Dr. David Eagleman

Everyone wants to prove that they were there.

You know, I went and saw the Mona Lisa at the Louvre recently, and every person there was just taking a picture of it instead of standing there looking at the damn Mona Lisa.

But here's my suspicion, is that they might have a slightly less present experience at the moment, but maybe it also lasts longer in the sense that every once in a while they see that picture of themselves at the concert and they remember it.

So maybe the area under the curve is the same.

I also think this is a social thing.

I think you can't even talk about beliefs that we hold without talking about what that means for our identity and for what team we're on.

Okay, so let me back up.

I think we're not any more polarized than ever before.

Just as an example, look at the 20th century.

You've got, you know, if you look really what happened with Nazism in Europe, in Germany or fascism in Italy or what happened in Cambodia with Pol Pot or in Rwanda or the Chinese and Russian communist revolutions.

All these things were extraordinarily polarized moments where people took up arms and killed their neighbors.

And that was all pre-social media.

So I don't think that has much to do with it, except that I do think maybe we're more aware because it used to be that everyone was in their echo chambers.

Also nothing new there.

But, you know, all of your friends and neighbors and whatever all believed in whatever.

And so you didn't realize there were other people who believed other things.

But I think now we're just much more exposed to that.

OK, so polarization, nothing really new about that, but it's very important for us to understand this.

So one of the experiments we did in my lab was the following.

We put people in the brain scanner, fMRI.