Dr. David Eagleman

As far as specialization goes, you know, economists will argue this is part of what makes a very healthy society is that.

You know, some people become the lumberjacks and some the lawyers and some the accountants and whatever.

You know, I do feel like we're in a really great era, though, in general, in humankind, where kids do get very broad educations.

And they're sort of encouraged to try everything and spend a few years in karate and in soccer and in piano lessons and so on.

That's wonderful.

So...

My father was a psychiatrist, and he always said, really, the whole job of a parent is just to open doors for the child.

That's it.

So you give the child all these lessons, you open all these doors, and then the kid takes their own path, depending on, you know, this extraordinarily complicated formula of things that we'll never understand, but they go through one door and not the others.

Kierkegaard said, every man starts as a thousand men and dies as one.

And what he meant, of course, was that you start with all this pretend you could do all you could have been a great saxophonist or whatever, but you're going to die having done exactly what you did and not the other path.

So what's weird about life is that, yeah, every door that you choose, some others close as a result.

Exactly right.

Exactly right.

You know, so as you, of course, know, the brain starts, you've got essentially a fixed number of neurons.

There's some debate about whether there's a few new neurons born in humans or not.

Put that aside.

What happens is over the first two years, those neurons connect more and more and more and more.

And what you end up getting is this hyperconnection by the time you're two years old.

And from there, it's just a matter of pruning an overgrown garden.