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.
Trend
recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 3 in all, peaking in Jan 2026 with 2.
Appearances
Yeah. And whatever they're doing where they are moving their hand, what they do is they set things up so that you're a little suspicious maybe of what they're doing with their left hand. So you're thinking, I'm a smart audience member. I'm going to keep an eye on the left hand. And while they're doing that, while you're watching, they're doing the right hand is do whatever they want.
And it's total inattentional blindness to the right hand.
Yeah. So this is something I've been very interested in for a very long time is about... how as a species, we're so cooperative. The reason we've built our whole civilization as well as we have is because we're so good at linking arms and making stuff happen. But we evolved in small groups. And so we are very prone to saying, this is my in-group and those people over there, they're my out-group.
And it turns out there's been lots of studies like that from my lab, many other labs showing that we just have less empathy for people in our outgroups. We just don't care about them as much as in if they get hurt or something. So here's a study that I ran in the lab some years ago.
We put you in the brain scanner, functional magnetic resonance imaging, fMRI, and you see six hands on the screen, six hands that all pretty much look alike. And the computer goes around and picks one of the hands. And then you see that hand either get touched with a Q-tip or stabbed with a syringe needle. And yeah, exactly. Watching it was getting stabbed with a syringe needle. Is it real?
The way we filmed it is we made a syringe needle that contracts. So as you're pushing, the needle's actually going back up.
Yeah, but it looks quite horrifying. And so what we do then is the way we analyze that kind of data is we compare the two cases. And in the case where the hand is getting stabbed, you have all this area come online, this network of areas, I should say, that we summarize as the pain matrix. And that's what happens if you get hurt.
If your hand gets stabbed, the same area comes online, which is to say when you are watching someone else get stabbed, This is the neural basis of empathy. You are empathizing with their pain, even though you're not in pain. And this is great. This is what humans do is they see the pain of someone else and they empathize. What would that feel like? So that's very important.
But what we then did is we had the same six hands. And we labeled each one with a one word label, Christian, Jewish, Muslim, Hindu, Scientologist, Atheist. And now the computer goes round, picks a hand. You see that hand gets stabbed. And the question is, if it's a member of one of your out group versus your in group, does your brain care as much? And the answer is it does not.
Your brain does not care as much if it's a member of any of your outgroups that gets stabbed. And by the way, we tested this on all religions, including, by the way, atheists. Even atheists have this, which is when an atheist hand gets stabbed, they have a bigger empathic reaction than when any of the non-atheist hands get stabbed.
So this is really the first lowest level signature of empathy that we have. And all it takes is a one word label for people to feel like, oh, I don't really care so much about that hand.
We saw this happen when the CEO of UnitedHealthcare was murdered in the street.
I don't totally understand why people felt that way. Oh, really? Obviously, people had bad experiences with the insurance company, UnitedHealthcare or others. But it's not that guy, Brian, making the decision and putting the red stamp on their piece of paper.
Okay. So this thing with LA, it's interesting because LA is so multicultural. You can imagine if an equivalent fire happened in, we could name different countries, the reaction that some people would have, which is, oh, Good, I'm glad that happened to those Russians or the whatever. It's tough, though. I don't think I would do that, but I don't know. Okay, here's the thing. You would.
I don't know what country or what religion or what thing it would be for you, but here's the interesting part. We measured 128 people on the scanner. We don't know that all of them actually act badly to their neighbors and so on. Why? Because what we are measuring is the first brain response, which is, hey, I really care about these people in my in-group. I don't care so much about these people.
But you might have other cognitive layers that say, you know what, that embarrasses me that I don't care as much about the Russians who were just in a fire. So I'm going to donate to that Russian charity because I'm... So there's a
And people have done these tests for years called the implicit association task. And by implicit, they mean something that you can't even articulate. It's not explicit. And what they find is that everybody has biases against certain things, certain groups. certain sexual orientation, whatever it is, everyone's got something going on deep down, but it doesn't mean anything about their behavior.
He wouldn't have had a pager.
So I felt the same way you did. But... Rewind history where you and I are born in Lebanon and for some reason our parents are Hezbollah. I would 100% have joined an organization like that.
What I was going to say, aside from joining an organization, the question is, would we feel empathic?
Showing 1241–1260 of 1,631 · page 63 of 82
← Previous
Next →