Dr. David Eagleman

Oftentimes people will ask me, like an older person will say, hey, I do crossword puzzles.

Is that good?

Yeah, it's good until you get good at it and then stop and do something that you're not good at and constantly find the next thing that's a real challenge for you.

That's the key thing about plasticity.

Your brain is locked in silence and darkness.

It's trying to make a model of the outside world.

And if you're constantly pushing and challenging it with things it doesn't understand, then it'll keep changing.

Okay, great.

I mean, this was Mother Nature's big trick with humans was figuring out how to drop a creature into the world with a half-baked brain and then let the world wire up the rest of it.

And so, you know, 1953, Crick and Watts, and I worked with Crick at the Salt...

they burst into the Eagle and Child Pub and said, we've discovered the secret to life, because they figured out the structure of DNA.

But that was really half the secret of life, because the other half is all around us.

It's every bit of experience that you have.

It's your culture, it's your language, it's your neighborhood.

All of that stuff gets absorbed by the brain and wires us up.

And I often think about this issue of, what if you were born 30,000 years ago, exactly your DNA,

you pop out and you look around and the question is, would you be you?

The answer is you wouldn't be.

You'd look maybe similar because of the same genetic blueprint, but you would have a different culture and a different language and different stories and all that stuff.

You'd be a very different kind of person.