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
I hope that is where it'll go 100 years from now. And by the way, let me just note, in case any of the listeners are thinking, hey, who even uses cash anymore? What's interesting is how much it's used around the world. Cash is still king. Really? Despite crypto, despite credit cards, all that stuff. Yeah, because most of the world... is at markets and stalls and flea markets.
There's just tons of that stuff going on. Yeah, even still.
Yeah, exactly. Obviously, most counterfeiting is the high 50s and 100s in Europe. By the way, there's one other thing about European money, which I suggested to them, which is European money is different sizes. So the 20 and the 50 and the 100. For blind people. Is that the idea? Exactly. Although note that we have blind people in the United States too.
I don't know, actually.
Oh, sure. And so in America, we have to at least look at the bill for 200 milliseconds longer to figure out what am I holding because the size doesn't tell you the answer to that. So I think they should make them all the same size so that you at least look at it a little bit longer. They said, we love the idea, but we'd have to retool all the vending machines in Europe.
So that's why they rejected it.
Exactly right. And Darren did that experiment. But this was actually an experiment done at Harvard originally with some colleagues of mine who did this. They were very interested in this concept of change blindness, which is... How much do we notice changes in the world? Now, the fact is that the world tends to be stable. So I'm talking to you now, Jordan.
And if I look somewhere else and then I look back, you're really likely to still be here because that's just how physics works. But so they wanted to know, but what does that mean? If I'm assuming that I'm talking to you and then I look somewhere and you turn into somebody else, would I even notice? And so they did this experiment in the Harvard quad with the door passing in between people.
But there are many different versions. Just the simplest is you show a photograph and then the photograph goes away and you show the photograph again. And maybe you swap back and forth between A and B and A and B with a little blank space in between each time. You tell the person there's some massive difference between photo A and photo B. Can you tell me what the difference is?
And people are terrible at it. And once they finally do see it or you tell them the answer, they think, how could I not have seen that? There's like a major difference. A car disappears from one to the other or the railing in the background moves by three feet up and down. The engine of the airplane is missing or not missing from photo A to B. But we just don't see that. Why?
It's because all we ever see is our internal model of the world. So when I look at a photograph, let's say it's a bunch of soldiers lined up to get on an airplane, big Hercules jet. When I'm asked to look at the photograph and see the details there, I think, okay, soldiers, jet, aircraft.
Sky, tarmac, and then I'm crawling around the scene with my attentional capacities and I'm trying to pull in more details to figure out what is the difference between these two photos that look the same to me. Okay, what are the soldiers wearing? What color is their thing? How many soldiers are there? And so on.
But it takes me a while before I land on, oh, the jet engine that's appearing and disappearing between photos A and B. I just don't notice it. So the thing is, when I look at the photo, this is the important part. I'm not seeing it as though I am a camera of some sort. All I ever see. is however rich my model is. So all I see is, oh, there's people and plane and sky.
And I go out in the world and I ask questions and that's how you get more and more detail on stuff. This is the heart of change blindness. This is why we don't notice when there are massive changes. So in the case of the person giving directions to the pedestrian who asks,
All you're thinking about is, oh, there's somebody, there's some stranger standing in front of me and I'm just trying to do this job of telling them how to get the directions and I'll never see them again. So your brain just doesn't put that much effort into it.
Oh, yeah, quite right. And I can show you other change blindness examples of things. For example, you can link this on the show notes. There's a British guy named Richard Wiseman who has this great card trick that he does on YouTube. I'm so sorry. Let me not tell what the punchline is, but link this on the show notes. What you'll see is he does this card trick
essentially asking you what you notice and you see the trick and you think, wow, how did I not notice that? But it's extraordinary. It's a terrific video.
Exactly right. So this is what's classified as inattentional blindness. Your attention is on the basketball. You're following the basketball very carefully to see where it's going. And as a result of attending in one spot, you have inattentional blindness to other things in the scene, like the gorilla walking in. Change blindness is essentially a version of that.
You don't know what to look for in the photograph of the airplane. And so you just don't see things.
I don't know. Yeah, that's exactly right. I mean, magicians have been for centuries very good at this. It's so easy to get the audience's attention to go here and there. They do all kinds of things like they never move their hand in a straight line. They move in a curved arc. And for whatever reason, you just can't resist having your attention follow that.
Showing 1221–1240 of 1,631 · page 62 of 82
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