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.
Trend
recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 3 in all, peaking in Jan 2026 with 2.
Appearances
Okay, now you take an equivalent set of rats, you give them an acetylcholine blocker. They do exactly the same number of trials they're doing the thing, but they don't get better and their brain doesn't change. They don't ever get better at the task. They're not faster at doing it because they don't have the plasticity available to them anymore. Because you need the acetylcholine.
By the way, something that, of course, we know is all of the neuromodulators and neurotransmitter systems, these are all working together in a very complicated dance. So, you know, dopamine is involved in saying like, hey, that was, you know, good, bad, better or worse than expected. But acetylcholine is the thing that says, hey, let's make plasticity available here.
Yeah, it's interesting because there's so many acetylcholine blockers that are used in animals for things, but I don't know what the emotional experience is for a human on that. My guess, if I were just pulling something out of a hat, would be that they just feel like they don't care about this particular thing.
I don't know. I don't know. Good question. But just, you know, I'm trying to think through what it would feel like. Imagine that you were trying to learn a new sport that you haven't played. You know, pickleball, let's say. So you're... And we're both learning the sport at the same time. And for some reason, it's really relevant to us.
But if one of us got acetylcholine blockers, my assumption would be that we feel like, we just don't care about this thing. You know, I'm more interested in what's going on over there or something. We wouldn't particularly care.
Okay, so you talked about, we had a bit of... Sorry, let me just give another example of that. Okay, so when somebody gets a stroke, and let's say they get a stroke and they lose the function in their left arm, their left arm's mostly paralyzed, and they can do things with their right hand. Well, so the way that you need to operate to get the left hand working again is,
Do you know what they do clinically? So what they do is what's called constraint therapy. This is the single best move. You take the right hand, which is working well, and you pin it down. You strap some of it so that they're forced to use their left hand. Necessity. Yeah, exactly. Necessity. That's the relevance. So now I want to get the sandwich to my mouth. I have to use the left arm.
I need to get my zipper down to go to the restroom. I have to use my left hand. These are the sorts of things that matter. This is what causes brain plasticity. Oh, yeah. Relevance. Oh.
Yes, that's exactly it.
Ah, yeah. I don't know. I don't know what it is in humans when we use this.
I think it wouldn't. It wouldn't directly be mediating the trying because I think what would happen is you would try it, but you wouldn't have the plasticity that says, hey, something useful happened here. So let's make changes to the motor cortex over here. You just wouldn't have that. And so the system would stop trying that.
It's all we ever have in there.
I have a suspicion that it's not, as Nietzsche said, that each one is coming with a personality or something. But my suspicion is that each one is reaching out to other spots, like visual cortex, like your limbic system, like your frontal cortex. When a network is dominant, it's sort of pulling information and sort of constructing a personality.
Yeah, that's right. Right. In terms of deciding what to say next, for example, you know, it's looking at the, you know, at your whole speech system, Wernicke's and Broca's and all these errors and saying, am I going to say something cruel or kind or whatever? But it's still using those basic mechanisms. It's taking advantage of the machinery that's there.
And it just has the ability to draw on it differently than a different.
You're thinking about neural networks as being the rats and the kind of collaboration that neural networks work out through time?
Okay, yeah.
So here's what I think. I think... So you have all these different drives, some of which are very primitive, you know, hunger and thirst and sexuality. And so you've got all these different drives, but you have more sophisticated drives too, including various forms of short-term thinking versus long-term thinking.
You have these different financial drives I was talking about with valuation or predicted emotional experience or social context. You've got all these different things going on. The way that they... form these agreements through time, they form these friendships, let's say, I think that makes an integrated personality.
That's what makes you, you and me, me, is the way that we let these things win or lose in different circumstances. In other words, All unconsciously, these networks have worked out ways of saying, all right, look, I'm going to let you in here and I'm going to do this. And maybe there's an advantage to letting anger win out in this moment. You know, I find that that works sometimes.
Showing 1421–1440 of 1,631 · page 72 of 82
← Previous
Next →