David Eagleman

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.

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 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, 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 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 eat, mate, sleep, whatever.

And that's it.