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
Oh, that's very interesting. So a lot of what I've studied in my career has to do with time, our perception of time. And the bottom line, of course, is that we live slightly in the past. Why? Because it takes time for signals to get, you know, processed and integrated, right? So when signals hit my... For example, I used to play baseball and...
You know, when you're swinging at a fast pitch, this all happens unconsciously. The best you can do as this ball is traveling from the mound to the plate is to adjust your swing up or down as you're already swinging. But all this is happening unconsciously. My experience has always been when I hit the ball... I become aware that I have just hit the ball.
And I say to myself, throw it out the bat and run. Because it's already flying. The reason being, of course, because it takes at least half a second before you get conscious awareness of anything. The signals have to move around in your brain. As you know, signals are very slowly in the brain, about a meter per second on unmyelinated axons, maybe 10 times faster than on myelinated axons.
It's 10 times faster? Yeah. Okay. And what's interesting, we've got big bodies, right? So if I touch your toe, the signals have to travel all the way up. you know, up your leg and up your spinal cord to your brain. But here's the weird part. You know, if I touch your toe and your nose at the same time, you'll feel those simultaneously.
And that's weird because how does your, you know, does your brain feel the signal from the nose and then say, okay, I'm just going to wait and see if anything's coming up. If your eyes are closed? Yeah. Yeah. That's weird. Yeah, so here's the thing. Yeah, yeah, that's weird.
This, by the way, led me to a hypothesis some years ago that taller people live further in the past than shorter people because your brain has to wait for all the signals to come together, your vision, your hearing, your touch, touch from your toes, all this stuff to come together. It puts together your conscious perception of what's happening right now. And that's slightly longer lag time.
Slightly longer lag time if you're taller, yeah. It's a very funny hypothesis, by the way. So... Yeah, so we live a little bit in the past, and during that time, I totally concur, there can't be free will involved in any of the processing or certainly reflexes, but also ballistic movements that we're doing. There's no possibility for free will to operate there.
If we do have free will, the argument I made at the end of Incognito is that, you know, there may be free will. It's very difficult neuroscience-wise to nail this question of if there is or not. But if there is, it's a bit player in a much larger system. And so... You've got all this unconscious processing, most of what's happening in the brain.
I think of the conscious brain as a broom closet in the mansion of the brain. I should say the conscious mind 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.
Right. This doesn't answer the free will question, though, because if I choose this particular future, we can still question whether I had free will to choose that, or if I rewound history a thousand times, would I always choose that future?
One argument for this is that when you simulate a future, you then feel emotionally what that future feels like, and you compare that to the next future and the next future. There's obviously truth in that. Yeah, and maybe you need to simulate each one in order to make your evaluation. But the question is, you know, I say, oh, that future feels the best to me.
That's who I want to be in the long term. But was it a free choice? I don't know. Just for the record, I don't come down one way or the other on the free will because I don't know.
Yeah, that's right. That's right.
Great. Okay, well, I'm running a couple of new books. And so one of them is called Empire of the Invisible. And this is about all the stuff that we don't see. In other words, I've always been fascinated by this question of why do each of us think we know the truth? And if we could just shout it on X in all capital letters enough, everyone would come to agree with us.
Everyone would see the wisdom of our point of view. I've seen firsthand that that isn't true. Yeah. Exactly. So everybody on social media knows the truth. And on any side of the spectrum, whether you're a denizen of Wokistan or Magistan or whatever, everyone feels like it's clear. And my question is, why do we all have such limited internal models where we think we know the truth?
I'm saying this in a way that's free of any political opinion. I'm speaking metapolitically now. And so this is what Empire of the Invisible is about, is how do we come to our internal models and why do we take them so seriously?
Nice. Let me just unpack that for the listener. It's that when you say, okay, this is my view, I've got this, then the uncertainty is reduced. Yeah, to almost nothing.
That's right. And one of the main, exactly. One of the main goals of the brain always is to reduce energy expenditure. Of course. On the, on the immediate timescale. Yeah, of course. Yep. Of course.
Oh, lovely.
It's like, oh, okay. And it's a positive feedback loop because once you have your point of view on something, then, of course, we know about confirmation bias and other ways where you seek data that merely validates and you ignore the data that speaks against it.
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