Dr. David Eagleman

Interesting.

We have four times as much cortex as our nearest neighbors in the animal kingdom.

And that seems to be the magical stuff.

And I'm sure the listenership knows this, but, you know, the cortex is just the outer three millimeters of the brain.

It's that wrinkly bit.

And that's the magic stuff because it turns out cortex is a one trick pony.

The reason the cortex looks the same everywhere is because it is the same.

It's got the same circuitry.

It's got six little layers.

It's doing the same algorithms.

And it gets defined by what you plug into it.

So if you plug in a cable that's carrying visual information...

then it becomes visual cortex.

And we look at it and we say, oh, look, it detects the orientation of lines and it detects motion, things like that.

If you plug auditory information into it, it becomes auditory cortex and so on.

And it turns out, you know, the way we do this in textbooks is we make a picture and we say, look, that's visual cortex, that's auditory, that's somatosensory.

But

All this stuff is really flexible.

It's so much more interesting than the textbook model because you can take the fibers and plug them in somewhere else.

So you may know the study in 2000 by Murgonkasor at MIT where he, in a ferret, took the visual –