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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Appearances
Heck yeah, we would, right?
What's very interesting is we also did, in parallel with these neuroimaging studies, we also gave people these very full questionnaires where they filled them out. And there are these standardized tests for how empathic a person you are. And what we found was something we really didn't expect
which was that the people who showed the biggest difference between their in-group and out-group neural responses were also the people that described themselves as the most empathic, which is very interesting. I think there are a few possible interpretations of that. One is that they somehow deep down know that they aren't sero-empathic, and so they're lying. I see. That's one possibility.
One possibility is that when they think about their empathy— They're thinking about their in-group.
Yeah, like what if I saw my uncle fall and twist his ankle? Would I be empathic?
Oh, I'd be the most empathic person in the world. And they're right in assessing that. They're just not thinking about how they would feel if it was their out-group. So anyway, this all goes to your statement about what things we admit to ourselves and do not. I have a strong suspicion that if we could ever really know ourselves really deeply, it would be awful.
I don't think we'd want to know all of our weird flaws and the lies we make to cover up the kind of personality things. Yeah.
So, by the way, yeah, I wrote about it in my book, Incognito, years ago, was this issue that really the way to think about the brain is that we are a team of rival. You've got all these neural networks that all have different drives, and they want different things, and you are a collection of these things, okay?
For example, if I put some chocolate chip cookies in front of you, part of your brain wants to eat that. Part of your brain says, don't eat it, I'm on a diet. Part of your brain says, okay, I'll eat it, but I'll promise my wife that I'll go to the gym tomorrow. Whatever, you can contract yourself automatically argue with yourself, cuss at yourself.
This is the weird part about being human is we've got all these different drives. Okay, here's what Nietzsche said. He said, every drive philosophizes in its own spirit. What he meant by that was when you are gripped by rage or sexual desire or desire to eat the chocolate chip cookies, you have this way to philosophize, to rationalize, to say, this guy really deserves this.
Or, yeah, I'm going to make this lie over here to get what I want sexually. Or here's all the reasons why I should eat the cookie. But the point is, when you're in that moment, when you're being driven by these particular neural networks, You philosophize in that spirit. You say, you know what? Actually, this makes total sense. I should do this. I should do exactly what I want.
Your aim makes the pathway open up to you. Oh, here's exactly what I should do so that I can eat these cookies.
Whatever it is, like not recycle the cans because you're feeling lazy or you want to. Let's take the simpler example. I want to eat the cookies. So when I'm gripped by that desire, I can cook up something.
Exactly. What I'm doing is I'm philosophizing in such a way that I can land at the conclusion that I want.
Exactly.
That's exactly right. But what's interesting is the end conclusion of that is that you might actually do really wonderful things in the world. You might go out of your way to go to some charity events. In fact, people have long noted that sometimes the people who are the loudest about, let's say, being anti-racist online...
Sometimes they're the people with the deepest internal demons that they're fighting.
Yeah, although what's interesting is that every group... is on a really broad distribution. So that will always be available to people to say, I like you, but I think that in your group, whatever group it is, there are people who do XYZ and I don't like that. So what's interesting is that chess move will always be available to those guys. Yeah, that's true.
It actually wouldn't make sense for them to meet one young woman who they think is really great and then say, oh, I used to have these political opinions, but now I've changed my mind entirely because of an N of one.
Here's the thing. So there's two things I would say there. One is that, interestingly, if you measured any of these Klansmen who had hung up their robe, you'd probably find this really low level circuitry in their brain having a difference in their reaction to black and white. But this is an example of the guy layering on cognition and what we might call wisdom and saying, hey, you know what?
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