Young and Profiting with Hala Taha - David Eagleman: What Neuroscience Reveals About Your Brain and Human Nature | Human Behavior | YAPClassic

Episode Date: March 20, 2026

What is the psychology behind how the human brain constructs reality? When David Eagleman fell twelve feet off a roof as a child, the entire fall lasted just 0.6 seconds, yet his brain made it feel like an eternity. That moment sparked a lifelong curiosity about the brain and how it constructs perception, ultimately leading him to Stanford and a career in neuroscience. In this episode, David reveals the science of time perception, brain plasticity, and sensory substitution, and why the human brain is far more powerful and expandable than you ever imagined. In this episode, Hala and David will discuss: (00:00) Introduction (01:26) A Childhood Fall That Revealed Time Perception (06:46) How the Brain Constructs Reality  (10:33) Hidden Senses the Human Brain Is Missing (16:46) What Is Brain Plasticity and Livewiring? (27:50) Sensory Substitution and Expanding Human Senses  (36:29) The Psychology Behind Why Humans Dream (42:02) Where Science Meets Spirituality and Religion  (48:47) The Future of Livewired Technology (51:39) Why Human Intelligence Still Outsmarts AI David Eagleman is a neuroscientist at Stanford University, a bestselling author, and the founder of Neosensory and BrainCheck. He is the writer and presenter of the international PBS series The Brain with David Eagleman and The Creative Brain on Netflix. His bestselling book Livewired reveals how the brain adapts in real time, reshaping our understanding of perception, consciousness, and human psychology. Sponsored By: Indeed - Get a $75 sponsored job credit to boost your job's visibility at Indeed.com/profiting Shopify - Start your $1/month trial at Shopify.com/profiting. Spectrum Business - Keep your business connected seamlessly with fast, reliable Internet, Phone, TV, and Mobile services. Visit https://spectrum.com/Business to learn more. Northwest Registered Agent - Build your brand and get your complete business identity in just 10 clicks and 10 minutes at northwestregisteredagent.com/paidyap Framer - Publish beautiful and production-ready websites. Go to Framer.com/profiting and get 30% off their Framer Pro annual plan. Quo - Run your business communications the smart way. Try Quo for free, plus get 20% off your first 6 months when you go to quo.com/profiting Experian - Manage and cancel your unwanted subscriptions and reduce your bills. Get started now with the Experian App and let your Big Financial Friend do the work for you. See experian.com for details. Bitdefender - Start protecting your business today with Bitdefender Ultimate Small Business Security. Get 30% off your plan at bitdefender.com/profiting  Intuit - Start paying bills the smart way, not the hard way. Learn more at QuickBooks.com/billpay   Resources Mentioned: David’s Book, Livewired: bit.ly/Livewired  David’s Website: eagleman.com  Active Deals - youngandprofiting.com/deals  Key YAP Links Reviews - ratethispodcast.com/yap YouTube - youtube.com/c/YoungandProfiting Newsletter - youngandprofiting.co/newsletter  LinkedIn - linkedin.com/in/htaha/ Instagram - instagram.com/yapwithhala/ Social + Podcast Services: yapmedia.com Transcripts - youngandprofiting.com/episodes-new  Entrepreneurship, Entrepreneurship Podcast, Business, Business Podcast, Self Improvement, Self-Improvement, Personal Development, Starting a Business, Strategy, Investing, Sales, Selling, Psychology, Productivity, Entrepreneurs, AI, Artificial Intelligence, Technology, Marketing, Negotiation, Money, Finance, Side Hustle, Mental Health, Career, Leadership, Mindset, Health, Growth Mindset, Habits, Positivity, Critical Thinking, Robert Greene, Chris Voss, Robert Cialdini 

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 Podcasts and also 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

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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 screensaver, 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 Improfiting 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 Aman, 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 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 I ended up breaking my nose on the brick floor below. But the thing that really struck me about it was that it's...

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, 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 equals 1 half AT squared, I realized, wow, the whole fall took place in 0.6 of a second. And I couldn't reconcile that. I couldn't figure out how those, how it had seemed to have taken so long. So I got really interesting 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 freefall, and they're 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, when 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

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, the event's already long gone by that point and you're living in the past. And by the way, I've 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, 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 break, when you realize a car is pulling out of the driveway ahead 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 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. Human 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 enormously 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, 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 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 thing's done and unload it 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, 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 umwelt, right? Umwelt. I think that's how you pronounce it? Um, yeah. Um, it sounds German, right?

Yeah, so, so basically it's this concept that our environments 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 you think about the umwelt is that, you know, looking across the animal kingdom. So, you know, for a tick, for example, 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 echo locating bat, its 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 Black Ghost Knife Fish, it's just detecting, 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 that's this concept of the umwelt, which is, you know, that's how 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? 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 colorblindness, right? So let's say, This person's colorblind, 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 photoreceptors in their eye, but four types, which means they're seeing colors the rest of us aren't seeing. And or takes something like synesthesia, which is where you, you know, someone, let's say, looks at letters or numbers and it triggers a color experience or, 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 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 3% of the population has synesthesia and others don't. Or something that I've been studying a lot lately is what's called hyperfantasia or at the other end of the spectrum, Afantasia, which is how you visually image something. So if I ask you to imagine an ant crawling on a table, 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 hyperphantacic. The second group's called aphantagic. 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 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 alluded to it before that, you know, 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, okay, so almost all animals have a sense of smell that's so much better than ours. And I don't know if you saw my, my TED talk, but I, I did. 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 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 umwelt. And so we think, oh, yeah, I've got a great room. I'm 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. Turns out cows have good magneto reception as well. 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. 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, we're not even going to know for the next, you know, 50, 100 years when someone realizes, oh my gosh, it turns out, you know, antelope are picking up on this thing that we didn't even realize was the thing. So when you really study the biology across the kingdom, you find that 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 mind-blowing to think that, like, animals are having a totally different experience than you are, and 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 it turns, and by the way, sounds, yeah, there are lots of animals that hear and what we call the infrasonic range 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 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. That's right. Now, it's not clear, for example, why we have lost so much skill with smell. But, you know, everything is a, 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 and smell, for example. And so somehow when everything balances out, we've ended up exactly as we are. Yeah, fam, you just realized your business needs to hire somebody yesterday. How do you find great candidates fast? Easy. Use indeed. When it comes to

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Department of Financial Services. 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, right? To me, 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 with 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 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 things. 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 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 live wired. 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, 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 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 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 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-toasted term for it. So that's why I'm using the term live-wired because what really opens up when we start studying this in 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, 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 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. But I don't think that was the intention. I think it sells all fighting for survival. And in one of these, you know, amazing, bizarre biological, you know, 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, 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 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, okay, so that's exactly right. So it turns out that in the brain, no territory lies fallow. 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. Because it's perfectly good territory. Now, the territory I'm talking about is called the cortex, which is the, 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 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. And this is because 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. And that's it. And you're doing the same thing that goats did 10,000 years ago. 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 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 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.

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 unpackes 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 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 half-baked brain into the world. She's assuming, okay, well, you should get all the normal language and love and touch and, 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 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. They're, yeah, it's just a half-baked brain that never gets cooked all the way.

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, 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 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 the new country.

But if you move after the age of 13, 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 Mila Kunis and Arnold Schwarzenegger, both of whom were born outside of America. But they, you know, Mila 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 Armstrong 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, kiteboard 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. Hmm, 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. 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 we sort of feel like oh yeah i'm just 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 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. And so 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 at 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 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 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 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 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 go 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 what I did first is I built a vest with vibratory motors on it. And the vest captures sound and turns that, to 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, 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 I spun this out of 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 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. This a dog barking, things like that. 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 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. 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 right. 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, 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 seventh sense 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, we've, you know, set this up with the wristband very inexpensively for five bucks. You set up these infrared billometers, 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. 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 neocensory.com slash 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 a million different projects we have

where we're feeding in new data streams and you can come to have a perception. One of the things we've been doing is for drone pilots where you feel the pitch y'all roll heading and orientation of the drone on your skin. So it's like you're becoming one with the drone. 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. 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 defense. What's up young and profitors? We're still at the start of a new year, and you know what that means?

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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 hypothesis that my student and I came up with some years ago, which is the following. If you go blind, as we mentioned earlier,

if you go blind, that territory of visual cortex gets taken over by neighboring kingdoms of, of, data like hearing and touch. But the surprise in neuroscience is how fast this can happen. So some colleagues of mine at Harvard did this experiment where they took normally cited 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 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 this takeover starts after about an hour. So what we realized was, given the rotation of the planet, you know, this causes a real problem

for the visual system because you end up in the dark for half the same thing. cycle. And obviously the thing of interest here is evolutionary time before we had lights, which is just the last, you know, nanosecond of 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 realize 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 screensaver. So we published this and we studied 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 grey mouse lemur, it's called, 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 so we looked at how much,

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

in my dreams. 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 other 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 Rorschach 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 have to say, yeah, some of us do. I mean, I've done it. 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 in 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. 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 of 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. 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 and parts. We can't build, you know, with transistors as 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 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. 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, you know, has this idea that the earth is 6,000 years old. Well, 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 event. 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 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 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 the scientific temperament is saying, what could be going on here? How did we get here? What is our purpose here, if anything? 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 is 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 of hypotheses on the table. And then we gather evidence to weigh in favor of

some of those and, you know, and against others. And that's what I think we should be doing. That's what I call possibilityism. And I actually presented this in a TEDx talk many years ago. And I got hundreds of emails right afterwards from people saying, hey, I think I'm a possibility in 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, there's so much activity about Possible. 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 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 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, it's every time I see religious conflict, it just blows my mind. 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 stuff and it's it's so goofy um and yet this is the 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 i think i'm i think i'm correct in 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 feature 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 feature 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, you know, that computers cannot. And as I mentioned earlier, you know, computers are obsolescent from the day they come off the factory. So, I'm, you know, I'm very, I'll give an example, which is the Mars rover, I can't remember

for a spirit of curiosity, one of them. Anyway, you got up to Mars, they did an extraordinary job, rolled around the red planet and, 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, 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 live-wired. 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 live wired and AI? Because from 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 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, 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, 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, yeah, I 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 anything. It can't do well at any of that stuff. Um, 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 can 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, 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, 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 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 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 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 with our descendants of 100 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. What is one actionable thing our young improfitors 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? Relating. Relating. Relative. 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, 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.