David Eagleman

The really special thing with humans being live wired is that we drop into the world half-baked and we absorb everything around us.

That's how you absorb your language, your neighborhood, your culture, your parents, your way of acting, your way of acting in the 21st century and so on.

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

If you were born 10,000 years ago, exactly you with the same DNA would

and you ended up in the world 10,000 years ago, you'd be totally different in terms of your cultural beliefs, whatever weird, you know, animistic religion you believe in, whatever kind of, you know, thing is appropriate for, you know, burning people at the stake or whatever, or how you hunt a lion or stuff like that.

You would just be a different kind of person.

And this is because we...

you know, we absorb the world around us.

And this is what I flagged a little bit earlier.

What separates us from our closest cousins in the animal kingdom is that most animals are still dropping into the world, essentially pre-programmed.

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

And that's it.

And you're doing the same thing that goats did 10,000 years ago.

When you drop in as a human,

um you in your first several years essentially get to learn everything that humans have discovered up until now and then you springboard off the top of that and that's what has led to the success of our species we've taken over every corner of the planet we've gotten off the planet we've invented the internet and quantum computation and so on um precisely because we're able we're not starting from square one every time but we start from where humans have already gotten

Yeah.

So happily, these examples are rare, but they're very heartbreaking, which is sometimes you find a child who's had such neglect and abuse that they haven't had all the normal input.

So

Mother Nature is taking a gamble when she drops a half-baked brain into the world.

She's assuming, okay, well, you should get all the normal language and love and touch and, you know, interaction with other humans.