Steve Levitt

speaker

962 appearances 8 recordings 1 series first heard Dec 2024 last heard 31 Jul

Steve Levitt’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

Trend

recordings per month · last 12 months

Recordings per month over the last 12 months — 5 in all, peaking in Jul 2026 with 2.

Appearances

newest first · ▶ plays the moment

Freakonomics Radio · Your Brain Doesn’t Work the Way You Think · 23 Dec 2024 podcast

And then in these studies, you put a blindfold on a person for two or three days and you try to teach them echolocation. If I understand correctly, even over that timescale, the echolocation starts taking over the visual part of the brain. Is that a fair assessment?

So in your book, you talk about REM sleep. And honestly, if I had sat down and tried to come up with an explanation of REM sleep, I could have listed a thousand ideas. Your pet theory would not be one of them. So explain what REM sleep is and then tell me why you think we do it.

Have you convinced the sleep scientists this is true? Or is this just you believing it right now?

So we talked about echolocation, which uses sound to accomplish tasks that are usually done by vision. And you've started a company called Neosensory, which uses touch to accomplish tasks that are usually done with hearing. Can you explain the science behind that?

Just make sure I understand it. Sounds happen, and this wristband... hears the sounds and then shoots electrical impulses into your wrist that correspond to the high and low frequency?

Do people train? You give them very direct feedback? Or is it more organic?

Okay. So hearing their own voice for the first time through this. Oh God. Yeah. That's interesting.

So then it seems like if I'm deaf and I see the dog's mouth moving, and I now associate that with the sound, do the people say that they hear the sound where the dog is? Or is the sound coming from the wrist?

So you also have a product that helps with tinnitus. Could you explain both what that is and how your product helps?

So what we're talking about is substituting between senses. Are there other forms of this, products that are currently available to consumers or likely to become available soon in this space?

Elon Musk's company Neuralink has gotten a ton of attention lately. Could you explain what they're trying to do and whether you think that's a promising avenue to explore?

So what we've been talking about so far has been sending signals to the brain. But what Neuralink is trying to do is take signals out of the brain. Is that right?

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.

Showing 921–940 of 962 · page 47 of 49