to get my zipper down to go to the restroom. I have to use my left hand. These are the sorts of things that matter. This is what causes brain plasticity. Oh, yeah. Relevance. Oh.

Yes, that's exactly it.

Ah, yeah. I don't know. I don't know what it is in humans when we use this.

I think it wouldn't. It wouldn't directly be mediating the trying because I think what would happen is you would try it, but you wouldn't have the plasticity that says, hey, something useful happened here. So let's make changes to the motor cortex over here. You just wouldn't have that. And so the system would stop trying that.

And I actually don't use the word plasticity as much anymore because that was a term originally coined by William James because he was impressed by plastic manufacturing. You could, you know, mold something into shape and it would hold that shape. And he said, that's kind of what brains do. You know, you learn the name of your fourth grade teacher and that gets written down and retained.

It's all we ever have in there.

I have a suspicion that it's not, as Nietzsche said, that each one is coming with a personality or something. But my suspicion is that each one is reaching out to other spots, like visual cortex, like your limbic system, like your frontal cortex. When a network is dominant, it's sort of pulling information and sort of constructing a personality.

Yeah, that's right. Right. In terms of deciding what to say next, for example, you know, it's looking at the, you know, at your whole speech system, Wernicke's and Broca's and all these errors and saying, am I going to say something cruel or kind or whatever? But it's still using those basic mechanisms. It's taking advantage of the machinery that's there.

And it just has the ability to draw on it differently than a different.

So he called that plasticity. But... What we're looking at is a system of such complexity. We've got 86 billion neurons. We've got 200 trillion synaptic connections. And every moment of your life, this forest of neurons is reconfiguring and changing.

You're thinking about neural networks as being the rats and the kind of collaboration that neural networks work out through time?

Okay, yeah.

And so I tend to call this live wiring instead of plasticity, only because I think the days of being impressed by plastic manufacturing are past us now. What we're looking at is a system that You know, every second of your life from cradle to grave is reconfiguring to represent the world around you and all of your experiences and all of your memories.

So here's what I think. I think... So you have all these different drives, some of which are very primitive, you know, hunger and thirst and sexuality. And so you've got all these different drives, but you have more sophisticated drives too, including various forms of short-term thinking versus long-term thinking.

You have these different financial drives I was talking about with valuation or predicted emotional experience or social context. You've got all these different things going on. The way that they... form these agreements through time, they form these friendships, let's say, I think that makes an integrated personality.

That's what makes you, you and me, me, is the way that we let these things win or lose in different circumstances. In other words, All unconsciously, these networks have worked out ways of saying, all right, look, I'm going to let you in here and I'm going to do this. And maybe there's an advantage to letting anger win out in this moment. You know, I find that that works sometimes.

You know, when it comes to this question of truth, there is no singular truth because you've got a completely different set of experiences that have wired your brain, my brain, everyone's brain. We're all going to perceive different things and seek different things from the world.

But in this other moment, I know that letting compassion win out is going to be the optimal thing for my marriage or whatever. Yeah. Okay. So there are these things. But what interests me is that... no matter how integrated a personality we think we have, we're constantly in conflict. I mean, every moment of our lives, we think, oh, should I do this or that? Or we're making decisions, right?

This is what decision-making is about. And so there's a sense in which there's never a stable scenario where we say, okay, look, these guys have figured out how to get along. What I find interesting is ways that we can... put ideas into place like the Ulysses Contract. So are you familiar with Ulysses Contract?

So, okay, just as a, you remember Ulysses Odysseus was coming home from the Trojan War and realized he was going to pass the Island of the Sirens. And he wanted to hear the song of the sirens, but he knew that like any mortal man, he'd crash into the rocks and die. So you remember what he did? He filled his men's ears with beeswax. He had them lash him to the mast.

And he said, no matter what I do, just keep on sailing. Okay. what was happening here was that the Ulysses of sound mind way back here knew that the future Ulysses would behave badly when he passed the island. Yes. He knew that there was no way he wasn't going to behave badly there. So what he did is he made a contract with himself.

He said, I'm going to lash myself to the master that I can't do the wrong thing. Okay, so this is what philosophers call Ulysses' contract. And I'm fascinated by these because we use these in all kinds of ways in our lives.

And actually, one of my next books is about this because I think it's the most practical way when you're in a moment of sober reflection to think about, okay, who do I want to be? And how can I establish a Ulysses contract with myself that I can't break? It's an unbreakable kind of contract. And so I'll just give you an example of this. Why were you driven...

Why were you attracted to the terminology contract? Because it's not something you can break. Because it's not that Ulysses said, okay, tie me to the thing, but leave a little string here that I can pull and let the ropes down or something. It's that he was bound to that mast. He was attached to it and could not get off the mast. Okay, that's the important part. It's like a marriage contract.

Yeah, exactly. But even more, you know, a marriage contract you can break also, but the key with Ulysses' contracts is you really want to make them unbreakable. Here's just a couple examples. For example, in Alcoholics Anonymous, the first thing they have you do is clear all the alcohol out of your house. Because even if somebody feels like, hey, look, I'm done.

I'm not going to drink, but I'll leave those things in case I have a party or whatever. They know that on some, you know, festive Friday night or a lonely Sunday night or something, you might, okay. So you get rid of it so that the temptation can't be there. Or with drug addiction programs, First thing they tell you is, look, don't ever walk around with more than 20 bucks in your pocket.

Because even if you think you're over it, at some point, someone's going to offer you drugs. And if you've got the money, you might spend it. So there's a million ways that we can make these kinds of contracts with ourselves. And the reason it's important is because what we're doing is setting up some kind of higher order ideal. Yeah. And I know you think about this in terms of religion.

I don't know that I agree with the definition. Let me think. Because all the Ulysses contracts that I try to set up in my life, I don't think about them as being religious, although they are… That's why it's a matter of definition.

I think the contract is part of the game, which is to say, gosh, I know I'm going to behave badly in that situation. So as one twist on this game, as a play in this game, I'm going to put something in place so that I can't do it. It forbids it. It forbids it, exactly. It's a way of saying, look, I know I've got all these rivaling networks and I'm not going to get through this.

I know that right now I feel like I'm not going to drink or smoke or whatever somebody's trying to get or die. Okay, so I've never had a drinking or smoking problem, but one thing I do try to prevent is... You know, I'm in a restaurant and let's say it's a predefined meal and they put a dessert down. I want to have a taste of dessert, but I don't want to eat the whole thing, okay?

And what happens is as I'm sitting there talking to everyone, I end up eating the whole thing like an idiot. So what I do is I take a bite or two and then I take the table salt and I cover the thing in salt, the chocolate cake. So that, that's my Lucy's contract because I know that the me of three minutes from now is going to keep sticking my fork in it.

So I'm making a contract with myself that I can't break because now the cake is ruined. And so this is just one play in the game of dealing with these rivals.

Right.

Every game's like that. Right. I guess you could think of it that way. I think of it as just another move in the game of life in a sense, which is to say, you know, I could eat it. It's a rich energy source. It's delicious sugar, whatever. And I've got this other move I can do. I guess I think about it in terms of long-term versus short-term networks in the brain.

And so how do I get those networks? Because, you know, we can image this in fMRI. We see these areas that are involved in long and short-term thinking. So how do I get these guys to play together in the same game, but in a way that aligns with who I want to be? Yeah. with my long-term thinking.

Yes.

What's your aim? That game has to do with health, has to do with keeping slim, has to do with vanity, all of the things that I want to make sure the kind of person I am who doesn't gulp down the entire chocolate cake. Right.

This is just part of the passage into maturity, right? We realize that it's a long game. And so we get to know that, you know, as kids, we eat the cake every time. Maybe we get sick from it. And what we realize is that the things that we want for our lives are a different category of things. And so these are part of the networks that are right.

I totally agree. And by the way, you introduced this idea of thinking about the future and thinking about community, but I think we'd agree those are not orthogonal actions. Not at all. Exactly. They point in the same direction or similar directions.

You know, I think they're very similar. Yeah, okay. Thinking about a stranger and thinking about yourself. For some reason, we have this special attachment to our future selves. So we do things like put money into an IRA. We do all kinds of things that we're doing for our future self. So our future self will be, you know, happy, we imagine, even though our future self will be unrecognizable to us.

You don't know who that future person is, and you're making all kinds of decisions in deference to them.

Oh, that's interesting.

I'm not sure I would think you would need that piece. Well, that's the question. I'll think about that further. But here's what I would say. It's the experience of time that children have that allow them to think about time. In other words... In other words, if you and I talk about ancient Rome, we're at an age where we can kind of think about 2,000 years and think about what that means.

An eighth grader learning about that in school really can't imagine 2,000 years. No. Much less imagine 50 years, what that time scale. Or even next week. Exactly. Yeah, yeah. But as you mature in the world, you're able to think about timescales that you simply weren't able to before.

Agreed, agreed. Okay, great. So where we get then is maturation leads to an ability to think long-term. It's this capacity to think about who do I want to be is something that requires experience and some amount of wisdom. And this is... I know that we share an interest in stories and how this can set... This can help us set an idea in our heads for, hey, that's... That's who I want to be.

I hadn't thought about this because my short-term networks have been having fun and I've been in elementary school and middle school and so on. But now I'm really starting to think about this and what impact I want to make in the world. Anyway.

When you have that idea in mind, even let's say, let's imagine a person is religious and really has established, hey, I want to be like this deity or this role model of any sort. There's always conflict though, right? Because then you've got temptations in front of you, all around you. And so there's always this rivalry.

I only mentioned this going back 10 minutes because the issue of, do these systems work out some sort of nice gameplay? Sort of, but there's also the fact that they're always in conflict. You're just always dealing with this, even when you have... Well, that's also... Well, maybe I would say...

That's right. Right. And this allows us to go back and tie two pieces together, which is that You know, the brain's job is really to burn things into the unconscious when it says, oh, I've got this, I've got that. This is a routine I've seen before, right? But the reason we're always conscious, the reason the brain's always burning a lot of energy is because the world throws lots of novelty at us.

And so despite all our best efforts, every day is full of the unexpected. And therefore, we're always in these novel conflicts, right?

That's right. Although I suspect that a lot of our future simulation is unconscious because some amount of our future sim is, you know, is something that we've... Right, it's using the machine. It's using the machine, exactly. Yeah, yeah, definitely.

And so we certainly can pull things up into consciousness and think, okay, I really want to understand what it would be like if I did this and if I moved to this other city and got this other job. But much of the time, we're just slamming things forward.

Let me make sure I can unpack that. It's that if you're looking at a high entropy state where there's lots of possibilities, then you have higher anxiety. Anxiety actually indexes that.

That's almost by definition. And by the way, this goes back to what we were saying also about, you know, for example, the Tetris players, or let's just say, I don't know, let's say when you, did you play soccer as a kid? Okay, so when you first were learning how to play soccer, again, your brain, if we could have measured it while you were running around on the field, it's on fire because you're,

You're trying to figure out, wait, where's the ball? Where's everyone else? You know, it's all knees and elbows and you don't know what's going on. Okay. A professional soccer player is a hundred times better than you, but his brain isn't burning nearly as much energy as the child trying to figure this out. That's right. He's in a much lower entropy state. Exactly. He's in a lower entropy state.

That's because his movements are more efficient. Right. But the reason is because the child is trying to simulate all the possibilities. The professional has sort of seen everything play out before. That's the key. He's got the patterns. But the child has the high entropy state because, you know, what if I try this? What if I try that? Yeah. And so on.

And what he famously said is, I'm not thinking about where the puck is, I'm thinking about where the puck is going to be. Right, right, right.

Oh, that's very interesting. So a lot of what I've studied in my career has to do with time, our perception of time. And the bottom line, of course, is that we live slightly in the past. Why? Because it takes time for signals to get, you know, processed and integrated, right? So when signals hit my... For example, I used to play baseball and...

You know, when you're swinging at a fast pitch, this all happens unconsciously. The best you can do as this ball is traveling from the mound to the plate is to adjust your swing up or down as you're already swinging. But all this is happening unconsciously. My experience has always been when I hit the ball... I become aware that I have just hit the ball.

Right? That's exactly right. And so the key is if you ask these people, you know, if they did anything different while answering the question, they won't have any idea. But their eyes are like, you know, on a covert operation doing the thing. So as you know, of course, you know, eyes jump around about three times a second. Those are called saccades.

And I say to myself, throw it out the bat and run. Because it's already flying. The reason being, of course, because it takes at least half a second before you get conscious awareness of anything. The signals have to move around in your brain. As you know, signals are very slowly in the brain, about a meter per second on unmyelinated axons, maybe 10 times faster than on myelinated axons.

It's 10 times faster? Yeah. Okay. And what's interesting, we've got big bodies, right? So if I touch your toe, the signals have to travel all the way up. you know, up your leg and up your spinal cord to your brain. But here's the weird part. You know, if I touch your toe and your nose at the same time, you'll feel those simultaneously.

And that's weird because how does your, you know, does your brain feel the signal from the nose and then say, okay, I'm just going to wait and see if anything's coming up. If your eyes are closed? Yeah. Yeah. That's weird. Yeah, so here's the thing. Yeah, yeah, that's weird.

This, by the way, led me to a hypothesis some years ago that taller people live further in the past than shorter people because your brain has to wait for all the signals to come together, your vision, your hearing, your touch, touch from your toes, all this stuff to come together. It puts together your conscious perception of what's happening right now. And that's slightly longer lag time.

Slightly longer lag time if you're taller, yeah. It's a very funny hypothesis, by the way. So... Yeah, so we live a little bit in the past, and during that time, I totally concur, there can't be free will involved in any of the processing or certainly reflexes, but also ballistic movements that we're doing. There's no possibility for free will to operate there.

If we do have free will, the argument I made at the end of Incognito is that, you know, there may be free will. It's very difficult neuroscience-wise to nail this question of if there is or not. But if there is, it's a bit player in a much larger system. And so... You've got all this unconscious processing, most of what's happening in the brain.

I think of the conscious brain as a broom closet in the mansion of the brain. I should say the conscious mind is a broom closet in the mansion of the brain with very little access to what's going on. There may be free will, but it's going to be a small player if it's there.

Right. This doesn't answer the free will question, though, because if I choose this particular future, we can still question whether I had free will to choose that, or if I rewound history a thousand times, would I always choose that future?

And then in between, there's little micro saccades. But the point is we're not aware of that at all. So when your brain is going out to seek the answer to a question, it... it's running its mission and it's looking at all the points and pieces that it needs to, to gather the information. But we consciously are totally unaware of that. And this of course is representative of, of most of perception.

One argument for this is that when you simulate a future, you then feel emotionally what that future feels like, and you compare that to the next future and the next future. There's obviously truth in that. Yeah, and maybe you need to simulate each one in order to make your evaluation. But the question is, you know, I say, oh, that future feels the best to me.

That's who I want to be in the long term. But was it a free choice? I don't know. Just for the record, I don't come down one way or the other on the free will because I don't know.

Yeah, that's right. That's right.

Great. Okay, well, I'm running a couple of new books. And so one of them is called Empire of the Invisible. And this is about all the stuff that we don't see. In other words, I've always been fascinated by this question of why do each of us think we know the truth? And if we could just shout it on X in all capital letters enough, everyone would come to agree with us.

Everyone would see the wisdom of our point of view. I've seen firsthand that that isn't true. Yeah. Exactly. So everybody on social media knows the truth. And on any side of the spectrum, whether you're a denizen of Wokistan or Magistan or whatever, everyone feels like it's clear. And my question is, why do we all have such limited internal models where we think we know the truth?

I'm saying this in a way that's free of any political opinion. I'm speaking metapolitically now. And so this is what Empire of the Invisible is about, is how do we come to our internal models and why do we take them so seriously?

Nice. Let me just unpack that for the listener. It's that when you say, okay, this is my view, I've got this, then the uncertainty is reduced. Yeah, to almost nothing.

That's right. And one of the main, exactly. One of the main goals of the brain always is to reduce energy expenditure. Of course. On the, on the immediate timescale. Yeah, of course. Yep. Of course.

Um, we don't know how we're gathering the data, but this is what we do. In fact, so what my book incognito was about, of course, was that almost everything in the brain is happening unconsciously. You just don't have any access to it and really no awareness or acquaintance with it either. Um, And this is just a good example of that.

Oh, lovely.

It's like, oh, okay. And it's a positive feedback loop because once you have your point of view on something, then, of course, we know about confirmation bias and other ways where you seek data that merely validates and you ignore the data that speaks against it.

Right. Exactly. By the way, which makes me want to come back to a point that you mentioned about socially seeing people as friends or foes. In fact, the way we see most people in the world are strangers. Yeah. You don't need to worry. Yeah, exactly. You're relevant. Most things are irrelevant. Exactly. Most things are irrelevant. Yeah, yeah. And thank God for that. Yeah, exactly.

So that's analogous here.

Oh, they cause you to pay attention. Yeah, exactly right. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Yeah. Right, right. And you know what I was going to say? This also ties back to another thing about maturation. Maturation, as I think it was Fitzgerald who said, is the ability to hold two contradictory ideas in mind at the same time. So what we're trying to do always is get our aim to reduce the entropy, our worldview. But as we mature, we say, okay, look, it could be this.

On the other hand, it could be that. And the ability to hold that and not have that, to have a slightly higher entropy and not have that be stressful to us. I don't know that I have a model.

That's great. And maybe instead of think, we could call it something like reconsider. Because it's, I mean, there's this, I only say this because thinking is sort of a term that might have too much semantic weight on it. But reconsider meaning, okay, I've already considered this. I know exactly how to think about it, low entropy. But now I'm going to reconsider this.

I'm going to think about what if I'm wrong about this? What if it's this totally other model?

Yeah.

You don't have a reaction to it. Yeah, exactly. Oh, that's interesting. And I imagine this comes up a lot because people are involuntarily confronted with their, let's say, their political views. Often there's a whole social component to that, which is I'm getting challenged by this person, maybe in front of other people, that sort of thing.

And so there's all this other stuff that comes into play. But if you get to sit in the peace of your own home and think, You know, what if I'm wrong? What if the other party's point on this bill... What would that look like? What would that look like? Yeah, that's a much calmer situation.

Absolutely.

Yes. Right.

Yeah, yeah. I'm always interested in these old, you know, the physicists in the early 20th century. You know, Einstein was giving a presentation, and I'm afraid I forgot if it was, I think it was Heisenberg who challenged, a young kid challenged him, and Einstein said, you know, I think you're right. He went home and worked on the problem for five days and came back.

But I'm just, you know, these stories of that kind of challenge and Einstein had, you know, a very mature reaction. Right, right.

Yes.

My brain plasticity, so we didn't talk about that at all, but I've got all kinds of cool stuff to talk about there.

It's definitely a mission. Yeah, okay. Yeah, so in this case, you're asking a question about the painting, and the subject is trying to answer that. But this is true for all of us in all cases. Let's imagine you're on a hike with friends here in Phoenix. And you guys are walking along and one of your friends is a mycologist. So he notices the mushrooms that you don't notice.

And your other friend is a climatologist. And so he's noticing the tree line and where things have changed. And you've got a friend who's a podiatrist and she's noticing the angle of your feet and so on. The point is that All the data is hitting all of your eyes, but you guys are seeing different things. You're having different experiences in the world predicated on what questions you're asking.

And that, of course, is predicated on who you are, all of your experiences, and what is relevant to you.

There's the big ones about three times a second, and then there's the micro saccades, which are always moving. That's for a slightly different reason.

Eye movement. Exactly. Smooth pursuit eye movements when you're following something. Right. Yeah, exactly. Right.

Yes, yeah, that's absolutely right. And the fascinating part is that all this is happening unconsciously. We're going and we're seeking out answers from the world. And it's a matter of what your attention is drawn to also. So if I say, hey, what's the feeling of your shoe on your left foot right now? Right, right. You can become aware of that.

You've got all the data, if we want to call it that, available to you, but you're only seeking little parts. And this all depends on your internal model of the world. in terms of who you are, what is relevant to you. And that's the filter through which we interpret everything. And so when it comes to this question of truth, there is no singular truth because

You've got a completely different set of experiences of your brain, my brain, everyone's brain. We're all going to perceive different things and seek different things from the world. Something we might get into later that I'm very interested in, and I know you are too, is this collection of neural networks or personalities that we have inside.

And Nietzsche's view on this was that they each have their own truth. They're each perceiving. Yeah, we could talk about that right away. Okay, okay. So I know you and I are both fans of Nietzsche.

Exactly. Okay, so let's unpack that. So it's, you know, you've got all these neural networks that have different drives and want different things. And what Nietzsche meant by that, just for the listener, of course, is that each of those drives puts together a story or its truth about why it's seeing the world that way.

Oh, sure. And so in America, we have to at least look at the bill for 200 milliseconds longer to figure out what am I holding because the size doesn't tell you the answer to that. So I think they should make them all the same size so that you at least look at it a little bit longer. They said, we love the idea, but we'd have to retool all the vending machines in Europe.

So that's why they rejected it.

Exactly right. And Darren did that experiment. But this was actually an experiment done at Harvard originally with some colleagues of mine who did this. They were very interested in this concept of change blindness, which is... How much do we notice changes in the world? Now, the fact is that the world tends to be stable. So I'm talking to you now, Jordan.

And if I look somewhere else and then I look back, you're really likely to still be here because that's just how physics works. But so they wanted to know, but what does that mean? If I'm assuming that I'm talking to you and then I look somewhere and you turn into somebody else, would I even notice? And so they did this experiment in the Harvard quad with the door passing in between people.

But there are many different versions. Just the simplest is you show a photograph and then the photograph goes away and you show the photograph again. And maybe you swap back and forth between A and B and A and B with a little blank space in between each time. You tell the person there's some massive difference between photo A and photo B. Can you tell me what the difference is?

And people are terrible at it. And once they finally do see it or you tell them the answer, they think, how could I not have seen that? There's like a major difference. A car disappears from one to the other or the railing in the background moves by three feet up and down. The engine of the airplane is missing or not missing from photo A to B. But we just don't see that. Why?

It's because all we ever see is our internal model of the world. So when I look at a photograph, let's say it's a bunch of soldiers lined up to get on an airplane, big Hercules jet. When I'm asked to look at the photograph and see the details there, I think, okay, soldiers, jet, aircraft.

Sky, tarmac, and then I'm crawling around the scene with my attentional capacities and I'm trying to pull in more details to figure out what is the difference between these two photos that look the same to me. Okay, what are the soldiers wearing? What color is their thing? How many soldiers are there? And so on.

But it takes me a while before I land on, oh, the jet engine that's appearing and disappearing between photos A and B. I just don't notice it. So the thing is, when I look at the photo, this is the important part. I'm not seeing it as though I am a camera of some sort. All I ever see. is however rich my model is. So all I see is, oh, there's people and plane and sky.

And I go out in the world and I ask questions and that's how you get more and more detail on stuff. This is the heart of change blindness. This is why we don't notice when there are massive changes. So in the case of the person giving directions to the pedestrian who asks,

All you're thinking about is, oh, there's somebody, there's some stranger standing in front of me and I'm just trying to do this job of telling them how to get the directions and I'll never see them again. So your brain just doesn't put that much effort into it.

Oh, yeah, quite right. And I can show you other change blindness examples of things. For example, you can link this on the show notes. There's a British guy named Richard Wiseman who has this great card trick that he does on YouTube. I'm so sorry. Let me not tell what the punchline is, but link this on the show notes. What you'll see is he does this card trick

essentially asking you what you notice and you see the trick and you think, wow, how did I not notice that? But it's extraordinary. It's a terrific video.

Exactly right. So this is what's classified as inattentional blindness. Your attention is on the basketball. You're following the basketball very carefully to see where it's going. And as a result of attending in one spot, you have inattentional blindness to other things in the scene, like the gorilla walking in. Change blindness is essentially a version of that.

You don't know what to look for in the photograph of the airplane. And so you just don't see things.

I don't know. Yeah, that's exactly right. I mean, magicians have been for centuries very good at this. It's so easy to get the audience's attention to go here and there. They do all kinds of things like they never move their hand in a straight line. They move in a curved arc. And for whatever reason, you just can't resist having your attention follow that.

Yeah. And whatever they're doing where they are moving their hand, what they do is they set things up so that you're a little suspicious maybe of what they're doing with their left hand. So you're thinking, I'm a smart audience member. I'm going to keep an eye on the left hand. And while they're doing that, while you're watching, they're doing the right hand is do whatever they want.

And it's total inattentional blindness to the right hand.

Yeah. So this is something I've been very interested in for a very long time is about... how as a species, we're so cooperative. The reason we've built our whole civilization as well as we have is because we're so good at linking arms and making stuff happen. But we evolved in small groups. And so we are very prone to saying, this is my in-group and those people over there, they're my out-group.

And it turns out there's been lots of studies like that from my lab, many other labs showing that we just have less empathy for people in our outgroups. We just don't care about them as much as in if they get hurt or something. So here's a study that I ran in the lab some years ago.

We put you in the brain scanner, functional magnetic resonance imaging, fMRI, and you see six hands on the screen, six hands that all pretty much look alike. And the computer goes around and picks one of the hands. And then you see that hand either get touched with a Q-tip or stabbed with a syringe needle. And yeah, exactly. Watching it was getting stabbed with a syringe needle. Is it real?

The way we filmed it is we made a syringe needle that contracts. So as you're pushing, the needle's actually going back up.

Yeah, but it looks quite horrifying. And so what we do then is the way we analyze that kind of data is we compare the two cases. And in the case where the hand is getting stabbed, you have all this area come online, this network of areas, I should say, that we summarize as the pain matrix. And that's what happens if you get hurt.

If your hand gets stabbed, the same area comes online, which is to say when you are watching someone else get stabbed, This is the neural basis of empathy. You are empathizing with their pain, even though you're not in pain. And this is great. This is what humans do is they see the pain of someone else and they empathize. What would that feel like? So that's very important.

But what we then did is we had the same six hands. And we labeled each one with a one word label, Christian, Jewish, Muslim, Hindu, Scientologist, Atheist. And now the computer goes round, picks a hand. You see that hand gets stabbed. And the question is, if it's a member of one of your out group versus your in group, does your brain care as much? And the answer is it does not.

Your brain does not care as much if it's a member of any of your outgroups that gets stabbed. And by the way, we tested this on all religions, including, by the way, atheists. Even atheists have this, which is when an atheist hand gets stabbed, they have a bigger empathic reaction than when any of the non-atheist hands get stabbed.

So this is really the first lowest level signature of empathy that we have. And all it takes is a one word label for people to feel like, oh, I don't really care so much about that hand.

Yeah, that's a project I did for a year in secret until it was all done. Why is it secret? Because they don't want you to... Why was it secret? I don't know. They just didn't want me talking about it while I was doing it.

We saw this happen when the CEO of UnitedHealthcare was murdered in the street.

I don't totally understand why people felt that way. Oh, really? Obviously, people had bad experiences with the insurance company, UnitedHealthcare or others. But it's not that guy, Brian, making the decision and putting the red stamp on their piece of paper.

Okay. So this thing with LA, it's interesting because LA is so multicultural. You can imagine if an equivalent fire happened in, we could name different countries, the reaction that some people would have, which is, oh, Good, I'm glad that happened to those Russians or the whatever. It's tough, though. I don't think I would do that, but I don't know. Okay, here's the thing. You would.

Yeah.

I don't know what country or what religion or what thing it would be for you, but here's the interesting part. We measured 128 people on the scanner. We don't know that all of them actually act badly to their neighbors and so on. Why? Because what we are measuring is the first brain response, which is, hey, I really care about these people in my in-group. I don't care so much about these people.

But you might have other cognitive layers that say, you know what, that embarrasses me that I don't care as much about the Russians who were just in a fire. So I'm going to donate to that Russian charity because I'm... So there's a

That's right. That's right. Yeah. I had to sell all kinds of paperwork. They would take me to the European Central Bank. They like beat me through a door and then we go and we'll go do another door. You have to do another security badge and then another. It was really deep in there where they keep all the counterfeits. Oh, they have the counterfeits. Oh, how cool is that?

And people have done these tests for years called the implicit association task. And by implicit, they mean something that you can't even articulate. It's not explicit. And what they find is that everybody has biases against certain things, certain groups. certain sexual orientation, whatever it is, everyone's got something going on deep down, but it doesn't mean anything about their behavior.

He wouldn't have had a pager.

So I felt the same way you did. But... Rewind history where you and I are born in Lebanon and for some reason our parents are Hezbollah. I would 100% have joined an organization like that.

What I was going to say, aside from joining an organization, the question is, would we feel empathic?

Heck yeah, we would, right?

What's very interesting is we also did, in parallel with these neuroimaging studies, we also gave people these very full questionnaires where they filled them out. And there are these standardized tests for how empathic a person you are. And what we found was something we really didn't expect

which was that the people who showed the biggest difference between their in-group and out-group neural responses were also the people that described themselves as the most empathic, which is very interesting. I think there are a few possible interpretations of that. One is that they somehow deep down know that they aren't sero-empathic, and so they're lying. I see. That's one possibility.

One possibility is that when they think about their empathy— They're thinking about their in-group.

They keep counterfeits that they collect and they've got them in piles. And we think this is from Turkey and we think this is from Germany and whatever. And the way they can tell is just some signature of that counterfeit. So they just put those all together and...

Yeah, like what if I saw my uncle fall and twist his ankle? Would I be empathic?

Oh, I'd be the most empathic person in the world. And they're right in assessing that. They're just not thinking about how they would feel if it was their out-group. So anyway, this all goes to your statement about what things we admit to ourselves and do not. I have a strong suspicion that if we could ever really know ourselves really deeply, it would be awful.

I don't think we'd want to know all of our weird flaws and the lies we make to cover up the kind of personality things. Yeah.

So, by the way, yeah, I wrote about it in my book, Incognito, years ago, was this issue that really the way to think about the brain is that we are a team of rival. You've got all these neural networks that all have different drives, and they want different things, and you are a collection of these things, okay?

For example, if I put some chocolate chip cookies in front of you, part of your brain wants to eat that. Part of your brain says, don't eat it, I'm on a diet. Part of your brain says, okay, I'll eat it, but I'll promise my wife that I'll go to the gym tomorrow. Whatever, you can contract yourself automatically argue with yourself, cuss at yourself.

This is the weird part about being human is we've got all these different drives. Okay, here's what Nietzsche said. He said, every drive philosophizes in its own spirit. What he meant by that was when you are gripped by rage or sexual desire or desire to eat the chocolate chip cookies, you have this way to philosophize, to rationalize, to say, this guy really deserves this.

Or, yeah, I'm going to make this lie over here to get what I want sexually. Or here's all the reasons why I should eat the cookie. But the point is, when you're in that moment, when you're being driven by these particular neural networks, You philosophize in that spirit. You say, you know what? Actually, this makes total sense. I should do this. I should do exactly what I want.

Your aim makes the pathway open up to you. Oh, here's exactly what I should do so that I can eat these cookies.

Whatever it is, like not recycle the cans because you're feeling lazy or you want to. Let's take the simpler example. I want to eat the cookies. So when I'm gripped by that desire, I can cook up something.

Both are very difficult, but dollars, apparently there are super bills, which means perfect counterfeits.

Exactly. What I'm doing is I'm philosophizing in such a way that I can land at the conclusion that I want.

Exactly.

That's exactly right. But what's interesting is the end conclusion of that is that you might actually do really wonderful things in the world. You might go out of your way to go to some charity events. In fact, people have long noted that sometimes the people who are the loudest about, let's say, being anti-racist online...

Sometimes they're the people with the deepest internal demons that they're fighting.

Yeah, although what's interesting is that every group... is on a really broad distribution. So that will always be available to people to say, I like you, but I think that in your group, whatever group it is, there are people who do XYZ and I don't like that. So what's interesting is that chess move will always be available to those guys. Yeah, that's true.

It actually wouldn't make sense for them to meet one young woman who they think is really great and then say, oh, I used to have these political opinions, but now I've changed my mind entirely because of an N of one.

Here's the thing. So there's two things I would say there. One is that, interestingly, if you measured any of these Klansmen who had hung up their robe, you'd probably find this really low level circuitry in their brain having a difference in their reaction to black and white. But this is an example of the guy layering on cognition and what we might call wisdom and saying, hey, you know what?

Even though my very first reaction is this, I know that if I sit down at the bar with this guy and talk to him, he obviously had a desire to do that to see if he could discover something new. then he can do something wonderful. And obviously, we all know as kids we grow up, whatever neighborhood we're in, we're maybe exposed to all these races and religions, but not these other ones.

If you live in Europe, it's just easier to- Launder them?

And so it's easy with our in-group, out-group proclivities to say, okay, that's an out-group. But then you go to college, you meet people of various things. This is the whole game. It's just meeting lots of people and seeing that... Look, here's how I view it. Humans moved out of Africa about 250,000 years ago.

Humans started radiating north out of Africa and some turned left and became Europeans, some turned right and became Asians. And... That period of time is so short from a biological point of view. We're all exactly the same on the inside. We've all got brains and lungs and hearts. If you look from the point of view of a biologist, there's no difference between people.

Yeah, exactly.

Obviously, cultural differences exist. Religious differences exist. There's all kinds of local cultural stuff, but people are the same. So the important part is to figure out how do we find ways to reach across the aisles? And so one of my... Big interests is if I can get to the right ears, the right place to tweak the social media algorithms. So here's what I mean.

Currently, as we all know, the social media algorithms favor anger and it's incentivized to be incendiary, let's call it. But here would be the optimal social media algorithm that I think could actually change the world is imagine that you and I have totally different political beliefs. But we both like hang gliding and this kind of dog and we like biking on Sundays and whatever.

Yeah. What they wanted to know was, what do people actually perceive when they look at a bill? And what do they not perceive? So what they were doing was spending- Tons of money on anti-counterfeiting measures. There's a hologram, there's color-changing ink, and there's a little stripe, and there's little fibers in the bill that change color when you shine a UV light on them, things like this.

So every time one of us makes a post on that, we're both seeing that. I don't know you yet. You're a stranger to me, but I see that post and you see my post. Oh, hang gliding. Oh, this. We find all these things that we have in common. Then one day when we discover, oh, we have different political opinions, then we're like, oh, cool, Jordan, tell me about that. Why do you feel that way? And so on.

Then we can talk. But if the first thing you know about me is that I have a different political opinion, then it's a different ballgame.

Exactly right. And by the way, it doesn't have to be the in-group everybody. It's my in-group is other hang gliders and other people who like this kind of dog. Like, that's my only group. That's fine, because there's nothing about that that's going to make me pick up arms and go to war over that stuff.

Exactly. Exactly right. And by the way, obviously these social media companies from our behavior and things we post, they know hundreds of data on us. So that can really be used for good by saying, hey, look, these two strangers have something in common that they like. Just whatever. We like Salvador Dali paintings or whatever it is.

Yeah. So, okay. The short answer is right now, we don't have the technology that would even get us close to that. Why? Because the brain is made up of 86 billion neurons, about that same number of glial cells. And the connections between the neurons is about 200 trillion synapses, the connections between them. Okay. What does that mean?

It means we don't have, if you took all the computing power on the planet right now, it's not enough. To actually... On the whole plane. On the whole plane. Yeah, because it's about a zettabyte of information is what it would take to actually scan and store your brain. And we have probably a quarter of that capacity right now. So we can't do that yet.

But 100 years for sure, we'll have the capacity. No problem there. Okay. But the question is, if we took your brain and we put it onto a different substrate, let's say on silicon, would it be you? In theory, yes. In theory, it would be because if we're running the algorithm of Jordan, that is you. And I could probably replicate it out of different material.

I could make it out of beer cans and tennis balls. And if it's running the right algorithm, I can say, hey, Jordan, how are you feeling? You say, oh, I'm feeling good, whatever. This is what's known as the computational hypothesis of neuroscience, which is it's the algorithms that matter and not the details of how Mother Nature had to build it out of cells. Okay, fine.

but it's still a simulation of just my brain. Right, so here's the key. Is that me? Yeah, well, there's a few interesting points here. One is we have to actually capture the mechanisms of brain plasticity. In other words, your brain's ability to change and move. Your brain is reconfiguring itself all the time, every second of your life.

There's all kinds of stuff. And it turns out no one ever notices this stuff. As in, okay, forget the UV light part. Just looking at the bill, there's about five or six different security measures. People just don't notice. So what the EU realized is they're wasting tons of money every year on this stuff, and they wanted to figure out

This was my last book, LiveWired, is all about this brain plasticity stuff. Because if we don't, if we simply replicate this snapshot, then you don't remember anything new. In other words, if I took a static snapshot of your brain, then you say, oh great, today is whatever, January 20th of 2035, and you never get past it. I'm just in this room with you forever. Forever, exactly.

That's number one, is you gotta get brain plasticity. And then number two is there's this really interesting thing about whether it is you. So let's imagine we scan your brain and then we kill you. You have to. And 100 milliseconds later, we start the thing up. Then it's like you've transferred it.

The thing that starts in this computer world says, whoa, I was just sitting in the living room with David and now I'm here in this computer world. Okay, and it feels like you've transferred it. The question is, the you sitting here right now

Do you feel like you have transferred or do you feel like you just got killed and then this other creature came up that happened to have all of your memories, but the question is, is it you? And it might not be. It might not be you.

He's miserable. What's weird is that if I kill you 100 milliseconds after the upload, then that's murder. Yeah, you're just murdering.

Exactly right. I find this really interesting. Look, here's the thing. If we do upload ourselves at some point in the distant future, let's say a thousand years from now, there's a couple of things that we have to really watch for. One is, who are the programmers? Who watches the Watchmen? Like, you are completely at the mercy of whoever is running the simulation.

Yeah, they're God, essentially. They're God. Exactly right. It's scary because, in fact, it's just some 21-year-old guy with a goatee. Who's like playing Warcraft at the same time on another screen. Exactly. So that's a really weird thing. There's presumably going to be whole bodies of legislation around this and what the rules are around this.

What is the way we see the world and what would cause people to look at the bill and get it a little bit better? So I happened to be at a visual neuroscience conference and I was standing in the back and there was this other guy standing there. So we start chatting at some point. He said he's from the European Central Bank.

But yes, one of the things I mentioned is that let's imagine we realized, oh God, the universe is collapsing and the universe is only going to last five more minutes. The programmer couldn't speed it up so that you live a thousand years in those last five minutes and you didn't know it.

And I said, wow, what are you doing at this little visual neuroscience conference? And he said, I'm here to learn some things and figure out how to reduce counterfeiting. So we started chatting for a while. Yeah. popped some ideas, and then that's how they contracted me.

It might work. You certainly could freeze a body that long. We have not perfected cryogenics yet, but in theory, it's not so hard. And we know that it works in the sense that sometimes people will fall through the ice on a lake and they will try to get out and they can't get out and they drown and they die.

And then their body is rescued and they're brought to the hospital and there's this whole thing where you extract the blood and warm the blood in a machine and you're passing it back in. And people end up freezing.

fine like they actually come back to life really from being frozen i've never heard of that happening that's incredible here's one to link in the show notes i'll send you a lancet article is a medical journal about a woman who was a young doctor who this happened to on a skiing trip and yeah she's probably fine she's practicing medicine now and so on but she was dead she was actually dead and frozen and she was brought back this happens not infrequently in theory she's a few minutes younger than her actual age it's not bad

Not bad. So everything about cryogenics should work in theory. The problem is simply that how do you freeze things fast enough so that you don't get ice crystals and you get ice crystals that tears the cell membranes and blah, blah. So there's some stuff to be worked out there. But yeah, I think freezing people and sending them on space travel is certainly a possibility.

What's interesting about that theory is that Descartes was at least one of the first people to talk about this thing. How do I know I'm not brain in a vat being stimulated by scientists so that I think I'm sitting in this sunny living room talking with Jordan and so on? And people have worked on better and better versions of this.

And obviously, in the modern computer era, this became, how do I know I'm not a computer simulation? Well, what's been so weird to watch just over the last decade, really, is... how extraordinary things are becoming. For example, with generative AI, people are using this in VR now to create whole VR worlds instantly. Like, hey, I want a 15th century whatever with a castle.

And this just gets created the same way you would create an image, but a whole 3D VR world. And we're just in 2025. I mean, just imagine what things are going to be in 2045 or something. So the point is, it becomes more and more plausible to say, God, we know we can make extraordinary simulations. Why not? And all it requires is imagining that maybe...

Just imagine our civilization a thousand years from now, they might be running these sims. And of course, this could be recursive all the way down.

I mean, I suspect they did some research on me and they figured out that I was capable of doing this. But yeah, I think it was so brave of them to do this because to my knowledge, other governments haven't done that before. They've got their guys and they try to figure stuff out about better and better security measures, but that doesn't work.

So do you remember the website called Second Life? Yeah, of course. Philip Rosedale, a friend, he's the guy who started that. Wow. And for those who don't remember Second Life, it's just you get to be an avatar in this little computer world. You walk around, you talk to other avatars, and you can talk to them. First, I met a couple that had met in Second Life, and they were married to one another.

That's how they met each other. But it turns out that's not uncommon. Here's the thing. Technology has moved way on beyond Second Life. But there's still about a million people that use Second Life every day.

And these people often, not always, but quite often are people who, for example, are in wheelchairs or have other physical ailments, and they can be in Second Life and be avatars and live this other kind of life, which is precisely what you're describing. It's exactly the kind of thing.

So you and I will be hanging out in the metaverse where we don't have any dots on our skin or gray hairs, and we'll be really great high-resolution 3D avatars instead of low-resolution Second Life avatars. But I think that's exactly where we're all going.

Oh, that's really interesting to me. That's right. You know what I was thinking about is imagine you were in that situation and People find themselves in these situations. Let's not even take something as awful, but just like a divorce. You know, they're alone again. Building up a new relationship and getting a new spouse, that's a giant undertaking.

So I've been very interested in what is the near-term future of AI relationships. As you may know, there are tons of websites where people get, let's say, an AI girlfriend. It's typically males getting an AI girlfriend. There are some women who get AI boyfriends.

But in Japan, apparently, this is an enormous thing going on where the statistic I heard, I haven't verified this, but I heard that 30% of young males have an AI girlfriend. Now, I'm fascinated by this because presumably that's not going away. So there's two things that could happen.

The general prediction that I see in the media is that this is going to lead to the collapse of the population and people are going to get married and stuff like that. Why? Because an AI girlfriend is always going to be better than a real girlfriend in the sense that... They don't have needs. Yeah, exactly. They don't get hangry. They don't get grumpy. They don't say mean things to you sometimes.

In fact, the European Union had done this thing for a while where they... ran public campaigns, this thing about, hey, everyone, when you're handed a bill, you should really stop and look at the bill. And it didn't work at all.

But I have a more optimistic view on it. I think that this kind of thing might... in the best circumstances, actually improve relationships because it's sort of a way to get practice and do all the dumb stuff and say something. And the AI girlfriend says, hey, that really hurt my feelings when you said that. And maybe your AI girlfriend leaves you or whatever.

But the point is... Damn it, I can't even keep an AI girlfriend. And they're still billing me. But the point is you get practice like all of us as young men do stupid stuff and we learn and you get wiser in relationships.

And I think if there's an AI girlfriend company that builds these things so that there is pushback and there are thresholds at which they say, I'm leaving, I'm not hanging out with you anymore.

Because that's what we do all the time is we simulate conversation. to say this and then she's going to say that and then I'm going to say that to her and so on. What a great opportunity to actually run through and say, oh God, I hadn't even thought of that. That's a good, you know.

That's really going to hurt her feelings if I say that and it's not worth it.

Nope. No, great. So I'm glad he asked this question. The idea of mind reading using, let's say, fMRI, which is our current hot technology, but in 10 years it'll be outdated and there'll be xMRI or something better. But the point is... Every brain is completely different. You and I have tons of stuff in common, but our brains are totally different. We grew up in different places.

We had different childhood experiences. We had different parents or whatever. And as a result, all the fine structure of our brain is different. So there are certain things. that you would find appealing, like a certain math problem or something. I might find something, maybe you like flying an airplane. I like riding horses and whatever, like there's just a million differences.

Okay, so that's the first problem. But the second problem is real thought, a real person is so rich and multilayered and highly textured that I assert it's actually impossible to do mind reading, certainly in our lifetime, maybe ever. So here's what I mean.

With five bucks. Exactly. So they spent $10 million more doing these public service ads on it and didn't lead to anything. So that's why they were looking for a new strategy there.

Where this shows up in the media all the time is, oh, scientists have shown that we can measure, let's say, what's happening in visual cortex to the degree that you can actually understand what somebody is seeing. Even if you're not seeing what they're seeing, just by the activity of their visual cortex, you can understand what they're seeing.

The way you do this is you put people in the scanner, you show them hours and hours of videos and pictures and stuff like that. And for each image, you're looking at what am I seeing in the visual cortex? And so you end up with these very fine correlations.

Okay, so let's stick with vision for just one second. So if I'm measuring your visual cortex, I show you hours and hours of images, I measure your visual cortex, and eventually I can make a pretty good correlative map. Why? It's because your visual cortex is essentially like a warped television screen, your primary visual cortex. Okay.

So the media looks at these things and says, wow, that's mind reading. I can show you an image and say, I don't know what the image is, but I look at your visual cortex. I say, oh, Jordan's just seeing an image of an elephant riding a unicycle. That's pretty amazing, right? But it's not mind reading. That's just reading your visual cortex. Same with auditory cortex.

You can actually nowadays figure out what somebody is hearing in their ears from the activity on their auditory cortex. Very cool, impressive stuff. It's not mind reading. The auditory cortex is just laying out the different frequencies. Okay. think about what a thought actually is for you.

The thought is, when you walked in my house, you're thinking, okay, let's see, I'm carrying this thing in my left hand. Oh, I've got to step over here because there's a rock in the way. I'm just moving over here. And oh, I've never been to David's house before, even though David and I have known each other for a long time. And oh, look, oh, what's that? Oh, there's a grill over there. Cool.

Yeah, exactly. There's so much... thinking that we're never going to be able to figure out because it has to do with you and it has to do with, oh, and I forgot. I have to tell my brother about this thing that I forgot that happened last week. And all these things are running through your head all the time. So point is, we can measure visual cortex. We can measure auditory cortex.

but all the rest of it is what's happening in your brain. It's on your experiences, yeah. That would all be like noise in this machine. Yeah, exactly. We couldn't possibly understand what it is because let's imagine that I don't know that you have a brother and that something happened to you last week that you need to tell him about.

If I don't know that, there's no way for me to establish a correlation in the neuroimaging.

Okay, you can imagine a scenario a thousand years from now where there's so much cameras and things and everything that every moment of your life is tracked. And then in theory, you've got to be a lot closer, but still you might have thoughts that are remixing things that you've experienced.

I wouldn't know that if you think, wait, I saw this piece of architecture over here and then I saw this other thing over here. And what if I put that on a Euro bill? I wouldn't be able to read that because I've never... Seeing you experience that, you're remixing it.

And by the way, people ask me sometimes like, hey, could we do mind reading technology so we could know in an airport as people are walking through, if somebody's thinking about bombing a plane.

Yeah. But something specific like a bomb on an airplane. But of course, Half the people in the airport are thinking about a bomb because they're thinking, I hope there's not a bomb on the plane. And so it doesn't tell you. Yeah.

Lie detection is a very fascinating thing because you can actually measure things in neuroimaging when somebody is doing a lie because essentially a lie requires two things. One is... squelching the truth. Let's ask you a question. You know what the truth is. I say, hey, what's your wife's name?

You know what the true answer is, but then you have to squelch that and then you have to cook up a new version. Okay. And so what happens when you lie is there's a couple of different regions that we can see in the brain. Okay. So when that was discovered about the year 2000, a couple of companies started right away to do fMRI lie detection. Okay. But they both went out of business.

And here's why. It's because it's super easy to fool these things. Because, for example, if I'm in the scanner, I can move my foot around or do other things or think about some other thing and screw up the whole signal. These are very sensitive signals. And it turns out lie detection.

There's also there's a misunderstanding about lie detection, which is there's no such thing as a lie that you're just reading. Let's say with the traditional lie detector, the polygraph test that they use in courts. You're not measuring a lie. What you're measuring is the stress, the physiological stress that's typically associated with the lie.

So if you ask me a question and I'm lying to you, there's certain stress that goes with that. And that's what's being picked up on. But let's say I'm a particularly good liar or I practice this lie a bunch or I'm a psychopath and I don't care that I'm lying. It doesn't stress me out at all. Then there's not going to be that signal.

I believe you, but a good liar would say the same story that you're saying, by the way.

Oh, man. If you're a sophisticated liar, you would set this up so that then people around you think, oh, we know when Jordan's lying, so then you can get away with it.

Yeah. Yeah, that's exactly right. That's one of the issues is the sanctity of your inner cosmos. Yeah. So just as an example, there was a case in the 1960s where the police thought this guy probably had drugs. They broke into his house and he ran upstairs and they chased him. After he got to his bedroom and there were these pills on the dresser and he

Stuck all the pills in his mouth and swallowed them and then said, you can't bust me anything because you can't find anything. So they had him taken to the hospital and they pumped his stomach. And this went all the way up to the Supreme Court about whether that's okay to do that or that's an invasion of privacy.

And so the Supreme Court ruled that that was an invasion of privacy to pump somebody's stomach. But there are other circumstances when you can be given a blood test or something. So anyway, this issue about brain imaging is always right in between. This is an active area in legislation right now about when it counts as private or not.

But I think for a while, what we're going to see is that it's a step too far and far as invasion of privacy. Even if we had meaningful fMRI lie detection, the idea of saying we're going to handcuff you and force you in the scanner and force your brain to tell us something that's not going to fly.

Exactly. Typically, what we have now, though, is that you can volunteer. You say, hey, I would like to take the lie detector test and present that as evidence. The court doesn't have to accept it. That's true. Yeah. It's minority report ish. Yeah.

Now, the interesting thing about Minority Report, which is important, is that it is a total fantasy to imagine that you could ever predict what somebody is going to do. Why? Because the world's really complicated and every moment your brain is changing based on what the whole world is doing to you. So we can't ever know, oh, now we've got such great technology.

We know that in a week Jordan's going to commit a crime. No possible way of ever knowing that.

Exactly right. So there may or may not be a next step. That's right.

Great. Thanks, Jordan.

Exactly right. But also, it's really easy to copy that. The ECB, the European Central Bank, hired me to do this. So I said, okay, are you going to send me some counterfeits? And they said, we can't for legal reasons, so you need to counterfeit yourself. You need to make your own? Exactly.

The conscious mind just gets access to the very top little bit, the newspaper headlines. And the reason is, you know, you've got almost 100 billion neurons. Neurons are the specialized cell type in the brain. These are doing incredibly complicated things.

And by incredibly complicated, I mean things we haven't even scratched the surface of yet in terms of the algorithms that they're running that make us up. I don't think we could even function at our scale of space and time if we had access to that level of detail. I mean, you can't keep 100 billion things in mind and each one of these neurons is talking about 10,000 of its neighbors.

I mean, just look at riding a bicycle. If you really pay attention, okay, how exactly am I moving my, you'll probably crash.

If you play a musical instrument, you know that if you start paying attention to what your fingers are doing, you're dead, you can't do it anymore because what's happening is so fast and sophisticated that you can't possibly address that with this slow, low bandwidth consciousness. This has to be something that the rest of your brain takes care of and just does for you.

These are all zombie routines, they're just completely automatized. Most of them we'd never even have access to. The vest is probably our best bet for the next 50 years or something, until we figure out better ways to get deeper in there and plug things directly into the brain, but that is not as easy as people think.

We're just now at this moment in history, for the first time in billions of years, where we can suddenly feed in completely new senses to the brain. And a year from now, the human species starts proliferating into all these different kinds of experiences that can be had.

And it turns out, for the kind of studies I was doing, the difficulty with counterfeiting, for example, is getting the paper right. The paper is very special. I'll tell you how they do that in some places. In Venezuela, when the economy was really crashing there, they would bleach the Bolivar bills.

They would bleach their bills to make counterfeits for other countries because it turned out to be economically worthwhile to do that. But... So what I did, though, is I would, for example, you can take a bill and you can just copy it with a high resolution scanner and print it and so on. It doesn't feel quite right.

But the point is, it's quite easy to get all the pieces and parts, except for one, except for the watermark. The watermark is the part where you hold up the bill and you look and you can see a little figure through the thing there. That, it turns out, is the part that's the most difficult to counterfeit because that exists between the front and the back. That's what I thought, yeah. Exactly.

So you can't print that in any normal way. So typically counterfeit operations have an artist that draws that part. So this led to one of the main recommendations I made to the European Central Bank, which is they had a building, a little structure as their watermark. So you look in the thing, you see the little building.

I ran studies showing that I can show you a building and then I can show you another bill that has a similar building and you can't tell the difference. Unless you're an architect, you specialize in that kind of thing or something. This has Doric columns. This has ionic columns. Exactly. What I recommend is they put a face there because faces we are super specialized for.

We've got all this neural real estate for recognizing faces.

So you can tell if a face doesn't look right. Imagine you're looking at your wife's face and someone's drawn to the side. You would immediately be able to tell.

Now, the problem was they thought that was a great suggestion and went for that, but they didn't know whose face to use because in the European Union, you've got all these different countries and everyone wants their own person, their own king.

So what they did finally is they used the face of the mythical goddess Europa. Now there you go. Which is sort of a half step in the right direction because on the one hand, we can get used to it and recognize, hey, that face doesn't look right. But it's not a face we immediately recognize because it's a made up face, first of all. So it wasn't the perfect solution, but it got us closer.

So one is your ability to recognize other people's faces. This is evolutionarily very important. We're an extremely social species. So we live in small groups and we look at faces and the identity is massively important to us.

And we're so good at it that when you realize that the difference from face to face is like a tiny difference in the distance between the eyes or the length of the nose or the frenulum These are really subtle differences. Yeah. But we are exquisitely good at it because we're a social creature.

Now, the issue about why you don't recognize your own face, that's because you only see your face from a particular angle in the mirror straight on. So it's backwards. By the way, it's left, right reversed in the mirror. But also you don't see yourself from all the other angles. Oh, it was a side profile too, yeah. Yeah. I was like, that's not what side profile looks like.

I was like, you're crazy. It's exactly what your side profile looks like. This is analogous to you for different reasons, but it's analogous to hearing your own voice. You and I as podcasters are probably much more used to hearing our voice than other people. But when you're a kid and you hear your own voice on a tape recorder, you think, it doesn't sound anything like me.

And that's because you only hear your own voice from inside your head. The resonance of the skull and the cavities in there is very different from how other people hear you.

Exactly. So that's why when you saw your face and stuff. The other weird part is that you're constantly changing, right? Your face morphs through time. And when you look at a picture of yourself from a decade ago, two decades ago, and so on, but it's hard somehow to keep track of that about ourselves.

Now, here's the thing. The reason the watermark is important is because all the rest of it is just super easy to scan digitally and reproduce. So all the rest we just assume will be right. The watermark is the part that has to be done by hand usually. And so that's why that really matters there.

What's interesting, I'll tell you one of the other recommendations I made to these guys is I said, look, what I've realized from a year of doing this is that a bill is full of distractions, right? The thing, the trees, the flowers, the banners, the eagles, the whatever. Like it's so full of stuff that you would not notice if that tree were missing or the eagle. Like it just doesn't matter.

And what that does is it distracts us from the security features. Therefore, the optimal thing to do would be to have a blank bill with a single hologram in the middle. Holograms are hard to counterfeit. That's it. You just want a single hologram that tells you the money, 20 or 50 or 100. And I made the argument to these guys and they all sat there and they said, you know what?

In theory, we agree with you. The logic of it is indisputable. But what they felt like is money has to be regal looking. And they felt like there's all this cultural momentum to money. And so in the end, they rejected that. They turned it down. But it's a real shame because that's how you stop counterfeiting or reduce it greatly.

That's it. That's the whole thing. That's the right way to do it.

I hope that is where it'll go 100 years from now. And by the way, let me just note, in case any of the listeners are thinking, hey, who even uses cash anymore? What's interesting is how much it's used around the world. Cash is still king. Really? Despite crypto, despite credit cards, all that stuff. Yeah, because most of the world... is at markets and stalls and flea markets.

There's just tons of that stuff going on. Yeah, even still.

Yeah, exactly. Obviously, most counterfeiting is the high 50s and 100s in Europe. By the way, there's one other thing about European money, which I suggested to them, which is European money is different sizes. So the 20 and the 50 and the 100. For blind people. Is that the idea? Exactly. Although note that we have blind people in the United States too.

I don't know, actually.