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
And I think if there's an AI girlfriend company that builds these things so that there is pushback and there are thresholds at which they say, I'm leaving, I'm not hanging out with you anymore.
Because that's what we do all the time is we simulate conversation. to say this and then she's going to say that and then I'm going to say that to her and so on. What a great opportunity to actually run through and say, oh God, I hadn't even thought of that. That's a good, you know.
That's really going to hurt her feelings if I say that and it's not worth it.
Nope. No, great. So I'm glad he asked this question. The idea of mind reading using, let's say, fMRI, which is our current hot technology, but in 10 years it'll be outdated and there'll be xMRI or something better. But the point is... Every brain is completely different. You and I have tons of stuff in common, but our brains are totally different. We grew up in different places.
We had different childhood experiences. We had different parents or whatever. And as a result, all the fine structure of our brain is different. So there are certain things. that you would find appealing, like a certain math problem or something. I might find something, maybe you like flying an airplane. I like riding horses and whatever, like there's just a million differences.
Okay, so that's the first problem. But the second problem is real thought, a real person is so rich and multilayered and highly textured that I assert it's actually impossible to do mind reading, certainly in our lifetime, maybe ever. So here's what I mean.
Where this shows up in the media all the time is, oh, scientists have shown that we can measure, let's say, what's happening in visual cortex to the degree that you can actually understand what somebody is seeing. Even if you're not seeing what they're seeing, just by the activity of their visual cortex, you can understand what they're seeing.
The way you do this is you put people in the scanner, you show them hours and hours of videos and pictures and stuff like that. And for each image, you're looking at what am I seeing in the visual cortex? And so you end up with these very fine correlations.
Okay, so let's stick with vision for just one second. So if I'm measuring your visual cortex, I show you hours and hours of images, I measure your visual cortex, and eventually I can make a pretty good correlative map. Why? It's because your visual cortex is essentially like a warped television screen, your primary visual cortex. Okay.
So the media looks at these things and says, wow, that's mind reading. I can show you an image and say, I don't know what the image is, but I look at your visual cortex. I say, oh, Jordan's just seeing an image of an elephant riding a unicycle. That's pretty amazing, right? But it's not mind reading. That's just reading your visual cortex. Same with auditory cortex.
You can actually nowadays figure out what somebody is hearing in their ears from the activity on their auditory cortex. Very cool, impressive stuff. It's not mind reading. The auditory cortex is just laying out the different frequencies. Okay. think about what a thought actually is for you.
The thought is, when you walked in my house, you're thinking, okay, let's see, I'm carrying this thing in my left hand. Oh, I've got to step over here because there's a rock in the way. I'm just moving over here. And oh, I've never been to David's house before, even though David and I have known each other for a long time. And oh, look, oh, what's that? Oh, there's a grill over there. Cool.
Yeah, exactly. There's so much... thinking that we're never going to be able to figure out because it has to do with you and it has to do with, oh, and I forgot. I have to tell my brother about this thing that I forgot that happened last week. And all these things are running through your head all the time. So point is, we can measure visual cortex. We can measure auditory cortex.
but all the rest of it is what's happening in your brain. It's on your experiences, yeah. That would all be like noise in this machine. Yeah, exactly. We couldn't possibly understand what it is because let's imagine that I don't know that you have a brother and that something happened to you last week that you need to tell him about.
If I don't know that, there's no way for me to establish a correlation in the neuroimaging.
Okay, you can imagine a scenario a thousand years from now where there's so much cameras and things and everything that every moment of your life is tracked. And then in theory, you've got to be a lot closer, but still you might have thoughts that are remixing things that you've experienced.
I wouldn't know that if you think, wait, I saw this piece of architecture over here and then I saw this other thing over here. And what if I put that on a Euro bill? I wouldn't be able to read that because I've never... Seeing you experience that, you're remixing it.
And by the way, people ask me sometimes like, hey, could we do mind reading technology so we could know in an airport as people are walking through, if somebody's thinking about bombing a plane.
Yeah. But something specific like a bomb on an airplane. But of course, Half the people in the airport are thinking about a bomb because they're thinking, I hope there's not a bomb on the plane. And so it doesn't tell you. Yeah.
Lie detection is a very fascinating thing because you can actually measure things in neuroimaging when somebody is doing a lie because essentially a lie requires two things. One is... squelching the truth. Let's ask you a question. You know what the truth is. I say, hey, what's your wife's name?
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