Dr. David Eagleman

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.

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.