The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
523. Why We Dream, Learn, and Adapt Faster Than Any Other Species | Dr. David Eagleman
Thu, 20 Feb 2025
Dr. Jordan B. Peterson sits down with neuroscientist, bestselling author, and PBS presenter Dr. David Eagleman. They discuss brain plasticity, how perception works, whether free will exists (and if it’s superordinate), how willingness to engage with higher entropy indicates sophistication of thought, and the preconditions for forming a Ulysses contract. Dr. David Eagleman is a neuroscientist at Stanford University and an international bestselling author. He is co-founder of two venture-backed companies, Neosensory and BrainCheck, and he also directs the Center for Science and Law, a national nonprofit institute. He is best known for his work on sensory substitution, time perception, brain plasticity, synesthesia, and neurolaw. He is the writer and presenter of the international PBS series, “The Brain with David Eagleman,” and the author of the companion book, “The Brain: The Story of You.” He is also the writer and presenter of “The Creative Brain” on Netflix. This episode was filmed on January 13th, 2025. | Links | For David Eagleman: On X https://x.com/davideagleman On Instagram https://www.instagram.com/davideagleman/?hl=en Website https://eagleman.com/ Read his most recent book: “Livewired: The Inside Story of the Ever-Changing Brain” https://a.co/d/cBY6tGx
Chapter 1: What is the conscious brain's role in decision-making?
The conscious brain is a broom closet in the mansion of the brain with very little access to what's going on. There may be free will, but it's going to be a small player if it's there.
Every drive wants to philosophize in its spirit. Exactly. Okay, so let's unpack that. If you understand that aim constrains entropy, then you get some sense almost immediately why people cling so desperately to their frameworks.
This doesn't answer the free will question though.
I thought we could walk through perception because it doesn't work the way people think it does.
You know, when it comes to this question of truth, there is no singular truth because you've got a completely different set of experiences that have wired your brain, my brain, everyone's brain. We're all going to perceive different things and seek different things from the world.
You said something else too that I don't think I've thought about exactly before. Hello, everybody. I had the opportunity to speak to David Eagleman today. David is an adjunct professor of psychiatry at Stanford University. He doesn't run a lab there anymore because he runs two companies, Neosensory and BrainCheck.
David recently did a course for Peterson Academy called Brain Plasticity, and in the largest sense, that's what we talked about today. Plasticity, to some degree, is an archaic term and based on an archaic metaphor, but it's been well adopted, thoroughly adopted in the neuroscience literature, and it means something like adaptive flexibility.
And human beings are unique in their degree of adaptive flexibility. Now, the advantage to that is that we can change our environment and we can change our perceptions and we can adapt each generation to a radically new environment. And the price we pay for that is an intensely long period of socialization.
And so we talked about brain architecture, we talked about brain chemistry, we talked about the role of aim and intent, the role that aim and intent plays in determining perception, which is a very interesting philosophical issue because
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Chapter 2: How does perception differ among individuals?
Answering a question or being on a quest taking a journey or being on a mission because a mission is goal-directed and I've been trying to work out a paradox in recent years that emerges because of those the difference in those two viewpoints Data and you and you use both those metaphors in your in your analysis of the eye movement patterns data implies something
directly, that's value-free, but mission implies value, right?
It's definitely a mission. Yeah, okay. Yeah, so in this case, you're asking a question about the painting, and the subject is trying to answer that. But this is true for all of us in all cases. Let's imagine you're on a hike with friends here in Phoenix. And you guys are walking along and one of your friends is a mycologist. So he notices the mushrooms that you don't notice.
And your other friend is a climatologist. And so he's noticing the tree line and where things have changed. And you've got a friend who's a podiatrist and she's noticing the angle of your feet and so on. The point is that All the data is hitting all of your eyes, but you guys are seeing different things. You're having different experiences in the world predicated on what questions you're asking.
And that, of course, is predicated on who you are, all of your experiences, and what is relevant to you.
And all your various aims. Yeah, well, so this is... The reason I focused in on the philosophical implications of this is because... the empiricists, the philosophical implication of the idea of data as reality is that reality itself is value-free and value is added to the data. But mission is a whole different way of conceptualizing things because
If the basis of data is perception, and perception is mission-driven, then insofar as perception is reality, reality is not value-free. And that's at the level of perception, right? So this is why the difference is so crucial, because the empirical presumption is the data is there, you add value to it. It's like, no. the value is built into the perception, right?
And there's no place in the perception where the value isn't built in. You talked about those micro, so when your eyes move, how many different levels of saccades are there?
There's the big ones about three times a second, and then there's the micro saccades, which are always moving. That's for a slightly different reason.
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Chapter 3: Why is brain plasticity crucial for humans?
I think the contract is part of the game, which is to say, gosh, I know I'm going to behave badly in that situation. So as one twist on this game, as a play in this game, I'm going to put something in place so that I can't do it. It forbids it. It forbids it, exactly. It's a way of saying, look, I know I've got all these rivaling networks and I'm not going to get through this.
I know that right now I feel like I'm not going to drink or smoke or whatever somebody's trying to get or die. Okay, so I've never had a drinking or smoking problem, but one thing I do try to prevent is... You know, I'm in a restaurant and let's say it's a predefined meal and they put a dessert down. I want to have a taste of dessert, but I don't want to eat the whole thing, okay?
And what happens is as I'm sitting there talking to everyone, I end up eating the whole thing like an idiot. So what I do is I take a bite or two and then I take the table salt and I cover the thing in salt, the chocolate cake. So that, that's my Lucy's contract because I know that the me of three minutes from now is going to keep sticking my fork in it.
So I'm making a contract with myself that I can't break because now the cake is ruined. And so this is just one play in the game of dealing with these rivals.
It seems to me that there's a deep analogy between that Ulysses contract and something like the rule of a game. I mean, if you set up a basketball game, there are moves that are forbidden, right? And so... You can think of games as enabling principles. Here's things you can do in the game, but there's rules that are forbidding as well.
Is it with the Ulysses contract concept that you're looking at the rules of the game that forbid? Is that the fundamental concentration on the Ulysses contract side? There are limitations rather than enabling conditions? Because you have both in a game, right?
Right.
Things you can do and things you can't do.
Every game's like that. Right. I guess you could think of it that way. I think of it as just another move in the game of life in a sense, which is to say, you know, I could eat it. It's a rich energy source. It's delicious sugar, whatever. And I've got this other move I can do. I guess I think about it in terms of long-term versus short-term networks in the brain.
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Chapter 4: What are the philosophical implications of perception?
Chapter 5: How do drives and personalities influence behavior?
Exactly.
And then the activation pattern shrinks away from the right hemisphere into the left and then it moves from the left front to the back, and as it moves, it becomes a smaller and smaller area until a little machine is built, essentially, that's automated. And once that's built, well, you don't need consciousness, and it's hyper-efficient.
That's exactly right. So the unconscious brain, which is most of what's happening... It's all about speed and efficiency. So if you look at, for example, this study has been done with playing Tetris. So you take a bunch of people, male and female, of course, left and right-handed, and you teach them to play Tetris.
So when they're first learning, they're amateurs, their brain is on fire with activity as measured functional magnetic resonance imaging. So you're measuring their brains. After they become good at it, the activity shrinks and shrinks. Right. It's less and less. I did this. I competed against this 10-year-old world champion cup stacker. So he takes these cups and stacks them.
It's this routine that you do as quickly as you can. I had never done it before. So we both wore high-density EEG caps, electroencephalography, and we looked at what was going on. Of course, my brain was on fire with activities. I was trying to figure out what the heck to do. But he, practicing four hours a day on this, His brain is essentially quiet while he does this incredibly rapid routine.
So it's exactly right. The job of the brain is to take novel things and say, hey, if this is relevant and I need this, I'm going to burn it down into the circuitry so I never have to think about it again. Like bicycle riding. When you're first learning, you're paying attention to your torso and your legs and you don't know what you're doing.
When you get good at it, then you can text on your phone, you can talk to someone while you're biking, because it's now part of the machinery of the brain.
Right, right. So you could think about consciousness as something that's continually climbing up a ladder of automated processes, right? So you think and practice, And that all automates and you become hyper-efficient in your perceptions and your actions. And that disappears in some ways from consciousness. It becomes part of the substructure of consciousness.
Exactly.
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