David Eagleman

of committing suicide.

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

It's that they're saying, okay, I'm done here.

And they fold up shop and they carefully kill themselves.

And so this is a majorly important part of how the brain develops.

Yeah.

Okay.

So that's exactly right.

So it turns out that in the brain, no territory lies fallow.

Everything is going to get used.

And so we think about this area at the back of the head, we think of that as the visual cortex.

But yes, if you go blind, it's no longer the visual cortex.

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

Now,

the territory I'm talking about is called the cortex, which is the outer wrinkly bit of the brain.

And the cortex is, we have more of it

in relation to our body size than anybody in the animal kingdom.

This is sort of the magical stuff that makes us really good at what we're doing.

So it turns out that cortex is a one trick pony, which is to say, it's not that this is fundamentally visual and that's fundamentally auditory and for touch and for controlling the motor system, but instead any of it can trade off with any other of it.

And so