David Eagleman

They're feeling these bumps and so on and signals from other elephants.

And this is totally invisible to us.

Yeah, that's exactly right.

The reason that we see in this very narrow range that we call visible light is precisely because that big ball of fire in the sky, the sun, is optimally giving photons that bounce off things on our planet's surface in that range.

In other words, lots of stuff doesn't get through the atmosphere, so it wouldn't be useful for us to pick up on many of these other ranges.

And so, yeah, we pick up on stuff that's super useful to us.

That's right.

Now, it's not clear, for example, why we have lost so much skill with smell, but everything is constrained.

So if you're getting better at this and you're devoting more real estate in your brain towards vision, then you're going to lose some real estate in smell, for example.

And so somehow when everything balances out, we've ended up exactly as we are.

Yeah.

That's right.

Well, both statements are true.

I mean, we are really special because our brains are running algorithms just slightly differently.

And I can talk about that, why we have taken over the whole planet.

compared to all our brethren in the animal kingdom.

But yes, it's all made of the same stuff.

If I showed you a brain cell, a neuron from a human, a horse, a cow, an insect, a squid, you couldn't tell me what's... I mean, they all look the same.

They're doing exactly the same thing.

It's just...