David Eagleman
Appearances
Freakonomics Radio
Your Brain Doesn’t Work the Way You Think
So this was not an original idea for us, except to try this on the wrist. And it works equally as well.
Freakonomics Radio
Your Brain Doesn’t Work the Way You Think
For people who are blind, for example, there are a few different approaches to this. One is called the brain port, and that's where, for a blind person, they have a little camera on their glasses, and that gets turned into... little electrical stimulation on the tongue. So you're wearing this little electro-tactile grid on your tongue and it tastes like pop rocks sort of in your mouth.
Freakonomics Radio
Your Brain Doesn’t Work the Way You Think
Blind people get pretty good at this. They can navigate complex obstacle courses or throw a ball into a basket at a distance because they can come to see the world through their tongue, which if that sounds crazy to It's the same thing as seeing it through these two spheres that are embedded in your skull.
Freakonomics Radio
Your Brain Doesn’t Work the Way You Think
It's just capturing photons and information about them, figuring out where the edges are, and then shipping that back to the brain. The brain can figure that out. There's also a colleague of mine that makes an app called Voice. It uses the phone's camera and it turns that into soundscape. So if you're moving the camera around, you're hearing, you know, it sounds like a strange cacophony.
Freakonomics Radio
Your Brain Doesn’t Work the Way You Think
But it doesn't take long, even for you as a sighted person, to get used to this and say, oh, okay, I'm turning the visual world into sound. And it's starting to make sense when I pass over an edge or when I zoom into something, the pitch changes, the volume changes. There's all kinds of changes in the sound quality that tells you, oh yeah, now I'm going to close something. Now I'm getting far.
Freakonomics Radio
Your Brain Doesn’t Work the Way You Think
And here's what the world looks like in sound. Coming up after the break. There's really no shortage of theoretical ideas in neuroscience, but fundamentally, we don't have enough data.
Freakonomics Radio
Your Brain Doesn’t Work the Way You Think
What they're doing is they're putting electrodes into the brain to read from and talk to the neurons there.
Freakonomics Radio
Your Brain Doesn’t Work the Way You Think
That is correct. Everything we've been talking about so far with sensory substitution, that's a way of pushing information in and non-invasive. And what Neuralink is, you have to drill a hole in the head to get to the brain itself, but then you can do reading and writing invasively. That actually has been going on for 60 years now. The language of the brain is electrical stimulation.
Freakonomics Radio
Your Brain Doesn’t Work the Way You Think
And so with a little tiny wire, essentially, you can zap a neuron and make it pop off, or you can listen to when it's chattering along, going pa-pa-pa-pa-pa-pa-pa-pa. There's nothing actually new about what Neuralink is doing, except that they're making a one-ton robot that sews the electrodes into the brain. So it can do it smaller and tighter and faster than a neurosurgeon can.
Freakonomics Radio
Your Brain Doesn’t Work the Way You Think
And by the way, there are a lot of great companies doing this sort of thing with electrodes. As people get access to the brain, we're finally getting to a point, we're not there yet, but we're getting to a point where we'll finally be able to push theory forward. There's really no shortage of theoretical ideas in neuroscience.
Freakonomics Radio
Your Brain Doesn’t Work the Way You Think
But fundamentally, we don't have enough data because, as I mentioned, you've got these 86 billion neurons all doing their thing, and we have never measured what all these things are doing at the same time.
Freakonomics Radio
Your Brain Doesn’t Work the Way You Think
So we have technologies like functional magnetic resonance imaging, fMRI, which measures big blobby volumes of, ooh, there was some activity there and some activity there, but that doesn't tell us what's happening at the level of individual neurons. We can currently measure some individual neurons, but not many of them.
Freakonomics Radio
Your Brain Doesn’t Work the Way You Think
Be like if an alien asked one person in New York City, hey, what's going on here? And then tried to extrapolate to understand the entire economy of New York City and how that's all working. So I think we're finally getting closer to the point where we'll have real data about, wow, this is what
Freakonomics Radio
Your Brain Doesn’t Work the Way You Think
thousands or eventually hundreds of thousands or millions of neurons are actually doing in real time at the same moment. And then we'll be able to really get progress. I actually think the future is not in things like Neuralink, but the next level past that, which is nanorobotics.
Freakonomics Radio
Your Brain Doesn’t Work the Way You Think
This is all theoretical right now, but I don't think this is more than 20, 30 years off, where you do three-dimensional printing, atomically precise, you make molecular robots, Hundreds of millions of these. And then you put them in a capsule and you swallow the capsule. And these little robots swim around and they go into your neurons, these cells in your brain.
Freakonomics Radio
Your Brain Doesn’t Work the Way You Think
And from there, they can send out little signals saying, hey, this neuron just fired. And once we have that sort of thing, then we can say non-invasively, here's what all these neurons are doing at the same time. And then we'll really understand the brain.
Freakonomics Radio
Your Brain Doesn’t Work the Way You Think
Plasticity is the term used in the field because the great neuroscientist or psychologist actually, William James, coined the term because he was impressed with the way that plastic gets manufactured, where you mold it into a shape and it holds onto that shape. And he thought that's kind of like what the brain does. The great trick that mother nature figured out
Freakonomics Radio
Your Brain Doesn’t Work the Way You Think
What we have now is EEG, electroencephalography. And there are several really good companies like Muse and Emotive that have come out with at-home methods. You just strap this thing on your head and you can measure what's going on with your brainwaves. The problem is that brainwaves are still pretty distant from the activity of 86 billion chattering neurons.
Freakonomics Radio
Your Brain Doesn’t Work the Way You Think
An analogy would be if you went to your favorite baseball stadium and you attached... a few microphones to the outside of the stadium and you listened to a baseball game, but all you could hear with these microphones is occasionally the crack of the bat and the roar of the crowd. And then your job is to reconstruct what baseball is just from these few little signals you're getting.
Freakonomics Radio
Your Brain Doesn’t Work the Way You Think
So I'm afraid it's still a pretty crude technology.
Freakonomics Radio
Your Brain Doesn’t Work the Way You Think
The fact is, if you felt good at some moment in your life and you sat around and tried to reproduce that, I think you'd do just as well thinking about that moment and trying to put yourself in that state rather than trying to match a squiggly line.
Freakonomics Radio
Your Brain Doesn’t Work the Way You Think
I think that's right. I mean, there's also this very deep question about what kind of feedback is useful for you. Most of the action in your brain is happening unconsciously. It's happening well below the surface of your awareness or your ability to access it. And the fact is that your brain works much better that way. Do you play tennis, for example? Not well. Or golf? Golf I play. Okay, good.
Freakonomics Radio
Your Brain Doesn’t Work the Way You Think
So if I ask you, hey, Stephen, tell me exactly how you swing that golf club. The more you start thinking about it, the worse you're going to be at it. Because consciousness, when it starts poking around in areas that it doesn't belong, it's only going to make things worse. And so it is an interesting question. about the kind of things that we want to be more conscious of.
Freakonomics Radio
Your Brain Doesn’t Work the Way You Think
I'm trying some of these experiments now, actually using my wristband, wearing EEG and getting a summarized feedback on the wrist. So I don't have to stare at a screen, but as I'm walking around during the day, I have a sense of what's going on with this. Or with the smartwatch, having a sense of what's going on with my physiology.
Freakonomics Radio
Your Brain Doesn’t Work the Way You Think
was to drop us into the world half-baked. If you look at the way an alligator drops into the world, it essentially is pre-programmed. It eats, mates, sleeps, does whatever it's doing. But we spend our first several years absorbing the world around us based on our neighborhood and our moment in time and our culture and our friends and our universities.
Freakonomics Radio
Your Brain Doesn’t Work the Way You Think
I'm not sure yet whether it's useful or whether those things are unconscious because... Mother Nature figured out a long time ago that it's just as well if it remains unconscious. One thing I'm doing, which is just a wacky experiment, just to try it. The smartwatch is measuring all these things.
Freakonomics Radio
Your Brain Doesn’t Work the Way You Think
We have that data going out, but the key is you have someone else wear the wristband, like your spouse wear the smartwatch, and you're feeling her physiology. And I'm trying to figure out, is this useful to be tapped into someone else's physiology? I don't know if this is good or bad for marriages. What a nightmare.
Freakonomics Radio
Your Brain Doesn’t Work the Way You Think
But I'm just trying to really get at this question of these unconscious signals that we experience. Is it better if they're exposed or better to not expose them? What have you found empirically? Empirically, what I found is that married couples don't want to wear it.
Freakonomics Radio
Your Brain Doesn’t Work the Way You Think
In my book, Incognito, the way I cast the whole thing is that the right way to think about the brain is like a team of rivals. You know, Lincoln, when he set up his presidential cabinet, he set up several rivals in it and they were all functioning as a team. That's really what's going on under the hood in your head is you've got all these drives that want different things all the time. So
Freakonomics Radio
Your Brain Doesn’t Work the Way You Think
If I put a slice of chocolate cake in front of you, Steven, part of your brain says, oh, that's a good energy source. Let's eat it. Part of your brain says, no, don't eat it. It'll make me overweight. Part of your brain says, okay, I'll eat it, but I'll go to the gym tonight. And the question is, who is talking with whom here? It's all you, but it's different parts of you.
Freakonomics Radio
Your Brain Doesn’t Work the Way You Think
All these drives are constantly arguing it out. It's, by the way, generating activity in the same parts of the brain as listening and speaking that you would normally do. It's just internal before anything comes out.
Freakonomics Radio
Your Brain Doesn’t Work the Way You Think
We absorb all of that such that we can then springboard off of that and create our own things. There are many things that are essentially pre-programmed in us. But we are incredibly flexible. And that is the key about live wiring. When I ask you to think of the name of your fifth grade teacher, you might be able to pull that up, even though it's been years since you saw that fifth grade teacher.
Freakonomics Radio
Your Brain Doesn’t Work the Way You Think
Well, this might be a good reason for you to keep pursuing possible ways to tap into your brain data. And by the way, it turns out that the internal voice is on a big spectrum across the population, which is to say some people like you have a very loud internal radio. I happen to be at the other end of the spectrum where I have no internal radio at all. I never hear anything in my head.
Freakonomics Radio
Your Brain Doesn’t Work the Way You Think
That's called anendophagia. But everyone is somewhere along this spectrum. One of the points that I've always really concentrated on in neuroscience is what are the actual differences between people traditionally that's been looked at in terms of disease states? But the question is, from person to person who are in the normal part of the distribution, what are the differences between us?
Freakonomics Radio
Your Brain Doesn’t Work the Way You Think
It turns out those are manifold. So take something like how clearly you visualize when you imagine something. So if I ask you to imagine a dog running across a flowery meadow towards a cat, you might have something like a movie in your head. Other people have no image at all. They understand it conceptually, but they don't have any image in their head.
Freakonomics Radio
Your Brain Doesn’t Work the Way You Think
And it turns out when you carefully study this, the whole population is smeared across the spectrum. So our internal lives from person to person can be quite different.
Freakonomics Radio
Your Brain Doesn’t Work the Way You Think
So I've spent about 25 years now studying synesthesia, and that has to do with some percentage of the population has a mixture of the senses. They might look at letters on a page, and that triggers a color experience for them, where they hear music and that causes them to see some visual, or they... put some taste in their mouth and it causes them to have a feeling on their fingertips.
Freakonomics Radio
Your Brain Doesn’t Work the Way You Think
There are dozens and dozens of forms of synesthesia, but what they all have to do with is a cross blending of things that are normally separate in the rest of the population. And what share of the population has these patterns? So it's about 3% of the population that has colored letters or colored weekdays or months or numbers. It's big. It's interesting. I wouldn't have thought it was so big.
Freakonomics Radio
Your Brain Doesn’t Work the Way You Think
The crazy part is that if you have synesthesia, it probably has never struck you that 97% of the population does not see the world the way that you see it. Everyone's got their own story going on inside, and it's rare that we stop to consider the possibility that other people do not have the same reality that we do. And what's going on in the brain?
Freakonomics Radio
Your Brain Doesn’t Work the Way You Think
In the case of synesthesia, it's just a little bit of crosstalk between two areas that in the rest of the population tend to be separate but neighboring. So it's like porous borders between two countries. They just get a little bit of data leakage, and that's what causes them to have a joint sensation of something.
Freakonomics Radio
Your Brain Doesn’t Work the Way You Think
I suspect it's the latter, which is to say everyone loves pointing out synesthetic musicians, but no one has done a study on how many deep sea divers have synesthesia or how many accountants have synesthesia. And so we don't really know if it's disproportionate among musicians.
Freakonomics Radio
Your Brain Doesn’t Work the Way You Think
So typically, as you said, it's totally idiosyncratic. Each synesthete has... his or her own colors for letters. So my A might be yellow, your A is purple, and so on. And then what happened is, with two colleagues of mine at Stanford, we found in this database of tens of thousands of synesthetes that I've collected over the years, we found that starting in the late 60s,
Freakonomics Radio
Your Brain Doesn’t Work the Way You Think
But somehow there was a change made in your brain and that stayed in place. You've got 86 books. billion neurons. Each neuron is as complicated as a city. This entire forest of neurons, every moment of your life is changing. It's reconfiguring, it's strengthening connections here and there. It's actually unplugging over here and replugging over there.
Freakonomics Radio
Your Brain Doesn’t Work the Way You Think
there was some percentage of synesthetes who happened to share exactly the same colors. These synesthetes were in different locations, but they all had the same thing. And then that percentage rose to about 15% in the mid-70s.
Freakonomics Radio
Your Brain Doesn’t Work the Way You Think
What we had always suspected is that maybe there was some imprinting that happens, which is to say, there's a quilt in your grandmother's house that has a red A and a yellow B and a purple C and so on. But, you know, everyone has different things that they grew up with as little kids. And so it was strange that this was going on.
Freakonomics Radio
Your Brain Doesn’t Work the Way You Think
The punchline is that we realized that this is the colors of the Fisher-Price magnet set on the refrigerators that were popular during the 70s and 80s and then essentially died out.
Freakonomics Radio
Your Brain Doesn’t Work the Way You Think
And so it turns out that when I look across all these tens of thousands of synesthetes, it's just those people who were kids in the late 60s and 70s and 80s that imprinted on the Fisher-Price magnet set, and that's their synesthesia. And then as its popularity died out, there aren't any more who have that particular pattern.
Freakonomics Radio
Your Brain Doesn’t Work the Way You Think
It does increasingly, yes. How should we teach? I think the next generation is going to be smarter than we are simply because of the broadness of the diet that they can consume. Whenever they're curious about something, they jump on the internet, they get the answer straight away or from Alexa or from ChatGPT. They just get the answers and that is massively useful for a few reasons. One is that
Freakonomics Radio
Your Brain Doesn’t Work the Way You Think
When you are curious about something, you have the right cocktail of neurotransmitters present to make that information stick. So if you get the answer to something in the context of your curiosity, then it's going to stay with you. Whereas you and I grew up in an era where we had lots of just-in-case information. What do you mean by that?
Freakonomics Radio
Your Brain Doesn’t Work the Way You Think
Oh, you know, like just in case you ever need to know that the Battle of Hastings happened in 1066, here you go.
Freakonomics Radio
Your Brain Doesn’t Work the Way You Think
That's exactly it. And so, look, you know, for all of us with kids, I know you've got kids, I've got kids, and we feel like, oh, my kid's on YouTube and wasting time. There's a lot of amazing resources and things that they learn on YouTube or even on TikTok, anywhere. There's lots of garbage, of course, but it's better than what we grew up with.
Freakonomics Radio
Your Brain Doesn’t Work the Way You Think
When you and I wanted to know something, we would ask our mothers to drive us down to the library and we would thumb through the card catalog and hope there was something on it there that wasn't too outdated.
Freakonomics Radio
Your Brain Doesn’t Work the Way You Think
My mother was a biology teacher and my father was a psychiatrist. And so they had all kinds of good information. I'm just super optimistic about the next generation of kids. Now, as far as how we teach, things got complicated with the advent of Google. And now it's twice as complicated with ChatGPT. Happily, we already learned these lessons 20 years ago.
Freakonomics Radio
Your Brain Doesn’t Work the Way You Think
And so that's why I've started to feel that the term plasticity is maybe underreporting what's going on. And so that's why I may have the term live wiring.
Freakonomics Radio
Your Brain Doesn’t Work the Way You Think
What we need to do is just change the way that we ask questions of students. We can no longer... Just assume that fill in the blank or even just writing a paper on something is the optimal way to have them learn something. But instead, they need to do interactive projects like run little experiments with each other.
Freakonomics Radio
Your Brain Doesn’t Work the Way You Think
And, you know, the kind of thing that you and I both love to do in our careers, which is, OK, go out and find this data and run this experiment and see what happens here. That's the kind of opportunities that kids will have now.
Freakonomics Radio
Your Brain Doesn’t Work the Way You Think
Like every curious person trying to figure out what we're doing here, what's going on, it just feels like there are two stories. Either there's some religion story, or there's the story of strict atheism, which I tend to agree with. But it tends to come with this thing of, look, we've got it all figured out. There's nothing more to ask here.
Freakonomics Radio
Your Brain Doesn’t Work the Way You Think
There is a middle position, which people call agnosticism. But usually that means, I don't know, I'm not committing to one thing or the other. I got interested in defining this new thing that I call possibilianism, which is, to try to go out there and do what a scientist does, which is an active exploration of the possibility space. What the heck is going on here?
Freakonomics Radio
Your Brain Doesn’t Work the Way You Think
We live in such a big and mysterious cosmos. Everything about our existence is sort of weird. Obviously, the whole Judeo-Christian tradition, that's one little point in that possibility space, or the possibility that there's absolutely nothing and we're just atoms and we die. But there's lots of other possibilities. And so I'm not willing to commit to one team or the other evidence.
Freakonomics Radio
Your Brain Doesn’t Work the Way You Think
So that's why I call myself a Possibilian.
Freakonomics Radio
Your Brain Doesn’t Work the Way You Think
How do you describe the book to people? I call it literary fiction. It's 40 short stories that are all mutually exclusive. They're all pretty funny, I would like to think, but they're also kind of gut-wrenching. And what I'm doing is shining the flashlight around the possibility space.
Freakonomics Radio
Your Brain Doesn’t Work the Way You Think
None of them are meant to be taken seriously, but what the exercise of having 40 completely different stories gives gives us is a sense of, wow, actually, there's a lot that we don't know here. In some of the stories, God is a female. In some stories, God is a married couple. In some stories, God is a species of dim-witted creatures.
Freakonomics Radio
Your Brain Doesn’t Work the Way You Think
In one story, God is actually the size of a bacterium and doesn't know that we exist. And in lots of stories, there's no God at all. That book is something I wrote over the course of seven years and became an international bestseller. It's really had a life to it that I wouldn't have ever guessed.
Freakonomics Radio
Your Brain Doesn’t Work the Way You Think
Some, actually, I chose because, among other things, that's the title story. In the afterlife, you relive your life, but all the moments that share a quality are grouped together. So you spend... three months waiting in line and you spend 900 hours sitting on the toilet and you spend 30 years sleeping. All in a row. Exactly.
Freakonomics Radio
Your Brain Doesn’t Work the Way You Think
It is organized around the senses, but the interesting thing is that the cortex, this wrinkly outer bit, is actually a one-trick pony. It doesn't matter what you plug in. It'll say, okay, got it. I'll just wrap myself around that data and figure out what to do with that data.
Freakonomics Radio
Your Brain Doesn’t Work the Way You Think
And this amount of time looking for lost items and this amount of time realizing you've forgotten someone's name and this amount of time falling and so on. Part of why I used the title Sum is because of the sum of events in your life like that. Part of it was because Cochito Ergo Sum. So it ended up just being the perfect title for me, even if it did lose a couple of readers there. Yeah.
Freakonomics Radio
Your Brain Doesn’t Work the Way You Think
Essentially, these artificial neural networks took off from a very simplified version of the brain, which is, hey, look, you've got units and they're connected. And what if we can change the strength between these connections? And in a very short time, that has now become this thing that has read everything ever written on the planet and can give extraordinary answers.
Freakonomics Radio
Your Brain Doesn’t Work the Way You Think
But it's not yet the brain or anything like it. It's just taking the very first idea about the brain and running with it. What a large language model does not have is an internal model of the world. It's just acting as a statistical parrot. It's saying, okay, given these words, what is the next word most likely to be given everything that I've ever read on the planet?
Freakonomics Radio
Your Brain Doesn’t Work the Way You Think
And so it's really good at that, but it has no model of the world, no physical model. And so things that a six-year-old can answer, it is stuck on. Now, this is not a criticism of it in the sense that it can do all kinds of amazing stuff and it's going to change the world, but it's not the brain yet. And there's still plenty of work to be done to get something that actually acts like the brain.
Freakonomics Radio
Your Brain Doesn’t Work the Way You Think
I suspect so, because there are 8.2 billion of us who have this functioning in our brains. And as far as we can tell, we're just made of physical stuff. We're just very sophisticated algorithms. And it's just a matter of cracking what that algorithm is.
Freakonomics Radio
Your Brain Doesn’t Work the Way You Think
The big textbook that we have in our field is called Principles of Neuroscience, and it's about 900 pages. And it's not actually principles. It's just a data dump of all this crazy stuff we know. And in 100 years, I expect it'll be like 90 pages.
Freakonomics Radio
Your Brain Doesn’t Work the Way You Think
It turns out that in almost everybody, you have functioning eyeballs that plug into the back of the head, and so we end up calling the back part of the brain the visual cortex. We call this part the auditory cortex, and this the somatosensory cortex that takes in information from the body and so on.
Freakonomics Radio
Your Brain Doesn’t Work the Way You Think
We'll have things where we put big theoretical frameworks together and we say, ah, okay, look, all this other stuff, these are just expressions of this basic principle that we have now figured out. Do you pay much attention to behavioral economics? Yes, I do. What do you think of it? Oh, it's great. And that's probably the direction that a lot of fields will go is how do humans actually behave?
Freakonomics Radio
Your Brain Doesn’t Work the Way You Think
One of the big things that I find most interesting about behavioral economics comes back to this issue about the team of rivals. When people measure in the brain how we actually make decisions about whatever, There are totally separable networks going on. Some networks care about the valuation of something, the price point.
Freakonomics Radio
Your Brain Doesn’t Work the Way You Think
You have totally other networks that care about the anticipated emotional experience about something. You have other networks that care about the social context, like what do my friends think about this? You have mechanisms that care about short-term gratification. You have other mechanisms that are thinking about the long-term, what kind of person do I want to be?
Freakonomics Radio
Your Brain Doesn’t Work the Way You Think
All these things are battling it out under the hood. It's like the three stooges sticking each other in the eye and wrestling each other's arms and stuff. But what's fascinating is when you're standing in the grocery store aisle trying to decide which flavor of ice cream you're going to buy, you don't know about these raging battles happening under the hood.
Freakonomics Radio
Your Brain Doesn’t Work the Way You Think
You just stand there for a while and then you say, okay, I'll grab this one over here.
Freakonomics Radio
Your Brain Doesn’t Work the Way You Think
Oh, gosh, no. And the reason is because we've got all these billions of brains running around. What that tells us is it has to be pretty simple in principle. You got 19,000 genes. That's all you've got. Something about it has to be as simple as falling off a log for it to work out very well so often, billions of times.
Freakonomics Radio
Your Brain Doesn’t Work the Way You Think
So what you learned back in high school or college is correct most of the time, but what it overlooks is the fact that the brain is so flexible. If a person goes blind or is born blind, That part of the brain that we're calling the visual cortex, that gets taken over by hearing, by touch, by other things. And so it's no longer a visual cortex.
Freakonomics Radio
Your Brain Doesn’t Work the Way You Think
The same neurons that are there are now doing a totally different job.
Freakonomics Radio
Your Brain Doesn’t Work the Way You Think
Turns out the kid will be just fine. You can be born without half the brain or you can do what's called a hemispherectomy, which happens to children who have something called Rasmussen's encephalitis, which is a form of epilepsy that spreads from one hemisphere to the other. The surgical intervention for that is to remove half the brain.
Freakonomics Radio
Your Brain Doesn’t Work the Way You Think
You can just imagine as a parent the horror you would feel if your child had to go in for something like that. But you know what? Kid's just fine. I can't take my laptop and rip out half the motherboard and expect it to still function. But with a brain, with a live wired system, it'll work.
Freakonomics Radio
Your Brain Doesn’t Work the Way You Think
So it turns out that blind people can make all kinds of sounds, either with their mouth, like clicking... or the tip of their cane, or snapping their fingers, anything like this, and they can get really good at determining what is coming back as echoes and figure out, oh, okay, this is an open space in front of me. Here, there's something in front of me.
Freakonomics Radio
Your Brain Doesn’t Work the Way You Think
It's probably a parked car, and oh, there's a little gap between two parked cars here, so I can go in here. The key is the visual part of the brain is no longer being used because for whatever reason, there's no information coming down those pipelines anymore. So that part of the brain is taken over by audition, by hearing and by touch and other things.
Freakonomics Radio
Your Brain Doesn’t Work the Way You Think
What happens is that the blind person becomes really good at these other things because they've just devoted more real estate to it. And as a result, they can pick up on all kinds of cues that would be very difficult for me and you because our hearing just isn't that good.
Freakonomics Radio
Your Brain Doesn’t Work the Way You Think
That is exactly right. This was my colleagues at Harvard. They did this over the course of five days. They demonstrated that people could get really good at, there are actually a number of studies like this. They can get really good at reading Braille. They can do things like echolocation. And the speed of it was sort of the surprise.
Freakonomics Radio
Your Brain Doesn’t Work the Way You Think
But the real surprise for me came along when they blindfolded people tightly and put them in the brain scanner and they were making sounds or touching the hand. And they were starting to see activity in the visual cortex after 60 minutes of being blind.
Freakonomics Radio
Your Brain Doesn’t Work the Way You Think
REM sleep is rapid eye movement sleep. We have this every night, about every 90 minutes, and that's when you dream. So if you wake someone up when their eyes are moving rapidly and you say, hey, what are you thinking about? They'll say, well, I was just riding a camel across a meadow. But if you wake them up at other parts of their sleep, they typically won't have anything going on.
Freakonomics Radio
Your Brain Doesn’t Work the Way You Think
So that's how we know we dream during REM sleep. But here's the key. My student and I realized that at nighttime, when the planet rotates, We spend half our time in darkness and obviously we're very used to this electricity blessed world, but think about this in historical time over the course of hundreds of millions of years, it's really dark. I mean, half the time you are in blackness.
Freakonomics Radio
Your Brain Doesn’t Work the Way You Think
Now you can still hear and touch and taste and smell in the dark, But the visual system is at a disadvantage whenever the planet rotates into darkness. And so given the rapidity with which other systems can encroach on that, what we realized is it needs a way of defending itself against takeover every single night. And that's what dreams are about.
Freakonomics Radio
Your Brain Doesn’t Work the Way You Think
So what happens is you have these midbrain mechanisms that simply blast random activity into the visual cortex instantly. every 90 minutes during the night. And when you get activity in the visual cortex, you say, oh, I'm seeing things. And because the brain is a storyteller, you can't activate all the stuff without feeling like there's a whole story going on there.
Freakonomics Radio
Your Brain Doesn’t Work the Way You Think
But the fascinating thing is when you look at the circuitry carefully, it's super specific, much more specific than almost anything else in the brain. It's only hitting the primary visual cortex and nothing else. And so that led us to a completely new theory about dreams. We studied 25 different species of primates, and we looked at the amount of REM sleep they have every night.
Freakonomics Radio
Your Brain Doesn’t Work the Way You Think
And we also looked at how plastic they are as a species. It turns out that the amount of dream sleep that a creature has exactly correlates with how plastic they are, which is to say, if your visual system is in danger of getting taken over because your brain is very flexible, then you have to have more dream sleep.
Freakonomics Radio
Your Brain Doesn’t Work the Way You Think
And by the way, when you look at human infants, they have tons of dream sleep at the beginning when their brains are very plastic. And as they age, the amount of dream sleep goes down.
Freakonomics Radio
Your Brain Doesn’t Work the Way You Think
At the moment, there are 19 papers that have cited this and discussed this. And I think it's right. I mean, look, everything can be wrong. Everything is provisional. But it's the single theory that is quantitative. It's the single theory about dreams that says not only here is a idea for why we dream, but we can compare across species and the predictions match exactly. No one would have...
Freakonomics Radio
Your Brain Doesn’t Work the Way You Think
suspected that you'd see a relationship between, you know, how long it takes you to walk or reach adolescence and how much dream sleep you have. But it turns out that is spot on.
Freakonomics Radio
Your Brain Doesn’t Work the Way You Think
Given that all the data running around in the brain is just data and the brain doesn't know where it came from, all it knows is, oh, here are electrical spikes, and it tries to figure out what to do with it. I got really interested in this idea of sensory substitution, which is, can you push information into the brain via an unusual channel?
Freakonomics Radio
Your Brain Doesn’t Work the Way You Think
Originally, we built a vest that was covered with vibratory motors. and we captured sound for people who are deaf. So the vest captures sound, breaks it up from high to low frequency, and you're feeling the sound on your torso. By the way, this is exactly what the inner ear does. It breaks up sound from high to low frequency and ships that off to the brain.
Freakonomics Radio
Your Brain Doesn’t Work the Way You Think
So we're just transferring the inner ear to the skin of the torso, and it worked. People who are deaf could come to hear the world that way. So I spun this out of my lab as a company, Neosensory, and we shrunk the vest down to a wristband, and we're on wrists of deaf people all over the world. The other alternative for somebody who's deaf is a cochlear implant, an invasive surgery.
Freakonomics Radio
Your Brain Doesn’t Work the Way You Think
This is much cheaper and does as good a job.
Freakonomics Radio
Your Brain Doesn’t Work the Way You Think
It's actually just vibratory motors. So it's just like the buzzer in your cell phone, but we have a string of these buzzers all along your wrist. And we're actually taking advantage of an illusion, which is if I have two motors next to each other and I stimulate them both, you will feel one virtual point right in between. Hmm.
Freakonomics Radio
Your Brain Doesn’t Work the Way You Think
The human brain is about three pounds. It's locked in silence and darkness. It has no idea where the information is coming from because everything is just electrical spikes and also chemical releases as a result of those spikes. And so what you have in there is this giant symphony of electrical activity going on, and its job is to create a model of the outside world.
Freakonomics Radio
Your Brain Doesn’t Work the Way You Think
And as I change the strength of those two motors relative to each other, I can move that point around. So we're actually stimulating 128 virtual points along the wrist.
Freakonomics Radio
Your Brain Doesn’t Work the Way You Think
Great question. It started off where we were doing a lot of training on people. And what we realized is it's all the same if we just let it be organic. The key is we just encourage people, be in the world. And that's it.
Freakonomics Radio
Your Brain Doesn’t Work the Way You Think
You see the dog's mouth moving and you feel the barking on your wrist, or you close the door and you feel that on your wrist, or you say something, you know, most deaf people can speak and they know what their motor output is and they're feeling the input.
Freakonomics Radio
Your Brain Doesn’t Work the Way You Think
And by the way, that's how you learned how to use your ears too. You know, when you're a baby, you're watching your mother's mouth move and you're hearing data coming in your ears and you clap your hands together and you hear something in your ears. It's the same idea. You're just training up correlations in the brain about, oh, this visual thing seems to always go with that auditory stimulus.
Freakonomics Radio
Your Brain Doesn’t Work the Way You Think
For the first few months, you're hearing it on your wrist. You can get pretty good at these correlations. But then after about six months, if I ask somebody, when the dog barks, do you feel something on your wrist? And you think, okay, what was that? That must have been a dog bark. And then you look for the dog. And they say, no, I just... hear the dog out there.
Freakonomics Radio
Your Brain Doesn’t Work the Way You Think
And that sounds so crazy, but remember, that's what your ears are doing. Your ears are capturing vibrations of the eardrum that moves through the middle ear to the inner ear, breaks up to different frequencies, goes off to your brain, goes to your auditory cord. It's this giant pathway of things. And yet, even though you're hearing my voice right now inside your head, you think I'm somewhere else.
Freakonomics Radio
Your Brain Doesn’t Work the Way You Think
And that's exactly what happens irrespective of how you feed the data in.
Freakonomics Radio
Your Brain Doesn’t Work the Way You Think
So tinnitus is a ringing in the ears. It's like beep. And about 15% of the population has this. And for some people, it's really, really bad. It turns out there is a mechanism for helping with tinnitus, which has to do with playing tones and then matching that with music. Stimulation on the skin. People wear the wristband. It's exactly the same wristband, but we have the phone play tones.
Freakonomics Radio
Your Brain Doesn’t Work the Way You Think
And you're feeling that all over your wrist. And you just do that for 10 minutes a day. And it drives down the tinnitus. Now, why does that work? There are various theories on this, but I think the simplest version is that...
Freakonomics Radio
Your Brain Doesn’t Work the Way You Think
your brain is figuring out, okay, real sounds always cause this correlating vibration on my wrist, but a fake sound, beep, you know, this thing in my head, that doesn't have any verification on the wrist. And so that must not be a real sound.
Freakonomics Radio
Your Brain Doesn’t Work the Way You Think
So because of issues of brain plasticity, the brain just reduces the strength of the tinnitus because it learns that it's not getting any confirmation that that's a real world sound. Now, how did you figure out that this bracelet could be used for this? This was discovered by a woman named Susan Shore, who's a researcher who discovered this about a decade ago.
Freakonomics Radio
Your Brain Doesn’t Work the Way You Think
She was using electrical shocks on the tongue. And there's actually another company that spun out called Lanier that does this with sounds in the ear and shocks on the tongue. They had an argument that they think it had to be touched from the head and the neck. And I didn't buy that at all. And that's why I tried that with the wristband.
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1123: David Eagleman | Your Prehistoric Brain on Modern Problems
Oh, sure. And so in America, we have to at least look at the bill for 200 milliseconds longer to figure out what am I holding because the size doesn't tell you the answer to that. So I think they should make them all the same size so that you at least look at it a little bit longer. They said, we love the idea, but we'd have to retool all the vending machines in Europe.
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1123: David Eagleman | Your Prehistoric Brain on Modern Problems
So that's why they rejected it.
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1123: David Eagleman | Your Prehistoric Brain on Modern Problems
Exactly right. And Darren did that experiment. But this was actually an experiment done at Harvard originally with some colleagues of mine who did this. They were very interested in this concept of change blindness, which is... How much do we notice changes in the world? Now, the fact is that the world tends to be stable. So I'm talking to you now, Jordan.
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1123: David Eagleman | Your Prehistoric Brain on Modern Problems
And if I look somewhere else and then I look back, you're really likely to still be here because that's just how physics works. But so they wanted to know, but what does that mean? If I'm assuming that I'm talking to you and then I look somewhere and you turn into somebody else, would I even notice? And so they did this experiment in the Harvard quad with the door passing in between people.
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1123: David Eagleman | Your Prehistoric Brain on Modern Problems
But there are many different versions. Just the simplest is you show a photograph and then the photograph goes away and you show the photograph again. And maybe you swap back and forth between A and B and A and B with a little blank space in between each time. You tell the person there's some massive difference between photo A and photo B. Can you tell me what the difference is?
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1123: David Eagleman | Your Prehistoric Brain on Modern Problems
And people are terrible at it. And once they finally do see it or you tell them the answer, they think, how could I not have seen that? There's like a major difference. A car disappears from one to the other or the railing in the background moves by three feet up and down. The engine of the airplane is missing or not missing from photo A to B. But we just don't see that. Why?
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1123: David Eagleman | Your Prehistoric Brain on Modern Problems
It's because all we ever see is our internal model of the world. So when I look at a photograph, let's say it's a bunch of soldiers lined up to get on an airplane, big Hercules jet. When I'm asked to look at the photograph and see the details there, I think, okay, soldiers, jet, aircraft.
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1123: David Eagleman | Your Prehistoric Brain on Modern Problems
Sky, tarmac, and then I'm crawling around the scene with my attentional capacities and I'm trying to pull in more details to figure out what is the difference between these two photos that look the same to me. Okay, what are the soldiers wearing? What color is their thing? How many soldiers are there? And so on.
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1123: David Eagleman | Your Prehistoric Brain on Modern Problems
But it takes me a while before I land on, oh, the jet engine that's appearing and disappearing between photos A and B. I just don't notice it. So the thing is, when I look at the photo, this is the important part. I'm not seeing it as though I am a camera of some sort. All I ever see. is however rich my model is. So all I see is, oh, there's people and plane and sky.
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1123: David Eagleman | Your Prehistoric Brain on Modern Problems
And I go out in the world and I ask questions and that's how you get more and more detail on stuff. This is the heart of change blindness. This is why we don't notice when there are massive changes. So in the case of the person giving directions to the pedestrian who asks,
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1123: David Eagleman | Your Prehistoric Brain on Modern Problems
All you're thinking about is, oh, there's somebody, there's some stranger standing in front of me and I'm just trying to do this job of telling them how to get the directions and I'll never see them again. So your brain just doesn't put that much effort into it.
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1123: David Eagleman | Your Prehistoric Brain on Modern Problems
Oh, yeah, quite right. And I can show you other change blindness examples of things. For example, you can link this on the show notes. There's a British guy named Richard Wiseman who has this great card trick that he does on YouTube. I'm so sorry. Let me not tell what the punchline is, but link this on the show notes. What you'll see is he does this card trick
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1123: David Eagleman | Your Prehistoric Brain on Modern Problems
essentially asking you what you notice and you see the trick and you think, wow, how did I not notice that? But it's extraordinary. It's a terrific video.
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1123: David Eagleman | Your Prehistoric Brain on Modern Problems
Exactly right. So this is what's classified as inattentional blindness. Your attention is on the basketball. You're following the basketball very carefully to see where it's going. And as a result of attending in one spot, you have inattentional blindness to other things in the scene, like the gorilla walking in. Change blindness is essentially a version of that.
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1123: David Eagleman | Your Prehistoric Brain on Modern Problems
You don't know what to look for in the photograph of the airplane. And so you just don't see things.
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1123: David Eagleman | Your Prehistoric Brain on Modern Problems
I don't know. Yeah, that's exactly right. I mean, magicians have been for centuries very good at this. It's so easy to get the audience's attention to go here and there. They do all kinds of things like they never move their hand in a straight line. They move in a curved arc. And for whatever reason, you just can't resist having your attention follow that.
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1123: David Eagleman | Your Prehistoric Brain on Modern Problems
Yeah. And whatever they're doing where they are moving their hand, what they do is they set things up so that you're a little suspicious maybe of what they're doing with their left hand. So you're thinking, I'm a smart audience member. I'm going to keep an eye on the left hand. And while they're doing that, while you're watching, they're doing the right hand is do whatever they want.
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1123: David Eagleman | Your Prehistoric Brain on Modern Problems
And it's total inattentional blindness to the right hand.
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1123: David Eagleman | Your Prehistoric Brain on Modern Problems
Yeah. So this is something I've been very interested in for a very long time is about... how as a species, we're so cooperative. The reason we've built our whole civilization as well as we have is because we're so good at linking arms and making stuff happen. But we evolved in small groups. And so we are very prone to saying, this is my in-group and those people over there, they're my out-group.
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1123: David Eagleman | Your Prehistoric Brain on Modern Problems
And it turns out there's been lots of studies like that from my lab, many other labs showing that we just have less empathy for people in our outgroups. We just don't care about them as much as in if they get hurt or something. So here's a study that I ran in the lab some years ago.
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1123: David Eagleman | Your Prehistoric Brain on Modern Problems
We put you in the brain scanner, functional magnetic resonance imaging, fMRI, and you see six hands on the screen, six hands that all pretty much look alike. And the computer goes around and picks one of the hands. And then you see that hand either get touched with a Q-tip or stabbed with a syringe needle. And yeah, exactly. Watching it was getting stabbed with a syringe needle. Is it real?
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1123: David Eagleman | Your Prehistoric Brain on Modern Problems
The way we filmed it is we made a syringe needle that contracts. So as you're pushing, the needle's actually going back up.
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1123: David Eagleman | Your Prehistoric Brain on Modern Problems
Yeah, but it looks quite horrifying. And so what we do then is the way we analyze that kind of data is we compare the two cases. And in the case where the hand is getting stabbed, you have all this area come online, this network of areas, I should say, that we summarize as the pain matrix. And that's what happens if you get hurt.
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1123: David Eagleman | Your Prehistoric Brain on Modern Problems
If your hand gets stabbed, the same area comes online, which is to say when you are watching someone else get stabbed, This is the neural basis of empathy. You are empathizing with their pain, even though you're not in pain. And this is great. This is what humans do is they see the pain of someone else and they empathize. What would that feel like? So that's very important.
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1123: David Eagleman | Your Prehistoric Brain on Modern Problems
But what we then did is we had the same six hands. And we labeled each one with a one word label, Christian, Jewish, Muslim, Hindu, Scientologist, Atheist. And now the computer goes round, picks a hand. You see that hand gets stabbed. And the question is, if it's a member of one of your out group versus your in group, does your brain care as much? And the answer is it does not.
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1123: David Eagleman | Your Prehistoric Brain on Modern Problems
Your brain does not care as much if it's a member of any of your outgroups that gets stabbed. And by the way, we tested this on all religions, including, by the way, atheists. Even atheists have this, which is when an atheist hand gets stabbed, they have a bigger empathic reaction than when any of the non-atheist hands get stabbed.
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1123: David Eagleman | Your Prehistoric Brain on Modern Problems
So this is really the first lowest level signature of empathy that we have. And all it takes is a one word label for people to feel like, oh, I don't really care so much about that hand.
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1123: David Eagleman | Your Prehistoric Brain on Modern Problems
Yeah, that's a project I did for a year in secret until it was all done. Why is it secret? Because they don't want you to... Why was it secret? I don't know. They just didn't want me talking about it while I was doing it.
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1123: David Eagleman | Your Prehistoric Brain on Modern Problems
We saw this happen when the CEO of UnitedHealthcare was murdered in the street.
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1123: David Eagleman | Your Prehistoric Brain on Modern Problems
I don't totally understand why people felt that way. Oh, really? Obviously, people had bad experiences with the insurance company, UnitedHealthcare or others. But it's not that guy, Brian, making the decision and putting the red stamp on their piece of paper.
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1123: David Eagleman | Your Prehistoric Brain on Modern Problems
Okay. So this thing with LA, it's interesting because LA is so multicultural. You can imagine if an equivalent fire happened in, we could name different countries, the reaction that some people would have, which is, oh, Good, I'm glad that happened to those Russians or the whatever. It's tough, though. I don't think I would do that, but I don't know. Okay, here's the thing. You would.
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1123: David Eagleman | Your Prehistoric Brain on Modern Problems
I don't know what country or what religion or what thing it would be for you, but here's the interesting part. We measured 128 people on the scanner. We don't know that all of them actually act badly to their neighbors and so on. Why? Because what we are measuring is the first brain response, which is, hey, I really care about these people in my in-group. I don't care so much about these people.
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1123: David Eagleman | Your Prehistoric Brain on Modern Problems
But you might have other cognitive layers that say, you know what, that embarrasses me that I don't care as much about the Russians who were just in a fire. So I'm going to donate to that Russian charity because I'm... So there's a
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1123: David Eagleman | Your Prehistoric Brain on Modern Problems
That's right. That's right. Yeah. I had to sell all kinds of paperwork. They would take me to the European Central Bank. They like beat me through a door and then we go and we'll go do another door. You have to do another security badge and then another. It was really deep in there where they keep all the counterfeits. Oh, they have the counterfeits. Oh, how cool is that?
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1123: David Eagleman | Your Prehistoric Brain on Modern Problems
And people have done these tests for years called the implicit association task. And by implicit, they mean something that you can't even articulate. It's not explicit. And what they find is that everybody has biases against certain things, certain groups. certain sexual orientation, whatever it is, everyone's got something going on deep down, but it doesn't mean anything about their behavior.
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1123: David Eagleman | Your Prehistoric Brain on Modern Problems
He wouldn't have had a pager.
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1123: David Eagleman | Your Prehistoric Brain on Modern Problems
So I felt the same way you did. But... Rewind history where you and I are born in Lebanon and for some reason our parents are Hezbollah. I would 100% have joined an organization like that.
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1123: David Eagleman | Your Prehistoric Brain on Modern Problems
What I was going to say, aside from joining an organization, the question is, would we feel empathic?
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1123: David Eagleman | Your Prehistoric Brain on Modern Problems
Heck yeah, we would, right?
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1123: David Eagleman | Your Prehistoric Brain on Modern Problems
What's very interesting is we also did, in parallel with these neuroimaging studies, we also gave people these very full questionnaires where they filled them out. And there are these standardized tests for how empathic a person you are. And what we found was something we really didn't expect
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1123: David Eagleman | Your Prehistoric Brain on Modern Problems
which was that the people who showed the biggest difference between their in-group and out-group neural responses were also the people that described themselves as the most empathic, which is very interesting. I think there are a few possible interpretations of that. One is that they somehow deep down know that they aren't sero-empathic, and so they're lying. I see. That's one possibility.
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1123: David Eagleman | Your Prehistoric Brain on Modern Problems
One possibility is that when they think about their empathy— They're thinking about their in-group.
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1123: David Eagleman | Your Prehistoric Brain on Modern Problems
They keep counterfeits that they collect and they've got them in piles. And we think this is from Turkey and we think this is from Germany and whatever. And the way they can tell is just some signature of that counterfeit. So they just put those all together and...
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1123: David Eagleman | Your Prehistoric Brain on Modern Problems
Yeah, like what if I saw my uncle fall and twist his ankle? Would I be empathic?
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1123: David Eagleman | Your Prehistoric Brain on Modern Problems
Oh, I'd be the most empathic person in the world. And they're right in assessing that. They're just not thinking about how they would feel if it was their out-group. So anyway, this all goes to your statement about what things we admit to ourselves and do not. I have a strong suspicion that if we could ever really know ourselves really deeply, it would be awful.
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1123: David Eagleman | Your Prehistoric Brain on Modern Problems
I don't think we'd want to know all of our weird flaws and the lies we make to cover up the kind of personality things. Yeah.
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1123: David Eagleman | Your Prehistoric Brain on Modern Problems
So, by the way, yeah, I wrote about it in my book, Incognito, years ago, was this issue that really the way to think about the brain is that we are a team of rival. You've got all these neural networks that all have different drives, and they want different things, and you are a collection of these things, okay?
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1123: David Eagleman | Your Prehistoric Brain on Modern Problems
For example, if I put some chocolate chip cookies in front of you, part of your brain wants to eat that. Part of your brain says, don't eat it, I'm on a diet. Part of your brain says, okay, I'll eat it, but I'll promise my wife that I'll go to the gym tomorrow. Whatever, you can contract yourself automatically argue with yourself, cuss at yourself.
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1123: David Eagleman | Your Prehistoric Brain on Modern Problems
This is the weird part about being human is we've got all these different drives. Okay, here's what Nietzsche said. He said, every drive philosophizes in its own spirit. What he meant by that was when you are gripped by rage or sexual desire or desire to eat the chocolate chip cookies, you have this way to philosophize, to rationalize, to say, this guy really deserves this.
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1123: David Eagleman | Your Prehistoric Brain on Modern Problems
Or, yeah, I'm going to make this lie over here to get what I want sexually. Or here's all the reasons why I should eat the cookie. But the point is, when you're in that moment, when you're being driven by these particular neural networks, You philosophize in that spirit. You say, you know what? Actually, this makes total sense. I should do this. I should do exactly what I want.
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1123: David Eagleman | Your Prehistoric Brain on Modern Problems
Your aim makes the pathway open up to you. Oh, here's exactly what I should do so that I can eat these cookies.
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1123: David Eagleman | Your Prehistoric Brain on Modern Problems
Whatever it is, like not recycle the cans because you're feeling lazy or you want to. Let's take the simpler example. I want to eat the cookies. So when I'm gripped by that desire, I can cook up something.
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1123: David Eagleman | Your Prehistoric Brain on Modern Problems
Both are very difficult, but dollars, apparently there are super bills, which means perfect counterfeits.
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1123: David Eagleman | Your Prehistoric Brain on Modern Problems
Exactly. What I'm doing is I'm philosophizing in such a way that I can land at the conclusion that I want.
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1123: David Eagleman | Your Prehistoric Brain on Modern Problems
That's exactly right. But what's interesting is the end conclusion of that is that you might actually do really wonderful things in the world. You might go out of your way to go to some charity events. In fact, people have long noted that sometimes the people who are the loudest about, let's say, being anti-racist online...
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1123: David Eagleman | Your Prehistoric Brain on Modern Problems
Sometimes they're the people with the deepest internal demons that they're fighting.
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1123: David Eagleman | Your Prehistoric Brain on Modern Problems
Yeah, although what's interesting is that every group... is on a really broad distribution. So that will always be available to people to say, I like you, but I think that in your group, whatever group it is, there are people who do XYZ and I don't like that. So what's interesting is that chess move will always be available to those guys. Yeah, that's true.
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1123: David Eagleman | Your Prehistoric Brain on Modern Problems
It actually wouldn't make sense for them to meet one young woman who they think is really great and then say, oh, I used to have these political opinions, but now I've changed my mind entirely because of an N of one.
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1123: David Eagleman | Your Prehistoric Brain on Modern Problems
Here's the thing. So there's two things I would say there. One is that, interestingly, if you measured any of these Klansmen who had hung up their robe, you'd probably find this really low level circuitry in their brain having a difference in their reaction to black and white. But this is an example of the guy layering on cognition and what we might call wisdom and saying, hey, you know what?
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1123: David Eagleman | Your Prehistoric Brain on Modern Problems
Even though my very first reaction is this, I know that if I sit down at the bar with this guy and talk to him, he obviously had a desire to do that to see if he could discover something new. then he can do something wonderful. And obviously, we all know as kids we grow up, whatever neighborhood we're in, we're maybe exposed to all these races and religions, but not these other ones.
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1123: David Eagleman | Your Prehistoric Brain on Modern Problems
If you live in Europe, it's just easier to- Launder them?
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1123: David Eagleman | Your Prehistoric Brain on Modern Problems
And so it's easy with our in-group, out-group proclivities to say, okay, that's an out-group. But then you go to college, you meet people of various things. This is the whole game. It's just meeting lots of people and seeing that... Look, here's how I view it. Humans moved out of Africa about 250,000 years ago.
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1123: David Eagleman | Your Prehistoric Brain on Modern Problems
Humans started radiating north out of Africa and some turned left and became Europeans, some turned right and became Asians. And... That period of time is so short from a biological point of view. We're all exactly the same on the inside. We've all got brains and lungs and hearts. If you look from the point of view of a biologist, there's no difference between people.
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1123: David Eagleman | Your Prehistoric Brain on Modern Problems
Yeah, exactly.
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1123: David Eagleman | Your Prehistoric Brain on Modern Problems
Obviously, cultural differences exist. Religious differences exist. There's all kinds of local cultural stuff, but people are the same. So the important part is to figure out how do we find ways to reach across the aisles? And so one of my... Big interests is if I can get to the right ears, the right place to tweak the social media algorithms. So here's what I mean.
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1123: David Eagleman | Your Prehistoric Brain on Modern Problems
Currently, as we all know, the social media algorithms favor anger and it's incentivized to be incendiary, let's call it. But here would be the optimal social media algorithm that I think could actually change the world is imagine that you and I have totally different political beliefs. But we both like hang gliding and this kind of dog and we like biking on Sundays and whatever.
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1123: David Eagleman | Your Prehistoric Brain on Modern Problems
Yeah. What they wanted to know was, what do people actually perceive when they look at a bill? And what do they not perceive? So what they were doing was spending- Tons of money on anti-counterfeiting measures. There's a hologram, there's color-changing ink, and there's a little stripe, and there's little fibers in the bill that change color when you shine a UV light on them, things like this.
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1123: David Eagleman | Your Prehistoric Brain on Modern Problems
So every time one of us makes a post on that, we're both seeing that. I don't know you yet. You're a stranger to me, but I see that post and you see my post. Oh, hang gliding. Oh, this. We find all these things that we have in common. Then one day when we discover, oh, we have different political opinions, then we're like, oh, cool, Jordan, tell me about that. Why do you feel that way? And so on.
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1123: David Eagleman | Your Prehistoric Brain on Modern Problems
Then we can talk. But if the first thing you know about me is that I have a different political opinion, then it's a different ballgame.
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1123: David Eagleman | Your Prehistoric Brain on Modern Problems
Exactly right. And by the way, it doesn't have to be the in-group everybody. It's my in-group is other hang gliders and other people who like this kind of dog. Like, that's my only group. That's fine, because there's nothing about that that's going to make me pick up arms and go to war over that stuff.
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1123: David Eagleman | Your Prehistoric Brain on Modern Problems
Exactly. Exactly right. And by the way, obviously these social media companies from our behavior and things we post, they know hundreds of data on us. So that can really be used for good by saying, hey, look, these two strangers have something in common that they like. Just whatever. We like Salvador Dali paintings or whatever it is.
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1123: David Eagleman | Your Prehistoric Brain on Modern Problems
Yeah. So, okay. The short answer is right now, we don't have the technology that would even get us close to that. Why? Because the brain is made up of 86 billion neurons, about that same number of glial cells. And the connections between the neurons is about 200 trillion synapses, the connections between them. Okay. What does that mean?
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1123: David Eagleman | Your Prehistoric Brain on Modern Problems
It means we don't have, if you took all the computing power on the planet right now, it's not enough. To actually... On the whole plane. On the whole plane. Yeah, because it's about a zettabyte of information is what it would take to actually scan and store your brain. And we have probably a quarter of that capacity right now. So we can't do that yet.
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1123: David Eagleman | Your Prehistoric Brain on Modern Problems
But 100 years for sure, we'll have the capacity. No problem there. Okay. But the question is, if we took your brain and we put it onto a different substrate, let's say on silicon, would it be you? In theory, yes. In theory, it would be because if we're running the algorithm of Jordan, that is you. And I could probably replicate it out of different material.
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1123: David Eagleman | Your Prehistoric Brain on Modern Problems
I could make it out of beer cans and tennis balls. And if it's running the right algorithm, I can say, hey, Jordan, how are you feeling? You say, oh, I'm feeling good, whatever. This is what's known as the computational hypothesis of neuroscience, which is it's the algorithms that matter and not the details of how Mother Nature had to build it out of cells. Okay, fine.
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1123: David Eagleman | Your Prehistoric Brain on Modern Problems
but it's still a simulation of just my brain. Right, so here's the key. Is that me? Yeah, well, there's a few interesting points here. One is we have to actually capture the mechanisms of brain plasticity. In other words, your brain's ability to change and move. Your brain is reconfiguring itself all the time, every second of your life.
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1123: David Eagleman | Your Prehistoric Brain on Modern Problems
There's all kinds of stuff. And it turns out no one ever notices this stuff. As in, okay, forget the UV light part. Just looking at the bill, there's about five or six different security measures. People just don't notice. So what the EU realized is they're wasting tons of money every year on this stuff, and they wanted to figure out
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1123: David Eagleman | Your Prehistoric Brain on Modern Problems
This was my last book, LiveWired, is all about this brain plasticity stuff. Because if we don't, if we simply replicate this snapshot, then you don't remember anything new. In other words, if I took a static snapshot of your brain, then you say, oh great, today is whatever, January 20th of 2035, and you never get past it. I'm just in this room with you forever. Forever, exactly.
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1123: David Eagleman | Your Prehistoric Brain on Modern Problems
That's number one, is you gotta get brain plasticity. And then number two is there's this really interesting thing about whether it is you. So let's imagine we scan your brain and then we kill you. You have to. And 100 milliseconds later, we start the thing up. Then it's like you've transferred it.
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1123: David Eagleman | Your Prehistoric Brain on Modern Problems
The thing that starts in this computer world says, whoa, I was just sitting in the living room with David and now I'm here in this computer world. Okay, and it feels like you've transferred it. The question is, the you sitting here right now
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1123: David Eagleman | Your Prehistoric Brain on Modern Problems
Do you feel like you have transferred or do you feel like you just got killed and then this other creature came up that happened to have all of your memories, but the question is, is it you? And it might not be. It might not be you.
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1123: David Eagleman | Your Prehistoric Brain on Modern Problems
He's miserable. What's weird is that if I kill you 100 milliseconds after the upload, then that's murder. Yeah, you're just murdering.
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1123: David Eagleman | Your Prehistoric Brain on Modern Problems
Exactly right. I find this really interesting. Look, here's the thing. If we do upload ourselves at some point in the distant future, let's say a thousand years from now, there's a couple of things that we have to really watch for. One is, who are the programmers? Who watches the Watchmen? Like, you are completely at the mercy of whoever is running the simulation.
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1123: David Eagleman | Your Prehistoric Brain on Modern Problems
Yeah, they're God, essentially. They're God. Exactly right. It's scary because, in fact, it's just some 21-year-old guy with a goatee. Who's like playing Warcraft at the same time on another screen. Exactly. So that's a really weird thing. There's presumably going to be whole bodies of legislation around this and what the rules are around this.
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1123: David Eagleman | Your Prehistoric Brain on Modern Problems
What is the way we see the world and what would cause people to look at the bill and get it a little bit better? So I happened to be at a visual neuroscience conference and I was standing in the back and there was this other guy standing there. So we start chatting at some point. He said he's from the European Central Bank.
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1123: David Eagleman | Your Prehistoric Brain on Modern Problems
But yes, one of the things I mentioned is that let's imagine we realized, oh God, the universe is collapsing and the universe is only going to last five more minutes. The programmer couldn't speed it up so that you live a thousand years in those last five minutes and you didn't know it.
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1123: David Eagleman | Your Prehistoric Brain on Modern Problems
And I said, wow, what are you doing at this little visual neuroscience conference? And he said, I'm here to learn some things and figure out how to reduce counterfeiting. So we started chatting for a while. Yeah. popped some ideas, and then that's how they contracted me.
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1123: David Eagleman | Your Prehistoric Brain on Modern Problems
It might work. You certainly could freeze a body that long. We have not perfected cryogenics yet, but in theory, it's not so hard. And we know that it works in the sense that sometimes people will fall through the ice on a lake and they will try to get out and they can't get out and they drown and they die.
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1123: David Eagleman | Your Prehistoric Brain on Modern Problems
And then their body is rescued and they're brought to the hospital and there's this whole thing where you extract the blood and warm the blood in a machine and you're passing it back in. And people end up freezing.
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1123: David Eagleman | Your Prehistoric Brain on Modern Problems
fine like they actually come back to life really from being frozen i've never heard of that happening that's incredible here's one to link in the show notes i'll send you a lancet article is a medical journal about a woman who was a young doctor who this happened to on a skiing trip and yeah she's probably fine she's practicing medicine now and so on but she was dead she was actually dead and frozen and she was brought back this happens not infrequently in theory she's a few minutes younger than her actual age it's not bad
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1123: David Eagleman | Your Prehistoric Brain on Modern Problems
Not bad. So everything about cryogenics should work in theory. The problem is simply that how do you freeze things fast enough so that you don't get ice crystals and you get ice crystals that tears the cell membranes and blah, blah. So there's some stuff to be worked out there. But yeah, I think freezing people and sending them on space travel is certainly a possibility.
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1123: David Eagleman | Your Prehistoric Brain on Modern Problems
What's interesting about that theory is that Descartes was at least one of the first people to talk about this thing. How do I know I'm not brain in a vat being stimulated by scientists so that I think I'm sitting in this sunny living room talking with Jordan and so on? And people have worked on better and better versions of this.
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1123: David Eagleman | Your Prehistoric Brain on Modern Problems
And obviously, in the modern computer era, this became, how do I know I'm not a computer simulation? Well, what's been so weird to watch just over the last decade, really, is... how extraordinary things are becoming. For example, with generative AI, people are using this in VR now to create whole VR worlds instantly. Like, hey, I want a 15th century whatever with a castle.
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1123: David Eagleman | Your Prehistoric Brain on Modern Problems
And this just gets created the same way you would create an image, but a whole 3D VR world. And we're just in 2025. I mean, just imagine what things are going to be in 2045 or something. So the point is, it becomes more and more plausible to say, God, we know we can make extraordinary simulations. Why not? And all it requires is imagining that maybe...
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1123: David Eagleman | Your Prehistoric Brain on Modern Problems
Just imagine our civilization a thousand years from now, they might be running these sims. And of course, this could be recursive all the way down.
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1123: David Eagleman | Your Prehistoric Brain on Modern Problems
I mean, I suspect they did some research on me and they figured out that I was capable of doing this. But yeah, I think it was so brave of them to do this because to my knowledge, other governments haven't done that before. They've got their guys and they try to figure stuff out about better and better security measures, but that doesn't work.
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1123: David Eagleman | Your Prehistoric Brain on Modern Problems
So do you remember the website called Second Life? Yeah, of course. Philip Rosedale, a friend, he's the guy who started that. Wow. And for those who don't remember Second Life, it's just you get to be an avatar in this little computer world. You walk around, you talk to other avatars, and you can talk to them. First, I met a couple that had met in Second Life, and they were married to one another.
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1123: David Eagleman | Your Prehistoric Brain on Modern Problems
That's how they met each other. But it turns out that's not uncommon. Here's the thing. Technology has moved way on beyond Second Life. But there's still about a million people that use Second Life every day.
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1123: David Eagleman | Your Prehistoric Brain on Modern Problems
And these people often, not always, but quite often are people who, for example, are in wheelchairs or have other physical ailments, and they can be in Second Life and be avatars and live this other kind of life, which is precisely what you're describing. It's exactly the kind of thing.
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1123: David Eagleman | Your Prehistoric Brain on Modern Problems
So you and I will be hanging out in the metaverse where we don't have any dots on our skin or gray hairs, and we'll be really great high-resolution 3D avatars instead of low-resolution Second Life avatars. But I think that's exactly where we're all going.
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1123: David Eagleman | Your Prehistoric Brain on Modern Problems
Oh, that's really interesting to me. That's right. You know what I was thinking about is imagine you were in that situation and People find themselves in these situations. Let's not even take something as awful, but just like a divorce. You know, they're alone again. Building up a new relationship and getting a new spouse, that's a giant undertaking.
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1123: David Eagleman | Your Prehistoric Brain on Modern Problems
So I've been very interested in what is the near-term future of AI relationships. As you may know, there are tons of websites where people get, let's say, an AI girlfriend. It's typically males getting an AI girlfriend. There are some women who get AI boyfriends.
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1123: David Eagleman | Your Prehistoric Brain on Modern Problems
But in Japan, apparently, this is an enormous thing going on where the statistic I heard, I haven't verified this, but I heard that 30% of young males have an AI girlfriend. Now, I'm fascinated by this because presumably that's not going away. So there's two things that could happen.
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1123: David Eagleman | Your Prehistoric Brain on Modern Problems
The general prediction that I see in the media is that this is going to lead to the collapse of the population and people are going to get married and stuff like that. Why? Because an AI girlfriend is always going to be better than a real girlfriend in the sense that... They don't have needs. Yeah, exactly. They don't get hangry. They don't get grumpy. They don't say mean things to you sometimes.
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1123: David Eagleman | Your Prehistoric Brain on Modern Problems
In fact, the European Union had done this thing for a while where they... ran public campaigns, this thing about, hey, everyone, when you're handed a bill, you should really stop and look at the bill. And it didn't work at all.
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1123: David Eagleman | Your Prehistoric Brain on Modern Problems
But I have a more optimistic view on it. I think that this kind of thing might... in the best circumstances, actually improve relationships because it's sort of a way to get practice and do all the dumb stuff and say something. And the AI girlfriend says, hey, that really hurt my feelings when you said that. And maybe your AI girlfriend leaves you or whatever.
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1123: David Eagleman | Your Prehistoric Brain on Modern Problems
But the point is... Damn it, I can't even keep an AI girlfriend. And they're still billing me. But the point is you get practice like all of us as young men do stupid stuff and we learn and you get wiser in relationships.
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1123: David Eagleman | Your Prehistoric Brain on Modern Problems
And I think if there's an AI girlfriend company that builds these things so that there is pushback and there are thresholds at which they say, I'm leaving, I'm not hanging out with you anymore.
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1123: David Eagleman | Your Prehistoric Brain on Modern Problems
Because that's what we do all the time is we simulate conversation. to say this and then she's going to say that and then I'm going to say that to her and so on. What a great opportunity to actually run through and say, oh God, I hadn't even thought of that. That's a good, you know.
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1123: David Eagleman | Your Prehistoric Brain on Modern Problems
That's really going to hurt her feelings if I say that and it's not worth it.
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1123: David Eagleman | Your Prehistoric Brain on Modern Problems
Nope. No, great. So I'm glad he asked this question. The idea of mind reading using, let's say, fMRI, which is our current hot technology, but in 10 years it'll be outdated and there'll be xMRI or something better. But the point is... Every brain is completely different. You and I have tons of stuff in common, but our brains are totally different. We grew up in different places.
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1123: David Eagleman | Your Prehistoric Brain on Modern Problems
We had different childhood experiences. We had different parents or whatever. And as a result, all the fine structure of our brain is different. So there are certain things. that you would find appealing, like a certain math problem or something. I might find something, maybe you like flying an airplane. I like riding horses and whatever, like there's just a million differences.
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1123: David Eagleman | Your Prehistoric Brain on Modern Problems
Okay, so that's the first problem. But the second problem is real thought, a real person is so rich and multilayered and highly textured that I assert it's actually impossible to do mind reading, certainly in our lifetime, maybe ever. So here's what I mean.
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1123: David Eagleman | Your Prehistoric Brain on Modern Problems
With five bucks. Exactly. So they spent $10 million more doing these public service ads on it and didn't lead to anything. So that's why they were looking for a new strategy there.
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1123: David Eagleman | Your Prehistoric Brain on Modern Problems
Where this shows up in the media all the time is, oh, scientists have shown that we can measure, let's say, what's happening in visual cortex to the degree that you can actually understand what somebody is seeing. Even if you're not seeing what they're seeing, just by the activity of their visual cortex, you can understand what they're seeing.
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1123: David Eagleman | Your Prehistoric Brain on Modern Problems
The way you do this is you put people in the scanner, you show them hours and hours of videos and pictures and stuff like that. And for each image, you're looking at what am I seeing in the visual cortex? And so you end up with these very fine correlations.
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1123: David Eagleman | Your Prehistoric Brain on Modern Problems
Okay, so let's stick with vision for just one second. So if I'm measuring your visual cortex, I show you hours and hours of images, I measure your visual cortex, and eventually I can make a pretty good correlative map. Why? It's because your visual cortex is essentially like a warped television screen, your primary visual cortex. Okay.
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1123: David Eagleman | Your Prehistoric Brain on Modern Problems
So the media looks at these things and says, wow, that's mind reading. I can show you an image and say, I don't know what the image is, but I look at your visual cortex. I say, oh, Jordan's just seeing an image of an elephant riding a unicycle. That's pretty amazing, right? But it's not mind reading. That's just reading your visual cortex. Same with auditory cortex.
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1123: David Eagleman | Your Prehistoric Brain on Modern Problems
You can actually nowadays figure out what somebody is hearing in their ears from the activity on their auditory cortex. Very cool, impressive stuff. It's not mind reading. The auditory cortex is just laying out the different frequencies. Okay. think about what a thought actually is for you.
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1123: David Eagleman | Your Prehistoric Brain on Modern Problems
The thought is, when you walked in my house, you're thinking, okay, let's see, I'm carrying this thing in my left hand. Oh, I've got to step over here because there's a rock in the way. I'm just moving over here. And oh, I've never been to David's house before, even though David and I have known each other for a long time. And oh, look, oh, what's that? Oh, there's a grill over there. Cool.
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1123: David Eagleman | Your Prehistoric Brain on Modern Problems
Yeah, exactly. There's so much... thinking that we're never going to be able to figure out because it has to do with you and it has to do with, oh, and I forgot. I have to tell my brother about this thing that I forgot that happened last week. And all these things are running through your head all the time. So point is, we can measure visual cortex. We can measure auditory cortex.
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1123: David Eagleman | Your Prehistoric Brain on Modern Problems
but all the rest of it is what's happening in your brain. It's on your experiences, yeah. That would all be like noise in this machine. Yeah, exactly. We couldn't possibly understand what it is because let's imagine that I don't know that you have a brother and that something happened to you last week that you need to tell him about.
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1123: David Eagleman | Your Prehistoric Brain on Modern Problems
If I don't know that, there's no way for me to establish a correlation in the neuroimaging.
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1123: David Eagleman | Your Prehistoric Brain on Modern Problems
Okay, you can imagine a scenario a thousand years from now where there's so much cameras and things and everything that every moment of your life is tracked. And then in theory, you've got to be a lot closer, but still you might have thoughts that are remixing things that you've experienced.
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1123: David Eagleman | Your Prehistoric Brain on Modern Problems
I wouldn't know that if you think, wait, I saw this piece of architecture over here and then I saw this other thing over here. And what if I put that on a Euro bill? I wouldn't be able to read that because I've never... Seeing you experience that, you're remixing it.
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1123: David Eagleman | Your Prehistoric Brain on Modern Problems
And by the way, people ask me sometimes like, hey, could we do mind reading technology so we could know in an airport as people are walking through, if somebody's thinking about bombing a plane.
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1123: David Eagleman | Your Prehistoric Brain on Modern Problems
Yeah. But something specific like a bomb on an airplane. But of course, Half the people in the airport are thinking about a bomb because they're thinking, I hope there's not a bomb on the plane. And so it doesn't tell you. Yeah.
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1123: David Eagleman | Your Prehistoric Brain on Modern Problems
Lie detection is a very fascinating thing because you can actually measure things in neuroimaging when somebody is doing a lie because essentially a lie requires two things. One is... squelching the truth. Let's ask you a question. You know what the truth is. I say, hey, what's your wife's name?
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1123: David Eagleman | Your Prehistoric Brain on Modern Problems
You know what the true answer is, but then you have to squelch that and then you have to cook up a new version. Okay. And so what happens when you lie is there's a couple of different regions that we can see in the brain. Okay. So when that was discovered about the year 2000, a couple of companies started right away to do fMRI lie detection. Okay. But they both went out of business.
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1123: David Eagleman | Your Prehistoric Brain on Modern Problems
And here's why. It's because it's super easy to fool these things. Because, for example, if I'm in the scanner, I can move my foot around or do other things or think about some other thing and screw up the whole signal. These are very sensitive signals. And it turns out lie detection.
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1123: David Eagleman | Your Prehistoric Brain on Modern Problems
There's also there's a misunderstanding about lie detection, which is there's no such thing as a lie that you're just reading. Let's say with the traditional lie detector, the polygraph test that they use in courts. You're not measuring a lie. What you're measuring is the stress, the physiological stress that's typically associated with the lie.
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1123: David Eagleman | Your Prehistoric Brain on Modern Problems
So if you ask me a question and I'm lying to you, there's certain stress that goes with that. And that's what's being picked up on. But let's say I'm a particularly good liar or I practice this lie a bunch or I'm a psychopath and I don't care that I'm lying. It doesn't stress me out at all. Then there's not going to be that signal.
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1123: David Eagleman | Your Prehistoric Brain on Modern Problems
I believe you, but a good liar would say the same story that you're saying, by the way.
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1123: David Eagleman | Your Prehistoric Brain on Modern Problems
Oh, man. If you're a sophisticated liar, you would set this up so that then people around you think, oh, we know when Jordan's lying, so then you can get away with it.
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1123: David Eagleman | Your Prehistoric Brain on Modern Problems
Yeah. Yeah, that's exactly right. That's one of the issues is the sanctity of your inner cosmos. Yeah. So just as an example, there was a case in the 1960s where the police thought this guy probably had drugs. They broke into his house and he ran upstairs and they chased him. After he got to his bedroom and there were these pills on the dresser and he
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1123: David Eagleman | Your Prehistoric Brain on Modern Problems
Stuck all the pills in his mouth and swallowed them and then said, you can't bust me anything because you can't find anything. So they had him taken to the hospital and they pumped his stomach. And this went all the way up to the Supreme Court about whether that's okay to do that or that's an invasion of privacy.
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1123: David Eagleman | Your Prehistoric Brain on Modern Problems
And so the Supreme Court ruled that that was an invasion of privacy to pump somebody's stomach. But there are other circumstances when you can be given a blood test or something. So anyway, this issue about brain imaging is always right in between. This is an active area in legislation right now about when it counts as private or not.
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1123: David Eagleman | Your Prehistoric Brain on Modern Problems
But I think for a while, what we're going to see is that it's a step too far and far as invasion of privacy. Even if we had meaningful fMRI lie detection, the idea of saying we're going to handcuff you and force you in the scanner and force your brain to tell us something that's not going to fly.
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1123: David Eagleman | Your Prehistoric Brain on Modern Problems
Exactly. Typically, what we have now, though, is that you can volunteer. You say, hey, I would like to take the lie detector test and present that as evidence. The court doesn't have to accept it. That's true. Yeah. It's minority report ish. Yeah.
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1123: David Eagleman | Your Prehistoric Brain on Modern Problems
Now, the interesting thing about Minority Report, which is important, is that it is a total fantasy to imagine that you could ever predict what somebody is going to do. Why? Because the world's really complicated and every moment your brain is changing based on what the whole world is doing to you. So we can't ever know, oh, now we've got such great technology.
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1123: David Eagleman | Your Prehistoric Brain on Modern Problems
We know that in a week Jordan's going to commit a crime. No possible way of ever knowing that.
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1123: David Eagleman | Your Prehistoric Brain on Modern Problems
Exactly right. So there may or may not be a next step. That's right.
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1123: David Eagleman | Your Prehistoric Brain on Modern Problems
Great. Thanks, Jordan.
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1123: David Eagleman | Your Prehistoric Brain on Modern Problems
Exactly right. But also, it's really easy to copy that. The ECB, the European Central Bank, hired me to do this. So I said, okay, are you going to send me some counterfeits? And they said, we can't for legal reasons, so you need to counterfeit yourself. You need to make your own? Exactly.
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1123: David Eagleman | Your Prehistoric Brain on Modern Problems
The conscious mind just gets access to the very top little bit, the newspaper headlines. And the reason is, you know, you've got almost 100 billion neurons. Neurons are the specialized cell type in the brain. These are doing incredibly complicated things.
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1123: David Eagleman | Your Prehistoric Brain on Modern Problems
And by incredibly complicated, I mean things we haven't even scratched the surface of yet in terms of the algorithms that they're running that make us up. I don't think we could even function at our scale of space and time if we had access to that level of detail. I mean, you can't keep 100 billion things in mind and each one of these neurons is talking about 10,000 of its neighbors.
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1123: David Eagleman | Your Prehistoric Brain on Modern Problems
I mean, just look at riding a bicycle. If you really pay attention, okay, how exactly am I moving my, you'll probably crash.
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1123: David Eagleman | Your Prehistoric Brain on Modern Problems
If you play a musical instrument, you know that if you start paying attention to what your fingers are doing, you're dead, you can't do it anymore because what's happening is so fast and sophisticated that you can't possibly address that with this slow, low bandwidth consciousness. This has to be something that the rest of your brain takes care of and just does for you.
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1123: David Eagleman | Your Prehistoric Brain on Modern Problems
These are all zombie routines, they're just completely automatized. Most of them we'd never even have access to. The vest is probably our best bet for the next 50 years or something, until we figure out better ways to get deeper in there and plug things directly into the brain, but that is not as easy as people think.
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1123: David Eagleman | Your Prehistoric Brain on Modern Problems
We're just now at this moment in history, for the first time in billions of years, where we can suddenly feed in completely new senses to the brain. And a year from now, the human species starts proliferating into all these different kinds of experiences that can be had.
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1123: David Eagleman | Your Prehistoric Brain on Modern Problems
And it turns out, for the kind of studies I was doing, the difficulty with counterfeiting, for example, is getting the paper right. The paper is very special. I'll tell you how they do that in some places. In Venezuela, when the economy was really crashing there, they would bleach the Bolivar bills.
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1123: David Eagleman | Your Prehistoric Brain on Modern Problems
They would bleach their bills to make counterfeits for other countries because it turned out to be economically worthwhile to do that. But... So what I did, though, is I would, for example, you can take a bill and you can just copy it with a high resolution scanner and print it and so on. It doesn't feel quite right.
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1123: David Eagleman | Your Prehistoric Brain on Modern Problems
But the point is, it's quite easy to get all the pieces and parts, except for one, except for the watermark. The watermark is the part where you hold up the bill and you look and you can see a little figure through the thing there. That, it turns out, is the part that's the most difficult to counterfeit because that exists between the front and the back. That's what I thought, yeah. Exactly.
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1123: David Eagleman | Your Prehistoric Brain on Modern Problems
So you can't print that in any normal way. So typically counterfeit operations have an artist that draws that part. So this led to one of the main recommendations I made to the European Central Bank, which is they had a building, a little structure as their watermark. So you look in the thing, you see the little building.
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1123: David Eagleman | Your Prehistoric Brain on Modern Problems
I ran studies showing that I can show you a building and then I can show you another bill that has a similar building and you can't tell the difference. Unless you're an architect, you specialize in that kind of thing or something. This has Doric columns. This has ionic columns. Exactly. What I recommend is they put a face there because faces we are super specialized for.
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1123: David Eagleman | Your Prehistoric Brain on Modern Problems
We've got all this neural real estate for recognizing faces.
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1123: David Eagleman | Your Prehistoric Brain on Modern Problems
So you can tell if a face doesn't look right. Imagine you're looking at your wife's face and someone's drawn to the side. You would immediately be able to tell.
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1123: David Eagleman | Your Prehistoric Brain on Modern Problems
Now, the problem was they thought that was a great suggestion and went for that, but they didn't know whose face to use because in the European Union, you've got all these different countries and everyone wants their own person, their own king.
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1123: David Eagleman | Your Prehistoric Brain on Modern Problems
So what they did finally is they used the face of the mythical goddess Europa. Now there you go. Which is sort of a half step in the right direction because on the one hand, we can get used to it and recognize, hey, that face doesn't look right. But it's not a face we immediately recognize because it's a made up face, first of all. So it wasn't the perfect solution, but it got us closer.
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1123: David Eagleman | Your Prehistoric Brain on Modern Problems
So one is your ability to recognize other people's faces. This is evolutionarily very important. We're an extremely social species. So we live in small groups and we look at faces and the identity is massively important to us.
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1123: David Eagleman | Your Prehistoric Brain on Modern Problems
And we're so good at it that when you realize that the difference from face to face is like a tiny difference in the distance between the eyes or the length of the nose or the frenulum These are really subtle differences. Yeah. But we are exquisitely good at it because we're a social creature.
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1123: David Eagleman | Your Prehistoric Brain on Modern Problems
Now, the issue about why you don't recognize your own face, that's because you only see your face from a particular angle in the mirror straight on. So it's backwards. By the way, it's left, right reversed in the mirror. But also you don't see yourself from all the other angles. Oh, it was a side profile too, yeah. Yeah. I was like, that's not what side profile looks like.
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1123: David Eagleman | Your Prehistoric Brain on Modern Problems
I was like, you're crazy. It's exactly what your side profile looks like. This is analogous to you for different reasons, but it's analogous to hearing your own voice. You and I as podcasters are probably much more used to hearing our voice than other people. But when you're a kid and you hear your own voice on a tape recorder, you think, it doesn't sound anything like me.
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1123: David Eagleman | Your Prehistoric Brain on Modern Problems
And that's because you only hear your own voice from inside your head. The resonance of the skull and the cavities in there is very different from how other people hear you.
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1123: David Eagleman | Your Prehistoric Brain on Modern Problems
Exactly. So that's why when you saw your face and stuff. The other weird part is that you're constantly changing, right? Your face morphs through time. And when you look at a picture of yourself from a decade ago, two decades ago, and so on, but it's hard somehow to keep track of that about ourselves.
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1123: David Eagleman | Your Prehistoric Brain on Modern Problems
Now, here's the thing. The reason the watermark is important is because all the rest of it is just super easy to scan digitally and reproduce. So all the rest we just assume will be right. The watermark is the part that has to be done by hand usually. And so that's why that really matters there.
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1123: David Eagleman | Your Prehistoric Brain on Modern Problems
What's interesting, I'll tell you one of the other recommendations I made to these guys is I said, look, what I've realized from a year of doing this is that a bill is full of distractions, right? The thing, the trees, the flowers, the banners, the eagles, the whatever. Like it's so full of stuff that you would not notice if that tree were missing or the eagle. Like it just doesn't matter.
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1123: David Eagleman | Your Prehistoric Brain on Modern Problems
And what that does is it distracts us from the security features. Therefore, the optimal thing to do would be to have a blank bill with a single hologram in the middle. Holograms are hard to counterfeit. That's it. You just want a single hologram that tells you the money, 20 or 50 or 100. And I made the argument to these guys and they all sat there and they said, you know what?
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1123: David Eagleman | Your Prehistoric Brain on Modern Problems
In theory, we agree with you. The logic of it is indisputable. But what they felt like is money has to be regal looking. And they felt like there's all this cultural momentum to money. And so in the end, they rejected that. They turned it down. But it's a real shame because that's how you stop counterfeiting or reduce it greatly.
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1123: David Eagleman | Your Prehistoric Brain on Modern Problems
That's it. That's the whole thing. That's the right way to do it.
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1123: David Eagleman | Your Prehistoric Brain on Modern Problems
I hope that is where it'll go 100 years from now. And by the way, let me just note, in case any of the listeners are thinking, hey, who even uses cash anymore? What's interesting is how much it's used around the world. Cash is still king. Really? Despite crypto, despite credit cards, all that stuff. Yeah, because most of the world... is at markets and stalls and flea markets.
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1123: David Eagleman | Your Prehistoric Brain on Modern Problems
There's just tons of that stuff going on. Yeah, even still.
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1123: David Eagleman | Your Prehistoric Brain on Modern Problems
Yeah, exactly. Obviously, most counterfeiting is the high 50s and 100s in Europe. By the way, there's one other thing about European money, which I suggested to them, which is European money is different sizes. So the 20 and the 50 and the 100. For blind people. Is that the idea? Exactly. Although note that we have blind people in the United States too.
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1123: David Eagleman | Your Prehistoric Brain on Modern Problems
I don't know, actually.