Dr. David Eagleman

I'll eat it later.

We've got all these other options that we can take.

That's one thing.

And then the other thing is exactly what you pointed to, which is the prefrontal cortex, which allows us to simulate what ifs.

Allows us to think about possible futures, simulate things in a way that we don't have to risk our lives doing it.

We can simulate it and say, oh, that would be a bad idea.

Oh, that'd be a pretty good idea.

And then we can take the action.

That is exactly right.

So it turns out, you know, right, people who are born blind, what we call the visual cortex in the back of the head here,

That gets taken over.

It's no longer visual.

It becomes devoted to hearing, to touch, to memory, things like this.

And you can demonstrate that people who are born blind are better at hearing and at touch and so on.

They can discriminate things much more finely.

Same with people who go deaf.

The auditory cortex, all that real estate, nothing lies fallow in the brain.

All that gets taken over for different tasks and they can do things like see your accent, you know, just by lip reading, they can tell where in the country you're from and so on.

All of this demonstrates that, first of all, the more real estate you have, the better.

We are, in a sense, if you've got all your senses, you have to share everything.