The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
523. Why We Dream, Learn, and Adapt Faster Than Any Other Species | Dr. David Eagleman
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 Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Full Episode
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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