David Eagleman

We don't have that luxury.

You have to learn everything on the fly.

All animals do have to learn the world on the fly and get good at it.

And this is where we outshine AI by a long way.

It's going to be pretty different.

I mean, for one thing, we'll be much better at actually being able to measure what's going on in the brain.

So for example, right now, our best technology is called functional magnetic resonance imaging, fMRI.

You stick somebody in the brain scanner and you can tell

sort of crudely where the activity is happening in the brain.

And, you know, we make all kinds of theories and we do, you know, I've written hundreds of papers on this topic, but the fact is it's a crude technology.

What we really need to understand how the brain is working is to be able to see the activity in each one of the 86 billion neurons in real time.

And they're each chattering along, you know, 10 to hundreds of spikes per second.

We're nowhere near that kind of technology, but eventually we will get there and that will generate a

completely different kind of understanding of how the brain actually works.

We're still missing really most of how the brain is actually doing what it does.

And when we get to that point, we'll be able to read and write from the brain and to the brain, and that's going to change everything.

Right now, the brain is really locked in this armored bunker plating of the skull, and we can't do much with it except for

I can try to read your intentions and you mine by our words and by our behavior, but it's pretty limited.

So there may be in the distant future straight brain-to-brain communication, which is a very different sort of bandwidth

of communication.