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
Right. Exactly. By the way, which makes me want to come back to a point that you mentioned about socially seeing people as friends or foes. In fact, the way we see most people in the world are strangers. Yeah. You don't need to worry. Yeah, exactly. You're relevant. Most things are irrelevant. Exactly. Most things are irrelevant. Yeah, yeah. And thank God for that. Yeah, exactly.
So that's analogous here.
Oh, they cause you to pay attention. Yeah, exactly right. Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Yeah. Right, right. And you know what I was going to say? This also ties back to another thing about maturation. Maturation, as I think it was Fitzgerald who said, is the ability to hold two contradictory ideas in mind at the same time. So what we're trying to do always is get our aim to reduce the entropy, our worldview. But as we mature, we say, okay, look, it could be this.
On the other hand, it could be that. And the ability to hold that and not have that, to have a slightly higher entropy and not have that be stressful to us. I don't know that I have a model.
That's great. And maybe instead of think, we could call it something like reconsider. Because it's, I mean, there's this, I only say this because thinking is sort of a term that might have too much semantic weight on it. But reconsider meaning, okay, I've already considered this. I know exactly how to think about it, low entropy. But now I'm going to reconsider this.
I'm going to think about what if I'm wrong about this? What if it's this totally other model?
Yeah.
You don't have a reaction to it. Yeah, exactly. Oh, that's interesting. And I imagine this comes up a lot because people are involuntarily confronted with their, let's say, their political views. Often there's a whole social component to that, which is I'm getting challenged by this person, maybe in front of other people, that sort of thing.
And so there's all this other stuff that comes into play. But if you get to sit in the peace of your own home and think, You know, what if I'm wrong? What if the other party's point on this bill... What would that look like? What would that look like? Yeah, that's a much calmer situation.
Absolutely.
Yes. Right.
Yeah, yeah. I'm always interested in these old, you know, the physicists in the early 20th century. You know, Einstein was giving a presentation, and I'm afraid I forgot if it was, I think it was Heisenberg who challenged, a young kid challenged him, and Einstein said, you know, I think you're right. He went home and worked on the problem for five days and came back.
But I'm just, you know, these stories of that kind of challenge and Einstein had, you know, a very mature reaction. Right, right.
Yes.
My brain plasticity, so we didn't talk about that at all, but I've got all kinds of cool stuff to talk about there.
The human brain is about three pounds. It's locked in silence and darkness. It has no idea where the information is coming from because everything is just electrical spikes and also chemical releases as a result of those spikes. And so what you have in there is this giant symphony of electrical activity going on, and its job is to create a model of the outside world.
Plasticity is the term used in the field because the great neuroscientist or psychologist actually, William James, coined the term because he was impressed with the way that plastic gets manufactured, where you mold it into a shape and it holds onto that shape. And he thought that's kind of like what the brain does. The great trick that mother nature figured out
was to drop us into the world half-baked. If you look at the way an alligator drops into the world, it essentially is pre-programmed. It eats, mates, sleeps, does whatever it's doing. But we spend our first several years absorbing the world around us based on our neighborhood and our moment in time and our culture and our friends and our universities.
We absorb all of that such that we can then springboard off of that and create our own things. There are many things that are essentially pre-programmed in us. But we are incredibly flexible. And that is the key about live wiring. When I ask you to think of the name of your fifth grade teacher, you might be able to pull that up, even though it's been years since you saw that fifth grade teacher.
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