Dr. David Eagleman

Essentially, the backstory is this.

As you well know, your brain is locked in silence and darkness.

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

And its whole goal is to make a successful model.

And...

When it succeeds at that and says, oh, okay, wait, I've got good predictions about what's going on, then it stops changing.

I mean, that's its goal is to stop changing.

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

Okay, a few things on this.

As you well know, you know, all the neuromodulators exist in a dance with each other.

And fundamentally, I think we're going to come to understand this in 50 years as, you know, sort of combination locks of things.

And the way we keep looking at it in science currently is, ah, here's acetylcholine or here's serotonin or so on.

And it's probably not the right way to look at it.

It's certainly not how the neurons are looking at it.

Okay.

That said, acetylcholine really feels to me like the main one involved in plasticity when you are –

a baby, you've got acetylcholine going everywhere whenever you're trying to figure out the world, whenever something's not matching a prediction and you've got acetylcholine going everywhere that says, hey, I gotta figure out what just happened and how to link this with what I did and so on.

As you get older,

It's more like a pointillist artist who just dabs things here or there.

You get acetylcholine release very locally in small places, and that's where you make changes.