David Eagleman
speaker
1,631 appearances
7 recordings
5 series
first heard Dec 2024
last heard 20 Mar
David Eagleman’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 3 in all, peaking in Jan 2026 with 2.
Appearances
And so its world is built out of that.
Or for the blind echolocating bat, its world is built out of these, you know, echoing sound signals.
You know, it lets out a chirp and it gets an echo back.
And that's how it figures out the three-dimensional structure of the cave it's flying through.
or for the black ghost knife fish, it's just detecting, it has electrical fields around it, and it's detecting when that gets, you know, perturbed by, let's say, a rock or some predator there.
And those are the only signals that it has that it can pick up on from the world.
And so that's this concept of the umwelt, which is, you know, that's how it constructs its reality.
And what I've always found interesting is that presumably,
we all, you know, every animal species accepts its reality as the entire reality out there, because why would you stop to ever question or think that maybe there's something beyond what you can detect?
But what you said is also correct.
And this is actually the topic of my next book, which is the difference from human to human has been fascinating to me, just as one example.
Well, an easy example is colorblindness, right?
So let's say,
This person's colorblind, this person's not.
They're actually seeing the scene differently.
And we now know that a small fraction of women have not just three types of color photoreceptors in their eye, but four types, which means they're seeing colors the rest of us aren't seeing.
Or take something like synesthesia, which is...
where you, you know, someone, let's say, looks at letters or numbers and it triggers a color experience or they taste something and it puts a feeling on their fingertips or they hear something and it causes a visual for them.
There are many forms of synesthesia, but the point is it's not a disease or a disorder.
It's just an alternative perceptual reality.
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