Dr. David Eagleman

You're saying the concept of language.

The concept of language, the concept that I can name things and I can ask for things and so on, that never clicks in the brain.

For example, in Romania at the fall of Ceausescu, there were tens of thousands of kids in the orphanages because their parents had been killed.

It was too many kids.

And so the staff there said, look –

The kids will get clingy if you pay too much attention to them.

So here's what we're going to do.

We're going to feed the kids, but we're not going to hold them.

We're not going to talk to them.

And all these children grew up with real cognitive deficits as a result.

Here's the thing about brain plasticity.

Human beings have a similar brain to all our neighbors in the animal kingdom.

If you compare our brain to a horse brain, a dog brain, anything like that, it's the same general structures and stuff.

But what we have is much more of the wrinkly outer bit called the cortex.

It's the outer three millimeters.

And maybe we'll come back to why that matters so much.

But the other thing that Mother Nature tweaked with us, it's small genetic tweaks, but we have much more plasticity, adaptability, such that...

When a horse drops into the world, it's doing the same thing that horses did 100,000 years ago.

It's just, you know, eat, mate.

But when a human drops in the world, we learn everything that's happened before us, and then we springboard off the top of that.