Dr. David Eagleman

They were blowing their family's fortune on online gambling in Las Vegas and so on.

And what they realized is when you crank up the dopamine, that changes your risk aversion such that people were taking it.

So now it's a contraindication that's listed on the model.

You know, if you notice gambling, turn down the…

the amount here.

So anyway, whenever we start dialing these around, we always find things that are a little bit out of our predictive realm.

But the general story is that your brain's trying to put together this model of what's going on.

And as it gets better and better, it's doing less and less plasticity.

I do want to point out, though, that parts of the brain become less plastic and others stay plastic your whole life.

As an example,

your primary visual cortex of the back of the head, that locks down early.

You really can't do much to change that.

And there were studies by Logothetis' lab years ago where they looked at changes to, let's say, the retina in an adult monkey, and they expected to see changes in the visual cortex of the monkey, and they didn't see any changes at all.

And that surprised them given all the plasticity literature.

But it's because the visual cortex locks down.

In contrast, these downstream areas from the visual cortex that care about things like recognizing faces or new brands of fast food restaurants or whatever it is, those stay plastic your whole life because there's constantly new data coming in on those.

So the general story is the primary areas are like the – I think about it like the –

The software kernels where, you know, if you're at Microsoft, for example, there's parts of the code that no one ever touches because that's like how to add two numbers and multiply or whatever.

That's the kernel of the code.

You never touch that.