David Eagleman

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to the library and we would thumb through the card catalog and hope there was something on it there that wasn't too outdated.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.

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.