This Neuroscientist Shows You How to Unlock Hidden Strengths of Your Brain | David Eagleman

Everybody, welcome to another episode of Conversations with Tom. I'm here with author and neuroscientist David Eagleman. David, welcome to the show, man. Awesome to see you, Tom. Dude, I'm super stoked to have you back on. Anytime that I get to research you with like the specific purpose of you coming on, I'm a very happy man. Uh your new book, Livewired, I think it's really extraordinary and I want to So, I'm haunted by a quote and that quote is genius is a young man's game. You never use that quote in the book, but you touch on the subject in terms of how much ability we have to change and learn as we get older. And I want to pinpoint just like I really want to feel like I can get better and better as I age and that I'm not going to suffer the slings and arrows of, you know, sort of crystallizing into dogma or not being able to learn and push myself. Um how changeable is the brain? So, the good news is the brain remains flexible all through adulthood, which is why you can learn new names, new people, new facts, and so on. So, it's not that plasticity shuts down, but it does diminish. But, I actually want to address this for a second because I feel like this is a really important area, which is that as all of us get older, we sort of lament this. We think, "Oh, we would love to have the flexibility of a young brain." But, in fact, I think you would not. And here's why. Although you'd be able to learn Chinese, you know, in a few weeks instead of a year or whatever, it's um the hardening of your brain actually represents you're doing something right. Your your brain's job is to make an internal model of the external world. And it's trying to figure out, "Okay, what is my language? What's my culture? What's the beliefs of my society? How do I interact with people such that they respond to me in the right way? What is my internal model of my spouse's behavior?" All these kinds of things. And if you somehow could take a magic pill that returned you to the flexibility of an infant's brain, you would forget all of that. You wouldn't be you. You wouldn't be Tom anymore, you'd be you'd be an infant again, and you'd have to relearn life again. So Let me let me push you on that. If I could get the flexibility, but not wipe the slate clean, would there be advantages to that? Or this cold war for resources that the brain is sort of engaged in, does that become so problematic that it becomes hard to solidify the self? Yeah, I mean So let me just jump to the first thing. I think there's not a way of doing the flexibility without losing yourself. Why is that? From Is there a physiological like the brain structure becomes just too squishy? Like what's happening? it's that who you are is the sum total of all of the experiences you've ever had. You know, you know, at the end of the book I I sort of suggest that you are a a vessel, each of us is a vessel of space and time, where you were born in a particular town at a particular year, you go around you vacuum up your experiences. I I was born in a different town at a different year, I go around I vacuum up my little experiences, and um and that's what makes us us. And if you got rid of that and said, you know, I want to forget all that and start over, you there wouldn't be anything about you anymore. I mean, maybe you would learn Chinese and you'd be you'd have a different name, you'd be a different person, whatever, you have to learn everything over again. It's interesting. So one of the things that um So I think a lot about death, and you covered this in an interview that I was listening to um about I I forget who you were quoting, but man lives two lives, one sort of when he has no sense of his mortality, and then the second one once he becomes aware of that. And I really think in the last 12 months I've become aware of my mortality, and I don't know if it's just the the age. So anybody that's been watching me for a while will see that my rhetoric used to be really hardcore, I'm trying to live forever. And when I really I I stopped to ask from an evolutionary standpoint, why don't we live forever? There are jellyfish that can do it. And it is sort of what you're talking about now, where the jellyfish sort of re-enters, it's not a pupa stage, but something like that where it sort of like blobs back out and then sort of rebuilds itself. Yeah. And renewal was the answer that I came up with in terms of why we don't live forever because, you know, the the old adage of science advances funeral by funeral. Because you need that sense of renewal and change for a society to work. So, a society certainly doesn't care about any one individual. Um is is that part of when you think about neuroplasticity, you're the like every time I hear you say you don't want to get to that level of flexibility, you sound crazy to me. And I keep thinking it's because you understand something about the way neuroplasticity works that I don't. So, walk us through like the fundamental reality of what neuroplasticity is. And I think one thing that is interesting is that notion that the the regions of the brain are actually competing against one another which I had never heard until reading Livewired. Yeah. Okay, great. Yeah, well, I mean, one of the things I've tried to do in Livewired is propose completely new frameworks about how to think about all this. So, I'm glad I mean, you wouldn't have heard this before Livewired cuz I feel like at least my hope with this is it's a completely new way of of looking at the brain. Um okay, so there's a lot to unpack in in your question. I'll say a few things. Actually, let me just start with the the quotation uh just in case anyone wants it is it's it's from Confucius and he said, "Yeah, man lives two lives. The second one begins when he realizes he has just one." Um and I agree with you about this whole uh immortality thing. It may be that there is a evolutionary basis to this which is Mother Nature does a lot of work to figure out, okay, what do I need to do to make a species successful? And it may be that part of that is figuring out, okay, how long do I make them live in order for the species to to be really successful. Obviously, it's not cast that way from another nature's point of view. It's just an evolutionary issue, but um some species do better than others if they have the right turnover rate um uh in terms of in terms of death. Okay, so you asked what can I just go back to say what neuroplasticity is? It's that your whole life your brain is changing. You've got you know, most of your listeners probably know this, but you've got 86 billion neurons, you've got 0.2 quadrillion connections between these neurons, and your whole life, every moment, these things are changing their strength, they're unplugging, they're replugging, they're these the neurons the cells in your brain are seeking. They're actually moving around and trying different things out. Each one has about 10,000 connections with its neighbors. The interesting part is your whole life this is what's happening, which means you are a slightly different person than who you were when you started this podcast 5 minutes ago, and and and I am too, and um so this is what I mean when I'm talking about the flexibility of the brain. Now, the argot of the field, we call this brain plasticity, um but the fact is I think we need a new term because plast- the reason it got that name a century ago is because plastic you can mold into shape and it holds that shape, but what the brain's doing is so much more than simply holding on to shape. It's constantly reconfiguring itself. And so that's why I introduced the term livewired, which I do to distinguish how we think about everything in Silicon Valley, which is hardware and software, where you make these trim and efficient two layers and they interact with each other. Liveware is constantly actually it's like a living electric fabric. It's, you know, unplugging and replugging and changing itself and getting things down into the system. Now, back to your question about um you know, as you get older, the thing is you've been plugging things down into the system your whole life and uh the longer it goes, the deeper that gets into the system. And that's why I'm skeptical about this idea of returning to plasticity of a of a child because the way learning works in the brain is everything builds on what you already know. So, it's not like a computer where you give it some piece of information, it stores a little file. It's not like that. It's instead everything you learn is in the context of what you have already known. So, just as an example, if you and I were learning how to fly a B-212 helicopter, you might think about it in terms of like, "Oh, okay, I get it. This is sort of like a motorcycle. I lean this way." And I might think about it in terms of a horse. Like, "Okay, yeah, I grew up riding horses, so here's how I do it and here's how I think about it." But, it's all predicated on what we've known before. Yeah, I I heard you destroy my fantasy, which is one day we will be like the Matrix and we can download stuff and you introduce that level of complexity where it's like it learning doesn't actually work like that and you have to think of these things as as existing in these different layers in the brain and that we're essentially synthesizing machines, which I've always said to myself in in a derogatory way cuz I look at somebody like Elon Musk and he seems to be truly thinking sort of in a unique way. Whereas, I've always felt like I have to take in all this data and then it bounces around in my mind in a unique way, but it isn't sort of truly from the ground up a unique insight. And that may just be me looking at it incorrectly and everybody is a synthesizing machine, um but that reality of the way that we take in data and then I I've always thought of it sort of as a pinball machine where it comes in and it hits something else, which then bumps into something else and then it it recongeals into this sort of new and unique idea. Um, but that's interesting and it it becomes it becomes somewhat trouble troubling and you have a quote in the book. I forget the exact words, but basically you're everyone is born as many men but die as one. And that notion of you have all this infinite possibility. You could could have been born anywhere at any time, encounter anything, but ultimately you become one very specific person. And because I'm in sort of the mindset space, I encounter people that have childhood trauma a lot. And the way that childhood trauma shapes them I find really distressing. And this is my obsession around this notion of I don't I don't want to be a slave to my past. So I acknowledge how important it is, but how much can we begin to push beyond that? Like if if we're at, you know, a 10 in terms of malleability when we're young, are we at like a 0.5 when we're 70? Or like where we where are we at? Well, I'll tell you something in this context. This is something I've been thinking about a ton, which is Okay, let me let me explain why we don't change as much as we grow older. It's because you are getting a good model of the world with which you're successful and so there's no particular motivation to change further. Now, I I happen to know that you and I both love the idea of continuing to change and trying as hard as we can to do that all the time. But it's not the general story. Most people find, let's say, just a career and they figure out how to do it and they learn all the vocabulary vocabulary career and they figure out, great, this is this is what I'm doing. And um unfortunately with a lot of people when they retire, their lives really shrink. And then they are not challenging their brain in any way. Here's why that matters. It's because when you challenge your brain, you're building new bridges and roadways all the time. And as people get older, of course, their brain tissue actually starts to degenerate, so you need to build those new bridges to cover broken roadways or else they're really in trouble. Um and you may have heard the story about these nuns who when they when they died they gave their brain at autopsy for analysis and it turned out that some fraction of these nuns who had lived in the convent till the day they died, they had Alzheimer's disease but nobody knew it when they were alive because they didn't have the cognitive deficits. And so it turns out it's because living in a convent you've got other people to deal with and chores and responsibilities and other things. And so they were able to build new bridges all the time. So anyway, this is one of the most important things that we can do with our brains. Now I'm trying to remember what was the what was the connection to the thing we said before. This is about how far you can push yourself. So I'm going to I'm going to go now into a direction that means a lot to me. So when you think about your kids, so I know you have kids, are you like [ __ ] I'm going to introduce them to everything that might be meaningful? I'm going to have them playing piano because the way that the brain will drink in music and reorganize itself is going to matter. I'm going to have them doing sports because obviously that's going to lay certain foundations that they won't be able to lay later. Like how critical is that developmental period? Like if if I'm going to be a good steward, I don't have kids you don't have to worry about me. I'm not going to you know [ __ ] anybody up. But like how I would really sweat that? Like I would really worry that I either haven't done enough to sort of lay important foundations or I've done too much. Like how do you think about making the most of that plastic period? Yeah. I'll tell you. So my father was a psychiatrist and he had actually prepped me for this a little while ago. He said he said look the the view of modern psychiatry is that the most important thing a parent can do is open doors for their children. That's that's it. Meaning you give the kid piano lessons and soccer lessons and this and that and chess and blah blah blah. But you can't kids kids already start having personalities very young and they love this but they hate that and so on. The best you can do is give the kids the opportunity. And the other thing that's so important is just teaching kids creativity. And by that I I simply mean teaching them how to consume lots of data and then remix and do their own versions of it because the the way that schools often go wrong is by teaching lots of stuff and then the semester ends and that's it. Like okay, now you know all the different ways that these painters painted or all the different ways of electrical engineering that you can do this and that. But the important part is you should add a week to the end of that where you say to the kids, okay, now I want you to bend, break, and blend all these painting styles and come up with your own. Now I want you to come up with an engineering project that you care about, that you've thought of that incorporates everything we've learned in this semester. So that's I would say the main thing I'm trying to do as a parent is make sure that whatever my kids learn, I turn it into something where they're leveraging it, they're using it. So that knowledge becomes not just a an endpoint but a springboard. So do you think of it in terms of cuz after reading the book I walked away thinking this way. All of us are going to make when we're young, accidentally or on purpose, we're going to make decisions about what infrastructure we build that's robust. And thinking of a musician is probably the easiest way to explain this. So if I understand it right, a kid that starts practicing music when they're really young, the density of the brain regions that deal with either how their fingers move or reading sheet music or you know, whatever the different elements are, they are physically more robust in a way that they will not be with the same amount of hours if you pick it up at the age 40. And so there becomes like these really critical because I don't know if you've read the book Nudge, but it talks about how little pushes in any direction can have a huge impact in somebody's life. So my dad one time made an offhanded comment that hey, cuz we had a camcorder and I used to play with it, which now kids think, yeah, everybody has a camera. This was really [ __ ] rare back then. So the fact that my dad brought the camera home already begins nudging me in a direction. Then my dad makes a comment that he thinks that I'm good with the camera. That pushes me even harder in that direction. I end up going to film school. All of this like And so, it becomes a question of my dad was really um distant. So, to get his attention, was I I didn't have that sense that I was doing it for that reason. But were those like little nudges that pushed me to build all this infrastructure now around visual storytelling, storytelling. My whole life revolves around this [ __ ] So, I'm like, knowing how nudges can have this big impact like for the parents out there listening, is there certain types of infrastructure? Problem solving is what I heard you just saying now or critical thinking? I don't know what words you would use to describe what you're talking about now. So, actually there there's so many points that I want to address in the things you've said already. Um and actually, if you don't mind, just before I forget the queue of things, let me go back to a to a few steps here in case it's useful. I'm going to tie it all together. One is about about Elon Musk versus you. Um Yeah, you know, everybody's brain is running the same software, which is you absorb the world and you um you know, you you generate remixes of it. And his brain is no different. And when you look at quotations from Henry Ford, from Thomas Edison, whatever, they're all saying the same thing, which is I mean, Henry Ford said, "I invented nothing new. I merely took the advances of all the people before me and I just assembled it into a new package." And that's of course what Musk is doing. Because they're actually, weirdly, there is no such thing as a as a thought out of the blue. Everything builds on what you have been exposed to. Um the second thing is the quotation you mentioned was was Martin Heidegger. Yeah, every man is born as many men and dies as one. The reason where this all comes together for parents, why it's important, is because um the number of things that is going to influence a child, whether you bring home a camera or whatever the thing is, it's so infinitely manifold that as a parent you actually in the end can't control it. There's just too much stuff. So, the best a parent can do, and what a parent should do, is just try to just try to bring home all that stuff and play with your children and encourage your children to do the stuff because you can't possibly steer things in a in a meaningful way. When your father brought home the camera, that was a a meaningful, important moment, but he might have brought home four other things that you have forgotten since because it just didn't resonate with who you were as a person. So, the weird part is we are this weird combination of nature and nurture, which is to say you dropped into the world with a particular set of genetics that give gave you particular predispositions. For some reason you're a real visual guy, you like doing that, so the camera resonated with you, but the other things your dad brought home you you don't even remember them. So, this is the weird thing about who we become is is this mixture of nature and nurture. If you had to give a split, what would you say? What I I've seen sort of 50/50. Do you think that's accurate? It's a dead question in in biology nowadays because you can't say which is because of the way they intertwine. What I mean by that is um you know, there's this moment where you dropped into the world, you've got a certain set of genes, but from there there's feedback on your genetic expression from your experiences. And this is this new field of epigenetics, which is to say depending on the experiences you have, that actually feeds back into your brain all the way down eventually to the level of the nucleus in the neurons, and you change the conformation of the DNA with certain proteins that fit on it and change it such that some genes are getting expressed more, some genes are getting expressed less. So, what this means is that the nurture actually affects the nature. And uh and obviously the nature affects the nurture because if you know, if let's say I like swimming, right? But I don't have the wingspan of Michael Phelps, so I'm never going to be Michael Phelps and be able to compete with him. Um so these things anyway all feed back on each other. So that's why you can't even put a split on it. Yeah, that is the notion that we're not blank slates, I think is really important for people to understand. We're going through a super weird time right now. I'm utterly shocked by this where people are talking about humans like they're sort of infinitely malleable. Um and while that would actually be kind of cool, I wish I and you've already debunked this. I wouldn't be myself if I were infinitely malleable and so okay, I do accept that. Um but thinking of children at least is sort of infinitely malleable and that, you know, you could become anything um is is really exciting, but it's so divorced from reality that it breaks people's ability to predict how human beings are going to react and um how to even, you know, structure a society in a way that's functional. Um how do you think about that intertwining? Are there things that, you know, for for instance, the sexes? Like are there things that are somewhat sort of categorizable if you know just even that amount of the person or is it like, "Nope, even even that you can't begin to segregate people."? The The interesting part is that essentially anything you measure exists on a distribution. So let's take something like, you know, skill at chess or swimming or math or whatever. Um you know, anything you think of there's this big distribution in society. And when it comes to something like comparing the sexes, there's a distribution with whatever you're measuring and these those tend to be non um those tend to be not centered exactly the same place and yet overlapping a lot. And that's why it's challenging ever to say, "Oh, well, that's a male, that's a female, so they're going to be ba ba ba because you only talk All you can The best you can talk about is on average." Um so we're in this weird funny position there where, you know, yeah, one can try to ignore and say, "Well, I think it makes no difference that she's a female, he's a male, but it makes some difference on on average, but maybe not for that individual is the is the key. And as far as this thing, but you know, what you just mentioned a moment ago is the thing I've been thinking about with all the where we are in 2020, um I can just tell you personally, I give my charity money to um to organizations that deal with kids and babies and infants. That's where I put all my money on this on this bet because just as one example, um there's one uh charity that I donate to that deals with daycare centers because in poor neighborhoods, where both parents have to work or maybe it's just a single mom, um they need to put the kid in daycare. And most of the daycare centers in poor neighborhoods, just all the kids get gathered in front of a television and they watch television all day. Essentially, the whole goal is just to keep the kids alive for the day. But it's not interacting with the children the way a uh uh you know, a good a really rich neighborhood's daycare center would operate. And this stuff matters so much because a young child's brain is is so thirsty for all the information of the world. And so that's why this matters a lot and and because of this issue we've been talking about how brain's flexibility diminishes through time, it's just where I put my my bets, my chips is that um you know, sometimes what you have in poor neighborhoods is you have to make a a bet on the upcoming generation. You say, "I'm going to do everything I can to make this next generation get off the starting blocks and an equal point as a rich neighborhood so that um so that the kids are not disadvantaged from day one." There's a guy named Geoffrey Canada that I I have been stalking. I'm waiting for the restraining order. I am trying to get him on the show so desperately. And he said something and it's one of those I don't know if I remember it accurately and I can't refind it, but my memory of it is that he said so he is really really bright guy grew up in Harlem ends up getting a full ride to Harvard goes to Harvard and says I'm going to come back and um change the education system basically help all these kids in Harlem. And goes tries realizes the education system is so problematic that he can't fix it from the inside he has to fix it from the outside starts looking at what the real problem is and what the real solution is and realizes the big difference between kids that grow up in um a sort of normal suburban life and kids that grow up in poverty is the number of words they hear by the time they're five and the ratio that's positive to negative. And and the thought of being able to boil it down to something that simple because again going back to this notion of infrastructure they have the language infrastructure in their brain and that that has these massive knock-on effects later in terms of their ability to communicate get a good job all this crazy [ __ ] and so like you he's focused on kids and what I think I remember him saying was you have to give up on adults. And that may have just been the terror that it struck into my heart but my memory of that statement which obviously is all about brain plasticity has been so influential in my life that this company Impact Theory started aimed at adults and now about 5% of what we do maybe 20% 20% of what we do is aimed at adults 80% is aimed at kids cuz I'm like if I actually want to have the kind of impact I want to have I've got to hit him during that age of imprint where their brain remains incredibly malleable and so yeah man that like talk to me talk to me about um what happened in I think it was the Ukraine? When there was so much death after the war that basically there was the orphans had trouble Yeah you know what that was actually in Romania it was after the death of Ceaușescu there were tens of thousands of kids who'd been orphaned cuz their parents had been killed. So, the Romanians set up these orphanages, these state-run orphanages, where um there were too many kids and too few staff. And so, the staff said, "Look, don't pick up the kid. Don't talk to the kid because the kid will get clingy if you do that." So, what they did is they just ran their business keeping the kids alive, but not giving them what a child needs. And these kids grow up with massive cognitive deficits. This is one of nature's tragic natural experiments where you get to look at it and say, "Ah, okay. Now we realize that what children they're br- Here's the whole thing, and this is as you know, the theme of Livewire is that human brains drop into the world half-baked. This is the great trick that Mother Nature discovered with our species. You drop them in not ready, but there's a certain expectation, a certain gamble nature is taking, which is that you'll get the right sorts of inputs. And it's a gamble because if you don't get those inputs, then the brain does not um come out uh optimally at all. Talk to me about the inputs that will break you if you don't get. Well, one of them is um you you know, actually that's an interesting question because we don't know how to phrase it except as a general thing about love and language and you know, attention and physical touch. break you though? Cuz like if somebody's deaf, they can still develop and and have normal relations when they're older, I think. They Exactly right, but they are speaking language. They have language. They have sign language that they're speaking with people. And so, um If they didn't have that, would they be um developmentally [ __ ] They Prob- It's an interesting question. Let me think if I can think of an example. I I don't I don't know. I'll have to I'll have to look that up. The reason is cuz all of the examples of deafness I know, and I know at this point hundreds or thousands of deaf people, they they've all grown up in a society that's modern enough that from whatever, the age of 6 months or a year or whatever, their parents said, "Wow, we need to get help here and learn sign language or put you into a a school or get a tutor who can she teach you sign language. So, I actually don't know of people who have grown up where they are completely ignored in that way and not getting any language. Of course, there you know, there's a certain language of people paying attention to you and touching you and saying like would you like to milk or even if you can't hear, you might still be getting a sense of languageness. But, there are these again, these tragic natural natural experiments where a child is so abused, so neglected that let's say a perfectly hearing child doesn't get any language because the parent locks them in a room and just gives them food or something, but gives them none of the language or attention and kids like that grow up with really horrid deficits like they never learn language, they never learn the structure of language grammatically. Uh for example, I tell the story of one girl in the book who was found at the age of seven having been abused like this and what happened after her parents were arrested and so on, all these psychologists came in, all these people who gave her lots of love and attention and tried to teach her, but she never could learn language. It was too late, that window had closed for her. She just never got the rules of grammar. So, she says she can say no and stop it and one other thing, but she can't speak language. There's nothing wrong with her um in terms of genetically, in terms of why she couldn't do that. Yeah. One of the most interesting studies um I've ever come across and I know you've talked about this is Harlow's monkeys and how if you give the monkey the option between basically sort of affection, physical affection, comfort from just a carpet mother and then a wire mother, but it actually has food, that it will go eat really fast and then run back and cuddle the carpet mother. It is so weird to me. Like when I hear people say, "Man, humans are just love." Like it makes my skin crawl, but then when I think about what the fact that if you don't touch and love on a human, it actually dies. That is so weird. Do you have a sense like is that tied to the the like think of the visual cortex, right? Visual cortex is expecting information. I'm sure you can explain your theory on dreaming, which I think is [ __ ] fascinating. Like is there something where we have like a love center that like if it isn't getting that love, it What the hell happens? Like I don't understand how we break fundamentally as a human. Yeah. You know, I would say it's this issue So we don't know and happily the reason we don't know is because there's simply are not enough examples. So Harlow's monkeys, you know, he did this I guess it's about 50 years ago where he would do things like, you know, give the monkey the choice. He also did these experiments where he would isolate a monkey and have the monkey raised in isolation with a one-way mirror that he could look through. But those kinds of experiments were shut down because, you know, he was doing it let's say for the right reasons, you know, trying to understand depression and so on, but it was just decided that the outcomes were so awful that it was too cruel to do. And and these um terribly abused children are super rare, thankfully. So we don't really know. There's not a love center in the brain, but instead it's something about about this issue of the brain coming into the world where as much as possible Mother Nature has put out onto the world. Like you need to be getting this love and attention and touch. I mean, we we understand a lot about the touch system and if you're not getting touched and stroked as a child, that affects the development of, you know, what's called your somatosensory cortex, you know, this part right under where you wear headphones. And um Do you have a hypothesis why? Again, it's this thing about it's this thing about coming in half programmed. And the rest of it is waiting for the world to program you. And if the world is not programming you, there are no hands on the keyboards there, uh you're just not getting what you need. See, what you have is uh you know, essentially an infant's brain without without the extra stuff that you need to to grow up. We As far as specifically like uh if you don't get enough touch and language, this is precisely what happens. We don't know that, and as I said, it's for the it's for the right reasons that we don't know that. And hopefully, I kind of hope that we we never know exactly why that is, cuz it would require studying that. Which is sad. Yeah, I mean, look, I hope that we figure out why it is. I hope we never find out because we have had cases like that, for sure. But one thing that is interesting, and things begin to unlock. So, the one of the key things that I took away from Livewired is this notion that um re- the the brain is real estate. You use this great example of a map. And if you look at a map as a kid, you just assume, oh, all the country lines are like, that's how it is. And of course, it couldn't be any other way. Um but as a historian, you know, looking back on it, it could have been any manner of configurations. And the brain is the same, that you have competing resources fighting for resources. Walk us through that, because to me, I I want to push some more on this idea of how we break as a human if we don't get the right input, but I need to understand if it's tied to that sort of resource thirst or or some other mechanism. Yeah. So, the general framework I put forward is that it's actually competitive system under the hood there. So, you look at a picture in a neuroscience textbook and it says, okay, here's the brain. That's the visual part, hearing, touch, and so on. And that's how every textbook is. You think, oh, okay, I got it. That's that's the brain. But in fact, it's this fluid dynamic system that's constantly changing. If you are born blind, this part isn't your visual cortex. That gets taken over by hearing and touch, and so on. Even if you go blind later, that gets taken over. Um it's like that with everything. For people who are deaf, that doesn't remain their auditory cortex. There's no real estate that lies fallow in the brain ever. And so this is the remarkable thing about Yeah, about resource allocation. So, that Yeah, you know, the analogy I give in the book is it's like if you saw the you know, the Cuban Missile Crisis. You were an alien that flew in and you saw the Cuban Missile Crisis, you'd say, "Oh, the Americans and Soviets, nobody's doing anything. I guess everyone's just uh nothing's happening." But, in fact, what you wouldn't realize is that all the missiles are aimed, everything is super tight. And what And the reason nothing is happening is because all the guns are pointed at each other. And that's what I propose is going on in the brain. It has to be understood as a competitive system at many different levels of competition um from, you know, from regions all the way down to neurons and even within neurons synapses competing against one another and so on. And so, that's what allows things to change uh really rapidly in the brain. And what is the dynamic by which they um or either winning or losing? Is it I'm receiving input, haha, so I get to keep going? That's exactly it. It's I I'm I'm getting the input and so the um I mean, forgive me cuz you already read the book, but you know, I give this analogy of uh of colonization in early the Americas. You know, you had the French and the British and the Spanish were all colonizing North America. And what I did is I just went back and I looked at it to see if I could correlate how people's territory changed given the number of ships they were sending over from Europe. And what happened is the French started sending fewer ships than the British. And um and so, you know, as they sent fewer and fewer ships, their territory shrunk. The French owned this huge territory all the way from Canada down to Louisiana. Um And as they sent less and less stuff, eventually they lost all their territory and eventually they sold the whole Louisiana territory. So, this is an analogy that I use to what's going on about how the brain remaps itself all the time. It depends on the number of ships coming over. So, you know, just as an example, if you're an amputee and you lose your arm, um suddenly there's no more ships coming in from your hand to the brain and so that territory gets taken over. So, yes, it's about how much data is coming in and by the way, how useful that data is. So, if you look at a map of the body um in the brain, you find that the areas that carry more sensitive information have bigger representation. So, for example, in my somatosensory cortex, my fingertips have a big representation cuz they're carrying a lot of important information. In contrast, my thigh doesn't, you know, has a very little territory cuz no one who cares about my thigh. Um in terms of the number of ships that it's sending up to the brain. So, if they're locked in this battle for that, going back to the idea of if you're not touching an infant, loving an infant, um stroking them, is is it that regions that would otherwise go to that are being taken over by something and that causes that sort of a like basically that there is it's probably more distributed than this, but the idea being there is a distribution of items in your brain that their allocation is for social interaction. So, that I get social cues in and I I sort of play with them as you talk about babbling. So, I sort of babble, I give a response and maybe I I I hit my parent. You see kids do that all the [ __ ] time. I grab your hair and you tell me no. Oh [ __ ] okay, I get a bit of input there. I smack your face and you tell me not to do that. Whoa. And so, I begin to realize, okay, cool, like there's this give-and-take relationship that I have with this person. It's not carte blanche. I can't do whatever I want. And now, I'm basically forming my my the the literal centers of my brain as myself as a social creature. And is And when now we take that sort of feral child and put them now in a social context, they seem broken, but they might actually do just fine as a completely isolated creature. That's right. Although, it would be hard to define what we mean by doing just fine as an isolated creature, but but but I totally I totally agree with your your point of view on this, which is it it this is the part I talk about in the book about babbling. So, we all know with children they babble. And the reason they're babbling is cuz they're saying something with their mouth and they're hearing what comes out of their mouth and they're comparing that to what's coming out of their mother's mouth, their father's mouth, and they're figuring out what And as they get older, it's a different kind of babbling. Exactly as it says, like a social babbling. They're like, "What if I say FU to this Oh, wow, that didn't work at all." And so, um this is how you try things out in the world. And this is how our brains learn how to drive our bodies, by the way, is by motor babbling. You know, we try things out. Oh, I turn the bike this way. Oops, that didn't work. And so on. So, um yeah, I think that's exactly right. They're not getting a chance to do motor babbling. And one of the things about plasticity that really matters is that you have these windows, and they're pretty short windows before those doors close. Different areas of the brain have different windows to them, but um yeah, so if you don't have a chance to try language and figure out what's going on, whatever, at some point it becomes too late to do. What are some of the doors that close early? Yeah, well, so language is one of them. Even subtle things like uh like accents. I mean, I just I've always thought this was a cool, interesting thing that, you know, I can tell usually when I'm talking to somebody if they were born in foreign country when they moved to America. Cuz if you move here before the age of 13, you don't have any accent. But if you move here after the age of 13, you always retain a bit of an accent. And the later you move, the more of an accent you retain. So, so I compare in the book, uh you know, Mila Kunis to Arnold Schwarzenegger, both of whom were born outside of the United States, didn't speak any English. Mila Kunis moved here when she was six, so most people don't know that she was born in the Ukraine and learned English later. But Schwarzenegger moved here when he was 19, and he can't shake that accent. It's a thick accent. And it's because they both learned the the structure of language and grammar and how to get what they want, but even more subtle things change different times. So, this is all to say that it's actually a whole suite of doors that close for different aspects at different times. Um yeah, but you know, people look at things like, you know, um right, learning language in general, um you know, skill at piano or violin or something. I use the example of Vladimir Ashkenazy and Yitzhak Perlman as great pianists and violinists and so on. Um I made the assertion in the book that um they would never be able to be what they are if they picked up their instruments as a teenager. And I just saw that someone made a comment online where they said, "Oh, Dr. Eagleman's wrong. He's what a jerk because people can pick up musical instruments as teenagers and become just as good as them." But they can't. It's just not It's just inaccurate. You cannot become a Perlman or Ashkenazi unless you start really, really young. And it's because you have to burn that stuff all the way down into the deep parts of your brain. Uh so, let's be maybe say it a different way and see if I'm right. It is both that they need to burn it into a deeper part of the brain. It'll be interesting to hear you walk through sort of how things start in the hippocampus and then um get pushed deeper and deeper, and that the the notion of sort of depth is real, and um but then the the other side of this is not just the putting it deeper and deeper, it's that the very ability to put deeper and deeper is no longer. And that that's sort of the fundamental thing that your book um I hate about the truth of your book, which is that they there are these doors and that they do close and so even if like let's say that Perlman were to play for, you know, 30 years, but he plays from the time that he's two till he's 32. And now I pick up the violin at 20 and I play until I'm 60. Now I've clocked more years, but because I'm sort of outside of that window, it doesn't matter, right? So even that that sort of deeper and deeper it's not just hours clocked, it's the time in which I clock them. Exactly. It's when you started. There's one other thing that as you know I point out in the book, which is it's about relevance also. So for Yitzhak Perlman, I don't know about his childhood, but you know, presumably he got proper social feedback where people said, "Wow, you're really good at that. Hey, you know, this is something that you've got a special talent." That kind of stuff really matters a lot because if you had let's say picked it up at the age of two just like Yitzhak did, but for some reason you had mean parents who said, "Oh, that's really hurting my ears. I don't want you to play." Then you could have clocked the same number of hours, but it wouldn't have the same influence. Why? Because we've got all these neurotransmitter systems that are involved in reward and that of course includes social reward, what you're getting out of it. And um Will that increase the rate or veracity with which I learn something? Yes. Uh it increases the ability to even have the rock the the right cocktail of neurotransmitters present for the plasticity to take place. So you actually need I mean let's just let's say I said to you, "Hey Tom, I really want to teach you seven important dates in Mongolian history." And I told you to say like if you don't care about Mongolian history, it's just so hard for you to remember it. It's right? But if I'm telling you something that really matters to you in your life and it's relevant, bang, you'll remember that. You'll have a So it has to do with relevance to you. And part of I mean this is a an interesting complicated area, but part of relevance to you has to do with also what you think you can get out of it. Like if I tell you some interesting fact and you think, "Wow, that's cool. I can tell that to someone else at a cocktail party and they'll be really impressed by that fact." Whatever. I mean, people are always trying to surprise and impress each other and there's all kinds of interesting reasons why you might find something relevant. But, that needs to be there for plasticity to take place. Which is more powerful, positive or negative reinforcement? Oh, it's an interesting question. I don't know. I mean, both are used for so many things and you know, even when raising a child, you have to use both. I You know, it's an interesting question because people often ask this or you know, propose this thing of like, "Hey, I'm going to raise my child. I'm only going to say sweet things to my child and never say no." I don't really think that works. I don't think you can do that. So, the child slaps you in the face and you say, "You know, you did a great job slapping." And blah blah blah. But, yeah, it's it's hard to it's hard to get someone to So, I think both are needed to fence behavior inappropriately. Has anything been studied on that? Like, cuz I for instance, um I was a very rambunctious child. Like, I was I certainly had um I was diagnosed with hyperactivity disorder. Maybe some ADHD thrown in for good measure, but because I could sleep through the night, my mom refused to medicate me and I'm very glad for that. But, my mom was also a hardcore [ __ ] She did not play. And she was able to keep me in line. And there were many times where I really pushed the boundaries, man. And because my mom kept me in line, I I think that's part of the reason I developed discipline. Like, there were just things you could do in my house, you could not do. And there was work that was expected of you and that was just that. And she wasn't going to back down. Did not matter how much I fought, pushed. She just wasn't going to break. And I'm curious if if anybody's looked cuz it just like for me, I said, "Look, if I had kids, 100% I would not beat my children. But, I'd give them a spanking if that's what they need cuz my mom did it and it worked so well for me. If they don't need it, I won't do it. But and I people freak out. So, it's a good thing that I'm not having kids so anybody nobody has to worry about that. But like has anybody looked at that? Yeah, I mean look, this is one of those things everybody seems to have an opinion about that, but it's very difficult to compare if you get a child who's raised in family there's no spanking and a child who's spanking. It's just really hard to do any kind of good controlled experiment on that cuz there're probably 100 other differences in the family as well. So, by the way, when I had children, I thought, "Okay, I'll spank them appropriate, you know, just when the the situation really calls for it." My wife said, "No way, you are not ever injecting that kind of fear into a child about they're going to get physically hit and so on." So, we've just never done it and that's cool. I'm happy to go along with that, but I will never know the answer of whether they would have been better off with a little bit of physical, you know, hitting or not. Um yeah, those are they There's a whole class of questions that we can ask where there's no good way to study it. And I mentioned this in the book cuz I I I haven't heard anybody else say this, but I think it's really important. One of the questions that people ask is what is the effect of children growing up with the internet now. This is a question that always comes up to me when I give talks. And everybody's got an opinion on this, but it is a very difficult question to answer. Why? Because there's no way to do a good control group on that. You can't say, "Okay, I'm going to take these 18-year-olds who've grown up wired and I'm going to compare them to these other 18-year-olds who did not have the internet because the only 18-year-olds who don't have the internet are either Amish kids or kids who are totally impoverished in rural China or the favelas of South America or whatever." Um but there are 100 other differences there and you can't compare them to the previous generation cuz there are 100 other differences with the previous generation. Um and so, it's very difficult to say, "Oh, I know for sure the effect of the internet is blah blah blah blah blah cuz it's just hard to do that scientifically. So, anyway, there's a whole there's a whole class of experiments like that. I think probably spanking is one of them. Yeah, it makes me very sad that you can't run both like timelines to see what ended up working. I'm really curious and, you know, with sort of scientific curiosity, I'm open. Like if if I actually would have been better off somehow if my mom had had a more ninja style of parenting that didn't involve spanking me, cool. I'm I don't have some need for it to be that spanking worked. I just want to know what actually works. Like when I think about there's sort of two things that I think about. One, I actually am very, very interested in what sort of the ideal thing is to give to a kid psychologically to help them thrive. Just when I think about what's the contribution I want to make to society, it's all around mindset in kids. Um and then also just as as an adult, I think about how far can we take this? You know what I mean? Like every time I engage with you and your work, it's it there is some like cocktail party, like this is just [ __ ] fascinating and I want to tell people this at at a party, but there's far more than that for me is I want to use it in my own life. You know, the quote that I began with, I'm I'm not kidding when I say I'm I'm legitimately haunted by the notion that genius is a young man's game and the reason is I was a late bloomer. And so the idea that I know physicists talk about sort of 35, 36 is about the the sort of last moment you can expect yourself to have any meaningful breakthrough. And I'm in my 40s, so that sucks. You know, I actually want to address this issue about breakthrough cuz I originally had written a piece of this in the book and then I I took it out in the end, but I think this is actually really important. So, um one of the models that I Let me back up for 1 second just to give the foundation of this. One of the models I proposed is that the right way to think about the brain is in terms of pace layers, by which I mean some things are changing really fast and and if those stay stable, then that changes the layer below them, which is a little bit more conservative in its change. And if that's doing something, then the layer below that says, "Okay, I I see that that's a really consistent message. I'll change." And so, what happens is all the way down you get these deeper and deeper things. The name pace layer I'm taking from uh something that the thinker Stewart Brand proposed, who said that when you look at a city, you need to think of it in terms of pace layers. So, fashion changes rapidly, the infrastructure of city, like where the buildings are, that changes more slowly. Um the businesses that are in the buildings, that changes more rapidly than the infrastructure. The governance of the city, that changes more slowly, all the way down to the nature, you know, like where the river is in the city, that changes the most slowly. And the way to understand city is understand the interaction of all these different layers of speed. And so, I thought that was such a great insight that I really wanted to look at the brain that way. And that allowed me to put a lot of data together. Anyway, this is why, just as an example, there's this property of neurology that's very weird, which is that you that older memories are more stable than younger memories. And if you've seen people at the end of their lives, they often will have essentially receded back into their childhood. They've forgotten all the stuff from the last few years, last few decades, but they remember everything about their childhood and their childhood language and all this stuff. And what happens a lot actually is that people revert to the language they spoke as a child, even if they've been speaking, let's say, English their whole adult life. Um So, there's the So, that's one of the big themes of the book about how plasticity actually works. But, what interested me is this notion of of breakthroughs. This is the part that I didn't put in the book, unfortunately, but this notion that sometimes, as, you know, in your 40s, you'll have a breakthrough, where suddenly something you've believed your whole life, something happens where you get a different view on it, and you say, "Wait a minute. Maybe this deep layer, this thing where I absolutely thought this is fundamentally how the world works, maybe that's not true. And all this other stuff falls apart in your internal model, and you're able to recast something. And um Have you ever taken the Landmark Forum? You ever done that? I know of it very well, but no. Okay, great. So, anyway, they talk about breakthroughs. That's um something that they try to get people to have, and it's a really stunning experience. What you know, we've all had in our lives. There's breakthroughs and say Let's Let's say you thought somebody did something to you or said something or whatever. And then you find out years later that's not actually what happened, and there was a misinterpretation of what This is the kind of thing that really um is is meaningful for changing our lives. And the reason I mention this is in the context of you saying in your 40s, can you still change? Happily, there are these deep things that happen where suddenly is you have an opportunity to change. And the And okay, so that's one thing, and the related issue that I want to say is this is what's happening to us now during COVID-palooza. We are all knocked off of our hamster wheels. We are Suddenly, our internal models Remember I talked about how our you know, our whole lives we sort of make this model of exactly what's going on. All of a sudden, we're all kicked off this this path of least resistance. And we're having to refigure out everything afresh. And there's a lot of stress and depression and anxiety. It's a terrible time for essentially everybody. But the one tiny silver lining that is worth emphasizing is that it forces our brains to rethink our models. Everything about, you know, where I don't know, where are you going to get these supplies? How are you going to get food in your fridge? Where do you get the toilet paper? All this stuff. To more creative things about, okay, well, jeez, how do I How do I thrive from here, given that my shop has closed or my, you know, employment has ended or what You're like, what do I do now? And it's It's forcing a creativity. It's forcing the brain to rethink things in a way that is actually, despite all the lousy stuff, really good for the brain to to build new bridges. I can hear people in the comments screaming about um not being heard, not being understood. You don't know what they're going through. Um what what do you say to that? What I say is I actually do hear you. I hear all the crappy stuff about what's going on, and let's all agree on that and put that over here. And I'm saying that's this extra bit that is I mean, everything has a silver lining, and that's the that's the one to to this. Just as an example, I mean, from the first moments of lockdown, I started seeing the stuff where people were, I don't know, using their banks of 3D printers to print hospital masks or playing bingo across the apartment complex in these apartments where everyone's, you know, in their own apartment but shouting what's going on across the other thing, and everyone's having fun in this community. Or there's a friend of mine who plays uh tennis, and suddenly everything got all the tennis courts got shut down. And so, she started calling people on Airbnb, wealthy people who have a tennis court on their property, and say, "Hey, can I just Airbnb your tennis court for an hour?" You know, stuff like but it's just like it's really creative. It's so smart to do that. It's so There's new models for everything going on. And um so, despite all the lousy stuff, which we all agree on, uh it's it's it's the one thing that's coming out of it is that that part of it is good for your brain because it's forcing you to rethink deep parts of your internal model. This is a another fascinating part of the brain, and I'm super excited to to be putting out these ideas with you here where you can slap me down if I'm out of my mind. Um so, the I think a lot about the quote, "It doesn't matter what you look at, it matters what you see." And I find that getting people to focus on what's good about this time is critically important. Like the bad is going to present itself. You're going to be clubbed over the head with the bad. You're not going to be able to avoid it. But, if you're looking for the bad, you're going to be overwhelmed by it. If you're looking for the good, it's going to shift your focus, and now you're going to start to Okay, cool. Well, I can actually make something out of this. Is that really the reticular activating system? Like is that Is your brain designed to amplify what you already believe? Um it is absolutely the case that we see what what your internal model is already built to detect. It's more than the reticular activating system. It's the whole principle of how the system operates. And that's why you can gain expertise in something. So, if I am you know, Itzhak Perlman, I hear somebody playing the the violin, and I hear the notes a little flat, and they're doing it. But like, I, not being Itzhak Perlman, would not would not hear any of that stuff cuz I'm not um I'm not even sensitive to those kinds of details. So, yes, we are always seeing what we've already built up our expertise in um to see. And I agree with you. I mean, part of you know, I mentioned earlier we're this massively social species, where a lot of the wiring of our brain comes about from other brains. But this is what's so useful is you have a way of seeing the world, I way of seeing the world, everyone we know has this. But when we communicate, we get to share that. Like Hey, but Tom, what if you looked at it this way? Hey, David, what if you looked at it this way? And that's so unbelievably useful for break That's really our only chance, unfortunately I think, is other people telling you People we love and trust telling you, "Hey, wait, what if you looked at it this other way?" Matters massively cuz in answer to the thing you said, which I think is totally right, I'm probably in isolation never going to be smart enough to look at it a different way than I'm used to looking at it. You know, it's interesting, going back to that idea of um breakthroughs and and And I I I will introduce the idea of sort of reinventing yourself. Um I'm curious to know if there are specific things that you do as a scientist to stay relevant, if staying relevant is even something you care about, or no, no, no, I want to niche out and just go like hard, hard, hard down this one path that I've chosen. Um as an entrepreneur, I've it started out accidental and has now become somewhat intentional. I have accidentally reinvented myself sort of every 8 to 12 years, and dude, the way that you're able to see things other people can't see because you have experience in a completely different industry. Um like even now, I'll get my teammates pitching technological solutions, and I'm like, I used to run a technology company. So, I know and understand things about the pain of creating technological solutions that you're very much discounting or just straight blind to. Or coming into the comic book industry now, having worked in um nutrition and doing distribution to retail outlets at a global scale, you see sort of how ridiculously broken the comic book distribution industry is. Um do you do things like that to try to like stay fresh? Yeah. I mean, this is one of the joys of of science is that you can get involved in very different areas of things. So, as you know, you know, I I do things from neuro law all the way to things like sensory substitution, how to feed new data streams into the brain and create new senses. These are very different. I study issues about synesthesia. I study things about time perception. And each of these, I hope, brings things to one another. And then, as you know, I I spun off a company from my lab 5 years ago. Um and you know, the good news also on a personal level, by the way, is that I didn't know anything about running a company, and so I my my learning curve was so steep. All the vocabulary, all the way I had to run a board meeting, all this stuff. And that's such a pleasure to always be on the steepest part of the learning curve. Because if one is not reinventing oneself in these ways, then you become really good at being, you know, whatever, a an insurance salesman or a pool repair guy or whatever things, and and you never get that kind of challenge. Um yeah, so I could not agree with you more that there's always things that can be ported over from various things. Yeah, I think looking people looking for ways to do that, like going way out of their way to do that, and that goes back to what you're saying about the nuns and like staying fresh and pushing yourself and having constant challenges. And staying social was one of the things that I took away from the nun thing. Um let's talk about Neosensory, your your company. This [ __ ] is so interesting to me. 100% the second the Buzz can read like infrared, I'm about it. Um what is what what are new senses? How do we actually pull that [ __ ] off? Great. We can already read infrared. So So So what we did though? That is. It's on the market. It's on the market? I can buy it today? Yeah, yeah, yeah. Get out. I knew I could do the sound. I didn't know the infrared was available. What you do is you So I should I should clarify. Um what we have is the Buzz, which is the wristband with vibratory motors on it, and then we have a series of blog posts on if you want to do infrared, you buy these parts, you solder this, you do it this, here's the API, and it's done. So all the instructions are there to do the infrared thing. But you just said I have to solder something myself. Yes, it'll be good for your brain to do, Tom. Yeah. That's true. You got me, you got me. Um yeah, so so the company is uh you know, this thing I spun off from my lab cuz I got really interested in this idea about how the brain takes in information given that it's totally dark and silent inside the brain. All you have is these spikes. So the question is, can you feed information into the brain via unusual pathways? So So we made this this wristband with with vibratory motors on it, and we can capture any kind of information and feed it onto the skin, which climbs up the arm and up the spinal cord into the brain. And the brain can figure out how to make the right sorts of correlations to come to have a direct perceptual experience of it. So, yeah, as you said, the main thing we're doing is for people with hearing loss, we capture sound and turn that into patterns of vibration, and they come to hear the auditory world. And not only can they come to hear it, but they have a a direct perceptual experience of it, the way that you would think of hearing through your ears, which of course seems totally natural to you, but of course you had to learn how to use your ears. It's just spikes that are getting sent to the brain from that very complicated machinery. Um we can transfer that to this other part of the body, and then the brain can figure out how to hear with that. Could a person wearing that understand their own name? Oh, yeah. So, I could say Tom or David, and they can actually tell the difference? Oh, yeah. Yeah, well, because your name is something you're overtrained on. What's more difficult with the wristband is to understand, let's say, an audio book with lots of detail, but your name is an easy one. The reason it's hard to do the audio book is because you've only got the skin of the wrist with the wristband. Originally, we built a vest that was covered in vibratory motors, and with that, actually, you could learn you could do lots of good stuff. Um uh you know, really really understand the details of language further, but it turns out that's totally impractical in terms of product market fit, but everyone's wanting to do the the wristband. So, it's slightly lower resolution. But but what people get out of it is a total environmental awareness, as in, "Oh, there's a dog barking. My baby's crying. Somebody's calling my name. There's a knock on the door. There's a a doorbell." You know, all the stuff around you that we take for granted in the world really helps if you can pick up on that. But what we've been doing is um just recently, now that we've been on the market for about 6 months, is having our customers take questionnaires about their private internal subjective experience. In other words, is it is it actually like hearing, or is it you know when when a dog barks do you feel like oh there's a buzzing on my wrist that must be a dog where's the dog or is instead like oh there's dog barking somewhere and and and it's the latter after some number of months it just becomes the latter like oh yeah I hear a dog barking somewhere even though it's coming into your brain through a different pathway. Dude that is so crazy and so exciting and I've heard you contrast this with neural link which is my other sort of fetish I'm super excited but I think you're right in terms of invasiveness I would not be an early adopter of something that requires them to cut open my skull but this the idea of the vibratory stuff becoming a sense I there's I don't know an immediate sort of recognition of what that would be like partly from video games in that you in the controllers I don't think so much about the controller vibrating in my hand as much as I think I'm being shot cuz I always play first-person shooter games and so it's like okay [ __ ] I'm being shot where am I being shot from because you're you're picking up all these cues from the the controller so I definitely get that what are the what are the senses that you guys are working on so we have sound we have infrared what else? Yeah we've got about I got about 20 experiments going so one thing I presented at TED a while ago is this thing with drones where you can feel the pitch yaw roll orientation and heading of the drone on your skin so you're becoming one with the drone it's like you're stretching your skin up to there so you can learn how to fly in the fog or the dark because it's an extension of you we've done things with you know just getting Twitter data or stock market data where you feel like oh yeah oh is oil's crashing or whatever the stocks you're following that kind of thing we're doing things with for example continuous glucose monitoring for people with diabetes you know currently they've got a glucose patch and then they have to look at their cell phone to understand what they're thinking but if you can feel what's going on with your blood sugar level, that makes you much more responsive to it. Um we're doing things with a uh some a team recently did this thing with air pollutants. Um so, you can feel the VO the um you know, the the what do you call it? The the the the particulate matter in the air. Um Was it PM2.5 or something? I forgot what it was. I have no idea. You can make it up and I'd never know. Uh what what How are you guys taking in the data? So, what we're doing is we So, we built the Buzz, which as I said has a microphone for people with hearing loss. But, we also have an open API. We have SDKs for all these platforms. So, you can feed in any data stream you want via Bluetooth, for example. And so, we are just finishing a developer contest where 70 teams applied from all around the world, and people are feeding in different data streams to it because we set it up so it's super easy to do. Did you offer a cash prize? Yeah, we have a cash prize, exactly. And um yeah. And but by the way, it's not that much. It's a thousand bucks, which isn't really that much, but the level of enthusiasm we got about people who are already waiting and willing to do this is so extraordinary. So, um Do you know in in some of the more extreme cases, or even in like the infrared one, what are you using? Is that Are you using a cell phone? Have you guys developed something? Like, what is the the mechanism by which you detect the infrared? So, what you have is a little um infrared detector, which you can buy for about three bucks. We put it on a Yeah, for example, the simplest way is we just put it on a breadboard, we put some wires, and so on. And we put that right next to the Buzz. Um and that just talks to it either directly or via Bluetooth. So, you know, as you're walking around the world, you're just sensing if there's infrared. For example, the first day we ever built this, this was already a year and a half ago, but I was walking um between two buildings in the dark and suddenly I felt a bunch of infrared. And so I thought, "What is that?" So I started following my wrist and it took me to a a building with, uh, an infrared camera with infrared LEDs. So it's a night vision camera, totally invisible to you under normal circumstances, but it was completely obvious to me that it was there, that I was getting radiated with infrared light. And, um, you know, you can see I mean, for example, temperature you can set up different wavelengths of of infrared cuz there are many different lengths. Um, but, you know, if we have it measuring temperature, I can walk through a parking lot and tell which cars have just recently parked versus which cars have been there for a while cuz the engine block is hot if they've just recently gotten there. I went to the library with it. I can actually tell on the display shelf which books have been recently picked up cuz there's an infrared signature. out. Yeah! Yeah, I can tell which seat was recently sat in. There were two chairs there. This one has a hot signature, this one does not. Yeah, it's weird how much how much information is there in the infrared range, but it's completely invisible to us. It's not to all animals, you know, lots of it is snakes see in infrared range and so on. Um, but our eyes just aren't engineered for that and so it's totally invisible. And, you know, we may have talked about this before, Tom, but I am so interested in the whole spectrum and it's going to take me a lifetime to explore the spectrum, but I feel like The the spectrum of potential inputs? No, uh, sorry, uh, of electromagnetic radiation. So the part that we call visible light is this very tiny little piece of it, but everything, radio waves, gamma rays, microwaves, all this stuff is the same stuff. It's electromagnetic radiation. It's just that we can't see it. It's invisible to us. But it's easy to set up detectors to be able to see this stuff and so I feel like there are probably several Nobel Prizes hidden in the different parts of the spectrum and I'm going to spend my lifetime exploring different stuff, but now what's cool is we've got this developer community that's building and building that's exploring this. One of the things, I can't remember if we ever talked about this before, but just an example of the kind of things that can be discovered is I have a a a friend who runs a satellite company and they view things in the microwave range. Um just a different wavelength of light. And uh and what they found quite accidentally is that you can tell if water is drinkable or polluted just based on how it looks in the microwave range. Yeah. What? Super simple thing, but no one ever knew that before. But all you have to do is start looking and you start finding stuff like that. And so this is the kind of thing I'm so excited about. And by the way, some people ask me a question. I just want to address this. Some people say well, if you're going to take in all this information, why don't you just feed it into an artificial neural network cuz they're so smart and they can do pattern recognition. Why don't you do that? The reason is that has no notion of what is meaningful to a human. So I am a human. I'm walking around seeing the the small part of the spectrum that is useful to humans. And I'm now feeling another part of the spectrum. And it's the correlations that I can discover there that matter to us. Just as an example, you know, like with the stock market, someone says, well, why don't you just have an artificial neural network look for these patterns? The reason is I as a human can walk down the street and I see, wow, you know, I just noticed everyone's wearing these new shoes. But also everyone's kind of depressed about this COVID thing. And also, you know, I know that this company is laying off 10,000 of their employees. And you know, I just I have all this knowledge AS A HUMAN. AND BY the way, I'm detecting something about the stock market. It's that combination that matters. It's not just looking for patterns. It's looking for patterns with what matters to humans. It's interesting. Um I read what you're saying I guess maybe with just with different words, which is it might be actually useful to put everything through that um the neural network and and have that spit out the things that it's going to spit out. But this to me is is more exciting and more interesting in that I get to determine what matters to me. I get to decide sort of what bands, you know, I'm playing with, what parts of the spectrum. Um that is so interesting. The the one that really got me and I thought, "Ooh, this is [ __ ] interesting." is vision on my back. Like being able to like how much you can actually begin to sense, "Oh, it's it's somebody they're they're moving. They're actually moving towards me. They're moving towards me quite quickly. Um they're on my left. They're on my right. They're big. They're small." Like that's crazy. And that gets so exciting and the thought that this stuff is actually here now. So, I wrote a comic book, which I'm actually wearing the shirt cuz I figured this would come up about people that augment themselves with technology. So, it's set 30 years in the future and it's cuz the the idea behind the story is that the world will bifurcate into two types of people, which is something I stole completely from I think it's Fahrenheit um 451, where he's saying, "I- if you say that you can't read anymore, the world will split." And you've got the people that get behind that notion and you've got people who live out in the wilderness cuz they're just not prepared to give up on reading. And I thought, "That's really [ __ ] interesting." And this idea of bifurcation where you hit these moments where the world just splits. And I think technology is going to be one of them. Certainly when you get into Neuralink, you're going to have people that are just there's a sense of purity and they don't they don't want you [ __ ] with the human body and it's divine and you know, just don't mess with it. And then you're going to have people like me that as soon as it's safe, like I'm going hard for that technology. Um so, augmenting myself such that I can read um take one that you talked about, which is magnetic north. Like even just being able to read magnetic north, like that's cool. That is so cool. And this was actually I can't remember, maybe 20 years or something this has been going on. And when I say going on, I mean it's a very tiny little thing, but there's this company called Feel Space and they you know, they make this belt that just vibrates in the direction of magnetic north. So, as I turn, I'm always feeling it on my body. And um and yeah, that you know, people there's actually two interesting things that come out of that. One is that people develop a new qualia, in other words, a a subjective sense. It's not just, oh, I know where north is, but instead it's the way that things fit together. If I'm walking around like, oh yeah, that part of the building and that over there. People have a better sense of that. But the other thing that struck me as interesting, and I mentioned this in the book, is that the experimenters running the study would ask the subjects who'd been wearing the belt for a couple months, you know, what's it like and blah blah. And there were a lot of things that the subjects felt they just couldn't communicate. But the subjects could communicate this to each other quite well, because it was a shared experience, and that's what language is all about is shared experiences. And so, when they say, you know, this is like the you know, seeing a new color or whatever, when they were able to, you know, let's say you and I got something where we were able to see a new color. We could talk about it each other, but but with nobody else. So, what I suggest in the in Liveware is that we may actually be on the cusp of not just a bifurcation, but uh you know, multiple pathways coming out. Where depending on what you're using these new senses for, let's say I'm doing stock market and you're doing Twitter and someone else is doing whatever, you know, that uh that we have a very different internal experience, and there's no way to communicate with each other. So, I say to you, wow, Tom, you know, I I just I think Google is going up and Apple is going down, and that feels a very weird way to me, and I try to explain to you, you'd have no ability to understand. Even if you pretended to understand, you wouldn't really get what I'm saying. And if you said, okay, look, I don't know, but I can tell you what my infrared experience is like, and I wasn't doing that, I would not really understand what you're meaning. Just like just like if you try to explain vision to a person who's born blind, they there's no way they can ever understand you. Or try to explain purpleness to a person who's born colorblind, there's no way for them to actually get what you're talking about. Yeah, man. It is uh it's intriguing. Now, one thing I'm really curious about is in the book you talk about how dreaming may be a defense against other um regions of the brain taking over that while we sleep, which is really interesting. And I'm curious as we begin to augment, what areas of the brain will be given up? Because if nothing is sitting unused now, if I take in the stock market and and for anybody watching, I highly encourage you, don't take in Twitter. Don't Don't get the qualia of a Twitter feed. That strikes me as a very bad idea. Yeah, I totally agree. But what regions of the brain are going to be usurped? Yeah. Well, let me let me say two things just for for listeners to our conversation who don't know what the dreaming hypothesis is. It's just that you know, what I realized was the speed of takeover when senses go. So, I mentioned earlier, you know, if you're born blind, your visual cortex gets taken over. What But I think the probably the most shocking thing that we've discovered is I mean, as a field, is the speed of this takeover. So, it turns out if you blindfold somebody and stick them in the scanner, you start seeing activity in their visual cortex pretty rapidly. Like, within an hour you can start detecting hearing and touch registering in the visual cortex, which means the whole system, as I said earlier, is sprung tight, ready for takeovers and moves. And so, what my student Don and I realized is that, you know, when the planet rotates into darkness every night, obviously we're talking about in evolutionary time, not recently. The it's pitch black, and you can still hear and touch and taste in the dark, but you can't see in the dark. And so, that puts the visual system at a disadvantage. And what we realized is, given the speed of takeover, that means the visual system is going to get taken over at night time. And so, the right way to combat that is every 90 minutes, you just blast activity into the occipital lobe back here, and that's what defends it from takeover. And that, we propose, is the whole circuitry and everything about dreaming is why we have that every 90 minutes during the night. We're just blasting information there. And of course, if you're a sighted person, you experience that as vision, even though your eyes are closed. You see whatever bizarre thing you're you're seeing. So, um and it's obviously related to what you've done during the day and your whole level of experience is on um And by the way, as a side note, if you're a blind person, you still have dreams. It's just that now your dreams involve, okay, I'm walking around the house and the furniture is moved, and then I feel a bear over here, and you just some bizarre thing like that. But that's because their occipital cortex has been taken over by touch and hearing and so on. Um anyway, that's the the dreaming activation theory. Um Now, what you asked is about if we build new senses like, you know, stock market, infrared, and so on. What gets taken over? Here's the thing, the brain is really good at sharing territory. And one thing that is unknown right now is how many senses we're going to be able to add. I mean, we already know we can add a sixth sense, but can we add a seventh, an eighth, a ninth, a tenth? We just don't know. It may be that um what what eventually happens, let's imagine that, you know, I'm wearing two buzzers and two on my legs and a belt and whatever, you know, maybe by the time I've added a bunch of senses, my vision starts to get a little bit worse or you know, a little bit excuse me, a little bit blurrier or something like that. We don't we don't actually know yet. Um but in general, the brain is really good at sharing stuff. You know, I teach medical students, and they always say things like, "Oh gosh, if I learn one more fact, something else is going to fall out." But happily, the brain does not work that way. Um instead, everything is built on what you already know, and so um we might be able to add lots of senses without any noticeable degradation. So, if the brain doesn't work that way that one more fact is going to have to take the place of something else, walk me through what is the process of remembering? So, I'm very frustrated by my memory and I find that I have to read in what I call reading swarms. So, I'll encounter an idea. I don't worry about memorizing it cuz I know I'm going to read on the same subject a bunch of different things so that it just sort of gets repeated and that's sort of the only way for me to solidify this stuff. Um what what is the mechanism of memory transferring from short-term to long-term specifically? Yeah, you know, this is still a very active area in neuroscience. We don't actually know the answers yet. We know a ton of data on this. Um You mentioned this thing about transferring from short-term to long-term. So, I'll just mention something about that, which is the the theory has always been the entire time I've been in neuroscience, the theory has always been what happens is you take something in, it lives in short-term memory and that's actually kept by um active neurons. So, so if I say I say, "Hey Tom, can you, you know, um go over there and get me uh uh if you wouldn't mind get me a glass of water with three ice cubes and this and a Coke and whatever." And you say, "Okay." And you keep that in short-term memory. It's it's active in your head. But long-term memory is something that gets consolidated later into the structure of what's going on with the neurons. And um and what we know is that the hippocampus, this area of the brain, is involved in that consolidation. If you remove the hippocampus, you can still have the short-term memory just fine, but then you forget it. You can't quite turn into long-term memory. And there have been, you know, many clinical cases where someone had both their hippocampi removed and that's what happens is they sort of live in this window of 15 minutes. And by the way, we've all experienced it. You experience it every morning because you wake up and you have some dream that's so vivid and you, you know, tell your wife like, "Oh my god, this is what happened." But but 50 but it's it's like impossible to hold on to because the hippocampus actually shut down during dreaming and so that never gets consolidated in something. So you just can't hold on to it after a little bit. Um So that is the sort of canonical idea of how memory works and then what I suggest is it's actually getting burned down deeper and deeper. But I will say even this canonical theory has question marks around it. Um a team recently showed that instead of short-term and then gets transferred long-term, you might be getting both at the same time but this takes longer to develop and it's not related to Anyway, it's not going to It's not going to go into details. All I want to say is it's 2020 and we still don't understand tons about how it works. And I And I want want to say one other thing which is people look at what's going on in the field of artificial neural networks, machine learning, AI and so on and they think, "Wow, that's amazing. Like really great stuff going on. It must be that we've got this all figured out." That stuff is sort of a baby toy model where the idea is you say, "Okay, we're going to take neurons and we're going to connect them together in synapses or connections and we're going to just change the strength of those connections." And you can do really great stuff with that but that's actually a a bifurcation from neuroscience and people are exploring that. We've got lots of great stuff coming out of that but neuroscience is very different from that. You don't just have neurons and the connections between cells. You have parameters all the way down, the distribution of channels in the membrane, the biochemical cascades going on inside the neurons, all the way down to the nucleus and where which genes are getting expressed and so on. There's a million things that are changing in real neurons and all of that is part of the story of memory. Um so that's the short version. Yeah, the short version sounds crazy complicated. If you had to put a number to where we're at in terms of understanding exactly what is going on in the brain, are we at um 2%? We at 30%? Like how much do we understand? I I love the question but I think it's impossible to put a number cuz you can't until you know what 100% looks like, it's hard to know. Um I mean, what's clear is we are at the foot of the mountain. Absolutely. We know so little. You know, I can't remember if I mentioned this to you before, but in 2006, I wrote the uh the cover article in Discover magazine called uh 10 unsolved questions of the brain. And what's fascinating to me is that 14 years later in 2020, they're all exactly as unsolved as they were in 2006. Um and so, you know, these are very basic things like um why do your brain sleep and dream? Although hopefully we've my latest made a little progress on that, but you know, what is intelligence? I mean, we can clearly measure it. The IQ test measures something going on and it's correlated with all kinds of things in life. Um but we don't know what intelligence is. Is it the ability to squelch distractors or generate new possibilities or you know, 50 other hypotheses. Um what is consciousness, of course, is a giant one in neuroscience. Like, how in the world do you stick together 86 billion neurons and you get something like the redness of red or the taste of feta cheese or the smell of cinnamon or the beauty of a sunset. Like, we don't even have we don't even know we don't know how to start a point on this kind of stuff. There's so many questions that um So so that's why I know that we're at the that the very foot of the mountain. And it's funny because science always goes like that where you have to spend your life in something to really recognize how little we how little we know how how big the ocean is out there. Cuz the cuz you know, if when people I don't know, when they're freshmen or something, they start with the neuroscience textbook and they say, "Wow, look, it's an 800-page textbook full of stuff. We clearly know a lot about the brain." And of course, things are written to sort of act as though we know a lot about the brain, but um precisely because it's locked in this armored bunker plating of the skull, it's been very hard to get at. And we've been building technologies to see inside there better and better, but our best technologies are our brain imaging is still very crude. Um, yeah. You can't imagine how many times I have both thought of and quoted you talking about how the brain is encased in total darkness and silence. That was one of those sort of paradigm shift moments for me where I realized cuz you know given sort of my um pension for science fiction and you know me talking about doesn't matter what you look at him as what you see and the Matrix comes up as my favorite movie of all time and so people ask you know do you think that we're living in the Matrix and I don't and look I've no reason to think we are or we aren't but the brain itself is creating a virtual reality for you. And that to me like becomes very interesting and I'm obsessed with this notion of what I call the physics of being human which are just like you you every human sort of has these right? Um Do you as a neuroscientist do you think about sort of what the core functioning elements of the brain like if there were just a few things it's like the brain does this you know whether that's um process data or it you're we're an active species and we are propelled towards pleasure and away from pain like do you have sort of a few key things that you think really um define what it means to be human? Yeah, I I think well oh uh to define what it means to be human is slightly different. Sorry I thought I was starting to answer the uh what the brain is doing what the principles are I'll take that. Okay, I mean so this is essentially why I wrote Live Wire because I felt like the principles that that I was thinking about are not expressed anywhere so I wanted to really make this argument that what I think the brain is doing from its dark control center is figuring out what is the information coming in through whatever senses you happen to have what is the information coming in? How do I correlate that? What can I do with that? And then how can I drive this body? And of course those it's all in a feedback loop so as soon as you know something there's some signal over here so then I generate the command to the extraocular muscles to look over there, and that gives me more information cuz it puts that on the, you know, high-resolution photoreceptors at the central vision, and so on. Like, there's all this interaction between what I do with motor output and input. And that I think is fundamentally what the brain is doing. And what I did is I sewed together all of the data and all the arguments about how striking this is, how good the brain is at saying, "Okay, I'm going to drive whatever kind of body I find myself in." Doesn't matter. Um, and I'm going to figure out whatever by that. Um, what do you what do you mean? Yeah, I'll give an example. Um, take take Faith the dog, which is this dog who I saw once, um, who happened to be born without front legs. So, she walks bipedally on her back legs like a human. One leg at a time or does she hop? Um, uh, she uh, it's actually it's sort of both. I mean, she goes one leg at a time and then she hops also. She she does both. And you can see films of her online. The thing is, I really that got me thinking like, my god, could all dogs do this? And almost certainly all dogs could do it. They just they're not motivated enough to do it. It's presumably hard. But she walks around just fine on her back legs this way. Because the important lesson here is dog brains are not pre-programmed to drive dog bodies. Instead, they figure out, "Oh, I need to get to the food over there. I need to get to the I need to get to my mother." Like, whatever. I got to figure out how to operate this this machinery. And so, it just figures out what to do with it. Well, one of the example yeah, I mean, because you read the book, you know, near the end of the book I give this comparison of of the the Mars rover. So, like, you know, take the Mars rover Spirit, which is a multi-billion-dollar piece of equipment. We got it all the way to the red planet. It rolled around. It did its thing. It did an awesome job. And then it got stuck with its right front wheel on the Martian soil, and it died. And you compare that to a wolf who gets its leg caught in a trap and it chews its leg off and it figures out, "Okay, now what do I do with three legs? Okay, yeah, here's how I do it." And it figures out how to walk on three legs. Why? Because it's motivated, because it has a yen for survival and for getting to food and getting back to its pack and all that stuff. And so it just figures out how to rewire its machinery to get to drive that new body. And of course, if you could I mean, one of my deep interest is how can we build machines starting now that take advantage of what's going on in the world of neuroscience and you know, so you build a Mars rover that chews its [ __ ] wheel off and says, "Okay, now I'm going to figure out how to work with these other wheels." So, that's the kind of thing that um Talk to me. You You go into this a little bit in the book. How far off are sort of nanorobots and one of the things Oh god, neural dust that you talked about that I thought, "What the [ __ ] I've never heard of this stuff." How How real is it? What's the exciting stuff? Yeah, the whole The whole point of all of these is people are trying to figure out how to get more information into and out of the brain. So, as I said, right now we have fMRI brain imaging. It's really crude. Like a voxel, you know, three-dimensional pixel in the brain, you're measuring millions of neurons. So, you say, "Oh, there's more activity here." But you're You're not seeing the details of what's going on. So, everyone's eager to figure out how can we do this better? So, obviously there's things like EEG, also extremely crude cuz they're all the way on the outside of the skull. So, you can stick electrodes in the brain and actually measure what individual neurons are doing. You can also drive them and this is what Neuralink is doing. It's just doing it at a higher resolution. There's nothing new about what they're doing except they're sewing the electrodes into the tissue so you get higher resolution and it's wireless the transmission. So, sorry, I don't mean to say there's nothing new about what they're doing. It's terrific. It's tremendous. But But what I mean is you're just measuring the activity. But um what what other people are trying to do, for example, neural dust is put in a whole fleet of these very tiny little transponders that float around and and stick on the uh you know inside the skull but on the outside of the brain and each of them is measuring the activity and can also put activity in and so it's like having an EEG on the outside but super high resolution detail on the inside. get it there? Um you the idea is you would just inject it and you'd have to engineer it so it can cross the blood brain barrier to get into the brain. Are we able I I I don't know what what size does something have to be to cross a blood brain barrier? Really small although possibly bigger than you'd expect. What what the what it takes to cross the blood brain barrier is you just need the right FedEx labels on these things. You just need the right labels that say oh yeah let me in okay great and it goes in. So um And we can manufacture things that small? Good question possibly not at the moment but in three years yes. So this group at Berkeley's been working on they're doing an awesome job. What they're doing right now is testing all this in the peripheral nervous system right now and the goal is to eventually get it into the central nervous system into the where the brain and spinal cord are sitting. Wait are people injecting nano robots for lack of a better word now? Yeah now the neural dust isn't exactly a nano robot instead it's just a tiny little transponder just send it says hey here's what I'm measuring and it just sends it out wirelessly. Yes That's being injected into living organisms that yeah I'm careful not to use that word but that right now. Yes right now they've been doing that for a few years now actually. Jesus. Yeah yeah. And what I propose in the book is a few other methods by which we can do this but it's all very far off but what that would look like I think instead of injecting electrodes I mean I am a super enthusiastic about what Neuralink is doing but there are other methods that wouldn't require drilling holes all over the head and injecting stuff and and that has to do with you know actually getting nano robots into the into the brain tissue and by this I actually mean little robots which are engineered to, you know, swim and invade a neuron and detect when there's big calcium influx meaning that the neuron is just active and then send out a signal and you probably build it with a mesh network where each little robot talks to other robots and you get the signal out to the outside of the brain that way and there are a lot of you know, a lot of cool things that can be done there. Um you can also stick little nano robots into the blood vessels because your your brain of course is shot through with blood vessels. No one ever pays attention to this but I mean every cubic millimeter brain tissue has has blood cells going to it so you could uh blood vessels going to it so you could actually stick tiny tiny robots in there so that they're sort of listening to the electrical activity just on the other side of the vessel. Woah. Um there are million things that need to be solved there though like making sure that you don't give the person a stroke because of a of clogging something up. So anyway, there's lots of future things but what I think this means is that in 20 I mean I'll go ahead and put a number down. I think by 2040 there's no reason why we won't be able to to read and write from a huge portion of the cells in the brain. To actually hear what's going on and that is when neuroscience is actually going to get really interesting because right now we're all drumming up theories and stuff based on very wispy data that we have. But once we can actually read, oh yeah, here's what Tom's 86 billion neurons are doing right now in real time when I say this sentence or I ask him to think about his uh you know, his mom or think about whatever like when we can actually measure that and then do massive computational analysis of that offline then we'll start getting somewhere. Woah. Man, that that starts to get really really exciting when I think about you know, getting that real-time feedback and obviously this stuff is going to start with fixing problems. You're not going to get people trying to just talk to their cell phone in the early days, but um I think that that is really really exciting when you start thinking about all the problems, Alzheimer's being one that would be just extraordinary if we could be in there and see the early signs of things that you could try a fix and actually see if it's working. You know, so much of this is um either you're using a crude instrument and thusly aren't getting great data, or there's something that can give you relatively good data, but it's expensive, or even just the ass ache of going in. Like I remember at one point I had the elasticity of my arteries um scanned using ultrasound, almost certainly. And so looking at arterial flexibility and things like that. And it's like even I, like I know that that exists, I know it's important, but it's like, ah, you know, it's a pain in the ass, find somebody that'll do it, go in and do it. Um but getting to the point where we could get that kind of real-time diagnostic feedback is is really thrilling. Oh, yeah. It's going to change everything. It makes me feel like, you know, I mean, I'm I've spent my whole adult life working my butt off in neuroscience, but sometimes I feel like, my god, if I could just wait 20 years until that kind of technology exists and then just say, oh, yeah, now we're just going to see what is actually happening instead of generating all the hypotheses about, hey, maybe this, maybe that. Uh it's just it's going to change the field. The field's going to in exponentially increase so rapidly at that point. Mhm. You know, one thing I found interesting with this concept of the brain is half-baked and it isn't specifically designed. You were you were mentioning dogs specifically, but, you know, amputations and people remapping. Oh, one thing, I can't remember if we talked about this in the last one, so for anybody that's sort of doubling up on these episodes, if I'm repeating myself, forgive me, but I find this so [ __ ] interesting. Um the the notion that things like um, the the homunculoid map uh [ __ ] Homunculus. Homunculus. Homunculus, yeah. And that if I remember right, the genitals are right next to the feet, which may explain foot fetish. And then um, also that if you get an amputated foot, that the experience of an orgasm will spill over into the foot because it's you know, phantom limb and that the body's basically remapping itself. Um, as we look forward into the future and what what do you see as our ability to augment the body like do you know who Hugh Herr is? Yeah, yeah, yeah. [ __ ] can sprint all out with bionic or he has people that can sprint all out with bionic legs. I can't remember if he was the one actually doing it. But I remember like that [ __ ] is crazy. How far are we going to be able to push physical augmentations for people that have, you know, lost a limb? Yeah. So here's the thing. So as you know, the argument I make is that your brain will just figure out, oh okay, you don't have that limb anymore, fine. Oh, I I have attached this new thing, great, fine. And this is so stunning. For example, they've done this in monkeys, they haven't done it in humans yet, but you can get a monkey, you you hook up electrodes into the the motor cortex in a monkey and it can learn how to control a robotic arm that is a third arm. So it can control its own arms and it control a third robotic arm with its motor cortex. It just figures out like, oh, this is how I send commands here and that's how I send send commands there. In humans, they do this with people who are paralyzed, you put an electrode array into the motor cortex and they can't move their body at all, but they can control a robotic arm beautifully. I mean, just smoothly and beautifully and grab things and put things in their own mouth and so on. So what this illustrates is it's really not that hard for the brain to figure out, oh okay, wait, what commands do I need to send? And it's just like learning how to ride a bicycle, you know, you sort of think command and it does the wrong thing and then you think it again, you know, you try, you get visual feedback and then eventually you can control it really well. Um And so, what I think is that this will increasingly become the case as we get ways of getting information into the brain better and better, starting with Neuralink, which is, you know, right now, in the context of what I just said, it's sort of a crude technology, given the idea of getting nano robots in there or something. But, the idea is um we will stop treating this as just our body, but having other things that are hooked up to us that we can control with our thoughts, exactly as you control your leg with your thoughts, or you control your arm with your thoughts. It's not It's no different. It's just that you're saying, "Okay, I want this to happen." And then it happens. And so, you know, with the drone, you can do that with a robot 100 miles away. You can do that with a robot on the moon. And I think, you know, if we could who knows if we'd even want to, but if you could see society 500 or 1,000 years from now, I think it's going to be unrecognizable to us in terms of people don't just think of this as their self, but they've got a self that's that's greatly extended. All right. I mean, look at there Go ahead. Yeah. Well, I mean, just look at when you drive your car, right? You drive your car, and that kind of becomes all yourself because you can control it. You're controlling what happens with it. So, it becomes an extension of you. So, just imagine doing that not with your hands like this, but just with your thoughts like that, and extended separate from you. That That to me is where this gets exciting. And so, there's a button in front of you, and you can peek and see what the world looks like in 5,000 years. Do you press it? Uh I would totally press it, but I wouldn't expect it I wouldn't expect it to be a future that I am um that is recognizable or understandable to me. I thought you were going to say desirable, cuz you seem like you're worried about what you're going to see. I don't even know if it would be desirable. It would be Yeah, I mean, it would be undesirable in the sense that it wouldn't make any sense to me. It would just be like it would be so foreign to me that it's not clear that I mean, let's imagine a caveman gets pressed the button and see 2020. And he sees us on Skype and cell phones and this and that all technology around us. Would it be desirable to him? Who the heck knows? It's just It's not even understandable to him. It's like, "God, but what about dancing around the campfire and being with your girlfriend?" Or whatever the thing It's It's so different it's not clear that it would have any real meaningful relationship. Um yeah. It's interesting. To me, I push the button with enthusiasm. Uh I think you're right. I think it will be jarring in that it will be so devoid of where we're at now. And I think that people would have a very hard time making that leap cuz it It's just It's so different. And And people fear like relatively minor change. So, the notion of what we would see, which to me is almost certainly not going to be biological. So, you're going to flash forward cuz So, going back to Hugh Herr, like looking at So, guy loses both of his legs in a climbing accident, ends up build engineering his own replacements, and they're extraordinary. When you see him walk, like I really want people to imagine this. When you see him walk with pants and shoes on, you cannot tell. His gait is [ __ ] perfect. You can't tell that he's a double amputee. He's got people that are sprinting all out on on not not just the springy legs that you would see um you know, an Olympic sprinters who's a double amputee running on, but like legitimate they look like mechanical legs like you would expect on a cyborg, and they are sprinting. It's crazy. So, when I think about, "Okay, it starts with you're getting somebody sort of back to normal functioning." It very quickly, once you figure that one out, very quickly goes to adding I mean, you're already talking about adding, you know, perception to people and giving them additional senses. Like, I think this stuff is is it's just going to push and push and push. And the coolest definition of technology I've ever heard is technology is hope for a better future. And that's it. And that's why you can't stop it. This is why Elon Musk, despite trying to get everybody to back off AI, he just couldn't get them to see the dangers because technology is the hope of a better future. So, people think about, you know, AI being able to save grandma and, you know, being able to get rid of my knee pain or, you know, whatever they're fantasizing about. But, it's that hope. And so, dude, I I really think, barring catastrophe where we press the button and it's just a a [ __ ] World War III wasteland of radioactive nothingness, but barring that, like it I I can't see us being biological. Can you? We'll certainly be a lot less biological. I mean, already we put in artificial hearts, you can do all kinds of artificial parts of the body. You can do Hugh Herr type of prosthetics and so on. And yeah, I think as we get better and better into tapping into here, you'll have prosthetics that are not physically attached to you, but instead attached by Bluetooth or attached by the internet on some more distant. And so, yeah, the notion of what it is to be a human is is different. Um yeah, and I think it's going to be unrecognizable that way. Sorry, I'm stuck on this thing about hope for a better future cuz, you know, as you know, I live up in Silicon Valley and I feel like I wish it were that. I feel like more it's I feel like it's the How do I put this? It feels to me like what can be done is what gets done in technology. And so, taking AI as an example, is it that is it that some young person is thinking, I have hope for a better future? Or is they thinking, hey, wow, I can make a lot of money if I program this thing that looks at tweets and whatever. Um yeah, that's the That's the question. I wish it were just about hope for a better future as opposed to hope for making a bunch of money to uh you know, by making a some business that's plausible. You Uber for ice cream or whatever the thing is that the next person's making. Yeah, this is a massive can of worms that would be very interesting to have you back at some point to to go through because I am I am keenly interested in where the human mind goes, where it becomes pathological, um because I am I am a rabid capitalist. I recognize though the realities. This is why I'm obsessed with that notion of the physics of being human because humans metastasize at at both sides, right? So, you're going to metastasize whether you're left-leaning, you're going to metastasize whether you're right-leaning, and there's sort of pathology in the extremes, and everything comes down to that that friction. And the reason that I wrote the the comic's called Neon Future, and the the reason that I wrote it is I wanted to explore what that split looks like when you get two camps of people that that really are technology is a better future, but it's infused with people that are just trying to make what they can make, what they can make for a quick buck. Then you get people that are dogmatically in the opposite direction, and you know, they're saying no technology whatsoever, and that sort of push-pull gives you something that has, I hope, ethics in the middle, and you you get like wobbles for sure. Like Twitter to me seems like an obvious [ __ ] wobble. Can we just correct that [ __ ] real fast? Like people are like it is it is a I would never go spend time on Twitter because the level of just like unchecked vitriol is so bizarre. I don't understand it. So, whatever makes people want to steep in that, that's a feeling I don't enjoy. So, I'm just like, "Yo, I'm I'm I'm out. Don't don't count me in." But, You know what I've been You know what I've been wondering, Tom? I'm curious what your opinion is on this is what To what degree is the vitriol that we see on Twitter representative of what is going on? The reason I ask is because when I look at the you know, I see some innocent tweet and then someone on the left says something insane and someone on the right says something insane back to the person on the left and back and forth and and I think like, "Oh my god, if this is actually where our society is sitting right now, we are about to have a lot of bloodshed and it's really scary." I mean, I think we're really on the verge of something awful. But then if I get away from Twitter for a while, I feel like, "Okay, well, maybe it's not so bad." But I'm trying to figure What What's your opinion on whether it's reflecting something real or not? I I think it's reflecting something real. For the first time in my life, I feel like the smorgasbord of options now has to contain at least a small plate of civil war. Like it is a possibility. Now, I hope people don't scoop of the bowl of civil war. I really hope that we can avoid it. Uh I never thought I would speak a sort of political social commentary word in my life. Like it is not something I find intrinsically interesting. But for the first time in my life, I felt like a coward for not speaking up and saying, "Hey, like this If you want to know what um the pathology looks like, we are officially there." And it's like whatever camp you're in. Like I I don't care. Um both left and right seem like swear words to me. It's like you've got to understand you you must instantly right now fill your heart with love for the other side and find a way to like meet in a non-destructive place. And look, that's my value system and I know not everybody shares it. But it's like it's to me it's like a marriage. You're You're in the [ __ ] marriage. And so to me, when I got married, I said, "I'm never getting divorced." I don't even make jokes about divorce. I'm not joking. I don't tease my wife about divorce. I never say I'm going to leave you over that [ __ ] Nothing. Not for a laugh. Not to win an argument. Never [ __ ] ever. We call it the D-word. If I were talking to my wife right now, I wouldn't even say divorce. I would say the D-word. Because you just can't play. So it's like for me, the the idea of tipping over the table and saying [ __ ] society, we'll start this over. That is patently madness. And that that's like the the nuclear option in a marriage, which I'm not saying that marriages don't get to the point where it's really [ __ ] problematic that you have to address it. And I'm not even saying abstract, of course in a marriage divorce is an option if it gets so crazy. But when when you talk about actually shooting somebody, like that's where we got to reel this [ __ ] back. And we have to find a way to to be like, yo I have to coexist with these people. And so, this isn't about being right, this is about functioning well as a non-violent society. Yeah, well listen, I am I mean I am with you here and if we can link arms with others who think like us about how do we get people to not play this insane game of there's this issue about what you can see. Having a point of view requires having blind spots. And what we see all around us with the left and right screaming at each other is I you know I I I look at these threads going back and forth and it's like they don't understand what that person's trying to say and that person doesn't understand what that person is trying to say. And it really worries me. And so, I I don't know if you guys but I wrote an article in The Economist last year called does your brain care about other people? It depends. And what it's all about is these experiments I've done in my lab about about empathy from the brain's point of view, like how your brain cares about other people. I might have we might have talked about this once before, but We I don't think we have, but this is so powerful, you got to walk people through it. Okay, great. I'll I'll great. I'll The short version is we put people in the brain scanner, fMRI, and they see six hands on the screen, just just the hand. The computer do do do do do randomly picks a hand and you see that hand get stabbed with a syringe needle. And what happens is these pain areas in your brain come online. It's not your hand getting stabbed, it's someone else's hand, but that is the neural basis of empathy. You are seeing someone else's hand get stabbed and it feels awful to you. Okay, what we now do after we've measured that a bunch of times is we now add a one-word label to each hand, Christian, Jewish, Muslim, Scientologist, Hindu, Atheist. The computer picks a hand, you see the hand get stabbed and the question is, do you give a [ __ ] as much if it's not a member of your in-group? And the answer is you do not give a [ __ ] as much. That's um and so and of obviously we tested all types, you know, Christians, Muslims, Jews, everybody, including by the way Atheists. Atheists have exactly the same thing, they care when they see other Atheists hand get stabbed, they don't care as much about us. So it's not about it's not an indictment of religion, it's just about in-groups and out-groups and who you align with. And so one of the things that to my mind was the most maybe fruitful or interesting about this was we then discovered that if we tell people, okay, now the year is 2025 and these three religions have teamed up against these three religions. The computer obviously picks it randomly for each subject, but the key is now whatever religion you are, you have two allies suddenly. All of this is a one-word sentence saying that you you teamed up and these are your allies and these are your enemies. And now when you see your allies hands get stabbed, you don't uh sorry, you you care a little bit more than you did about them a minute ago because you're told they're on your team and that's all it takes. So what this got me thinking about was the Iroquois Native Americans who for years, there were several tribes, for years they fought these bloody wars. And a leader came in who was known as the Great Peacemaker. I can't remember if we ever talked about this last time or something, but the Great Peacemaker came in and what he did is he said, okay, there are these different tribes, but I'm also going to assign different clan membership to you. So within a tribe, you belong to the Bear Clan, you belong to the Elk Clan, you belong to the Beaver Clan and so on. And that's cross-cutting. So now let's say Tom, you and I belong to different tribes, warring tribes, but we both happen to be in the bear clan. So I'm like, well, I can't I can't attack you guys cuz we're in cuz here's my bear brother over here. So yeah, it's this cross-stitching. Anyway, it's a it's a really beautiful powerful idea. And what I'm trying to think of now besides putting this out in articles in The Economist, trying to get people to read this and think about this, is how do we actually implement this? Cuz I look at these people crazily screaming at each other on the left and the right. I think, how can we establish this cross-cutting thing? Because telling people, "Hey, just love one another." That unfortunately is insufficient. So So there's the That's the goal. If anybody listening to this has some ideas about like, "Okay, look, here's the way that we do this cross-stitching so that everyone feels like, okay, yeah, but you're also from my hometown or you're also whatever." I'm going to think about you a little bit differently than I did a moment ago. That feels to me like the secret key. Dude, that's so powerful. Um that's the whole thing about the physics of being human. Um part of what I've written down is um ingroups versus outgroups or um us versus them. It it it is innate to the species. Um I think that's a very interesting solution. We'll end it on that. I think that's so brilliant and such a great idea. Um there's so much more I could go into, dude. I love spending time with you. Thank you for coming on the show. Terrific. Thanks, Tom. Awesome to see you again. Absolutely. Guys, if you're not already following David, reading his books, everything, like this guy has taught me so much about the brain, I can't even tell you. Um be sure to read the new book Livewired. It is fugging phenomenal. And speaking of things that are phenomenal, if you haven't already, be sure to subscribe. And until next time, my friends, be legendary. Take care. In the medical landscape, you know, we go we get our blood pressure tested, we get all kinds of things tested, but what's happening under the hood, we never get tested. Like, how are you doing cognitively?