Dr. David Eagleman

So you can't just say, oh, look, I'm comparing to this kid who grew up without food and I'm going to say there's this difference.

Who the heck knows why the difference is there?

Right.

Even a generation ago, there's so many differences in terms of diet and pollution and politics and blah, blah, blah, everything that you can't do it.

So I only mention this because I think it's very important.

A lot of people pipe off with things about, oh, the younger generation, their brain, this, that.

But we don't actually know.

And I will tell you that I happen to be.

a cyber optimist on this point about what growing up with the internet does for young people.

I think it's going to make them much smarter than the generation that came before.

And here's why it has to do with the size of the intellectual diet that they can bring in.

So when I was a kid, I grew up pre-internet.

I wanted to know stuff, so my mom would drive me to the library, which was 25 minutes away, and I would pick up the Encyclopedia Britannica, and I would flip through it and hope they had an article about the thing that I wanted to know about.

And that's how I was able to get my little straw of knowledge.

But now kids are growing up with access to anything they're interested in, and this is so good for the brain.

And from a plasticity point of view, the reason this matters is because change happens in the brain when you are curious about something.

So when a kid asks a question to Alexa or Siri or whatever, and they get the answer, that sticks because they have the right cocktail of chemicals going on in their head.

In contrast, when I grew up, I learned tons of just-in-case knowledge.

I mean, that's all that the teachers could teach us is just in case you ever need to know this fact.

Here it is.