Dr. David Eagleman

But that was really half the secret of life, because the other half is all around us.

It's every bit of experience that you have.

It's your culture, it's your language, it's your neighborhood.

All of that stuff gets absorbed by the brain and wires us up.

And I often think about this issue of, what if you were born 30,000 years ago, exactly your DNA,

you pop out and you look around and the question is, would you be you?

The answer is you wouldn't be.

You'd look maybe similar because of the same genetic blueprint, but you would have a different culture and a different language and different stories and all that stuff.

You'd be a very different kind of person.

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.