523. Why We Dream, Learn, and Adapt Faster Than Any Other Species | Dr. David Eagleman
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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 what would you say, the enlightenment view of the world, the empiricist view was that we create our structures of reality by aggregating something like objective data. But the science of perception casts a dim light on that presumption because we prioritize our perceptions and we do that using our aim. And so we don't have perceptions that are devoid of value. And so we talked about that a lot as well. And so if you're interested in a walk through brain science from the structural perspective, the philosophical perspective, the neurochemical perspective to some degree, if you're interested in perception and emotion and motivation and drive and the competition of personalities and motivational states in the psyche, then this is the podcast for you.
So you just recorded a course for Peterson Academy.
I did. Yep, it's on brain plasticity, which is really my favorite topic. It's about how brains absorb the world around them and adapt to them. And the interesting part about this is that we are the only species that is as plastic as we are so you know you see a zebra get born and in 45 minutes it's running around or a dolphin is swimming after a few minutes of being born but if you see a homo sapien get born they're not doing it as quickly and the reason is mother nature essentially came up with a different trick with us where she drops us into the world half-baked and we absorb the world around us our language our culture all, you know, we take everything that's happened before us and we springboard off the top of that. And this is the reason why Homo sapiens has taken over the planet and been so successful because we, unlike a horse that's essentially living the same life that horses have for, you know, for generations, we are living different lives every time. So that's what brain plasticity is about.
And I actually don't use the word plasticity as much anymore because that was a term originally coined by William James because he was impressed by plastic manufacturing. You could, you know, mold something into shape and it would hold that shape. And he said, that's kind of what brains do. You know, you learn the name of your fourth grade teacher and that gets written down and retained.
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Chapters
5 chapters
1
What is the conscious brain's role in decision-making?
0:00–9:24
2
How does perception differ among individuals?
9:24–55:21
3
Why is brain plasticity crucial for humans?
55:21–1:28:22
4
What are the philosophical implications of perception?
1:28:22
5
How do drives and personalities influence behavior?
32:41–1:30:36