17 Burst results for "David Eagleman"
BrainStuff
"david eagleman" Discussed on BrainStuff
"This show is sponsored by better help. There are all kinds of approaches to mental health, but therapy can be really useful. Sometimes talking things through helps you figure out not just why you have certain reactions and behaviors, but how to grow. A better help is online therapy designed to be convenient and flexible. A quick questionnaire matches you with a licensed therapist, and you can switch to a new one if it's not working out. Discover your potential with better help. Visit better help dot com slash brain stuff. Today, to get 10% off your first month. That's better help. HELP dot com slash brain stuff. This is Kevin Costner, and if you're an avid traveler like me, you've got to download my new app atio. That's audio with a T AU. Enjoy a new way of traveling with stories activated by your location. So when you're driving through a new town, discovering a national park or just curious about the origin of your city's name. You can listen to a quick three to 5 minute story, covering our history from the first peoples to famous places and insights only locals would know. Your future in business is bright and nothing's going to get in your way. Take the next step and get a glimpse into what life is like as an executive MBA student at the Robert H Smith school of business. The Robert Smith school of business executive NBA for a day event is Saturday May 6th, network with current students and alums and see how the smith EMBA leads to an unstoppable career. Don't delay register today at RH smith dot UMD dot EDU slash EMBA day. University of Maryland, Robert H Smith, school of business. Hi, I'm David eagleman. I have a new podcast called inner cosmos on iHeart. I'm a neuroscientist and an author at Stanford University, and I've spent my career exploring the three pound universe in our heads. On my new podcast, I'm going to explore the relationship between our brains and our experiences by tackling unusual questions so we can better understand our lives and our realities. Like does time really run in slow motion when you're in a car accident or can we create new senses for humans? What does dreaming have to do with the rotation of the planet? What do you do when someone breaks the law because of a brain tumor? Why did Pythagoras think that numbers had genders and personalities? Why do hunters wear orange? It's not the reason you think. When you die, will you perceive the event that kills you? So join me weekly to uncover how your brain steers your behavior, your perception, and your reality. Listen to intercosmos with David eagleman starting march 27th on the iHeartRadio app, apple podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Your future in business is bright and nothing's going to get in your way. Take the next step and get a glimpse into what life is like as an executive MBA student at the Robert H Smith school of business. The Robert Smith school of business executive NBA for a day event is Saturday May 6th, network with current students and alums and see how the smith EMBA leads to an unstoppable career. Don't delay register today at RH smith dot UMD dot EDU slash EMBA day. University of Maryland, Robert H Smith school of business. This episode is brought to you by express employment professionals. Everywhere you look, businesses are hiring. If you need to hire, don't do it alone. Turn to express employment professionals. A ticket from Sheila, who said, I've given myself back time and money by using express with express the burden of hiring is removed, and the process ensures the employee is a good fit. I wish I started hiring through express years ago. Find out for yourself how your local express team can make hiring easier. Visit express pros dot com for a location near you. This year, and Ashley's anniversary sale, we were able to secure a more affordable price on the same great quality as before, and we're passing those savings on to you. Shop new, lower prices on hundreds of items throughout the store and online. Get ready for summer with 10% off. On all outdoor furniture. Plus, we're offering 5 years special financing with no minimum purchase. Visit your local Ashley store or Ashley dot com to celebrate and save today. Only at Ashley, see store Ashley dot com for details..
Minnie Questions with Minnie Driver
"david eagleman" Discussed on Minnie Questions with Minnie Driver
"What question would you most like answered? Years ago, in 2004, I wrote a cover article for discover magazine called ten unsolved questions of neuroscience. And what's interesting is that those are essentially as unsolved now as they were then, with one possible exception, actually. But the top question for me is the question of consciousness, which is, why does it feel like something to be you or me? Because the brain is built of 86 billion neurons, which are the specialized cells in the brain. And each of these neurons is sending information back and forth with these electoral spikes and they're releasing chemicals. All kinds of complicated stuff, but fundamentally, it's just a big biological machine. It's just doing stuff. It's just, you know, sending signals and reacting to signals. And as far as we can tell, that's all that's going on because when somebody damages their brain, we can make very particular predictions about what the consequences are going to be. It'll change their risk aversion or their decision making or their ability to name animals or see colors or understand music. You know, super specific things. And so that's why when we look at hundreds of years of brain damage we say, all right, look, it's pierce, just be a big machine there. But the question is, why does it feel like something to be alive? Why do you experience the beauty of a sunset or the smell of cinnamon or the taste of feta cheese on your tongue? Why aren't we just like, you know, my computer, my laptop here, is sending lots of signals around back and forth, but presumably it's not conscious. And when I watch a YouTube video that I think is funny, it presumably doesn't think it's funny. It's just sending zero. It's just something zeros and ones round. And when I shut it off at night, it doesn't lament its own death or something. So this is the question is, how do you build a biological machine and have it be self aware? Is that the fundament of possibility and ism? Yeah, exactly. So for anyone who doesn't know, you know, possibility doesn't mean it's this movement I started about 12 years ago, which is simply a way of me trying to capture what the scientific temperament is, where we shine a flashlight around the possibility space and we say, look, maybe it's that, maybe it's that, maybe it's that. And the reason I sort of tried to articulate this is because when you go into a bookstore, all you ever see are the books by the atheist, the neo atheist, and the books by the fundamentally religious. And they're often put on the same table in the bookstore so that you can sort of choose your side and see what's up. But the truth is that our existence and the cosmos is so deeply mysterious that almost certainly there's something much more interesting going on that is neither of those positions. I think you said it as well. The vastness of our ignorance. It is full of potential as opposed to full of admonishment. Yeah. When I read that, you know, being interested in celebrating the vastness of our ignorance. It was actually really dynamic, as opposed to you dumb dumb, it was like you dumb dumb. Right? The part that was surprised me is that people want to pick one answer and then fight for that and say, okay, this is the right answer. Yeah. How many people are in your movement? Can I be in it? Please, I'd love to have you. The interesting part, I wrote my book some, which is a book of literary fiction, and it's 40 stories of what happens after we die. And it's all made up. It's all meant to be funny and interesting. And none of it's meant to be taken seriously, but the part that is meant to be taken seriously is the idea of, wow, we really have no idea what this is, what our existence is all about here. And that's what the metal lesson that emerges in the book is. And so anyway, after I said this on NPR one day about possibilities, it sort of became a thing and people started websites and Facebook groups and stuff like that. So I don't know, I haven't really checked that in a while, but I'm glad to see it's moving. I like it. I think it's great. Now I've got to read some as well. I have conversations based on something that my mother post death, a phrase that she has coined, which is called brain share, because as she's said to me in our conversations, because she doesn't have a brain anymore, which is a huge relief. But she has to use mine so that I can feel her thoughts. Now, and it's so funny because a friend of mine was like, well, isn't that just your brain? Isn't that as the function of your grief? Because she died only a year ago. And I said, well, does it really matter? I don't really know. I'll never know. It doesn't matter if I know, or if I don't know, but I hear her voice very specifically, and we have these conversations which are so the fascinating to pick over. They're not just comforting. They're strange because there's clearly an evolution, either of my idea of her since she died or of her since she died, that it's different enough that I recognize her, but it's another version of her. Yeah, and one of the most fascinating things is that the job of the brain is to construct these internal models of other people. So you have an enormous number of models in your head, but you have thousands of these. You know, like, oh, your neighbor from down the street years ago, and oh, your college roommate and so on. You've got little models, some are more sophisticated than the others, so your model of your mother is you're devoting a lot of neural real estate to that actually. You've got a very rich model of her. Are there models that are thinner of your barista at Starbucks or something that you don't know that well? And you have to make lots of assumptions. But the thing that has always struck me as fascinating is, you know, in neuroscience, my field, you know, we've essentially spent all the time studying, okay, how does vision work? How does hearing work? How does decision making work? And so on. But the part that's gone underappreciated there is how social brains are. Brains are all about other brains. And so this is sort of an emerging field called social neuroscience, but the point is that a huge amount of the territory of your brain is there just to simulate your mother and your father and everybody you've ever known. Wow. All right, I'm going to be thinking about that through tea time. David, I'm so honestly just so chuffed as we say in England to talk to you. I can't thank you
Minnie Questions with Minnie Driver
"david eagleman" Discussed on Minnie Questions with Minnie Driver
"What is the quality you like least about yourself? Ah, well, you my whole life that's been true. I just take on too much and I have so many friends that are good at being laser focused and in fact, just this morning I was talking to a colleague of mine who also writes books and she said, yeah, what I do is I start with a table of contents and I write each piece and I know exactly what's going to go in the book and what the framework is and that's not at all how I do it. I'm completely on the other end of whatever the spectrum is that she's on. You know, I just have ideas and I dictate into Evernote all day long and I oh, this is gonna be a paragraph here and I know you're here and then I tie stuff together with time and I probably spend twice as much time putting something together that way and deleting whole scenes and paragraphs and chapters, but that's just the way that I write, but the problem is I'm always this is always been true I write 5 books at once and you know I teach at Stanford and I'm running two companies and I'm about to start my own podcast that podcast is going to be 40 minute monologues where I'm just talking for 40 minutes and so what that means is I'm just going to have a ton of work on my plate. I've got a great idea. I've got a great idea. You recall your podcast and then that becomes your book. So you just record it and then you put it through some programs so that it just dictates it. And then you just edit what you've said already. This is how you're going to save time. I would like to see this book. Yes. I love that idea. You know, the difficulty is with a book. It's like building a cathedral. You know, there's all this stuff, it's such a bigger kind of project. And I wish I could turn 40 minute monologues into a book, but perhaps if you do a hundred, 40 minute monologues. You will have the beginnings of a book. Oh, I have a lot of material. That's for sure. I've written one book, David, which is not really comfortable to anything that you've said. However, it was speaking the thoughts that then made it much nearer. It made the reality of that book much closer so I could actually reach out and get it. It was having verbalized it. So I wonder if it would maybe speed up the process by you hear yourself talking about these ideas and it becomes more coherent and certainly externalized and then becomes something that you can actually you can grab easier and write down. I don't know. No, I totally get that. You reify the ideas by saying them out loud. And then one trick that I do all the time lately is I will then take stuff that I've written and put into a program so that it speaks the text back to me, but with a totally different voice. Let's say a female voice or a British, but maybe your voice, so I'm listening like an audiobook to my own writing and then I think, oh, that part sucked and oh, that logic doesn't quite match up. That's amazing. I would love that. I would use that for difficult conversations with my son. Let me just let me just this. Let me just for us to hear that back. That's really cool. Yeah, as though you're hearing a different parent saying it and anything, that's nuts again. Actually, as I'm a single mother, that really would help I could do it in like a man's voice. Right, perfect. And by the way, many authors in the past have used this method, wordsworth, for example, had a lazy Susan on the table. You know, one of the circular jobs that spins around. And he'd have his different manuscripts on it, and he'd work on whatever manuscript until he was slowing down. And then he'd spin it and pick a different manuscript and work on that. And that's exactly how I work. Whenever I'm slowing down on something I switch projects and as a result, I'm always working at top speed on that project. So I think there actually isn't benefit to it. Touch amazing. So it sounds like that's not necessarily like a bad quality because you've done it always. And you're used to it in terms of taking on a lot of things. I mean, for example, I'm Silicon Valley, and the VCs who invest do not do not like this quality about me. I think they would much rather see me as the type of person who just doesn't wake up, think about this company. 24/7. And I do think about it essentially 24/7, but I'm also doing other things at the same time. You know, it has worked out, but it always feels like one of those things where I'm leaning forward as far forward as I can into the future and moving as fast as I can on all fronts. And as long as it works, that's great. You know, at some point, I'm going to whatever it is, I'm going to break a leg or get diagnosed with something or whatever. And then everything's going to pile up like a giant car accident. What would your life look like if you did slow down? You know, I just don't think it's my personality. I've actually tried, in fact, when I was in college, I had this professor who I really thought was wonderful, and he said, look, eagleman, life is like you are a lumberjack. And you can't go into the forest and take one thwack at each tree. You have to pick your tree and really hit that tree with you. And it sounded so wise, and I really liked this guy. And so I tried to change myself, but that's just not who I am. David, what would be your last meal? I think I would do a protein shake, and it's only because that represents my enthusiasm about the next steps about what's coming next and how I want to make sure my body is fit and so on for the future. So I might as well go out on a high note with my eyes still on the horizon. I think that's how I'd like to go out. You're still feeding your muscles and feeding it protein. Yeah. Yeah, cool. I like that. I like that a lot. What flavor protein shake would it be? I think chocolate. Why not? I knew you were going to say that. I knew you were going to say that, by the
Minnie Questions with Minnie Driver
"david eagleman" Discussed on Minnie Questions with Minnie Driver
"Understand that
Minnie Questions with Minnie Driver
"david eagleman" Discussed on Minnie Questions with Minnie Driver
"In your life, can you tell me about something that has grown out of a personal disaster? Ah, yeah, when I was in the third grade, I fell off of a roof of a house that was under construction. And I almost died. I fell from the roof and landed on the brick floor face first, and I shattered my nose, but I think that's part of what made me a neuroscientist because as I was falling, I was first of all having completely calm, clear thoughts. I was thinking about Alice in Wonderland and how this must have been what it was like when she was falling down the rabbit hole. And just before that, I was thinking about, okay, I wonder if I could still grab for the roof and then I realized, oh, that's tar paper and it's not going to hold and that's not going to work. And eventually I just turned and faced the bricks and hit. But the thing is that the whole event seemed to take a very long time. I still remember the thoughts very clearly because it was a traumatic event. But when I got to high school and I took physics, I realized that the whole fall had taken .6 of a second. And I couldn't figure that out. I couldn't understand how this thing that was so fast seems taking so long. It's not going to be really interested in our perception of the world and specifically in the perception of time. And why things seem to go in slow motion during a life threatening event. And I ended up growing up to become a neuroscientist and I studied that. I did these experiments where I dropped people from a 150 foot tall tower in freefall and they're caught in a net below going 70 miles an hour and I was able to measure aspects of their time perception on the way down. How did you do that? What I did is I built a device that went on their wrist and it flashed information at them, visual information at them at a certain rate. And depending on how fast they were seeing the world, the question was, would they be able to essentially see in slow motion? Because everybody who's ever gotten in a car accident says, oh, you know, it was like slow motion I saw the hood crumple in the rearview mirror fall off and the facial expression of the other person and so on. And so I wanted to really test whether that was true whether you could see in slow motion and it turned out that you do not see in slow motion. It's all a retrospective trick of memory, which is to say, when you're in a life threatening situation, you're laying down memories, really densely. Normally, you're not laying down much memory at all. You know, I don't remember my drive home, it was just nothing. But when something really matters, your brain writes down every single thing, so when you read that back out, when you say, what just happened? What just happened? What just happened? You remember it in such detail that your brain estimates, I guess that must have taken longer. I was thinking a long time. So it's all about the way memory is laid down. That's why we think the event took place in slow motion, whereas in fact, it's not slow motion. And I realized after I did these experiments that it has to be that way because coming back to the car accident, you want someone says, look, I know it went slow motion 'cause I saw all these things. You can just ask the person, okay, look, the passenger on the car seat next to you who is screaming, did it sound like the person was actually saying because if not, then that means it was not going in slow motion. And people have to allow that actually they didn't hear things in slow motion and so on. It's simply that they remembered all the details and so when their brain makes an estimate, it says, oh, I guess that must have been 5 seconds, because I don't usually have that much memory. Do you think that only a traumatic event can trigger that kind of memory sequence or could something that is intensely pleasurable and amazing to do the same thing? Yeah, good question. It can be the intensely pleasurable and amazing. That's more rare, but it's an area of your brain called the limbic system and the amygdala in particular that's involved in saying, hey, write this down. This is important. And there aren't that many things that are super important for us to write down. Certainly traumatic events count and certainly super pleasurable events count. But otherwise, most of the time, you're amygdala says, okay, you know, same old stuff. I'm not going to bother keeping dense memories of this. That's so funny, because childbirth, I don't know what your partner or wife experience, but it's so interesting. There is great swathes of the 37 hours that I was in labor that I remember so acutely and keenly and they involve pain and they also involved laughter and hilarious things that my mother and my sister said. And then there must be hours there were hours and hours and hours that I know I was just stumbling through pain, but I don't remember exactly. So it's interesting that there are parts of that 37 hours that are carved out in the boldest relief. It's so interesting about from wondered why my brain chose to remember those bits and not when I was sitting in the shower, you know, singing, which I know I did because they told me I did it, but I don't really remember it. Yeah. Well, what happens during pregnancies, you've got this hormones that are going up and down and bouncing all over the place. And for better or worse, it's just teaches us what biological machines we are, which is to say, oh, when this hormone is high and then you remembering and you can remember that later. And then when this other thing is happening, forget it, you're just not writing anything down. God, that's amazing. Yeah, it can be amazing and depressing and eye opening and so on. I think it's the most important thing for self understanding for understanding what is our experience in the world. I think that grief has taught me that meaning is just a sign. We assign meaning and the depth of our experience and the meaningfulness of our life is in direct proportion to what meaning we assign to it. Well, it's even worse than that, I think. Oh, great. Which is to say, a lot of the stuff is evolutionarily dictated. And so when you're a young person and you think, oh my God, I'm so in love and so on. That meaning we didn't really have a choice in that. That is what has allowed our species to survive. So many things are like that. Why is it that, you know, if there's a lemon pie in the oven, that smells so good, but let's say a piece of poop on the sidewalk smells so aversive, so bad. Given that, they're just molecules, both in both cases, just molecules that are wafting through the air and attach to receptors in your nose. You know, if you study olfaction, how that actually works, it's just molecules of different shapes. So if I showed you the two different shapes, I said, okay, one of these is lemon pie, one of them is poop. You wouldn't know which is which you couldn't possibly. And so the question is, why is one so pleasurable once over? And the answer has to do with the evolutionary meaning. So the lemon pie tells you, hey, there's food, there's high sugars in there, great, I can keep this battery powered robot, meat robot going. But the poop is full of bacteria and things that have been figured out through evolutionary time are dangerous to you or pathologic. And so the shorthand that your brain does to say, oh, that's aversive. Don't go near that thing. And so I often wonder about this issue of all the things that we find meaningful in life. The question is, how far does the hand of evolution reach in there and define what we find meaningful and what we know? Exactly. And spending time unwrapping that at that probably isn't quite enough life to do that. Or maybe there is, but maybe it would just take all the fun out of it. You know, I don't actually think so. My analogy is if you and I sat down for the next hour and I gave you a diagram and I showed you exactly why you like the taste of, let's say, a chocolate, why do you think that tastes so delicious? You might say, okay, good. I've got it. I understand the entire diagram, but that doesn't change your pleasure about it at all. It doesn't improve it, it doesn't diminish it. It's like it's a different world. I mean, if I said this to you about the color purple, I said, oh look here, you've got these color photoreceptors and this happens in the visual cortex, blah, blah, it doesn't change the fact that you look at something purple and you say, oh, that's beautiful. No. Has having your children made you think about neuroscience in a different way? Yeah. Because the yogis talk about beginner's mind, like that that is, that is a place that you are always seeking to get back to, which is what I always always perceived like having watched my son grow up. That beginner's mind is the purest, most beautiful. They are so connected to whatever was pre consciousness, and they've brought that in with them. So yeah. Well, one of the things that has sort of been an interesting surprise to me is just seeing the punctuated equilibrium by which I mean, you know, things change suddenly as in one day your daughter can't read and then kind of a week later she's a pretty good reader. It's just sort of these things that you work on with her for a long time selling change. And I've always found this kind of thing fascinating. It's like the system finds some thing where it says, okay, now I got it. Now I know how to read or ride a bicycle or whatever the thing is. So that's been really interesting to me. And also to really try to get an understanding of which things are pre programmed and which things are just a matter of absorbing from the world. And you know, it's always a combination of both. You may know this, but the nature versus nurture debate is totally dead because it's always both. You come to the table with a lot of pre programming and you absorb the world and you absorb your language and your culture and your neighborhood and your religion and so on that all becomes part of who you are. So just really watching my kids and trying to
Minnie Questions with Minnie Driver
"david eagleman" Discussed on Minnie Questions with Minnie Driver
"What relationship real or fictionalized defines love for you? I think there are two ways to think about that. One is how we feel about the love for our children. So if you think about cormac McCarthy's the road, for example, it's a post apocalyptic world after nuclear war. And this father does everything in his power just to save his son just to do everything he can to protect his son and keep him alive. And of course, there are many stories like this life is beautiful, Roberto benigni. Am I giving the title right of that one? Yeah, when he puts him in the bin at the end, yeah, absolutely. Yeah, he's in a concentration camp with his son, and he does everything he can to protect his son. So that's the kind of love that now that I'm a father is very meaningful to me as for romantic love, I think that would change each year of my life for me, which is to say, when we're younger, we all take these great romance fantasies to represent love. And as you get older, more realism seeps in. So I've been married for 12 years now, and I appreciate now the way that real relationships are complex and people change over different time scales as life changes in his career opportunities change and I just recently resaw rewatched fiddler on the roof. You know, and he says, have you asked? So do you love me? And she says, do I what? And so they realized that the romantic notions can't capture it, but other notions, you know, what they do for each other, how they demonstrate their bond to one another. This does capture something important. Do you think that the romantic love, the faith based love, service based love, the love of our children? Do you think that the route that it's erroneous that we have the same word for it? Because there are myriad ways to love. Right. Yeah, Raymond Carver has a short story called what we talk about when we talk about love. And I've always, it's a great short story, but I've always loved the title as well because it's about the complexity of it. And so many words in our language, there's just too much semantic weight that that word is trying to hold because in fact it is composed of many different things. Yeah, exactly. It's composed of so many things and which of those things matters to us. That changes through the years. You know, my father before he died was in one of these care homes. So I met some of the other people on his hallway, much older men and women who were there. And I think they still cared about love, but it was something so different for them. It wasn't about the sort of young sexy thing. It was about something else. Yeah, definitely. It's really I'm fascinated by the different permutations of it of devotion and of the way in which people love differently when the love that they have with their version of God or with animals or with something that they do, how they love romantically changes directly depending on what their relationship with that sort of outsourced love as it were. The love that we don't really talk about. I always think of lovers romantic. I think lots of people do, but yeah, that's right. And the other thing about love is obviously it goes in two directions. So we all want to get love. We want to receive love and various ways, including from our dogs, and so on. But we want to be good to the people that we care about and love them well, but it's hard, right? Because we're made up of all these different neural networks that all have different drives and care about different things. And so sometimes you're feeling hangry and sometimes you're feeling distracted by work and sometimes you're feeling whatever. And so we're constantly finding ourselves in situations where we don't behave the way that we would like to. One of the books that I'm writing right now has to do with something called the Ulysses contract, which is how you can make a deal with yourself in time to constrain your behavior by doing something right now that essentially puts you in a contract so that you'll behave better in some future situation. This is what Ulysses did when he lashed himself to the mask. He knew that the siren song would tempt him just like any mortal man and he crashed into the rocks. So what he did is the Ulysses of sound mind lashed himself to the mast so that the future Ulysses couldn't behave badly. And I find this a really interesting concept about the things that we do to make sure that we don't behave badly if you call this absolutely fascinating carry on carry on. Well, you know, one example is if you're trying to get over some addiction, alcoholism, what you do is you clear all the alcohol out of your house, so that on a festive Saturday night or a lonely Sunday Night or something, you're not going to go in there. Even if you think, oh, I'm sure I won't drink this anymore. You get rid of it. That's the Ulysses contract, or for drug addicts, one of the first things they're taught when they're trying to break. This is never walked around with more than $20 in your pocket because at some point someone's going to come up to you and offer to sell you drugs and you'll be tempted. And then you'll give in. So there are many things that we do to make sure that we can make a choice now that will pay off to keep us acting consistently with our long-term decision making. I mean, I think I could definitely just put a big piece of tape over my mouth. And that would be my Ulysses contract sorted. Future me is never going to say the stuff that I am thinking that I know is going to cause trouble because I've got a massive piece of tape and maybe you could TM your name. It could be like, David eagleman Ulysses tape. I would buy that shit. Okay. Good. But that requires a modicum of self knowledge that most people are not interested in interrogating because they don't want to think that there is something fundamentally wrong with them that's going to affect their situation now much less in the future when the mermaid is singing and calling you into the ocean. We're so tender and we're so lost. As people, I mean, I love that you write these books that really do act as guideposts because that's what I think they are. And I'm constantly looking for signs and sign posts because it is so fragile and tender. And that you know that you're writing a book for that, but I feel for all of us myself included going, I just I wonder how deep I can go into who I am to know how I could save myself from myself. Yes, exactly. So when it comes to this issue about self interrogation and really trying to understand who we are. One of the hardest things to see is the way that we come off to other people because, in fact, this is what one of my other books is that I'm writing right now. It's called empire of the invisible, and it's all about what's going on in politics right now. Specifically, it's asking why we each believe that we have the truth and we see the truth so clearly. And everyone else is misinformed or they're a troll or whatever it is. And if I can only shout in all caps loud enough on Twitter, I could convince everyone that I am right. It's crazy to me that everybody believes this, whatever part of the political spectrum, and by the way, in terms of relationships, we tend to all believe this as well, which is, okay, well, I already know how to do relationships. I'm saying the right things all the time. Do you think that that kind of, the surety of that empiricism that is so pervasive? Is that human or is that learned? Is that a hard wired into our brains? Is that something that was useful once when we were discovering fire? Yeah, it couldn't actually be any other way because the way we build a model of the world. Remember, your brain is locked in silence and darkness inside your skull. And all it's trying to do is put together an internal model of what is going on out there, which includes other people and how other people behave and how they'll react to what you say. And the thing is that this internal model is inherently limited. It's only built up from the little dribbles of data that you get in during your years. And so the way the brain works is it says, okay, look, I've got this data. I've collected all this data. I know what is true. And it's just built up from what we've taken in. Now, by the way, I will say, we're probably better off than we were historically, because now we have, for example, the printing press. And so we have movies and things like that. And so you put all this together and we're exposed to literature and to stories that are much broader than our own experience. So that helps. But still, I'm only read a finite number of books in my lifetime. I've only met a finite number of people, and that has shaped my experience just like your experiences have shaped your brain. And so that's why, given that data, you say, okay, I know what is true. This is what is true. It's very, very interesting.
Minnie Questions with Minnie Driver
"david eagleman" Discussed on Minnie Questions with Minnie Driver
"And my grandfather was born in 1883. I had a proper Victorian for a grandfather. So my grandfather was born in 1879, it turns out. What? Yeah, he was 50 years old when he had my father and my father was getting close to 50 when he had me. That's bananas. It was really interesting being taught to grow tomatoes by a 97 year old grandpa. Yeah. And my mother was always making jokes about are you sure girls are allowed to grow tomatoes? Hello, I'm Minnie Driver. Welcome to the mini questions season two. I've always loved priests questionnaire. It was originally a 19th century parlor game where players would ask each other 35 questions aimed at revealing the other players true nature. It's just the scientific method, really. In asking different people the same set of questions, you can make observations about which truths appear to be universal. I love this discipline. And it made me wonder, what if these questions were just the jumping off point? What greater depths would be revealed if I ask these questions as conversation starters with thought leaders and trailblazers across all these different disciplines. So I adapted Proust questionnaire and I wrote my own 7 questions that I personally think are pertinent to a person's story. They are. When and where were you happiest? What is the quality you like least about yourself? What relationship real or fictionalized to find love for you? What question would you most like answered? What person place or experience has shaped you the most? What would be your last meal? And can you tell me something in your life that's grown out of a personal disaster? And I've gathered a group of really remarkable people, ones that I am honored and humbled to have had the chance to engage with. You may not hear their answers to all 7 of these questions. We've whittled it down to which questions felt closest to their experience or the most surprising or created the most fertile ground to connect. My guest today is the neuroscientist and author, David eagleman. I'm not sure I've ever heard a really long conversation with a polymath before. But you sure don't forget it when it's over because, you know, you keep waking up thinking about things they said and it spans everything from quantum spirituality to philosophy to neuro law and science to coffee in IHOP. David writes about the brain and how it constructs perception and how different brains do so differently. And how much that matters for society. Here's among many other things, the executive director of the scent of the science and law, which is a nonprofit that sets out to improve the legal system by importing our knowledge about the human brain, which then gives options for rehabilitation beyond mass incarceration. He's written tons of books and you will read and be astonished by all of them. He said something that I think about a lot. He said he was interested in exploring the vastness of
Untangle
"david eagleman" Discussed on Untangle
"Is, you know, like if you're wearing a wristwatch or a Fitbit or whatever, go ahead and switch it to the other hand. So anyone who's listening to this who's wearing anything switch it to the other hand, this sounds so dumb and simple, but in fact, what it's doing is just breaking this little tiny bit of optimization, which is whenever you want to know what time it is, you look at your wrist and you're doing that. But now you have to look at your wrist and sort of pay attention to, oh, what am I doing? It's all my other hand. What does it actually look like? What does it feel like and so on? There are a million ways to do this. You can brush your teeth tonight with your other hand. It sounds simple. It's actually not so simple because you're so automatized with your one hand. So it'll really get you to pay attention, what the heck you're doing there. One thing that I try to do every day is drive a different route home from work as often as possible will take a different turn and what that does is it just forces you to look at a new neighborhood and see new houses and new trees and hopefully something you hadn't seen before. And this is a way to get yourself off of the automatized zombie driving that you would otherwise do every day. So there are a hundred things like this that you can do, including just something simple like rearranging your desk, your office, just so that you're not sitting in the same place with the same thing every day, but forcing yourself to just break out of that. It's so simple to do these little habits, but they're good habits to establish so that you don't lose your life to a timeless automatized existence. So in order to not lose your life to a timeless automatized existence, David eagleman suggests that you take a new path every day, do something novel, switch your hand, switch it up, and actually become re-engaged in your life. Bingo. Awesome. Thank you so much, David for letting us inside your head today. Great. Thank you. It's such a pleasure to be here. You can learn more about David and his fantastic work,.
Untangle
"david eagleman" Discussed on Untangle
"Something and think, oh, I just heard it or smelled it or something. And so because when you look in the brain, it's all the same stuff. It's all spikes. And as we know, if you were to, if we were to look at a little hole in the skull and look at the brain underneath it and say, okay, you're looking at a little piece of cortex that's popping off what part of cortex is that. There's actually no way you'd be able to tell because it looks exactly the same as visual cortex or auditory or smell or taste or anything. You know, what you're looking at is a bunch of cells popping off. So anyway, this got me very interested in the question of how the information is getting there in the first place. So when you look at the eyes, these are very specialized little features that pass information in a certain way, the capture photons. When you look at ears, what you're doing is capturing air compression waves and then turning that into spikes and setting it off to me. When you look at the nose, you're capturing molecules of different shapes and then sending spikes off to the brain and so on. So anyway, I started wondering, could you actually send off a whole different stream to the brain? Could you capture a different kind of information and send that off to the brain? And the way that the brain figures out how to deal with any sort of sensory information is by comparing it with other sorts of sensory information and by correlating it with your motor output and stuff like that. So all of this is to say that I started wondering if we could feed in a new sense into humans by using something like patterns of vibration on the skin because your skin is this wonderful computational material that mostly goes wasted in modern life. We're not using our skin for much of anything. Yeah, you got a ton of touch sensors in there. Exactly. It actually, the skin is the largest organ of your body. The joke that I use in the lab is that we don't call this the waste for nothing. So. Yeah, exactly. It's just very rich material and I thought, what if we could put in spatial patterns of vibration, but by which I don't just need through time. I don't mean buzz, buzz buzz, but I mean, you know, like a cross big swaths of skin. And could you actually correlate that with something so let me give an example of what we're doing we're out to solve the problem of hearing loss with vibration on the skin. So what we do is we capture sound into these vibratory patterns either on the torso or on the wrist. We now use a wristband. And deaf people can come to understand the world that way. And it's actually not hard. I mean, the surprising part is that on day zero, when they very first put on the wristband, for example, we play them a sound to the wristband, so they're buzzed. And then we say, okay, was that a dog working or a baby crying? And they have to guess which one it was. And people perform it up to 95% on day zero before they even have any training with it. So whether it's a car passing or a smoke detector or a microwave peeping or a cell phone ringing or whatever it is, it's just sort of surprisingly intuitive, even if you're getting it on your skin because it's getting up to the brain and the brain can interpret it. Totally amazing. So just to recap, there's a lot of information here. So we can take an information and our brain's job is to interpret that. And we know our basic senses are sites, smell, hearing, but you're suggesting that we can actually add additional senses. And so you actually have a little device so you can get little buzzes little tactile sensations right on your wrist. Yeah, because from the brain's point of view, it's just information that's getting to the brain. In the case of the wristband, it's just climbing up your spinal cord and up to your brain. And your brain says, oh, there's this stuff. Here's the important part about correlating it with other senses is let's say I'm deaf. I can watch your lips move and I feel it on the wristband at the same time. And that's how I correlate these things, or I can vocalize something. I can say the quick brown fox. And as I'm saying it, I'm feeling it. And that's how my brain figures out, oh, okay, got it. This is how I interpret this information. So our brains are learning machines and we're simply learning a new pattern pretty effectively. Exactly right. And the way that I've come to think about the brain in the last sort of 7 years is I think about it as a general purpose compute device and whatever information you feed into it, it just says, okay, that's cool. How's it correlated with these other things? And what is the meaning of that information? Wow, so what other stuff can we feed into the brain and derive meaning from? Yeah, so we're working on about 15 different projects here. Some of which I could talk about and so I can't, but essentially my interest is in sensory addition, which is so not just for a person who's deaf or blind or with a sensory disorder where they're not feeling their limb or things like that. We're doing all those kinds of clinical projects, but what other things can we do to feed in brand new sensory information? So whether that's stock market data or Twitter information or flying a drone, things like that, how can we take in new streams of info and come to have a direct perceptual experience of them? And how successful is it? We've done things with drone pilots where they're feeling the pitch. You all roll orientation and heading of their drone as they're flying it, they're filling it on their skin. And they can come to fly in the fog or in the dark and very quickly sort of surprisingly quickly. They just, they get it. They get what the meaning of it is. And maybe it's not surprising. I don't know, when you look at driving a new thing like a skateboarder, a sailboat, or some new thing that you haven't done before, let's say. Learning how to snowboard. Yeah, learning how to snowboard. It just doesn't take that long for you to figure out, oh, okay, I get instead of using my feet to walk and so on. Now I'll just balance and I'll get high velocity by leaning this way and I go downhill and yeah, the part that I keep saying is amazing is just the flexibility of the brain to say, oh, okay, I've got a new body plan now. I've got a new sensory input now. That's cool. I'll just figure it out. So this really opens us up to the notion of what we can become. All of the things that we can be and we can learn simultaneously. Yeah, exactly. And I have a few colleagues who are starting companies to do things with, for example, brain implants where you stick electrodes in the brain and then maybe feed in new senses that way, but the truth is I don't think that is the way this is going to go because neurosurgeons don't want to do these surgeries because there's always risk of infection and death on the table and consumers who want to interface with other things. I don't think they want to go in for an open head surgery. And so to my mind building a very simple cheap device that can do this, I can get new streams of information in the brain, probably the way to go. And I think what we're going to see in the next 5 years is the creation of new senses and part of my plan is I mentioned that we're doing a whole bunch of projects in my lab here. But there are 2000 projects that I haven't thought of and won't think of. And so by releasing this with an open API where people can feed in whatever kind of data streams they want, that makes it a community science project to figure out what kinds of new sensations we can experience. Okay, well, anybody out there who wants to know when they're baby is asleep by taking data from your baby monitor, putting it into your wristband and then feeling every toss and turn of your baby or every beat of its heart if you have an EKG on your little baby. Or any other piece of data that seems relevant to you. It can now transform it and learn it..
Untangle
"david eagleman" Discussed on Untangle
"Thanks, Patricia. Hello, I'm Ariel, and I'll be your guide as we go inside the head of some of the world's most extraordinary brain scientists, psychologists, meditators, those who are skilled in the mental arts. And we're going to learn both from their cutting edge work and their own human experience, how our brains work, how to optimize them, and how to manage the crazy in all of our minds. Today we're going to get inside the head of David eagleman an incredibly prolific neuroscientist, particularly a perception neuroscientist. You might know him from his TED Talk where he interprets the stock market through sensory vest, his PBS special on the brain, or any of The New York Times best sellers that he's written. He's also a buddy, a fellow startup entrepreneur, and an incredible guy. Today we are going to get inside David's head. Welcome, David. Thanks. It's awesome to be here. So David, to start off on one of your fascinating topics, you've written a lot about memory and how who we think we are is defined by our memories. But in fact, those memories are quite changeable. Can you talk a bit about that? Yeah. Memory is a myth making machine. And we're constantly reinventing our past to keep it consistent with who we think we are. And so it's this weird thing. I mean, I hate that we use the word memory and that computer scientists use the word memory because they're so such entirely different concepts. Yeah, one is fixed and the other is so labile movable. Exactly right. And the amount of data that we take in from any scene from any event, we're just taking in key frames and things that are important, but actually even that's not a good analogy to call it keyframes because that would imply that we're actually capturing the real data. But even our memories are a big part of who we are. In other words, if I'm a certain kind of person and I experience something outside, then maybe I'll think, oh, that guy who came up to me on the street, that guy was really funny. And if I'm an anxious person, I'll think, oh, that guy was really threatening. And my whole memory of the event is determined by what's going on inside of me. And yes, and then on top of that is the fact that we just don't remember most of what happens in our life. Our memories are like sieves and yet we always have the illusion that we remember it well, which is something that I've never quite figured out and it's an interesting mystery to me when I think back on some dinner at a restaurant, I might think like, oh yeah, I remember it. I remember who was there. But if I start asking questions, like, okay, what exactly was he wearing? What was she wearing? Who were the other diners in the restaurant? What was the person sitting right behind that person who would have been sitting on my retina the whole time, but you know, do I actually remember what were the chairs like, what was the tablecloth? All these things, if I really had a memory of the restaurant as I feel like I do, I feel like, oh yeah, it's just a cinematographic picture of what happened there. Then I should be able to answer all those questions, but in fact, I can't. Okay, so you and I can actually play a little game with this because we have some shared memories. Oh, great. So do you remember when we were at a conference and both of us were speaking at this conference? And there was a jazz concert. Oh boy. We're at the Biltmore hotel. Which city was this? I can't remember what city is in. Built more hotel that was really, really hot. Okay. You know what? I remember, I remember sitting with you and talking and there was another guy from your company there and we were talking about something and we were talking we were talking about views and what was going on with that. That's my entire memory of it. Do you remember we were sitting at a concert and I was pregnant and you put your hand on my stomach and felt the baby move? Oh yeah. Yeah, that I do remember actually, but I wouldn't have remembered that had you not reminded me. Yeah. Yeah. As I was thinking about this, I started to have access to the memories of that conference. And the things that I could remember that were most relevant was I wanted to go swimming. Yeah. I tried to get you to go swimming as well. I don't know if you remember that. And the other thing I remembered was how good the food was, because again, I was pregnant, so I had a really selective filter on that event. The food tasted really good..
Stuff To Blow Your Mind
"david eagleman" Discussed on Stuff To Blow Your Mind
"Can do so at contact at stuff to blow your mind dot com stuff to blow. Your mind is production of iheartradio for more podcasts. From iheartradio with the iheartradio app apple podcasts. Or wherever you listen to. Your favorite shows took looking for guidance motivation and variety from world class experts and your fitness and wellness journey. Find it with apt to the fitness out. That's right for you and your lifestyle no matter where you are and your fitness journey app can match your experience level and goals with over six thousand wellness classes on demand. Try a seven day free trial. Find your way to your happiest and healthiest life and have fun at the same time. Try it free for a week. Download the app and go to apt dot com slash iheart. That's double a. P. t. v. dot com slash. Iheart this episode of stuff to blow your mind is brought to you by seamy wine. Seamy wine was born from the grit and perseverance of its tenacious founder. Isabel see me because when life gave her grapes she knew exactly what to do. And that's why a glass of me wine as a reward worth having because good things come to those who work hard. Even a small goal achieved as a moment worth celebrating whether it's a sip of their medium bodied white wine chardonnay or the full bodied red wine. Cabernet-sauvignon raise a glass to the moments that make us seamy wine..
Stuff To Blow Your Mind
"david eagleman" Discussed on Stuff To Blow Your Mind
"May be that you essentially have two sides to the brain the left and the right side literally the two hemispheres and those used to be more separate and so it was as though people were hearing a voice from somebody else than what he argues. Is that if you look at ancient literature like ancient greek literature and so on. There's always this thing about hearing a voice from god and so on and the argument is that very recently the left and right hemispheres started connecting in a deeper way and so there was the super highway of fibers that goes back and forth between them and so what we have now is a unified consciousness instead of two separate voice going on in our heads as i said nobody really knows this is right or not. Because there's no simple way to test this directly. What are you incognito. Though is essentially a distant cousin of that which is that. What is absolutely clear is that we are not a single thing so we think of ourselves as individuals meaning not divisible into different parts but but in fact who you are is a collection of different neural networks. That all have different drives and this is why we can argue with ourselves in custody ourselves in contract with ourselves cajole ourselves. Who's talking with whom here. It's all us but it's different parts of us. This is why if i take some warm chocolate chip cookies out of the oven and put them in front of you. Part of your brain says. Don't eat it you'll get fat and party. Says that looks like a high energy totally want to eat those cookies. And part of your brain says how about. I eat the cookies. But i'll go to the gym tonight or whatever like everything that we do in our lives. We have arguments with ourselves about. Okay what should i do. Hear a part of me wants to eat this part of it doesn't want to and so what's going on. There are all the different voices. The different political parties of this neural parliament. That we have running under the hood. And this is the framework that i built in incognito is that we've got this parliament in the way you go just depends on the majority vote at any given moment and so you're not one thing you're a collection of voters are..
Stuff To Blow Your Mind
"david eagleman" Discussed on Stuff To Blow Your Mind
"But i'll be right back with david. Evil men today's episode is sponsored by general motors. Ever drive in evi. You'd know because once you feel the thrill of electric there's no going back and the next generation of ev's by general motors are an absolute joy to drive. Imagine an e v. That can go from zero to sixty in an estimated three seconds a lower center of gravity that handles like a dream letting you hug corners for tighter ride and don't even get started on available towing capacity. Yes towing in. And what's that. I hear a quieter driving experience. It's about time you listen to your favorite podcast. The way we intended so get ready to charge up and feel the thrill of the road. It's all made possible by altium. A revolutionary new ev platform from gm built for power flexibility and arrange ensuring. You keep the good times going. Isn't it time for everyone to feel good about driving a vehicle they love. Discover the thrill that awaits. Fgm dot com. Everybody today and every day you're doing the impossible with so little time under so much pressure and for businesses around the world it's a real.
Stuff To Blow Your Mind
"david eagleman" Discussed on Stuff To Blow Your Mind
"The hand gets stabbed. And the question is do you care. Does your brain care as much if it's someone in your out group versus a member of your group and that's exactly what happens if it's a member of your group you have a much bigger response and if it's a member of your brain doesn't really care that much and it turns out that we do all kinds of versions of this just as one example. We then say okay. The year is twenty twenty five and these. Three religions have teamed up against these three religions. And now you're to allies you care slightly more than he did a minute ago. Just because you're told in this one cents thing that that they're allied with you and the others are still clearly in your out group so your age doesn't care as much and by the way just a side note. Atheists have exactly the same thing about seeing atheist handsets up so it's not an indictment of religion. It's just an issue about ingram's actress who you feel like you know what your labels are so. We've done a lot of work on that. If anyone's interested. I wrote an article in the economist last year called. Does your brain care about other people. It depends but all of the sudden in two thousand twenty unfortunately all of the stuff is more relevant because society is really finding ways to divide themselves up with in groups and out groups Some people blame social media. The fact is i enroll student of history and the fact is that we've had this kind of stuff happen all the time with the chinese cultural revolution of the russian revolution or or what happened in nazi germany or we. We've we've seen this stuff lots of times before the internet so it's not like the internet is the single thing to blame here. This is this human nature so anyway this is what i think is relevant twenty. All right we're going to take one more break..
Stuff To Blow Your Mind
"david eagleman" Discussed on Stuff To Blow Your Mind
"Then there's a bear and i'm feeling the bear and all that kind of stuff so but it's exactly the same circuitry that they have because this is a very fundamental circuitry that is burned into the system and it doesn't care whether your eyes are working or not because it's it's more it's deeper than that and has working on this as his changed the way you reflect on your own dreams at all you know. I've always actually felt that dreams are not terribly meaningful like my own. I wake up. i. I've always described this. As sort of sticking your head in the night blender each night. And i kinda hate hatred. But now i have a deeper appreciation for why i'm going through that night blender because if not i would wake up and my visual system would be really disadvantaged. It would be taken over in large part by hearing and by touch especially in the later portions of the book. You you get into memories and even identity and there's there's a lot that really seems to resonate with the state of the world right now. how do you feel. this book. speaks to the the twenty twenty reader. Yeah i think there. I think there are many ways. I'll mention to one is actually. Let me start with this optimistic. One which is as lousy as twenty twenty has been for everybody. This is a year where there's serious spikes for everybody in stressing zaidi depression. It's just there's all kinds of stuff. But i will mention one tiny silver lining of this is that from the point of view of brain plasticity. We've all been kicked off of our hamster wheels and we're all being forced to rethink many things that we never thought about before so i mentioned before that our brain is locked in silence darkness. It's trying to make an internal model of the world out there and we all pretty much had that in two thousand nine hundred and we said okay. I get how the world works. I get how things operate how people respond how to get toilet paper how to get food in my fridge stuff like that and all of a sudden everything changed and from the point of view brain..
Stuff To Blow Your Mind
"david eagleman" Discussed on Stuff To Blow Your Mind
"To utilize that information so we actually just finished a big developer contest where people did all kinds of projects with monitoring air quality monitoring. You know blood sugar in your bloodstream. Or many many different kinds of monitoring your feeling electrical fields and so on so all this by the way. If anybody's interested we have an open. Api an st k. Four buzz on neo century dot com and pursue any kind of project. You want this. We've had hundreds of people just making their own thing which has been which has been very cool now to switch to the second thing about motor output. Yeah it turns out that your brain is not pre-programmed to drive your body but instead can figure out whatever the afford ince's are of whatever's there so just as an example. You know one of the things. I tell the story about this dog that was born without limbs. It didn't have his legs and so she walked by pd. She walks on her back. Legs like a human and presumably. Any dog could do this. But they're not sufficiently motivated but walked through on her hind legs and with this illustrates. Is that dog. Brains are not pre-programme drive dog bodies but instead they figure out okay. Here's what i can do. I need to get to my food to my to my mother. Whatever this is how i do it. And so Also you know. Tell the story of the guy who's the world's best archer. Yes the world's record for best archery shot and he doesn't have arms so he does this with his legs and it's just another illustration that the brain figures out whatever body it's in says okay. I can figure how to drive this. Of course we see this when people for example get an amputation. Let's say they lose an arm and a motorcycle accident or something the map of their body in their brain readjusts to say okay. I got a body without an arm. So i'm just gonna figure that out now okay so because is not preprogramed. It's extremely flexible. I think that we could actually build any kind of body. We want so coming back to your question. I mentioned about doc ock in one thousand nine hundred sixties which debuted in spiderman this scientists to plugs in four robotic arms so that he can actually do extra things in poor beakers and so on and he controls his brain. But then there's an explosion as lab and he turns evil and the scales buildings and learns new forms of martial arts with eight arms and so on and Doctor octavius starts to go by doc. Anyway the exactly as you said this is not as far off in weird as we used to think because now what we're doing is with for example patients who are paralyzed you can put electrodes into their motor cortex and they can learn to drive robotic arm even though they are paralyzed. They drive the robotic arm with their thoughts. Which sounds weird. But that's of course how you drive your fleshy arm you just you know you think about it you learn the you learned what the output signals are that make your arm responded the same thing with the robotic arm you can do that and there have been experiments with monkeys where they their bodies work fine. They're not paralyzed but they can drive a third arm with you. Know with their thoughts. So they're driving a robotic arm with their thoughts. There was experiment done where a monkey Uses his motor cortex to make a robot walk but the interesting part was the robot happened to be across the world..
Stuff To Blow Your Mind
"david eagleman" Discussed on Stuff To Blow Your Mind
"And i'm joe mccormack ended. It's saturday time for a vault episode. This one originally aired september twenty-ninth twenty twenty rob. This was the interview that you did with the neuroscientist. David gelman yeah. This is a lot of fun. I guess he gets into some really cool ideas here. A possible explanation for what dreams are for and one of my favorite parts. How in which ways is the human brain like. A mr potato is mr potato different from mr potato head. Well it's mr potato head. Yes okay. I guess actually. It's not mr potato head now right now. There is still a mr potato head but there's also a broader potato head concept. Okay yeah. I haven't followed all the potato head news but i've caught wind of some of the outrage over over some of it so at any rate It's a eagle uses. The potato head as a wonderful metaphor for exactly how our brain works when you plug different sensory inputs into it so I highly recommend it. It's a great great really enjoyable will interview. I enjoyed it. I think folks.