David Eagleman: How To Hack Your Senses, Master Dreams & Uncover Reality!

What's up, Yap fam? Today, we're unlocking the archives for a powerful YAP 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 LiveWired, 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 screens 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 going to love this one. So, sit back, open your mind, and enjoy this fascinating chat with Dr. David Eagleman. Welcome to Young and Profiting 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 Leaf, Dr. Daniel Aemon, Jim Quick, and a few others, but I feel like we've still only scratched the surface on the topic. There is 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 8 years old where you fell 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 uh 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 to fall from the roof. And so I was thinking about Alice in Wonderland as I was falling and how this must have been what it was like for her. And you know, I had it felt like lots of time as I felt. And later when I got to high school and I took physics and I learned d= 12 a squ I realized wow the whole fall took place in6 of a second and I couldn't reconcile that. I couldn't figure out how those uh how it had 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 um time perception in my laboratory. And so one of the experiments I ended up doing then was dropping people from 150t tall tower backwards in freef fall and they're caught by a net below. And I measured time perception on the way down. Um 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? 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 we're perceive. Can you talk to us about that? — Well, that's right. I mean, there's a sense in which you're never perceiving time directly. You're 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 you know I touch your toe and those signals have to travel along nerves which are very slow I mean thousands of times slower than you know 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. It the event's already long gone by that point and you're living in the past. So, um and by the way, I I've uh been pursuing a hypothesis that taller people live farther in the past than shorter people because it takes longer to get all the signals there. So, anyway, um 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 you know your foot gets halfway to the brake, when you realize a car is pulling out of the driveway ahead of you. Um, that happens before you're consciously aware. You become aware by the time your foot's already on the move. Um, so your brain can do lots of things uh 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. Um, you know, that kind of stuff can happen. But as far as our conscious perception of the world, that's always uh an old story. — So, so interesting. So, I mentioned that I'm going to try to talk about the future in 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 going to 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. The reason it's really hard to swat a fly is because the signals are moving along the neurons in 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, the 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 as so funny the way that we um you know once 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 save 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 thing's 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 don't 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 welt, right? Um, — I think that's how you pronounce it. That's — it sounds German, right? Exactly. Um 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 umt is that you know looking across the animal kingdom so you know for a tick for example um all it can detect is temperature and body odor that's its only signaling mechanisms and so its world is built out of that. Or for the blind echoloccating bat, its world is built out of these, you know, um, 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 ghost knifeish, um, 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 envel 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 you can detect. Um but what you said 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 blind, this person's not. They're actually seeing the scene differently. And we now know that a small fraction of women have not just three types of color photo receptors in their eye, but four types, which means they're seeing colors the rest of us aren't seeing. And um or take something like synthesia which is um where you know someone let's say looks at letters or numbers and it triggers a color experience or 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 sesthesia but the point is it's not a disease or a disorder. It's just an alternative perceptual reality and [snorts] different people you know like 3% of the population has sesthesia 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 aphantasia 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 hyperfantasic. The second group's called aphantasagasic. 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 ours, 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 gonna 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 alluded to it before that, you know, as humans, we experience things that are normal to humans, our 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, okay. So, almost all animals have a sense of smell that's so much better than ours. Um, and uh I don't know if you saw my TED talk, but I did this example of, you know, really imagine that you are a dog. Imagine you've got this long snout with 200 million scent receptors in it and everything for you is about smell and you've got these wet nostrils that attract and trap, you know, scent molecules and you've got floppy ears to kick up more scent. Everything for you is about scent and um and what it would be like if one day you looked at your human master and you thought, "What is it like to have the pitiful little nose of a human? " Right? You might imagine erroneously that there's sort of this missing, you know, black hole of smell and we all realize we have this missing smell. But of course, we're all trapped inside of our own. And so we think, oh yeah, I I've got a great 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 magneto 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. Um, turns out cows have good magneto 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 honeybees see in the ultraviolet range. Um, these are things that are just totally invisible to us. We don't pick this up at all. And I've been studying 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 we're not even going to know for the next you know 50 hundred years when someone realizes oh my gosh it turns out you know antelopee are picking up on this thing that we didn't even realize was a thing. So um 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 a very counterintuitive thing to think that your biology actually constrains your perception of reality. Yeah, it is mindblowing 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 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 it turns and by the way sounds Yeah. There are lots of animals that hear in what we call the infrasonic range and uh um and the ultrasonic range. So you know we hear from the details don't matter but you know from 20 hertz to 20,000 hertz. 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 conversations 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 signals from other elephants 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 in 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 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. — Um, that's right. Now, it's not clear, for example, why we have lost so much skill with smell. Um, but you know, everything is uh everything is constrained. So, if you're getting better at this and you're devoting more real estate in your brain towards vision, then you're going to lose some real estate in smell, for example. And so, somehow when everything balances

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All the animals have different senses but the material of our brain from my understanding is very similar at least with uh primates and mammals right to me that's I thought that our brains would be totally different I mean humans have took over the world right 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 I mean 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 uh 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, a neuron from a human, a horse, a cow, an insect, a squid, you couldn't tell me what's I mean, they all look the same. They're doing exactly the same thing. It's just a cell that has these um you know, things that these sort of roadways that come off of it and we give them fancy names and they have you know, but it's just a cell. it's just, you know, trafficking proteins around and putting receptors there and spitting out chemicals and it looks exactly the same across the animal kingdom. And so all that we're doing, um, all mother nature is doing, I should say, is, you know, 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 livewired and you could have called it brain plasticity but you called it livewired for a reason. So talk to us about the distinction between plasticity and your concept of livewired. — Yeah brain plasticity is what we term 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 um 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 uh other neurons. And um this changeability is what we call plasticity. I call it livewired nowadays. live wiring because um plasticity feels to me just a bit like an outdated term in the sense that this was coined about 100 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 on to that shape and that's what's useful about plastic. So um 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 as 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 uh a little too milktoast a term for it. So, so uh that's why I'm using the term livewired because what really opens up when we start studying this in depth is a 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 livewired devices. So instead of being something like you know a phone which um you know 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 from my understanding, neurons are essentially fighting with each other for relevancy. — This is the framework that I put forward 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 spitting 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. " But I don't think that was the intention. I think it's cells all fighting for survival and in one of these you know amazing bizarre biological um you know results you get a [clears throat] human brain out of this. Um but yes, you know, many of the neurons in your brain die and um what you get, you know, in your first two years of development is this massive overgrowth of all these things growing like a garden that's going nuts. 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 cells all over 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 u inflammatory chemicals. It's that they're saying okay I'm done here and they fold up shop and they carefully um kill themselves. And so this is a majorly important part of how the brain um 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. Okay. So that's exactly right. So it turns out that um in the brain no territory lies. 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. It gets taken over by hearing, by touch, by memorization of words, by lots of things. Um because it's perfectly good uh 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 uh 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 us really uh good at what we're doing. So, uh, it turns out that cortex is a onetrick pony, which is to say, um, it's not that this is fundamentally visual and that's fundamentally auditory and for touch and for, you know, 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 livewired is that we drop into the world halfbaked 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 on. 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 weird, you know, animistic religion you believe in, whatever kind of, you know, thing is appropriate for, you know, 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. Um, and this is because, um, we, you know, we absorb the world around us. And this is what I flagged a little bit earlier. What separates us from our closest cousins in 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. Um, and that's it. And you're doing the same thing that goats did. uh 10,000 years ago. But when you drop in as a human, um 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 has 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. um precisely because we're able we 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 use the analogy 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 uh but they're very heartbreaking, which is 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 halfbaked brain into the world. She's assuming, okay, well, you should get all the normal language and love and touch and um you know, 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 um they have terrible uh cognitive development. Um they just don't develop correctly, as in they can never get language. They don't even know how to chew. They don't um they can't see very far. um they're uh yeah, it's just a halfbaked brain that never gets uh cooked all the way and they have real IQ deficits. Um 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 this 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? — Plasticity 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 or five years. If you're not exposed to language you just can't get it. But but other things like let's say accent um 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 um it's very difficult to sonically morph into that culture you'll always retain an accent so I use in the book an example of Ma Kunis and Arnold Schwarzenegger both of whom were born outside of America but they you know Mila Kunis moved here when she was um Evan 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 Arms Forzinger moved here when he was 20. And uh so it was too late for him uh to get rid of his accent. So anyway, the point is there are many critical windows um that happen here with learning. That said, there are many things where you retain plasticity your entire life. So for example, your body uh 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, kiteboard or parachute or do any you can learn all kinds of new stuff. Take up a pogo stick if you want um 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 uh 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 um 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. They pick up on photons and they send electrical signals back into your 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 at 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 that's it. And so all of this is a construction of the brain, what you're seeing, what you're hearing. Um, 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. Um, 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, um, this was first shown actually at the end of the 1800s where, um, 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 so unusual to think about sight that way. And then I'll mention u in the 1969 uh another scientist put um 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 that poked into your back. So if it was a face or a square or a coffee cup or a telephone you'd feel the shape of that poked into your back. and uh 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. " — Really, really interesting stuff. So, I know that you've been using skin in a really unique way and now you have um 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 going to the ears via a different channel? And there are actually 212 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 I what I did first is I built a vest with vibratory motors on it and the vest captures sound and turns that into patterns of vibration on the skin. So sound is broken up from high to low frequency which is exactly what your inner ear is doing. Uh 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 at TED and then um I spun this off in my lab as a company called Neoensory 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 of 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 that's a dog barking things like that and um and so we're on wrists 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's uh 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 um 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 the really wild part is that by about, let's say, 4 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. " They say, "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 quality 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 um and but we perceive it as oh that's red that's green that's you know fuchsia whatever. And um and 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 seventh sense that just feels natural to us? — So that's what I've been working on uh 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 6 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. Uh so you can set up we've you know set this up with the wristband very inexpensively for five bucks. You set up these infrared bolometers 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 um, 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 cuz, you know, cuz 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. Or if I come across two chairs, I can tell which chair was more recently sat in because there's still a temperature signature on it and so on. There's a million things about this that, you know, one can just come to perceive a new sense, but you can have much wackier things. We've done, we actually have 70 projects in progress. If anybody's interested, go to neoensory. com/developers, and you can see our blog of all these different projects we have. So, you know, stock market or um or you know, feeling social media uh with your skin or um you know, firemen or blind people or people with prosthetics or um you know, there's just there's a million different projects we have where we're feeding in new data streams and you can come to have perception that one of the things we've been doing is for drone pilots where you feel the pitch, yaw, roll, heading, and orientation of the drone on your skin. And so it's like you're becoming one with the drone. You're it's like you've stretched your skin up there where the drone is. And pilots can become much better at flying drones this way uh in the fog and in the dark. Um and in fact, right now I'm working with a couple of young engineers in Ukraine um to implement this — um for their defense. — Yeah, fam. Today's episode is sponsored by Bit Defender, a global leader in cyber security. 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than non-sponsored jobs. That means you're not tossing your post into a void. You are connecting with qualified people who can help your business grow. Spend less time searching and more time actually interviewing candidates who check all your boxes. Less stress, less time, more results. When you need the right person to cut through the chaos, this job is for Indeed sponsored jobs. And listeners of this show will get a $75 sponsor job credit to help get your job the premium status it deserves at indeed. com/mpodcast. Just go to indeed. com/mpodcast right now and support our show by saying you heard about Indeed on this podcast. Indeed. commpodcast. Terms and conditions apply. Hiring. Do it the right way with Indeed. Okay. So, I want to switch back to what we were talking about a little bit earlier when 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 and I came up with some years ago which is the following. If you go blind as we mentioned earlier that territory or visual cortex gets taken over by neighboring kingdoms of data like hearing and touch. Um but the surprise in neuroscience is how fast this can happen. And so some colleagues of mine at Harvard did this experiment where they took normally cighted people and they blindfolded them and they put them in the brain scanner. And what they found to their surprise is 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 [snorts] 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. You know, there's these very long distance connections such that everything has, you know, roadways to get wherever it needs to get. And so somehow the this takeover starts after about an hour. So what we realized was given the rotation of the planet um you know 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 nancond of evolutionary time where we had lights or even fire. Um most of our history it's been extremely dark at night time 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. [snorts] 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 midbrain that just blast random activity just into your visual cortex. That's the only place it's hitting is just primary visual cortex. And every 90 minutes just blasts 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 um we published this and we studied 25 different species of primates and looked at how plastic they are. In other words, you know, um 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 [snorts] like the grey mouse lemur it's called um happens to be very let's call it pre-programmed where it you know — hits adolescence fast and learns how to walk fast and weans from its mother fast and all this stuff reproduces fast and um and so we looked at how much dreaming there is and it turns out humans have lots of dreaming to prevent take over the visual cortex whereas other you know less flexible animals um have less dreaming because they don't need it as much. — Yeah. 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 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 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 love to understand why are like 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, you know, 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, then it's likely that that's going to come up uh in my dreams. But you know, we all know dreams are just they're so weird in their um 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 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 truthfully, it's just random activity. And it's kind of like a roarshack blot. If you just look at some random blob of ink, you know, can you see things that you think are relevant to your life and you say, "Oh, yeah, that looks like, you know, 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. It's just random activity. And you can say, "Yeah, that, you know, I really thought of something here, whatever. " But yes, it's all random activity. And what we do is we impose meaning on it. — Yeah. And I say, — Yeah, some of us do. I mean, I've done it. But I think a lot of people try to make dreams this like magical experience, right? And I feel like so much of the human experience can be pretty silly uh in [clears throat] this way. So I'd love to talk about the intersection between, you know, 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. — Y — 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 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 unsolved mysteries of neuroscience and they're still unsolved. I mean, we are in deep mysteries all around us. Um, 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 you 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 parts. can't build uh you know with transistors a computer and say oh yeah it's enjoying this uh 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 we're 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 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 2,000 different religions on this little planet that we're on. And the part that's always struck me as 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. Um, obviously if one religion were true, we might expect that it spreads around the world. Uh, 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, you know, has this idea that the earth is 6,000 years old. Well, um, you know, I mean, the Japanese were making pottery 7,000 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 ad. Anyway, it's so goofy. This idea of like Adam and Eve and creation and so on is so clearly incorrect that there's absolutely no reason to believe in uh 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. Um, and so, you know, it's uh 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 possibilion. And that means I'm interested in the possibility space. In other words, this is the scientific

temperament is saying what could be going on here? How did we get here? What is our purpose here? if anything like what is happening around here. Um 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 is 6,000 years old. Um and we use the tools of science to open up new folds in the possibility space that we hadn't even thought of before. Um but the idea is the scientific temperament always allows lots of hypotheses on the table and then we gather evidence to weigh in favor of some of those and uh you know and against others and that's what I think we should be doing. That's what I call uh possibilianism. And I actually presented this in a TEDex talk many years ago. And uh and I got hundreds of emails right afterwards from people saying, "Hey, I think I'm a possibilian, too. " And it became this worldwide movement. There were newspapers and articles that people sent me from India, from Uganda, from whatever. Facebook groups sprang up. And now 11 years after this original talk, uh there's so much activity about possibilianism. And I'm so happy about this because I feel like there wasn't a position that people could take if they happened 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'm an I'm a strict atheist on the other end of the spectrum where I think nothing interesting is going on here. There's nothing else in the universe for us to understand. Or you would call yourself an agnostic, which means I don't know. That's all agnosticism means is not knowing. But possibil possibilianism 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. I to this day it's every time I see religious conflict, it just blows my mind. I mean, you know, the whole history of Europe was really defi 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. Um, and you know, it feels like you look at this stuff and it's so goofy. Um, and yet this is the history that we have been surrounded with and still have to deal with in a lot of the world. feel like I I think I'm correct in looking at the world now in 2022 and thinking okay 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 um yeah but anyway I hope that's right — let's talk about the future a little bit I want to talk about your book livewired 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 Livewired was put in the picture in addition to this hardware and software world 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 LiveWired 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 um you know that computers cannot. And as I mentioned earlier, you know, computers are obsolescent from the day they come off the factory. So, um, I'm, you know, and I'm very in, I'll give an example, which is the Mars rover. Um, I can't remember if it was Spirit or Curiosity, one of them. Anyway, it got up to Mars. It did an extraordinary job, rolled around the red planet and, um, you know, saw lots 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 chews 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 it 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 rovers 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 livewired. And so I'm very interested in the possibilities. I think the future is going to be much more biological than the way we do it right now, which is we build hardwired machinery that is inflexible. — Yeah. And so my next question for you is what's the difference between livewired and AI? Because from my understanding AI is supposed to be self, you know, it learns and can adapt. Um, so I'd love to understand the difference there. — Yeah. I mean, the thing about AI, it can do very impressive things, but it's still not nearly as good as a kid. You know, a 5-year-old can walk into a room, navigate a very complex room, you know, between the couches and under the table and whatever, can find her way to food and put food in her mouth, can socially manipulate adults, can do all these things. AI is really stupid in comparison to that. It's very good. It's extraordinarily good at, for example, image recognition or categorization of things. Um, but it can only tackle problems that are discreet and rule-based. So, for example, AI is great at chess and at go. It's beat the world champions at that. But that's only because that's a constrained uh 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 or whatever. It can't do well at any of that stuff. Um, — so that's the difference is that a Livewire child can figure out all kinds of things in the world. AI can only do these very uh 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, eventually we might, but certainly not right now. I mean, you can just, you know, turn the computer off. I mean, there's a there's um Yeah, it's 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, so what it does is it trains on a training set of let's say a billion images where it's labeled. Okay, this is a cow, this is a horse, 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. Um, 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 um 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 livewired materials. Tell us about how you imagine the future knowing all that you know. — Yeah, it's going to be pretty different. Um I mean for one thing we'll be much better at um actually being able to measure what's going on in the brain. So for example you know right now our best technology is called functional magnetic resonance imaging fMRI. You stick somebody in the 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 um 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 int 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 braintobrain communication which is a very different sort of bandwidth of communication. Um 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 uh what's going on social media. You know, these things will just be, you know, like getting eyeglasses for a kid. Um we'll have all that. Um, so I think we have more in common with our ancestors of 5,000 years ago than we have in common with our descendants of a hundred years from now. — Wow, that is powerful. Awesome, David. Well, I end this 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. Um, what is one actionable thing our young and profiters 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, learning new things. And what is your secret to profiting in life? — Relationships. It's uh 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, 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? — Um, eagleman. com. — Awesome. Well, thank you so much for your time. — Thanks.