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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Yeah, that's right. That's right. And so I think what I suggested in Incognito is that maybe we can look at the way that animals resolve conflict or don't, like the poor rat that gets stuck in the middle, and we can use that as at least a rough metric for the degree of consciousness that an animal has. Because the assertion there is that...
You know, consciousness allows you to mediate these things and figure out a path forward there.
Yeah. The difficulty with the consciousness question, of course, as we know, is there's no single spot in the brain that is consciousness. And so when I think about rivaling networks, I tend to think about them rivaling directly with one another. You're, of course, totally correct that For example, visual attention can amplify certain things.
It's like coming from visual cortex, you can pay auditory attention to something or something like that.
Exactly, but I have to confess that we just don't know what... What consciousness is, where does consciousness live in that? I mean, we can talk about visual attention, auditory attention, and so on, but where's this? It's not like an extra bit that just pays attention consciously. So that's still a bit of a mystery. Yeah, yeah.
Yeah. Well, what it's for, of course, is what you said at the beginning, which is the way that we go on missions into the world. You know, if I'm looking for the red object, then I find the red object. If I'm looking for the thing that looks like a broom, then I find that in the crowded space and so on. So visual attention is what allows us to parse the world
in a way that's aligned with our mission, that what we're trying to answer in that moment.
That's exactly right. So the unconscious brain, which is most of what's happening... It's all about speed and efficiency. So if you look at, for example, this study has been done with playing Tetris. So you take a bunch of people, male and female, of course, left and right-handed, and you teach them to play Tetris.
So when they're first learning, they're amateurs, their brain is on fire with activity as measured functional magnetic resonance imaging. So you're measuring their brains. After they become good at it, the activity shrinks and shrinks. Right. It's less and less. I did this. I competed against this 10-year-old world champion cup stacker. So he takes these cups and stacks them.
It's this routine that you do as quickly as you can. I had never done it before. So we both wore high-density EEG caps, electroencephalography, and we looked at what was going on. Of course, my brain was on fire with activities. I was trying to figure out what the heck to do. But he, practicing four hours a day on this, His brain is essentially quiet while he does this incredibly rapid routine.
So it's exactly right. The job of the brain is to take novel things and say, hey, if this is relevant and I need this, I'm going to burn it down into the circuitry so I never have to think about it again. Like bicycle riding. When you're first learning, you're paying attention to your torso and your legs and you don't know what you're doing.
When you get good at it, then you can text on your phone, you can talk to someone while you're biking, because it's now part of the machinery of the brain.
Exactly.
Oh, nice. Oh, I like that. Yeah, yeah. Yeah, that's exactly right. And what's interesting, by the way, I talked about this in the Brain Plasticity course and in my book, LiveWire.
What's interesting is that given who you are and what you've already packed down into your machinery, that determines what is relevant to you for the next thing, such that there's a million things you could learn or could pay attention to at every moment, but you're only going to... take on those things that are relevant to you and push them down into the unconscious brain as a result.
And we know, for example, the acetylcholinergic systems are involved in this process, which is to say they tag relevance. They say, hey, this is something that means something to you for whatever reason, who knows, but you really care about stamp collecting or genealogy or artwork or whatever it is that you care about.
And so then you go on these missions from the world and you take stuff in and you start burning that stuff down and it means something to you, whereas the rest of the stuff just goes.
Yeah, so you've got these acetylcholinergic systems that say, hey, this is important. I want you to initiate plasticity here. And by the way, these systems, just like dopamine actually, broadcast all around the entire brain. So the dopamine system is involved in saying, hey, that was better than expected. I wasn't expecting that to happen. You get a positive burst of dopamine.
If, in contrast, you're expecting reward and you don't get it, you get a decrease in the amount of dopamine. You have a little baseline going on. Absence of an expected reward is technically a punishment. Exactly right. Yep. And so that's what the dopamine system is for, saying, oh, better than expected, worse than expected.
But acetylcholine is what happens when you're saying, I want to make plastic changes to the system. Let me just give you an example. Yeah, yeah. An experiment with mice, and they have to learn how to reach through a narrow slot to grab pellets and whatever. And they get better and better at it. And the parts of their brain that are involved in this task actually grow in their real estate.
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