Dr. David Eagleman

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 –

information, the optic nerve, and he plugged it into the auditory cortex.

And then what would have been the auditory cortex became visually responsive, and it started caring about vision.

So what does that mean?

It means the cortex is a one-trick pony, and we got so much more of it, including the prefrontal cortex.

So that has two major effects.

One is that there's a lot more room with our species in between input and output.

So with a squirrel or a cat or even a macaque monkey, you know, you throw some food in front of it, that sensory cortex is right next to the motor cortex.

It's going to eat the thing.

But we've got all this computational real estate in between in and out.

So we can say, well, I'm on a diet.

I'm trying whatever.