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.
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recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 5 in all, peaking in Jul 2026 with 2.
Appearances
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.
And so in support of Possibilianism, maybe a better name could be in order, you wrote a book called Sum, that's S-U-M. So it's Sum, 40 Tales from the Afterlives.
When I heard about the book, I saw the subtitle and I thought, I have zero interest in reading a book about the afterlife. I totally misunderstood what the book was about. And then I certainly didn't understand that some was Latin.
People are super excited right now about these generative AI models, the large language models. What's your take on it?
Do you think that it is a solvable problem to give these models, a theory of mind, a model of the world? Yeah.
If we were to come back in 100 years, what do you think would be most different? I know that's a hard prediction to make, but what do you see as transforming most in the areas you work in?
There was a point in time among economists that there was a lot of optimism that we could really nail macroeconomics, inflation and interest rates and whatnot. And we could really understand how the system worked. And I think there's been a real step back from that. The view now is, look, it's enormous complex system. And we've really, I guess, given up in the short run.
Are you at all worried that's where we're going with the brain?
They say as you get older, it's important to keep challenging your brain by learning new things, like a foreign language. I can't say I found learning German to be all that much fun, and I definitely have not turned out to be very good at it. So I've been looking for a new brain challenge, and I have to say, I find echolocation very intriguing. How cool would it be to be able to see via sound?
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