Dr. David Eagleman

And so we're pretty good at vision and hearing and touch and so on, but everything has to get shared.

But there are pretty extraordinary things that happen when people devote more real estate towards one task.

And by the way, just as a side note,

This is one hypothesis about what goes on with savantism in autism is that somebody, for whatever genetic set of reasons, ends up devoting a ton of real estate to, let's say, the Rubik's Cube or the piano or memorizing visual scenes or something, and then they are absolutely superhuman at it.

That comes at the cost of other things, let's say social skills that might be needed.

But the general story is if you devote a lot of real estate towards something, you're going to get really good at it.

So this is really interesting because first of all, take somebody like the Williams sisters,

They got drilled on tennis from day one.

And this stuff can be taught.

And this is why they became champions.

And this is obvious, but this is the same way you find with chess champions and golf champions like Woods and so on.

You have to really spend the time doing it.

Now, I find this interesting for a few reasons.

One is that.

And cognitively, you can understand how to, you know, what a forehand or a backhand, you know, is a hit in tennis.

But to actually get good at it, you have to burn it down into the circuitry.

So actually, let me back up for one second, which is the reason that we have brain plasticity is because this is how a brain makes things that you do fast and efficient.

So when you're doing a task a lot, like serving tennis or something, you're taking that from the software to the hardware of the brain.

Let's say I'm an amateur tennis player and there's Serena Williams.

I'm playing against her.