Dr. David Eagleman

Kierkegaard said, every man starts as a thousand men and dies as one.

And what he meant, of course, was that you start with all this pretend you could do all you could have been a great saxophonist or whatever, but you're going to die having done exactly what you did and not the other path.

So what's weird about life is that, yeah, every door that you choose, some others close as a result.

Exactly right.

Exactly right.

You know, so as you, of course, know, the brain starts, you've got essentially a fixed number of neurons.

There's some debate about whether there's a few new neurons born in humans or not.

Put that aside.

What happens is over the first two years, those neurons connect more and more and more and more.

And what you end up getting is this hyperconnection by the time you're two years old.

And from there, it's just a matter of pruning an overgrown garden.

And that's all that's happening.

And the way the pruning happens is based on what you're experiencing in the world.

The world is what prunes your garden and strengthens particular paths and lets other paths go.

I love that.

I think that's brilliant.

One of the things that is so striking about time perception is that you don't have a single part of the brain that deals with that.

You actually have different mechanisms that deal with thinking about long eras of time and seconds and sub-seconds

Totally different mechanisms going on here.

And we can demonstrate this in the laboratory.