Your Brain Doesn’t Work the Way You Think
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Hey there, it's Stephen Dubner. Today, a holiday treat, a bonus episode from people I mostly admire, one of the other shows we make here at the Freakonomics Radio Network. It is an interview show hosted by Steve Levitt, my Freakonomics friend and co-author, who is an economics professor emeritus now at the University of Chicago. On this episode, Levitt interviews David Eagleman, a neuroscientist, entrepreneur and author of several books, including Live Wired, The Inside Story of the Ever-Changing Brain. It is a fascinating conversation. You are going to love it. To hear more conversations like this, follow people I mostly admire in your podcast app. Okay, that's it for me. Here is Steve Levitt.
I love podcast guests who change the way I think about some important aspect of the world. A great example is my guest today, David Eagleman. He's a Stanford neuroscientist whose work on brain plasticity has completely transformed my understanding of the human brain and its possibilities.
The human brain is about three pounds. It's locked in silence and darkness. It has no idea where the information is coming from because everything is just electrical spikes and also chemical releases as a result of those spikes. And so what you have in there is this giant symphony of electrical activity going on, and its job is to create a model of the outside world.
Welcome to People I Mostly Admire with Steve Levitt.
According to Eagleman, the brain is constantly trying to predict the world around it. But of course, the world is unpredictable and surprising, so the brain is constantly updating its model. The capacity of our brains to be ever-changing is usually referred to as plasticity, but Eagleman offers another term, live-wired. That's where our conversation begins.
Plasticity is the term used in the field because the great neuroscientist or psychologist actually, William James, coined the term because he was impressed with the way that plastic gets manufactured, where you mold it into a shape and it holds onto that shape. And he thought that's kind of like what the brain does. The great trick that mother nature figured out was to drop us into the world half-baked. If you look at the way an alligator drops into the world, it essentially is pre-programmed. It eats, mates, sleeps, does whatever it's doing. But we spend our first several years absorbing the world around us based on our neighborhood and our moment in time and our culture and our friends and our universities.
We absorb all of that such that we can then springboard off of that and create our own things. There are many things that are essentially pre-programmed in us. But we are incredibly flexible. And that is the key about live wiring. When I ask you to think of the name of your fifth grade teacher, you might be able to pull that up, even though it's been years since you saw that fifth grade teacher. But somehow there was a change made in your brain and that stayed in place. You've got 86 books. billion neurons. Each neuron is as complicated as a city. This entire forest of neurons, every moment of your life is changing. It's reconfiguring, it's strengthening connections here and there. It's actually unplugging over here and replugging over there.
And so that's why I've started to feel that the term plasticity is maybe underreporting what's going on. And so that's why I may have the term live wiring.
When I went to school, I feel like they taught me the brain was organized around things like senses and emotions, that there were these different parts of the brain that were good for those things. But you make the case that there's a very different organization of the brain.
It is organized around the senses, but the interesting thing is that the cortex, this wrinkly outer bit, is actually a one-trick pony. It doesn't matter what you plug in. It'll say, okay, got it. I'll just wrap myself around that data and figure out what to do with that data. It turns out that in almost everybody, you have functioning eyeballs that plug into the back of the head, and so we end up calling the back part of the brain the visual cortex. We call this part the auditory cortex, and this the somatosensory cortex that takes in information from the body and so on.
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