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
We're just now at this moment in history, for the first time in billions of years, where we can suddenly feed in completely new senses to the brain. And a year from now, the human species starts proliferating into all these different kinds of experiences that can be had.
The conscious brain is a broom closet in the mansion of the brain with very little access to what's going on. There may be free will, but it's going to be a small player if it's there.
This doesn't answer the free will question though.
You know, when it comes to this question of truth, there is no singular truth because you've got a completely different set of experiences that have wired your brain, my brain, everyone's brain. We're all going to perceive different things and seek different things from the world.
I did. Yep, it's on brain plasticity, which is really my favorite topic. It's about how brains absorb the world around them and adapt to them. And the interesting part about this is that we are the only species that is
as plastic as we are so you know you see a zebra get born and in 45 minutes it's running around or a dolphin is swimming after a few minutes of being born but if you see a homo sapien get born they're not doing it as quickly and the reason is mother nature essentially came up with a different trick with us where she drops us into the world half-baked and we absorb the world around us our language our culture
all, you know, we take everything that's happened before us and we springboard off the top of that. And this is the reason why Homo sapiens has taken over the planet and been so successful because we, unlike a horse that's essentially living the same life that horses have for, you know, for generations, we are living different lives every time. So that's what brain plasticity is about.
And I actually don't use the word plasticity as much anymore because that was a term originally coined by William James because he was impressed by plastic manufacturing. You could, you know, mold something into shape and it would hold that shape. And he said, that's kind of what brains do. You know, you learn the name of your fourth grade teacher and that gets written down and retained.
So he called that plasticity. But... What we're looking at is a system of such complexity. We've got 86 billion neurons. We've got 200 trillion synaptic connections. And every moment of your life, this forest of neurons is reconfiguring and changing.
And so I tend to call this live wiring instead of plasticity, only because I think the days of being impressed by plastic manufacturing are past us now. What we're looking at is a system that You know, every second of your life from cradle to grave is reconfiguring to represent the world around you and all of your experiences and all of your memories.
Right? That's exactly right. And so the key is if you ask these people, you know, if they did anything different while answering the question, they won't have any idea. But their eyes are like, you know, on a covert operation doing the thing. So as you know, of course, you know, eyes jump around about three times a second. Those are called saccades.
And then in between, there's little micro saccades. But the point is we're not aware of that at all. So when your brain is going out to seek the answer to a question, it... it's running its mission and it's looking at all the points and pieces that it needs to, to gather the information. But we consciously are totally unaware of that. And this of course is representative of, of most of perception.
Um, we don't know how we're gathering the data, but this is what we do. In fact, so what my book incognito was about, of course, was that almost everything in the brain is happening unconsciously. You just don't have any access to it and really no awareness or acquaintance with it either. Um, And this is just a good example of that.
It's definitely a mission. Yeah, okay. Yeah, so in this case, you're asking a question about the painting, and the subject is trying to answer that. But this is true for all of us in all cases. Let's imagine you're on a hike with friends here in Phoenix. And you guys are walking along and one of your friends is a mycologist. So he notices the mushrooms that you don't notice.
And your other friend is a climatologist. And so he's noticing the tree line and where things have changed. And you've got a friend who's a podiatrist and she's noticing the angle of your feet and so on. The point is that All the data is hitting all of your eyes, but you guys are seeing different things. You're having different experiences in the world predicated on what questions you're asking.
And that, of course, is predicated on who you are, all of your experiences, and what is relevant to you.
There's the big ones about three times a second, and then there's the micro saccades, which are always moving. That's for a slightly different reason.
Eye movement. Exactly. Smooth pursuit eye movements when you're following something. Right. Yeah, exactly. Right.
Yes, yeah, that's absolutely right. And the fascinating part is that all this is happening unconsciously. We're going and we're seeking out answers from the world. And it's a matter of what your attention is drawn to also. So if I say, hey, what's the feeling of your shoe on your left foot right now? Right, right. You can become aware of that.
You've got all the data, if we want to call it that, available to you, but you're only seeking little parts. And this all depends on your internal model of the world. in terms of who you are, what is relevant to you. And that's the filter through which we interpret everything. And so when it comes to this question of truth, there is no singular truth because
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