Steve Levitt

I've worn a continuous glucose monitor a few times. So you stick this thing in your arm and you leave it there for 10 days. And every five minutes, it gives you a reading of your blood glucose level. It gives you direct feedback on how your body responds to the foods you eat, also to stress or lack of sleep that you simply don't get otherwise.

I learned more about my metabolism in 10 days than I had over the entire rest of my life combined.

What you're talking about with these nanorobots is obviously in the future, but is there anything now that I can buy and I can strap on my head, and I know it's not going to be individual neurons, but that would allow me to get feedback about my brainwaves and be able to learn in that same way I do with a glucose monitor?

I could imagine that I would put one of these EEGs on and I would just find some feeling I like, bliss or peace, or maybe it's a feeling induced by drugs and alcohol. And I would be able to see what my brain patterns look like in those states. Then I could sit around and try to work towards reproducing those same patterns.

Now, it might not actually lead to anything good, but in your professional opinion, total waste of time you trying to do that?

You know, I'm a big believer in data, though, and it seems like somebody should be building... AI systems that are able to look at those squiggles and give me feedback. The thing that I'd so hard about the brain is that we don't get direct feedback about what's going on, which is how the brain is so good at what it does.

If the brain didn't get feedback from the world about what it was doing, it wouldn't be any good at predicting things. So I'm trying to find a way that I can get feedback. But it sounds like you're saying I got to live for 20 more years if I want to hope to do that.

So in my lived experience, I walk around and there's almost nonstop chatter in my head. It's like there's a narrator who's commenting on what I'm observing in the world. My particular voice does a lot of rehearsing of what I'm going to say out loud in the future and a lot of rehashing of past social interactions.

Other people have voices in their head that are constantly criticizing and belittling them. But either way, there's both a voice that's talking and there's also some other entity in my head that's listening to that voice and reacting. Does neuroscience have an explanation for this sort of thing?

Language is such an effective form of communicating and of summarizing information that at least my impression inside my head is that a lot of this is being mediated through language. But I also have this impression that there are parts of my brain that are not very good with language. Maybe I'm crazy, but I have this working theory that the language parts of my brain have really co-opted power.

The non-speaking parts of my brain, they actually feel to me like the good parts of me, the interesting parts of me, but I feel like they're essentially held hostage by the language parts. Does that make any sense?

So when you talk about the spectrum, it makes me think of synesthesia. Could you explain what that is and how that works?

People make a big deal out of it when they talk about musicians having this, and they imply that it's helpful, that it makes them better musicians. Do you think there's truth to that, or is it just that if 3% of the population has this, then there are going to be some great musicians among them?

So you've created this database of people who have the condition and you find a pattern that is completely and totally bizarre. And that's that there's a big bunch of people who associate the letter A with red and B with orange, C with yellow. It goes on and on. And then they start repeating it, G. In general, though, you don't see any patterns at all.

People can connect these colors and letters in any way. Do you remember when you first found this pattern and what your thought was?

So when you saw this, you must have been thinking, my God, this is important, right? Exactly right. The question is, how could these people be sharing the same pattern?

Now, I have to imagine that the way we teach in traditional classrooms with a teacher or professor at a blackboard lecturing to a huge group of passive students, as a neuroscientist, that must make you cringe, right?

And you want to contrast that with just-in-time information. Exactly. I need to know how to fix my car. And so the internet tells me, and then I can really remember it because I need it.

You were more ambitious than me. I would just ask my mother. And I have since learned that every single thing my mother taught me was completely wrong. But I still believe them. Because of this part of the brain that locks in things that you learn long ago, I still have to fight every day against the falsehoods my mother taught me. I wish I had told her to take me to the library.

David Eagleman is a professor, a CEO, leader of a nonprofit called the Center for Science and Law, host of TV shows on PBS and Netflix, and the founder of Possibilianism.