The Jordan Harbinger Show
1123: David Eagleman | Your Prehistoric Brain on Modern Problems
Tue, 04 Mar 2025
David Eagleman explains why counterfeiting works, how our empathy fails, why mind reading remains elusive, and if we'll ever upload our minds to computers. What We Discuss with David Eagleman: Dr. David Eagleman worked with the European Central Bank on anti-counterfeiting measures, and his research revealed that most people don't notice security features on bills. His key recommendation was to use faces rather than buildings for watermarks since our brains have specialized neural real estate for recognizing faces, making counterfeit detection easier. Research shows our brains have less empathy for people we consider part of our "outgroup." FMRI studies demonstrated that even simple one-word labels (like religious affiliations) can trigger this differential response in the brain's pain matrix when witnessing someone experiencing pain. True mind reading via brain scanning is likely impossible in our lifetime. While we can decode basic sensory input (like visual or auditory cortex activity), actual thoughts involve complex personal experiences, memories, and creative combinations that would be impossible to capture without knowing someone's entire life history. Uploading a human brain to digital form presents enormous technical challenges and philosophical questions. The computational requirements exceed our current global capacity, and questions about identity (is the upload "you" if your physical body dies?) remain unresolved. Brain plasticity would also need to be captured for the upload to remain dynamic. Understanding our brain's natural tendency toward ingroup/outgroup thinking gives us the opportunity to consciously overcome these biases. By recognizing our shared humanity and finding common interests with those different from us, we can build bridges across divides and develop greater empathy for all people. This awareness can help us make more compassionate choices in our daily interactions. And much more... Full show notes and resources can be found here: jordanharbinger.com/1123 And if you're still game to support us, please leave a review here — even one sentence helps! Consider including your Twitter handle so we can thank you personally! This Episode Is Brought To You By Our Fine Sponsors: jordanharbinger.com/deals Sign up for Six-Minute Networking — our free networking and relationship development mini course — at jordanharbinger.com/course! Subscribe to our once-a-week Wee Bit Wiser newsletter today and start filling your Wednesdays with wisdom! Do you even Reddit, bro? Join us at r/JordanHarbinger!See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.
Chapter 1: What is the main topic of this episode featuring David Eagleman?
Just visit jordanharbinger.com slash start or search for us in your Spotify app to get started. Neuroscientist Dr. David Eagleman is back on the show. He's been on several times. He's always a huge hit with all y'all.
Today, we're talking about counterfeiting money, why a neuroscientist was brought in to help solve this complex problem that largely relies on our brain's ability to detect counterfeits in the first place. Also, will we be able to upload our brains to the internet? How would that work? Of course, there's a lot that goes into this. Also, some philosophical questions come up as a result.
Who's the real me after that? My body or my virtual self? Do I have to kill one of them? That seems a little creepy. Maybe we'll get into that here on the show. And will we be able to read people's thoughts using fMRI or some other similar technology? Why or why not? And more importantly, when? All this and a whole lot more here today with Dr. David Eagleman. Alright, here we go.
Thanks for coming back to your semi yearly appearance on the Jordan Harbinger show, man. I love it. I say this every time I think, but we met through our mutual friend, John Levy, who runs the unfortunately named influencers dinners, which he picked that word before it was like a slur influencer. Oh, And he was great at connecting people. And I'm almost sure I've told this before, too.
But somebody had not shown up. And then you and I were tapped to give like a in the pinch five minute TED talk. You did something about the brain and I did something about North Korea because whoever it was didn't make it. They were stuck in traffic or something. Right. And then a woman asked, if this thing with the brain, that means telepathy must be real.
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Chapter 2: How does our brain detect counterfeit money?
And you very diplomatically handled telepathy. So that question was handled without making her look ridiculous, which I thought was nice of you. You've been up to some fun stuff. Tell me about the anti-counterfeiting. I was going to say, tell me about the Benjamins you're printing in the basement at Stanford.
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.
Yeah. It seems obvious that you wouldn't want to talk about anti-counterfeiting efforts. I guess they don't want an organized crime group to get to you and be like, we will pay you $10 million if you do this one thing for us. Put in this thing that we happen to be doing with our counterfeits.
Yeah.
And we'll pay you or threaten you.
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?
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...
Wow. Is it easier, I wonder, to counterfeit euros or dollars?
Both are very difficult, but dollars, apparently there are super bills, which means perfect counterfeits.
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Chapter 3: Why do faces help in counterfeit detection?
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.
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.
That's pretty cool. It seems shockingly informal for how a government would normally go about anti-counterfeiting. Yeah, I met this guy at a conference. We were hanging out in the back, having a couple of pina coladas or whatever, and then I decided to hire him to figure out how to stop counterfeiting these euros.
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.
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.
Who's going to do that? Yeah, exactly. Oh, come on, man.
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.
Yeah, that makes sense. If I got a counterfeit $100 bill, unless it was really bad, I would never notice. And it's also kind of not my problem because I'm going to go spend that at, I don't know, a gas station or something. And then they're going to put it in the bag. And then the bank is going to go, oh, crap, this is fake. And then I don't know how it works.
But I think the business loses that money. And if they use the marker and it's a good counterfeit, it's going to work with the marker. I don't think anybody pays attention to this. So somebody just gets screwed later down the line. It's not going to be the person who's selling flowers at the stand on the side of the road who gets it. It's going to be somebody who's going to the bank.
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Chapter 4: What is change blindness and how does it affect us?
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.
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.
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.
Starting off with podcasting is tough for a lot of people because they always go, I hate the way that I sound. And I always have to tell new podcasters that will eventually fade. And they go, oh, why will my voice change? And I thought, no, you're just going to get so used to hearing yourself in a recording.
It'll be almost like you're hearing yourself when you talk, but it's going to take a year or two because you need to build up the reps or the hours of hearing your own voice. But yeah, until then, it sounds like the answering machines in the 80s where you go, oh my God, is that what I sound like? This is horrible news.
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.
Yeah, that's interesting. So back to the money, people notice faces more than buildings. Since that's intuitive, maybe? Yeah. thing that we might notice because Loan's like, wait, this doesn't have that little strip on the side. When I shine the UV on it, it's not there. Or they mark it with a marker if you pay with 100 at Chuck E. Cheese to make sure they're not going to counterfeit.
They really just need to be able to look at it and go, eh, that face looks a little bit too cartoony. Maybe this is fake. Exactly.
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.
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Chapter 5: How does ingroup/outgroup bias affect empathy?
And then he would interrupt them with guys that are carrying a huge backpack.
painting or drywall or i forget what it was door and then he would switch out the person behind so you've seen this right this he'd switch the person out behind it it gets to the point of ridiculousness where it's like they change a guy with brown hair that looks a little bit like me to another guy with brown hair that looks a little bit like me and then it was like now they're changing it to a guy with no hair now they're changing it to an old man now they're changing it to african-american dude
And then it becomes like a guy that looks like me and then like an African-American woman. And the person who's talking just doesn't notice that's not the same person that asked for directions. We'll link to this in the show notes because it's insane.
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.
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.
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?
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?
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.
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.
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Chapter 6: How do we rationalize our behaviors and biases?
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.
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.
Speaking of counterfeit money, dust off that inkjet and print out some fresh $100 bills and support the fine products and services that support this show. We'll be right back. This episode is sponsored in part by design.com. All right, if you're starting a business or even just thinking about it, let me tell you about design.com.
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