David Eagleman

And it breaks frequencies of sound down into...

different areas and it sends spikes into the darkness of the brain and so on.

And it turns out that, I mean, this is the weird and wild part is that we sort of feel like, oh yeah, I'm just seeing the world.

It's like I'm piping light into my head and I'm piping sound into my head, but that's not it at all.

Your brain is locked in silence and darkness and all it has are these billions of neurons sending electrical signals around and that leads to chemical signals and that's it.

And so all of this is a construction of the brain, what you're seeing, what you're hearing.

And this is a very wild and deep thing to get your head wrapped around.

But anyway, that's just the biological truth of it.

And so my potato head model that I proposed a little while ago was that actually doesn't matter how you get the information into the brain as long as you get it there.

You can send information through a very unusual channel.

And as long as the information gets there, the brain will figure out what to do with it.

And so...

This was first shown actually at the end of the 1800s where some experimenters took someone who was blind and they had a little photo detector that would detect light and they turned that into patterns of vibration on the head and the person could essentially come to see via patterns of vibration on their forehead.

And

This is so unusual to think about sight that way.

And then I'll mention in 1969, another scientist put blind people into a modified dental chair, which had this little grid on the back and it would sort of poke you in the back in various ways.

And he set up a video camera and whatever the video camera was seeing, you would feel that poked into your back.

So if it was a face or a square or a coffee cup or a telephone, you'd feel the shape of that poked into your back.

And blind people got really good at being able to see the world this way.

And so it turns out it doesn't matter how you get the information in there.