David Eagleman

So

When you really study the biology across the kingdom, you find that there's lots of information out there and we are extremely limited.

And I think this is a very counterintuitive thing to think that your biology actually constrains your perception of reality.

Oh, yeah.

And by the way, sounds, yeah, there are lots of animals that hear in what we call the infrasonic range and the ultrasonic range.

So we hear from, the details don't matter, but from 20 hertz to 20,000 hertz.

Don't worry if you don't know that.

But it's just, that's the range of human hearing.

But there are animals that are communicating way above that and having conversations all the time, lots of insects and frogs and whatever.

And elephants are communicating at the ranges below that.

They're feeling it with their feet in the ground.

They're feeling these bumps and so on and signals from other elephants.

And this is totally invisible to us.

Yeah, that's exactly right.

The reason that we see in this very narrow range that we call visible light is precisely because that big ball of fire in the sky, the sun, is optimally giving photons that bounce off things on our planet's surface in that range.

In other words, lots of stuff doesn't get through the atmosphere, so it wouldn't be useful for us to pick up on many of these other ranges.

And so, yeah, we pick up on stuff that's super useful to us.

That's right.

Now, it's not clear, for example, why we have lost so much skill with smell, but everything is constrained.

So if you're getting better at this and you're devoting more real estate in your brain towards vision, then you're going to lose some real estate in smell, for example.