David Eagleman

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.

And you're doing the same thing that goats did 10,000 years ago.

When you drop in as a human, you, in your first several years, essentially get to learn everything that humans have discovered up until now, and then you springboard off the top of that.

And that's what has led to the success of our species.

We've taken over every corner of the planet.

We've gotten off the planet.

We've invented the internet and quantum computation and so on, precisely because we're able, we're not starting from square one every time, but we start from where humans have already gotten.

Yeah, so happily, these examples are rare, but they're very heartbreaking, which is sometimes you find a child who's had such neglect and abuse that they haven't had all the normal input.

So Mother Nature is taking a gamble when she drops a half-baked brain into the world.

She's assuming, okay, well, you should get all the normal language and love and touch and interaction with other humans.

And occasionally, you'll find a child who's locked up by their parents and they're not talked to and...

They have terrible cognitive development.