Dr. David Eagleman

But you get these higher and higher application layers on top of that.

And that's essentially how to think about primary sensory cortices and then all the stuff downstream from there.

That's right.

And it's very hard to direct.

So I feel like, you know, let's imagine you could take some cocktail of neurotransmitters and get total plasticity of your brain.

I don't think you'd want that.

You wouldn't be you anymore.

Who we are is the sum of our memories and the sum of our skills that we have built.

And, you know, that keeps changing.

We're always a moving target.

And who you will be in five or 10 years will be different.

But I don't think we'd want the plasticity of an infant, even though when you're doing, let's say, language learning, you say, oh, I wish I could learn this as well as I did when I was seven.

But generally, it's not a state that you would desire, I think.

Yeah.

Our capacity to think about our future selves is the most special part of being humans.

And if we didn't do it, if we said, I'm going to be stoked about it, yeah, you'd eat the cupcake and you'd do what, like all the things that wouldn't serve your future self.

So, yeah, we actually spend most of our time not in the here and now.

We're reminiscing about the past and we're simulating possible futures.

Your mind is a movie theater.

We're constantly thinking about where things are going.