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
You know what the true answer is, but then you have to squelch that and then you have to cook up a new version. Okay. And so what happens when you lie is there's a couple of different regions that we can see in the brain. Okay. So when that was discovered about the year 2000, a couple of companies started right away to do fMRI lie detection. Okay. But they both went out of business.
And here's why. It's because it's super easy to fool these things. Because, for example, if I'm in the scanner, I can move my foot around or do other things or think about some other thing and screw up the whole signal. These are very sensitive signals. And it turns out lie detection.
There's also there's a misunderstanding about lie detection, which is there's no such thing as a lie that you're just reading. Let's say with the traditional lie detector, the polygraph test that they use in courts. You're not measuring a lie. What you're measuring is the stress, the physiological stress that's typically associated with the lie.
So if you ask me a question and I'm lying to you, there's certain stress that goes with that. And that's what's being picked up on. But let's say I'm a particularly good liar or I practice this lie a bunch or I'm a psychopath and I don't care that I'm lying. It doesn't stress me out at all. Then there's not going to be that signal.
I believe you, but a good liar would say the same story that you're saying, by the way.
Oh, man. If you're a sophisticated liar, you would set this up so that then people around you think, oh, we know when Jordan's lying, so then you can get away with it.
Yeah. Yeah, that's exactly right. That's one of the issues is the sanctity of your inner cosmos. Yeah. So just as an example, there was a case in the 1960s where the police thought this guy probably had drugs. They broke into his house and he ran upstairs and they chased him. After he got to his bedroom and there were these pills on the dresser and he
Stuck all the pills in his mouth and swallowed them and then said, you can't bust me anything because you can't find anything. So they had him taken to the hospital and they pumped his stomach. And this went all the way up to the Supreme Court about whether that's okay to do that or that's an invasion of privacy.
And so the Supreme Court ruled that that was an invasion of privacy to pump somebody's stomach. But there are other circumstances when you can be given a blood test or something. So anyway, this issue about brain imaging is always right in between. This is an active area in legislation right now about when it counts as private or not.
But I think for a while, what we're going to see is that it's a step too far and far as invasion of privacy. Even if we had meaningful fMRI lie detection, the idea of saying we're going to handcuff you and force you in the scanner and force your brain to tell us something that's not going to fly.
Exactly. Typically, what we have now, though, is that you can volunteer. You say, hey, I would like to take the lie detector test and present that as evidence. The court doesn't have to accept it. That's true. Yeah. It's minority report ish. Yeah.
Now, the interesting thing about Minority Report, which is important, is that it is a total fantasy to imagine that you could ever predict what somebody is going to do. Why? Because the world's really complicated and every moment your brain is changing based on what the whole world is doing to you. So we can't ever know, oh, now we've got such great technology.
We know that in a week Jordan's going to commit a crime. No possible way of ever knowing that.
Exactly right. So there may or may not be a next step. That's right.
Great. Thanks, Jordan.
The conscious mind just gets access to the very top little bit, the newspaper headlines. And the reason is, you know, you've got almost 100 billion neurons. Neurons are the specialized cell type in the brain. These are doing incredibly complicated things.
And by incredibly complicated, I mean things we haven't even scratched the surface of yet in terms of the algorithms that they're running that make us up. I don't think we could even function at our scale of space and time if we had access to that level of detail. I mean, you can't keep 100 billion things in mind and each one of these neurons is talking about 10,000 of its neighbors.
I mean, just look at riding a bicycle. If you really pay attention, okay, how exactly am I moving my, you'll probably crash.
If you play a musical instrument, you know that if you start paying attention to what your fingers are doing, you're dead, you can't do it anymore because what's happening is so fast and sophisticated that you can't possibly address that with this slow, low bandwidth consciousness. This has to be something that the rest of your brain takes care of and just does for you.
These are all zombie routines, they're just completely automatized. Most of them we'd never even have access to. The vest is probably our best bet for the next 50 years or something, until we figure out better ways to get deeper in there and plug things directly into the brain, but that is not as easy as people think.
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