David Eagleman

You can learn how to kiteboard or parachute or do any, you can learn all kinds of new stuff, take up a pogo stick if you want at any age.

But things like your visual system, that gets less and less plastic with time because it says, okay, I got it.

This is what the world looks like.

And it sort of hardens into place.

Yeah, well, so it turns out that we've got these sensors like our eyes, which are these two spheres in the front of your skull that pick up on photons.

And they have chemical reactions.

They pick up on photons and they send electrical signals back into the darkness of the brain.

And you've got your ears, which are picking up on air compression waves.

And it's a very sophisticated little machine.

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.