Dr. David Eagleman

We're in red light.

And I watched her for, you know, like 60 seconds doing this.

And, yeah, it was tragic to me because her brain has set up an association, which is if I do this action, there will be this result.

That's what her future simulation is telling her.

And as far as we can tell, that's not true, that she'll have good luck from doing that.

But, yeah, that was an example of tragedy.

Well, I tell you, Albert Einstein said that he really enjoyed tasks like fixing a doorknob in his house or something.

And I do that all the time.

I live in this very old house and I'm doing lots of little dinky repairs all the time.

And I love that, just crossing these scales.

But I do want to say something about addiction because I think this is an awesome example about brain plasticity and something that I wrote about in my book LiveWired about this, which is

Addiction is all about brain plasticity.

You put a certain drug in your system and what your brain does is it upregulates the receptors for that drug, which is its way of saying, oh, I didn't know the world consisted of this stuff.

Good.

I'm going to prepare for this now and I expect more of it.

So then you give it more and it says, great, I'm going to upregulate the receptors again.

And it comes to expect that this is in the world.

And then if you stop, you have these awful drug withdrawal symptoms precisely because you've changed your system.

Now it's expecting the world to have that.

So I draw an analogy between that and heartbreak.