Dr. David Eagleman

So brain plasticity, for anyone who doesn't know, it's that the brain is constantly reconfiguring itself.

Every second of your life,

You got 86 billion neurons.

And really the way to think about it is these are like little creatures that are all crawling around and moving around.

Each one is, you know, on average contacting 10,000 of its neighbors.

But it's not like a fixed thing like you might see in a textbook.

Instead, they're, you know, plugging and unplugging and searching around and finding new places to plug in and, of course, changing the strength of those connections.

And I actually always find this weird.

It's like having all these little creatures in your head that are slithering around, but that's what makes us absorb every single thing in our worlds.

And this is what, you know, humans have that other creatures have less of.

And that's why we've taken over every corner of the earth.

That's why we have 60, we've gotten off the planet.

We build skyscrapers and compose symphonies and so on because we

Each generation, we land and we get to spend our first few years absorbing everything that's been discovered before us.

And then we springboard off of that and do something new because we are able to figure out all the discoveries that have come before us because of this ability to reconfigure our own circuitry.

And, you know, if you were a...

An alligator born 30,000 years ago, you'd be the same alligator, you know, eat, mate, swim, whatever, and you wouldn't be meaningfully different.

But humans, because of our flexibility, we are the dominant species.

We hear so-

in general.