Dr. David Eagleman

Some years ago, I suggested this Mr. Potato Head theory about thinking about the brain, which is whatever senses you plug in to a brain, it'll figure out what to do with that information.

And so when we look across the animal kingdom, we find all kinds of very weird stuff.

Not only, you know, eagle eyes and so on, but we find...

You know, many animals, like let's say snakes, they pick up on infrared range of vision, which is invisible to us.

You've got lots of fish that pick up on perturbations in electrical fields.

They have electroreception.

You have this animal called the star-nosed mole, which has this nose with 22 fingers on it and it feels its way through these tunnels with like these 22 fingers.

It's a weird thing.

Lots of birds and animals and birds and cows and insects have –

magnetoreception so they can pick up on the magnetic field of the earth and they can navigate that way for years i was staring at this stuff and figuring out how in the world does evolution happen so quickly that you can do all this and this is what led me to this theory that mother nature really only had to invent the brain once figure out the principles of brain operation

And after that, she could spend all of her time tweaking the genetics to make all these weird peripheral devices that you plug in, and it's all plug and play.

Whatever weird thing you come up with, you just say, okay, cool, I'm going to plug this in, and I'm sure the brain will figure this out.

And it always does.

And that's exactly why we can do sensory substitution.

And by the way, sensory enhancement or sensory addition, where you can add completely new senses.

One example is...

My colleagues at Osnabruck built this belt that you wear that's got vibratory motors all around it.

And there's just a little digital compass on it so it can tell where north is.

So whenever you're, you know, whichever direction north is on your body, you feel that motor buzzing.

So it might be on my left hip if north is that way.