David Eagleman: What Neuroscience Reveals About Your Brain and Human Nature | Human Behavior | YAPClassic

- Yeah, fam, I have really exciting news. After almost eight years of running this podcast, I finally was nominated for an "I Heart Podcast" award, which is like the Grammys of podcasting. I'm heading up against the diary of the CEO,

acquired, earn your leisure,

and all these amazing shows for the best business

and finance podcast. If you love young and profiting, and you love this show and you want me to win,

“the best way to help me is to write me a five-star review”

on Apple Podcast, and also choose to subscribe to my YouTube channel and engage on our videos. I also was nominated for an indie pack award. It's the first ever independent podcast and creator awards.

That's also happening in a couple weeks, and I was nominated for the best business and entrepreneurship podcast. I'm competing against Ice Coffee Hour and a number of awesome shows.

And again, if you want to help me win, these awards, please write me a five-star review on Apple Podcasts and follow our YouTube channel and engage on our videos. I appreciate any support.

If you guys have been to my free webinars, if you learned from the podcast,

and you guys know that I never ask you for anything.

This is the one time I'm asking you guys to support the show by writing us a review or engaging on our YouTube channel. I hope to take home these wins and thanks again for supporting the show.

What's up, Yapp Fam? Today we're unlocking the archives

“for a powerful Yapp Classic that will completely change”

how you think about your brain and reality itself. We're rewinding to my conversation with Dr. David Eagleman, Stanford, neuroscientist, bestselling author of Live Wired and a true pioneer in brain science.

David has dedicated his career to studying how our brains construct from our experience of the world, from time perception and dreams to neuroplasticity and sensory expansion.

In this episode, we explore why time can feel like it slows down, why dreams may just be your brain's screen saver, and how humans could one day develop entirely new senses through technology. This episode was so cool,

it totally changed the way that I see my own mind, and I know you're gonna love this one. So sit back, open your mind, and enjoy this fascinating chat with Dr. David Eagleman.

Welcome to Young Improveding Podcast David. - Thank you, it's so great to be here. - I'm super excited. I love to learn about the brain and so do my listeners.

“We've had a handful of episodes on the topic”

with renowned experts like Dr. Caroline Leef, Dr. Daniel A. Men, Jim Quick, and a few others, but I feel like we've still only scratched the surface on the topic. There's so much to learn about the brain.

So David, let's open up this conversation with some background on your childhood. You had an accident when you were eight years old, where you felt 12 feet from a roof. So tell us about that accident

and how it influenced you to then learn about time perception years later. - Yeah, so I slipped off the roof, and I ended up breaking my nose on the brick floor below, but the thing that really struck me about it

was that it seemed to take a long time the fall from the roof. And so I was thinking about Alice in Wonderland as I was falling and how this must've been what it was like for her.

And I felt like lots of time as I felt. And later when I got to high school and I took physics, and I learned D equals one half eighty squared, I realized, wow, the whole fall took place in point six of a second.

And I couldn't reconcile that I couldn't figure out how it seemed to have taken so long. So I got really interested in perception. I grew up, I became a neuroscientist. And I've studied a lot about time perception

in my laboratory. And so one of the experiments I ended up doing then was dropping people from 150 foot tall tower backwards and free fall. And then caught by a net below.

And I measured time perception on the way down. And I made a series of discoveries there. Essentially the bottom line is we don't actually see in slow motion. Instead it's a trick of memory when you're in a life-threatening

situation, you're laying down really dense memories. Such that when you read it back out and you say, what just happened, what just happened? It feels like it must have taken a very long time. Yeah, that's super interesting.

So essentially it's the way that we're perceiving time. It's not that time actually slows down. Our brain has evolved to perceive time in that way. And it turns out that the whole world is sort of like an illusion in that sense, can you talk to us about that?

Well, that's right. I mean, there's a sense of what you're never perceiving time

directly or always living at least half a second in the past.

So it takes right photons hit your eyes or air, compression waves hit your ears or whatever. I touch your toe. And those signals have to travel along nerves, which are very slow.

I mean, thousands of times slower than electronic signals travel in your computer. So it takes time for the stuff to move around in the brain, get to different places in the brain, and then it has to get stitched together with other senses.

And by the time all of this gets done and you're served up a conscious perception of what happened, the events already long on by that point

So and by the way, I've been pursuing a hypothesis

“that taller people live farther in the past”

than shorter people because it's longer to get all the signals there.

So anyway, yes, we're never perceiving time

directly and when you are thinking back on an accident situation, you are, you know, you're probing your memory. You're saying, what just happened a moment ago. And so all you're ever perceiving is your conscious perception.

Now by the way, of course, your body can do things much faster than that unconsciously. Like when your foot gets halfway to the brake, when you realize a car is pulling out of the driveway, head of you, that happens before you're consciously aware.

You become aware by the time your foot's already on the move. So your brain can do lots of things that way, you know, when you're hiking with friends and you find yourself ducking out of the way of a tree branch that's swinging back towards you

before you even realize that you're ducking, you know, that kind of stuff can happen. But as far as our conscious perception of the world, that's always an old story. - So, so, so interesting.

So I mentioned that I'm gonna try to talk about the feature and a lot of our conversation. And so you may not have the answer, but I'm curious, I'm sure you've thought about it. Humans hate to wait, especially as, you know,

we get more technologically advanced. You know, we don't even like to wait for our files to download on the computer, right? So do you think there's gonna be some sort of a future where we can manipulate time in that way

where we feel like we're at least not waiting? - I don't think so, actually. Only because the human brain is enormous. Compared to, let's say a fly, a house fly brain. And the reason that's really hard to swat a fly

is because the signals are moving along the neurons and a fly brain exactly the same speed that they're moving with us. But it can get across the brain and do everything it needs to

and get to the motor system of the fly really quickly because there's just not that much territory to cover. In contrast to human brain is enormous. You have to cross vast swaths of territory

with these signals to get stuff to happen.

So there's a sense in which we are always going to live

in the past, happily technologically, things have sped up a lot. And it's always struck me so funny the way that we, you know, when something speeds up, we say, oh, I never realized I could save time there

and then you can never go back. But often we don't realize there are ways that we could have saved time. Like, for example, if somebody invents something where you can wash all your dishes

or wash all your clothes, you know, like in one second and then the things done and unloaded automatically, you would say, oh, great, I'm never going back. But, you know, we do washing machines

and laundry machines now and it doesn't bother us too much. - Yeah, so interesting. So one concept that I think is really important as we start to get a foundation of your work.

“And I think a lot of my listeners are really beginners, right?”

I think a lot of the terms that we're going to talk about in this episode are going to be brand new terms. And one of them is this concept of, um, wealth, right? Um, wealth.

I think that's how you pronounce it. - Yeah, yeah. - It sounds German, right? - Yeah, exactly. So basically, it's this concept

that our environment is perceived differently like from human to human, right? We all are perceiving the world similarly, but differently at the same time. And so I'd love for you to explain that concept to us.

- Cool, well, the easiest way to think about the umveld is that, you know, looking across the animal kingdom. So, you know, for a tech, for example, all it can detect is temperature and body odor. That's, that's it's only signaling mechanisms.

And so it's world is built out of that or for the blind echo locating bat. It's world is built out of these, you know, echoing sound signals. You know, it lets out a chirp and it gets an echo back.

“And that's how it figures out the three-dimensional structure”

of the cave it's flying through. Or for the, um, black coast knife fish. It's just detecting it. It has electrical fields around it. And it's detecting when that gets, you know,

perturbed by, let's say, a rock or some predator there. And those are the only signals that it has that it can pick up on from the world. And so, uh, that's this concept of the umveld, which is, um, you know, that's how it constructs its reality.

And what I've always found interesting is that presumably,

we all, you know, every animal species accepts its reality as the entire reality out there. Because why would you stop to ever question or think that maybe there's something beyond what, what you can detect? But what you said is, is also correct.

And this is actually the topic of my next book, which is the difference from human to human has been fascinating to me, just as one example. Well, an easy example is color blindness, right? So let's say, this person's color blindness person's not there.

Actually, seeing the scene differently. And we now know that a small fraction of women have not just three types of color photoreceptors in their eye, but four types, which means they're seeing colors, the rest of us aren't seeing.

where you, you know, someone let's say looks at letters or numbers

“and it triggers a color experience, or where they taste something”

and it puts a feeling on their fingertips, or they hear something and it causes a visual for them. There are many forms of synesthesia, but the point is, it's not a disease or a disorder. It's just an alternative perceptual reality.

And different people, you know, like three percent of the population has synesthesia and others don't. Or something that I've been studying a lot lately is, um, what's called hyperfantasia, or at the other end of the spectrum, A Fantasia, which is how you visually image something.

So if I ask you to imagine an ant crawling on a tablecloth towards a jar of purple jelly, for some people that's like, a movie in their head, they can see the whole thing. Other people, it's just conceptual. There's no picture there at all.

So the first group is called hyperfantasia, the second group is called A Fantasia. And it turns out that across the population, everybody is smeared way out here. And so although we would assume that everyone has mental imagery,

that's like hours, in fact, everybody's totally different with this stuff. So this is what I've been spending my time writing about lately is the differences between humans, extremely fascinating to me. Yeah, and I feel like there's so many ways we can go.

I'm going to do my best to try to navigate this conversation in a way

that I feel like will really lock in the most important things

for my listeners. So I feel like I do want to stick on the topic of animals. I think this is really interesting. You eluded to it before that, as humans, we experience things that are normal to humans,

are five senses. But then some like a dog has this amazing experience with their nose and smells, right? And all of these other animals have senses that we can't even imagine what that would be like.

And so help us understand, what are the different senses

“out there that humans are essentially missing out on?”

Well, OK, so almost all animals have a sense of smell that's so much better than hours. And I don't know if you saw my TED talk, but I did this example of really imagine that you are a dog.

Imagine you've got this long snout with 200 million

cent receptors in it. And everything for you is about smelling. You've got these wet nostrils that attract and trap and molecules, and you've got floppy ears to get more sent. Everything for you is about scent.

And what it would be like if one day you look at your human master and you thought, what is it like to have the pitiful little nose of the human? Right, you might imagine, erroneously, that they're sort of missing black hole of smell.

And we all realize we have this missing smell. But of course, we're all trapped inside of our own umbelt. And so we think, oh, yeah, I've got a great umbelt. I detecting everything out there. We don't realize typically that there's so much

that we could be sensing. Now, lots of animals have magnitude reception, which means they're picking up on the magnetic field of the Earth. And that's how they navigate. That's how they know North and South.

So insects, birds, they've all got this. In terms of how cows have good magnitude reception as well. Um, there's, you know, some animals see in the infrared range. So rattlesnakes, for example. They have these heat pits and they're picking up on infrared

radiation. Others like honey bees see in the ultraviolet range. These are things that are just totally invisible to us. We don't pick this up at all. And I've been stunning this for many years because I'm fascinated by the idea

that there may be things that animals are picking up on that we can't even get. What we're not being in a no for the next, uh, you know, 50, 100 years when someone realizes, oh my gosh, turns out, you know, antelope are picking up on this thing that we didn't realize was the thing. So, um, when, when you really study the biology across the kingdom,

you find that, uh, there's lots of information out there and we are extremely limited.

“And I think this is very counterintuitive thing to think that your biology actually”

constrains your perception of reality. Yeah. It is mind blowing to think that like animals are having a totally different experience than you are and you could be, I could be sitting here, there might be sounds that are going on that I don't even hear

right now and you don't even hear right now, which to me is just so crazy to even think

about we're so set on this is the way that the world is that we never stop and actually

think about these things. Oh, yeah. And in terms of, by the way, sounds, yeah, there are lots of animals that here and what we call the infrasonic range and, um, and the ultrasonic range. So, you know, we hear from the details no matter, but, you know, from 20 hurts to 20,000

hurts, don't worry if you don't know that, but, you know, it's just, that's the range of human hearing, but there are animals that are communicating way above that and having conversation all the time, lots of insects and frogs and whatever. And elephants, um, are communicating at the ranges below that, they're feeling it with their feet in the ground, they're feeling these bumps and so on and, and signals from other

And this is totally invisible to us.

“Do all animals and humans have we evolved our senses based on our environment?”

Yeah. That's exactly right. The reason that we see in this very narrow range that we call visible light is precisely because that big ball of fire and the sky, the sun is optimally giving, you know, photons that bounce off things on our planet surface in that range.

In other words, lots of stuff doesn't get through the atmosphere, so it wouldn't be useful for us to pick up on, on many of these other ranges. And so yeah, we pick up on stuff that's super useful to us. Yeah. And then I guess we just evolve and start to focus on certain senses that are more helpful

than others, which I guess is why humans really focus on vision and hearing, I think more than other senses. That's right. Now, it's not clear, for example, why we have lost so much skill with smell. But, you know, everything is, everything is constrained.

So if you're getting better at this and you're devoting more real estate and your brain towards vision, then you're going to lose some real estate in smell, for example. And so somehow when everything balances out, we've ended up exactly as we are. Yeah, Pam, you just realized your business needs to hire somebody yesterday. How do you find great candidates fast?

Easy. Use indeed. When it comes to hiring, indeed is all you need. Stop struggling to get your job post seen on other job sites. Indeed, sponsor jobs help you stand out and hire fast.

With sponsor jobs, your post jumps to the top of the page for relevant candidates, so you reach the people you actually want faster. And it works. According to indeed data, sponsor jobs posted directly on indeed get 45% more applications than non-sponsored jobs.

What I love about indeed is knowing that my job post is getting the visibility that it requires. Plus, within indeed sponsor jobs, there's no monthly subscriptions, no long-term contracts, and you only pay for results. There's no need to wait any longer, speed up your hiring right now, with indeed.

And listeners of this show will get a $75 sponsor job credit to get your jobs more visibility at indeed.com/propheting. Just go to indeed.com/propheting right now and support our show by saying you heard about indeed on this podcast. Indeed.com/propheting.

Terms and conditions apply. The hiring indeed is all you need. Hey, Affam. If you're planning on starting a business, do not just launch it, build it the right way. When I first started my company, I thought registering the name was enough.

I had no idea how many moving parts were involved just to operate legally and professionally. So I ended up using one company for paperwork, one company for a website, another for email. It was messy and expensive.

“That's why Northwest Registered Agent is the company I wish I had back then.”

Northwest is an all-in-one business formation and identity platform that gives you everything you need to launch and run a legitimate business in one place. When you form with them, you get a registered agent service, a business address to get your home private, a domain website, a professional email, business phone number, and built and privacy all bundle together.

Now, yeah, Affam. I want to take a detour right now and talk to you about the importance of a registered agent. I had no idea what it was when I first started YAP.

I signed up with one and then I never checked the platform because it was only for my registered

agent. I didn't even know what it did. Apparently, I learned this third way that a registered agent is what notifies you if anybody ever sues you. So I actually got in trouble this year because I didn't even know that an old client that

we barely worked with put out a lawsuit and they didn't notify me and I ended up missing a court date and it cost me a lot of money. So you really need a registered agent that you trust that does a great job and I've recently switched to Northwest Registered Agents so this never happens again. Don't pay hundreds or thousands of dollars for what you can get for free on Northwest Registered

Agent. Visit Northwest Registered Agent.com/YAP Free. That's YAP Free and start using free resources to build something amazing. Get more with Northwest Registered Agent at Northwest Registered Agent.com/YAPFree. Young and profitors, let me ask you something.

Have you ever missed an opportunity from a potential client and felt that drop in your stomach? I know I have far too many times.

When my business first started scaling, calls were going to one person, texts were going

to another, and opportunities kept flipping through the cracks.

“That's why we switched to quotes, both cute, you, uh, quote is your team one shared”

business number like a shared inbox. Every call in text is in one place. Everyone sees the history. No more pointing fingers, and I thought you handled it going on. Plus the AI logs calls, summarizes them, and flags next step, so nothing ever gets missed.

Growing teams everywhere are upgrading to systems like this because once you scale, your old setup just doesn't work anymore.

Make this a year where no opportunity and no customer slips away.

I quote QUO for free, plus get 20% off your first six months when you go to quote.com/propheting.

Again, that's QUO.com/propheting, quote, no miss calls, no missed customers. So something else that I found really fascinating when I was studying your work is this idea that we all have these different senses, all the animals have different senses, but the material of our brain from my understanding is very similar, at least with primates and mammals.

To me, I thought that our brains would be totally different. Humans have took over the world, so we think we're really special, but in fact, our brain is made up of the same thing, so talk to us about that. That's right. Well, both statements are true.

We are really special because our brains are running algorithms just slightly differently, and I can talk about that. Why we have taken over the whole planet compared to all our brethren in the animal kingdom. But, yes, it's all made of the same stuff. If I showed you a brain cell and neuron from a human horse, a cow, an insect, a squid,

you couldn't tell me what, so I mean, they all look the same, they're doing exactly the same thing. It's just a cell that has these sort of roadways that come off of it, and we give them fancy names, but it's just a cell, it's just trafficking proteins around and putting receptors there and spinning out chemicals, and it looks exactly the same across the animal

kingdom. So all that we're doing, all Mother Nature is doing, I should say, is just wiring this up in different ways.

“Yeah, so I think this is a great place to kind of get an understanding of plasticity and”

live wiring and the difference between it. So you called your book live wired, and you could have called it brain plasticity, but you called it live wired for reasons, so talk to us about the distinction between plasticity and your concept of live wired. Yeah, brain plasticity is what we termed this in the field, and this just means, you know,

the ability of the brain to reconfigure itself. So neurons, the cells in the brain, are spending their whole lives, you know, plugging and unplugging and seeking and finding other places and changing the strength of their connection with other neurons, each neuron connects to about 10,000 other neurons. And this changeability is what we call plasticity.

I call it live wired nowadays, live wiring, because plasticity feels to me just a bit like an outdated term. In the sense that this was coined about a hundred years ago, because people were impressed by plastic manufacturing, and the idea with the material plastic is that you mold it into a shape, and then it holds onto that shape, and that's what's useful about plastic.

So the analogy to the brain that people saw was, oh, you know, you learn the name of your

“fifth grade teacher, and all these years later, you still remember that name.”

So it's like the system, you know, got molded by the information that came through, and it held on to that information. And so that, you know, stands is a very good analogy.

The only thing is, with 86 billion neurons, constantly changing every moment of your life,

reconfiguring, it seemed to me that plastic was maybe a little too milk toast to term for it. So that's why I'm using the term live wired, because what really opens up when we start studying this and depth is an entirely new way to think about this and to build technologies, moving forward. And that's one of the things I'm going to be doing, speaking of the future of the brain.

Is building live wired devices. So instead of being something like, you know, a phone which becomes outdated and eventually the technology is not good enough, and you just throw it out, because it's, you know, a layer of hardware with a layer of software on the top. What if you could build something like a brain that is constantly reconfiguring and learning

and getting better with time? Yeah, so for my understanding, neurons are essentially fighting with each other for relevancy. This is the framework that I put for it in the book, is that the right way to think about the brain actually is like a Darwinian competition, where each neuron is fighting for its own survival.

And when you look at single cell organisms, they're spinning out chemicals as a defense mechanism. And when you look at neurons in the brain, they're doing the same thing. It's just that we call those neurotransmitters and we say, oh, look, you're passing information along. I don't think that was the intention.

“I think it sells all fighting for survival.”

And in one of these amazing bizarre biological results, you get a human brain out of this.

But yes, you know, many of the neurons in your brain die, and what you get in your first two years development is this massive overgrowth of all these things growing like a garden

And then from about the age of two onward, all you're doing is you're really pruning

the garden. You're taking things away and sells all of your body, actually, have this way of committing suicide. It's called apoptosis where, you know, it's not that they're dying because of injury or something and releasing inflammatory chemicals.

It's that they're saying, okay, I'm done here and they fold up shop and they carefully kill themselves. And so this is a majorly important part of how the brain develops. Yeah. And so we're born with a certain amount of neurons.

They're making more connections and I'm trying to get more information about this because I want people to understand like how senses work and why somebody who's blind for example can hear really well and how those neurons actually can be, I guess, reutilized for something else because neurons need to stay relevant. Yeah.

That's exactly right. So it turns out that in the brain, not no territory lies follow. Everything is going to get used. And so we think about this area at the back of the head. We think of that as the visual cortex.

But yes, if you go blind, it's no longer the visual cortex gets taken over by hearing, by touch, by memorization of words, by lots of things. Because it's perfectly good territory. Now, the territory I'm talking about is called the cortex, which is the outer wrinkly bit of the brain.

And the cortex is, we have more of it in relation to our body size than anybody in the animal kingdom. This is sort of the magical stuff that makes this really good at what we're doing. So it turns out that cortex is a one trick pony, which is to say, it's not that this is fundamentally visual, and that's fundamentally auditory and for touch and for controlling

the motor system. But instead, any of it can trade off with any other of it. And so the really special thing with humans being live-wired is that we drop into the world half-baked, and we absorb everything around us.

“That's how you absorb your language, your neighborhood, your culture, your parents, your”

way of acting, your way of acting in the 21st century, and so in other words, if you were born with exactly your DNA, 1,000 years ago, you'd be a really different person. If you were born 10,000 years ago, exactly you, with the same DNA, and you ended up in the world 10,000 years ago, you'd be totally different in terms of your cultural beliefs, whatever we're, you know, animistic, religion you believe in, whatever kind of thing is appropriate

for burning people at the stake or whatever, or how you hunt a lion or stuff like that. You would just be a different kind of person. And this is because we absorb the world around us, and this is what I flagged a little bit earlier, what separates us from our closest cousins, and the animal kingdom is that most animals are still dropping into the world, essentially pre-programmed.

So if you drop in as a goat or an alligator, you essentially know, okay, here's how I, you know, eat, mate, sleep, whatever, and that's it. And you're doing the same thing that goats did 10,000 years ago.

Well, when you drop in as a human, you, in your first several years, essentially get

to learn everything that humans have discovered up until now, and then you springboard off the top of that.

“And that's what is led to the success of our species.”

We've taken over every corner of the planet, we've gotten off the planet, we've invented the internet and quantum computation, and so on, precisely because we're able, we're not starting from square one every time, but we start from where humans have already gotten. Yeah.

I think this is such an important point. So essentially what you're saying is that we're born, and you kind of, you see an algae of a computer very often. We're born with all these software packages that unpack at certain timelines, for example, the puberty software package that unpacks around 13 years old for everyone.

But at the same time, we're supposed to interact and be social animals and absorb information, right? So what happens to people or children who don't get a chance to absorb information? Yeah. So happily these examples are rare, but they're very heartbreaking, which as sometimes

you find a child who's had such neglect and abuse that they haven't had all the normal input. So mother nature is taking a gamble when she drops a half-baked brain into the world.

“She's assuming, okay, well, you should get all the normal language and love and touch and”

interaction with other humans. And occasionally you'll find a child who's locked up by their parents and they're not talked to, and they have terrible cognitive development.

They just don't develop correctly as in they can never get language, they don't even know

how to chew. They don't, they can't see very far.

And they have real IQ deficits.

“It turns out there are these things in brain development called critical periods.”

And one of those is if you don't get enough exposure to language, lots of language in

your first several years, you can never get language.

So often these children are rescued at some point and a whole horde of psychologists move in and give them lots of love and lots of training and language and things like that. But it turns out it's too late, you just can't even teach language at that point. And to me, like, you know, as somebody who's not a brain scientist or anything like that, I thought that the brain was supposed to be plastic, you know, the idea of plasticity.

So is it true then that there's certain parts of the brain that just cannot keep, I guess, changing or adapting? The elasticity diminishes with age and it doesn't do it smoothly. It does it with these sort of punctuated moments. So you've got, yeah, these critical periods for lots of different things.

“So for example, learning language, you have to do in the first, let's say, four, five years,”

if you're not exposed to language, you just can't get it. But other things, like, let's say accent. If you move to a new country before the age of 13, you typically won't have any accent in, you know, in the new country. But if you move after the age of 13, it's very difficult to, to sonically more fin to that

culture, you'll always retain an accent.

So I use in the book an example of Miele Kunis and Arnold Schwarzenegger, both of whom were born outside of America, but they, you know, Miele Kunis moved here when she was seven from Ukraine. She'd never spoken English before, but she doesn't have, you can't tell that she has any accent to her American English, but Arnold Schwarzenegger moved here when he was 20. And so it was too late for him to get rid of his accent.

So anyway, the point is there are many critical windows that happen here with learning.

“That said, there are many things where you retain plasticity, your entire life.”

So, for example, your body, as controlled by your motor system and your sensory system from your body, this is plastic, your whole life. You can learn how to, you know, kite board or parachute or do any, you can learn all kinds of new stuff, take up a pogo stick if you want, at any age, but things like your visual system, that gets less and less plastic with time because it says, okay, I got it.

This is what the world looks like, and it sort of hardens into place. So interesting. So I'd love to get your breakdown of how it actually works to hear or see, like, what's the mechanics behind that? And if you can go over your Mr. Potato Head model?

Yeah, well, so it turns out that we've got these sensors like our eyes, which are these two, you know, spheres in the front of your skull that pick up on photons. And they have chemical reactions that they pick up on photons and they send electrical signals back into the darkness of the brain. And you've got your ears, which are picking up on air compression waves and they have,

it's a very sophisticated little machine and it breaks frequencies of sound down into different areas and it sends spikes into the darkness of the brain and so on. And it turns out that, I mean, this is the weird and wild part is that we sort of feel like, oh, yeah, I'm just seeing the world, it's like I'm piping light into my head and I'm piping sound into my head.

But that's not it. All the, your brain is locked in silence and darkness and all it has are these billions of neurons sending electrical signals around and that leads to chemical signals and that's it. All of this is a construction of the brain, what you're seeing, what you're hearing.

And this is a very wild and deep thing to get your head wrapped around. But anyway, that's just the biological truth of it. And so my potato head model that I proposed a little while ago was that it actually doesn't matter how you get the information into the brain as long as you get it there. You can send information through a very unusual channel.

And as long as the information gets there, the brain will figure out what to do with it.

And so this was first shown, actually the end of the 1800s, where some experimenters

took someone who was blind and they had a little photo detector that would detect light and they turned that into patterns of vibration on the head. And the person could essentially come to see via patterns of vibration on their forehead. And you know, this is, this is so unusual to think about sight that way. And then I'll mention in the 1969, another scientist put blind people into a modified

dental chair, which had this little grid on the back and it would sort of poke you in the back in various ways. And he set up a video camera and whatever the video camera was seeing, you would feel

So if it was a face or a square, a coffee cup or a telephone, you'd feel the shape of that

poked into your back.

“And blind people got really good at being able to see the world this way.”

And so it turns out it doesn't matter how you get the information in there, the brain will say, oh, I got it. That's correlated with something out there that's useful and I'll figure out how to perceive it. Hmm.

Really, really interesting stuff. So I know that you've been using skin in a really unique way. And now you have a product, a wristband where you're actually helping deaf people, can you tell us about that? Yeah.

So I got interested in my lab many years ago about this question of could we make sensory substitution for people who are deaf? Could we feed in the information that would normally be going to the ears via a different channel? And there are actually two hundred and twelve different reasons you can go deaf genetically.

And most of these are not, you know, something that you can do anything about at the moment.

“So so what I did first is I built a vest with vibratory motors on it and the vest captures”

sound and turns that into patterns vibration on the skin. So sound is broken up from high to low frequency, which is exactly what your inner ear is doing. And then that's going, you know, on your skin and up your spinal cord and into your brain and deaf people could learn how to hear this way.

So I gave a talk on this a TED and then I spun this out for my lab as a company called Neocensory and we ended up shrinking the vest down to a wristband and the wristband does the same thing. It's capturing sound and it's turning that into patterns vibration on the skin and deaf people can come to understand the auditory world around them.

Like, oh, that's somebody calling my name. That's the doorbell. That's a baby crying. This is a dog barking. Things like that.

And so we're on wrist all over the world now, lots of deaf schools, lots of individuals wearing this and it's been so gratifying to take something that's a theoretical neuroscience idea and move it all the way to, you know, product that people are using every day. Yeah, it's really awesome what you're doing. And so I'd love to understand how long does it take for someone to get these vibrations

and then eventually have them mean something. Yeah.

So the answer is it's a linear increase.

So people just get better and better each day. So on day one, we test people after they've been wearing it for the first 10 minutes or so and they're slightly above chance on being able to recognize certain sounds. But then through time over the course of weeks, they just get better and better and better. And the really wild part is that by about, let's say, four months, people will describe

it as hearing. So I'll say, look, when the dog barks and you feel vibrations on your wrist, do you think, okay, wait, I just felt something, what is that? It must be something, you know, maybe there's a dog out there saying, no, I just hear

“the dog, which sounds crazy except that's what you're, that's what's going on with your”

hearing. You feel right now like, you're just hearing my voice out there, even though it's all taking place in your head, you've got spikes running around and you think, oh, yeah, that sounds like Eagleman's voice and then you attribute it to some source outside of you. But that's what it becomes when you're listening through the wristband.

Yeah. And from my understanding, this is called qualia, right? And it's, yeah, qualia is the term we use for the private subjective experience we have of something, for example, colors don't exist in the outside world. There's just different wavelengths of light, of electromagnetic radiation, and, but we perceive

it as, oh, that's red, that's green, that's, you know, fuchsia, whatever, and, and that's that's a qualia, that's a private subjective experience we have of what's going on out there, even though it's really just spikes in the dark. So then would you say that humans eventually could have a sixth or seven cents that just feels natural to us?

So that's what I've been working on for, for a while now, which is given that all these other animals have other kinds of things they can pick up on, what does it mean if we feed in that information?

And the answer is yes, we can absolutely have six cents, maybe many more, we don't have

any idea yet what the limit is on that. But the idea is what can we pick up on, you know, computationally or with any machine or whatever, and then feed that into you. So for example, you know, something I've been very interested in is perceiving infrared light. So you can set up, you know, set up with the wristband very inexpensively for five bucks,

you set up these infrared volometers they're called, they're, you know, just picking up on infrared light. And you can walk around and feel the temperature of things around you. And you know, I can, as I'm walking through a parking lot, I can feel which cars have been parked there for a while versus which have just arrived in the last 20 minutes because,

you know, because the engine block is a totally different temperature. But it's just something I know, as I'm walking through, I'm just feeling that information

there's still a temperature signature on it.

“And so there's a million things about this that, you know, one can just come to perceive”

a new sense. And you can have much wackier things, we've done, we actually have 70 projects in progress. If anybody's interested, go to niosensory.com/developers. And you can see our blog of all these different projects we have. So, you know, stock market or, you know, feeling social media with your skin or, you know,

firemen or blind people or people with prosthetics or, you know, there's just, there's

a million different projects we have where we're feeling a new data streams.

And you can come to have a perception that one of the things we've been doing is for drone pilots, where you feel the pitch, y'all roll, heading an orientation of the drone on your skin. So it's like you're becoming one with the drone, you're, it's like you stretch your skin up there where the drone is.

And pilots can become much better at flying drones this way in the fog and in the dark. And in fact, right now, I'm working with a couple of young engineers in Ukraine to implement this for their, for their defense. Yapping, it's confession time. I thought I had my money handled.

“I thought I had a good handle on everything going on.”

But I recently checked my bank statements and there was subscriptions everywhere, streaming,

apps, random charges, a few of them were billing me for a long time.

I didn't even know what they were. And it was a painful uncovering. So I downloaded the experience app. And now it's like I have a financial assistant in my pocket. The experience app helps you track spending and find subscriptions that you forgot about

and you no longer want. With your subscription cancellation feature available with an experience premium membership, you securely link your accounts. They scan for recurring charges and you pick what goes and what you want canceled. And then they cancel it.

It's as simple as that. They have over 200 eligible subscription types and it's usually done in three to seven business days. If getting your money tight is part of your gross plan this year and you don't want to manually have to do it, this is your move young and profitors get started with the

experience app today. Results will vary. Not all bills or subscriptions are eligible, savings not guaranteed, paid membership with connected account required. See, experience.com for details.

What's up, young and profitors? We're still at the start of a new year and you know what that means. New goals, new ideas and maybe that little voice in your head saying this is the year

that I finally start my business.

But let's be real, the what is show up fast, what if I fail, what if this is the wrong move? I've been there and what I learned is that it makes a huge difference when you have the right partner from day one and the hardest part is starting. For many entrepreneurs, that partner is Shopify.

Shopify is an all in one commerce platform that helps you build run and grow your business. You can create professional looking websites with ready to use templates, manage payments, and even use AI tools to write product descriptions so you can launch faster. What I love is how simple Shopify makes everything. You don't need to be technical, you don't need to have it all figured out.

It just lets you start and like I said, starting is the hardest part. Yeah, fam, don't kick yourself a year from now because you didn't take action today. Get your business with Shopify. It's time to turn those what ifs into with Shopify today. Sign up for your $1 per month trial at shopify.com/halla.

That's shopify.com/halla. Go to shopify.com/halla. Yeah, fam, today's episode is sponsored by Bit Defender, a global leader in cybersecurity. Now running a small business means wearing 100 hats at once, sales, payroll, customers, taxes, and scammers know that especially during tax season cyber criminals are sending fake

audit requests, phony tax documents and emails that look painfully real just to grab access to your accounts while you're so busy doing 100 other things.

“That's why I use Bit Defender Ultimate Small Business Security to keep my company safe.”

It protects every employee device, secure servers with customer data and shields daily activities like email and web browsing, whether you're in the office or working from home. And the part that I think is really smart is their AI-powered scam prevention. It's trained on real small business attack patterns, so it blocks fishing, fake websites, and shady messages before they ever reach your team.

Plus, you also get a password manager, unlimited VPN, and 24/7 expert support in one simple dashboard. Make companies have security teams. You don't. Bit Defender can help you fill that gap.

Start protecting your business today with Bit Defenders Ultimate Small Business Security.

That's bitdefender.com/propheting for 30% off.

That's BIT Defender.com/propheting. Okay, so I want to switch back to what we were talking about a little bit earlier when we were talking about our senses, or our neurons, sort of fighting for their territory.

“Because I want to get into the concept of dreaming, I think it's super interesting.”

And I want you to explain why we actually dream. So this is a hypothesis that my student I came up with some years ago, which is defying. If you go blind, as we mentioned earlier, if you go blind, that territory, your visual cortex gets taken over by neighboring kingdoms of data like hearing a touch. But the surprise neuroscience is how fast this can happen.

So some colleagues of mine and Harvard did this experiment where they took normally sighted people and they blindfolded them and they put them in the brain scanner. And what they found to their surprises that after about an hour, they could start seeing activity in the visual cortex when you touch somebody or when you play a sound for them. You're actually seeing the visual cortex start responding to that.

And what that means is that this takeover process can start happening really fast. Because essentially everything in the brain is wired up to everything else. There's these very long distance connections, such that everything has roadways to get wherever it needs to get.

“And so somehow this takeover starts after about an hour.”

So what we realized was, given the rotation of the planet, this causes a real problem for the visual system because you end up in the dark for half the cycle. And obviously the thing of interest here is evolutionary time before we had lights, which is just the last, you know, nanosecond evolutionary time where we had lights or even fire.

Most of our history, it's been extremely dark at nighttime. And that means your visual system is disadvantaged during the night. You can still hear and smell and taste and touch during the night, but you can't see.

And so we realized the problem is the visual system needs some way of defending itself

against takeover and that is what dreams are about. So every 90 minutes, you've got these very ancient circuits in your mid-brain that just blast random activity just into your visual cortex. That's the only place that's hitting is just primary visual cortex.

“And every 90 minutes just blast random activity in there.”

And so dreaming is the brain's way of defending the visual cortex against takeover. It's essentially a screen saver. So we published this and we study 25 different species of primates and looked at how plastic they are. In other words, you know, humans are extraordinarily, you know, adaptable and plastic in

their brains. And that means they're at higher risk of the visual cortex getting taken over. Whereas other primates, like the gray mouse lemur, it's called happens to be very, it's called pre-programmed where in, you know, it's adolescents fast and they're talking to walk fast and we eat this from its mother fast and all this stuff reproduce as fast.

And so we looked at how much dreaming there is. And it turns out humans have lots of dreaming to take over the visual cortex, whereas other, you know, less flexible animals have less dreaming because they just don't need it as much.

So so if I have this right, basically our visual neurons are being active at night and

dreaming, even though we're not actually seeing anything in our head, those same neurons are basically working so that they can keep their territory so that they can stay relevant in the brain. That's exactly right. Yeah.

It's so interesting. And you say that you actually hate dreaming and you feel like I've heard you say, do you think dreams are meaningless and you feel like it's sticking your head in a night blender when you go to sleep? So I'd like to understand why are dreams meaningless, then because a lot of people make

up these stories, like I can tell the future with my dreams and things like that, but you say that's nonsense. Yeah, it's just random activity. What happens is, you know, the synapses, the connections that are hot during the day are the ones when you blast random activity in there, those tend to be the stories that

get activated. So, you know, if I'm thinking about my, you know, my boss who said this to me or I'm thinking about this big thing that I have to do tomorrow, that it's likely that that's going to come up in my dreams, but, but, you know, we all know, dreams are just, they're so weird in their plot lines.

And because the brain is a natural storyteller, we end up imposing narrative. And by the way, when you wake up and you tell somebody else to your dream, you're doing a whole another layer of imposing narrative on it, because even just saying it out loud, you have to sort of make things make sense, but, but, truthfully, it's just random activity.

You know, can you see things that you think are relevant to your life and you say, oh, yeah,

that looks like, yeah, this is sort of a blob that's telling me that I should go change careers and whatever. We can do that with our dreams as well. That's just random activity, and you can say, yeah, that, you know, I really thought of something here or whatever, but, yes, it's all, it's all random activity and what

we do is we impose meaning on it. Yeah, and I say, yeah, some of us, yeah, I mean, I've done it. I think a lot of people try to make dreams that's like magical experience, right? And I feel like so much of the human experience can be pretty silly in this way. So I'd love to talk about the intersection between science and religion.

You've been studying the brain, and I feel like you probably have a very unique perspective on the world.

“I mean, parts about our brain and our life is still really mysterious, right?”

We don't really know how consciousness exactly works still. And so there is mystery and sort of magic to, like, still because we don't understand everything, but, you know, I'd love to understand what you feel about all this now. My, my general feeling on it is the world is full of mystery. The amount of stuff we know in science and have written down in big fat textbooks is a tiny

fraction of what's going on out there. Actually, I wrote an article in Discover Magazine back in 2004 called 10 Unsolve Mysteries of Neuroscience. And they're still unsolve. I mean, we are in deep mysteries all around us, and yeah, take consciousness.

I mean, consciousness somehow, you put together all this physical stuff of the brain. And you experience qualia, as we talked about, you know, experience pain and the beauty of a sunset and the taste of cinnamon and, you know, the smell of lemon pie and all these things that we experience. But we have no idea how to build pieces of art.

We can't build, you know, with transistors, a computer and say, oh, yeah, it's enjoying this, you know, even though I'm laughing at this YouTube video that I'm watching, the computer presumably is just moving around zeros and ones and not entertained by it, but somehow our brains, we think were just made of cells, and yet we are feeling stuff.

“So there's lots of mystery around us to my mind, the best way to tackle these mysteries”

is the scientific method, and this is so new for humans. I mean, this is really just the last few hundred years that we've kind of gotten this right, essentially since the Renaissance about doing science, which is just, it's nothing but a method of saying, okay, we're going to lay out our hypotheses on the table, and we're going to do careful experiments, we're not going to fool ourselves into, into believing

something unless there's evidence that supports it. And so to my mind, that's the way to tackle it. Now, the issue is we have a world full of religions, there are two thousand different religions

on this little planet that we're on, and the part that's always struck me is crazy is that

people are willing to fight and die for their version of their religion. There's a real lack of intellectual humility there. Obviously, if one religion were true, we might expect that it spreads around the world, and everyone says, oh, yeah, that one seems pretty right, but obviously they're all made up.

And when you look at stuff like, you know, Judeo-Christian Islamic religion, it has this idea that the Earth is six thousand years old, well, you know, I mean, the Japanese were making pottery seven thousand years ago, and people were writing on caves 30,000 years ago and so on. So you'd have to explain how they got there before the, I mean, it's so goofy, this idea

of like Adam and Eve and creation and so on, so clearly incorrect, that there's absolutely no reason to believe in this religious story, but I have felt that it's difficult to say, given the amount of mystery that we face to say, okay, well, we've got this all figured out, and so, you know, it's, it's a cold universe, and there's nothing but deterministic physics, and so on, we just don't know enough to say that.

That may well be the case. We just don't know enough to pretend that science has it all figured out, and so I call myself a possibility, and that means I'm interested in the possibility space. In other words, this is, this is the scientific temperament, you're saying, what could be going on here, how, how did we get here, what is our purpose here, if anything, what

“is, what is happening around here, and the best way to tackle that is with the tools of”

science, which means anything gets to be on the table at first, and then we use the tools of science to rule out particular things, like that the Earth to 6,000 years old, and we use the tools of science to open up new folds in the possibility space that we hadn't

even thought of before, but the idea is, the scientific temperament always allows lots

and, you know, and against others, and that's what I think we should be doing, that's

what I call a positive billionism, and I actually presented this in a TEDx talk many years ago, and, and I got hundreds of emails right afterwards from people saying, hey,

“I think I'm a possibility in two, and it became this worldwide movement. There were newspapers”

and articles that people sent me from India, from Uganda, from whatever Facebook group sprang up, and now 11 years after this original talk, there's so much activity about possibilityism, and I'm so happy about this because I feel like there wasn't a position that people could take if they happen to feel the way I did about this. You know, the only thing that was available is to say, okay, either I'm religious, and I believe what my

parents and my culture told me, or I mean, I'm a strict atheist on the other end of the

spectrum, or I think nothing interesting is going on here. There's nothing else in the universe to understand, or you would call yourself an agnostic, which means I don't know. That's all agnostic as a means is not knowing, but possibilityism is a much more active thing of saying, hey, we're going to go out and explore the possibility space and shine a flashlight around this and try to figure out what's going on.

And I feel like this is so positive for mankind. I feel like it could really help solve a lot of the self-inflicted issues that we have as people. Yeah. Yeah. To this day, every time I see religious conflict, it just blows my, I mean, you know, the whole history of Europe was really defined over the last 500 years, was defined by fights between the Catholics and the Protestants. I don't mean fights. I mean killing,

like murdering. And, you know, it feels like you look at this evidence. It's so goofy. And yet this is the history that we have been surrounded with and still have to deal

“with in a lot of the world. I feel like, I think I'm, I think I'm correct and looking”

at the world now in 2022 and thinking, okay, we're, we're maturing a bit, at least much of the world is maturing out of this idea of, okay, this particular ancient religion that I was taught is the truth. Yeah. But anyway, I hope that's right. Let's talk about the future a little bit. I want to talk about your, your book Live Wired, right? Much of the world and how we view it is very much like hardware and software.

And so I'd love to have you help us imagine what a future could be like if live-wired was put in the picture in addition to this hardware and software that we live in. Yeah. I mean, so this is going to be my next, so I'm running three companies right now, but this is going to be my next one is called Live Wired. Because I'm really interested in building this. I mentioned this before. I just feel like the way we think about building

all our technology now and the way that everything is set up, our factories are set up and our education system is set up is, okay, yeah, you make a hardware layer and then you put software on top of it and that's been a great idea and it's been super successful, but it's just not the way that biology ever does anything. And biology can do extraordinary things that, that, you know, that computers cannot. And as I mentioned earlier, you know,

computers are obsolete from the day they come off the factory. So, um, I'm, you know,

“and I'm very, I'll give an example, which is the Mars rover, um, uh, I can't remember”

what's Spirit of Curiosity, one of them. Anyway, you got up to Mars, they did an extraordinary job rolled around the red planet and, um, you know, saw a lot of stuff, but then it got its right front wheel stuck in the Martian soil and it couldn't move out of there and it died. Okay, contrast that with what happens when a wolf gets its leg caught in a trap, the wolf chooses its leg off and then figures out how to walk on three legs.

It's not that it was pre-programmed to walk on three legs. It just figures it out. It figures out how to make that happen because it is driven by, um, you know, motivations. It wants to get to food to water back to its pack and so on. So just, you know, figures out how to run its body differently. And wouldn't it be great if we could build a

billion dollar Mars rover, if we're spending all that money and effort on it, if it could just,

you know, saw off its wheel and then figure out how to operate in a different way. So this is the idea of live wiring and it's still the case that almost everything we program and the robots we build and the Mars rover we build are all totally pre-programmed. This is what your body looks like. This is how you're going to operate it as opposed to letting it operate like a human infant where it has to figure out its body.

I mean, imagine building a robot that flops around for years and eventually crawls and eventually learns how to walk, that's the kind of thing we need to do if we want it to be flexible and and live wired. And so I'm very interested in the possibilities. I think the

hardware machinery that is inflexible. Yeah. And so my next question for you is what's the difference

between live wired and AI? Because for my understanding, AI is supposed to be self, you know, it learns and can adapt. So I'd love to understand the difference there. Yeah. I mean, the thing about AI can do very impressive things, but it's still not nearly as good as a kid, you know, a five year old, a five year old can walk into a room, navigate a very complex room, you know, between the couches and under the table and whatever can can find her way to food, but food

and the mouse can socially manipulate adults, can do all these things. AI is really stupid and comparison to that. It's very good. It's extraordinarily good at, for example, image recognition or categorization of things. But it can only tackle problems that are discrete and rule-based. So, for example, AI is great at chess and it go. It's beat the world champions at that. But that's only because that's a constrained rule-based system that doesn't have anything outside of it.

And the real world is nothing like that. And so, by the way, you know, even though people often think, "Oh my gosh, AI can do anything and it's taking over everything." It can't even do any sort of, you know, strategy-based video game where you're running around with a gun and you're having to do strategies where they can't, it can't do well at any of that stuff. So, that's the difference. Is that a live-wire child can figure out all kinds of things in the

world? AI can only do these very basic things right now.

“Yeah, and this makes me feel good because I think all of us are really worried about AI. We're told”

to get worried about it, right? We're sort of fed this. So, as somebody who studies the brain, do we have anything to worry about? I mean, eventually we might, but certainly not right now. Certainly not right now. I mean, you could just, you know, turn the computer off. I mean, there's, yeah, it's still doing what it is

told as in, "Hey, I want you to absorb a billion pictures of cows and horses and then get really

good at being able to determine the difference between these. So, what it does is it trains on a training set of, let's say, billion images where it's labeled. Okay, this is a cow, this is a horse, this is a cow." And then it's extraordinarily good, better than human, at discriminating cows from horses. But in real life, we don't have training sets with billions of examples.

“We don't have that luxury. You have to learn everything on the fly. All animals do.”

Have to learn the world on the fly and get good at it. And this is where we outshine AI by a long way. Okay, my last question to you on the future. And then we'll round out this interview. Is really about how you imagine mankind in the future in terms of our brains, in terms of maybe live-wired materials? Tell us about how you imagine the future knowing all that you know. Yeah, it's going to be pretty different. I mean, for one thing, we'll be much better at

actually being able to measure what's going on in the brain. So, for example, right now, our best technology is called functional magnetic resonance imaging, FMRI. You stick to somebody that brain scanner and you can tell sort of crudely where the activity is happening in the brain. And, you know, we make all kinds of theories and we do, you know, I've written hundreds of

“papers on this topic. But the fact is, it's a crude technology. What we really need to understand”

how the brain is working is to be able to see the activity in each one of the 86 billion neurons

in real time and they're each chattering along, you know, 10 to hundreds of spikes per second. We're nowhere near that kind of technology, but eventually we will get there and that will generate a completely different kind of understanding of how the brain actually works. We're still missing really most of how the brain is actually doing what it does. And when we get to that point, we'll be able to read and write, you know, from the brain and to the brain. And that's going to

change everything. Right now, the brain is really locked in this armored bunker plating of the skull. And we can't do much with it except for, you know, I can read your and I can try to read your intentions and you mine by our words and by our behavior. But it's pretty limited. So there may be in the distant future, you know, straight brain to brain communication, which is a very different sort of bandwidth of communication. So that's one thing I think another thing is that

we'll be experiencing completely new senses. It'll just be trivial for everybody to experience, you know, whatever, infrared and stock market data and what's going on on social media. You know, these things will just be, you know, like, like getting eyeglasses for a kid, we'll have all that. So I think we have more in common with our ancestors of 5,000 years ago than we have in common

show with two questions that I ask everyone and then we do something fun at the end of the year with

them. So you're right at the end with us. What is one actionable thing? Our young

impropheters can do today to become more profitable tomorrow? Seek novelty. So the key is doing things

“that you're not already good at because that's how you exercise the brain and build a stronger brain”

is by doing things you have not done before. Okay. So challenging your mind at learning new things.

And what is your secret to profiting in life? Relationships. It's all about other people. The brain has an extraordinary amount of its circuitry devoted to other people and making models of them

“and understanding them. And I think one of the key things in life is especially now during our”

polarized era is to really try standing in the shoes of other people, especially people that you're disagreeing with and try to understand the world from their point of view. Awesome. That's awesome. You know, that was one of the biggest themes this year is everybody was talking about relationships.

“So very cool David. Where can everybody learn more about you and everything that you do?”

Eagleman.com. Awesome. Well, thank you so much for your time. Thanks. Great to be here.