929: David Eagleman | Exploring the Brain’s Inner Cosmos

929: David Eagleman | Exploring the Brain's Inner Cosmos

[00:00:00] Jordan Harbinger: Special thanks to Nissan for sponsoring this episode of The Jordan Harbinger Show.

[00:00:04] Coming up next on The Jordan Harbinger Show.

[00:00:07] David Eagleman: Seeking novelty is the most important thing we can do with our lives, because otherwise our brains get on to a track the path of least resistance, and that's where they stay. And so the important part is to figure out how can I challenge myself? How can I constantly be doing things in between the levels of frustrating and achievable?

[00:00:23] Jordan Harbinger: Welcome to the show. I'm Jordan Harbinger. On The Jordan Harbinger Show, we decode the stories, secrets, and skills of the world's most fascinating people and turn their wisdom into practical advice that you can use to impact your own life and those around you. Our mission is to help you become a better informed, more critical thinker through long form conversations with a variety of amazing folks, from spies to CEOs, athletes, authors, thinkers, performers, even the occasional gold smuggler, national security advisor, war correspondent, or legendary Hollywood actor.

[00:00:55] If you're new to the show or you want to tell your friends about the show, I suggest our episode starter packs. These are collections of our favorite episodes on persuasion and negotiation, psychology and geopolitics, disinformation and cyber warfare, crime and cults, and more. That'll help new listeners get a taste of everything we do here on the show. Just visit jordanharbinger.com/start or search for us in your Spotify app to get started. Today, back on the show, my friend David Eagleman. He's a neuroscientist and writer, and an amazing, amazing thinker. Great researcher and probably a hell of a teacher as well as you'll soon hear on the show.

[00:01:26] Dr. Eagleman is also the host of the original iHeart podcast Inner Cosmos. Today, we'll explore why things seem like they're moving in slow motion when we are in intense situations, what's going on with our brain there. We'll also learn why some people hear colors and taste sounds, literally. This is something that sounds like it might scare the crap out of you if it happened for the first time, but apparently a lot of us are like this.

[00:01:50] We'll also learn how close we are to being able to add new senses and even limbs to our brains and bodies that we can control with our brains. So, a whole lot on the brain today, including why blind people have better musical skills. I know I'm going to offend some people with that because they're going to be like, “Wait, I'm blind and I can't sing,” and that is just tough luck, folks. All this and more here right now with David Eagleman.

[00:02:17] This is a weird way to start a show but tell me about the time you fell as a kid. that's an interesting way to kick off your podcast as well

[00:02:24] David Eagleman: I was eight years old, and I was climbing on a house that was under construction and I fell off accidentally. As I fell towards the floor, the whole thing seemed to take a very long time. I was very calm. I was thinking about Alice in Wonderland and how this must have been, what it was like for her to fall down the rabbit hole. I busted my face up pretty badly.

[00:02:44] But the thing that stuck with me is how long the whole thing seemed to take and when I later got to high school physics and calculated d=1/2at^2 I realized the whole fall took half a second. And so, I was really surprised at how it could have seemed to have taken so long. So that's, I think, the thing that inspired my interest in time. So as a neuroscientist, I've devoted probably 40 percent of my career to understanding how we perceive time and what's going on with that.

[00:03:12] Jordan Harbinger: When I heard that, I was like, wow, that must've been a terrifying experience.

[00:03:15] And then I thought, well, that's why it slows down when we're afraid. But is it only when it's a gunfight, a car accident, does adrenaline have anything to do with it?

[00:03:25] David Eagleman: It does have something to do with it, but really, it's about salience. Really, it's about your brain saying something massively important is going on. So that can be a moment of pure joy as well. It's just those are more rare, and what we see unfortunately in life more is the car accident, the gunfight, the motorcycle accident, things like that. But it's essentially anything where your brain says, “Oh, my gosh. Something really important is happening. All systems pay attention to this.”

[00:03:50] And what happens is you write down more memory. Then when you say, “What just happened? What just happened?” The whole thing seems to have taken a very long time.

[00:03:58] Jordan Harbinger: I'm trying to think of a moment of pure joy that slowed down for me, and I wonder, I don't know if I can identify one. I mean, I saw the birth of my child, but I'm wondering, did that go slowly in my — I can't really even remember the time perception at all of that particular moment. I remember the moment well, but I don't remember the time being a thing.

[00:04:15] David Eagleman: It's any moment that you look back and you say, “Oh, my God. What just happened? What just happened?” That's where you’d get it. I don't know. Maybe if you won the lottery or something

[00:04:22] Jordan Harbinger: Yeah.

[00:04:22] David Eagleman: I'm trying to think of a good example of that. I don't know. I mean, obviously most of the things that get studied in neuroscience are the terrible moments.

[00:04:30] Jordan Harbinger: Yeah.

[00:04:30] David Eagleman: What happened is after I wrote my paper, I did a big study on this and I wrote this up, and I got literally probably a thousand emails from people over the years writing and saying, “Hey, here was my experience.”

[00:04:40] So that was a very good way for me to keep collecting up these anecdotes. But you know, there were lots of things where some guy worked at a museum and he was talking to his team and ended up knocking this Ming vase off with his elbow, but he ended up catching it. So that was a moment that maybe is in between joy and scariness. But the whole vase tipping off happened in slow motion in his —

[00:05:01] Jordan Harbinger: Whenever people knock off expensive things over, I always think who put that there where that could happen? Come on, man.

[00:05:07] David Eagleman: If you're a museum director, I think it happens more often than not.

[00:05:10] Jordan Harbinger: Oh, that's a good point, a museum director. Okay. That makes more sense. But it sounds like frame rate, right? In movies where you, or on YouTube, you see those guys that go, “We're going to shoot a bullet through 17 balloons or 117 balloons, and we're going to see where it stops.” And they shoot it at a high frame rate from the side and you can see each balloon pop. Then you replay it slower, right?

[00:05:31] It looks fast even if it wasn't fast during the initial experience. I'm doing a terrible job of explaining this. But when the frame rate is higher, you can replay it slower, and it looks normal

[00:05:38] David Eagleman: Yeah. This is what people assumed. First of all, there was nothing in the literature on this. I was surprised when I got into neuroscience that no one had ever done this study.

[00:05:46] But the assumption generally was that it must be that you sort of kick into a higher frame rate when you're in an emergency situation. In fact, I had a little grant from the military to do this study because the idea was, if this works and I could show that people see in slow motion, then maybe you could design a cockpit differently to flash information at you in a different way when things are really happening.

[00:06:07] But it turns out, the result that I found was that we don't actually see in slow motion with a higher frame rate. Instead, it's all a trick of memory. It's like you're writing down dense memories. Typically, your brain doesn't write down much of anything. I mean, my whole drive over here to meet you, you know, I passed people in cars, and I don't remember any of the drive

[00:06:26] Jordan Harbinger: Right.

[00:06:26] David Eagleman: But if something really salient happened, that all gets written down. And then when I say what happened, my brain goes and consults the footage that it has. And that's why we think something took a long time when you've written down a lot.

[00:06:38] Jordan Harbinger: I guess the military probably wanted to know, can we slow everybody down?

[00:06:40] Because if you're a man child like me, and you play a video game, right, and you're like, “Oh, I can do slow motion if I push these buttons together.” Then when you drive the car, you're driving at full speed, but everybody else is going really slowly. That's a superpower. So, if you could figure that out for pilots or anybody, but alas is not a thing.

[00:06:57] David Eagleman: Exactly. Alas, it doesn't happen. We're not seeing at a higher frame rate. I was hoping the same thing because there a million advantages if you could actually do that.

[00:07:04] Jordan Harbinger: Yeah.

[00:07:05] David Eagleman: It turns out though, that we do so many of our actions pre subconsciously, meaning the conscious mind takes a long time to catch up to what's going on, but your body can react and do quite amazing things even before you're aware that you've done it.

[00:07:18] This guy who knocked the Ming vase off caught it before he was even consciously aware of what was going on. This kind of thing happens all the time. I used to play baseball and when I'd hit the ball, my experience was always thinking, “Oh, the ball is flying away from me. Throw the bat and run,” because the whole thing happens faster than you can consciously keep up with.

[00:07:39] Jordan Harbinger: That makes sense. I would imagine the museum director imagined himself flipping burgers at McDonald's and was, “Noooo!” Right? And slowly caught the vase. Not that there's anything wrong with working at McDonald's, but when you're a museum director, it might be a little bit of a step down in your opinion.

[00:07:54] That's really interesting. You talk about flicker fuse frequency, is that the frame rate thing we're talking about here.

[00:08:00] David Eagleman: Exactly. It's called the flicker fusion frequency. Exactly. It's that, if I flash a light at you and it's flashing on and off, at some point about 35 times per second, you will see it as though it's a solid light, even though it's actually flickering on and off.

[00:08:12] Jordan Harbinger: Mm-Hmm.

[00:08:13] David Eagleman: And so, that's one way we can measure, hey, if you're seeing slow motion, would your flicker fusion frequency change? And it turns out, it does not.

[00:08:20] Jordan Harbinger: I think flicker fuse frequency is a good old autocorrect helping me write the wrong thing in my notes. I love when that happens. We can leave that in the show. No, I'm not going to bother correcting it. But yeah, that makes way more sense. Flicker fusion frequency. So that's the phenomenon that our brain blends together, the input from the eye if it's fast enough.

[00:08:37] David Eagleman: Exactly. Right.

[00:08:37] Jordan Harbinger: Interesting.

[00:08:38] David Eagleman: Yeah.

[00:08:38] Jordan Harbinger: Okay. So, we don't see in slow motion, which is a bummer. I was secretly hoping that we would. You said higher density. Is it a different kind of memory or is it just, I'm furiously scribbling to the notebook that I usually scribbled in because of this event.

[00:08:53] David Eagleman: Yeah. It's a little bit of both. You're fiercely scribbling everything out because for once, it actually matters to keep track of it. But in that case, you're actually recruiting a secondary memory system that's underpinned by a part of the brain called the amygdala, which is for emergency situations.

[00:09:06] So you're actually writing things down on two different memory tracks at once. Your normal hippocampal memory and now you've got your amygdala emergency memory, and so you've really got dense stuff going on there.

[00:09:17] Jordan Harbinger: If we have an emergency memory track, does that stuff get erased slowly or does it stay there forever? Because I think with traumatic experiences, like if you remember a crazy event, part of the problem is you can’t forget it, right?

[00:09:28] David Eagleman: That's exactly right. Amygdala memories are unerasable. But the fact, by the way that hippocampal memories are erasable is also super bizarre and weird. And that's something that's a pretty recent discovery.

[00:09:39] But for example, you train a rat to run a maze and he learns how to do it, and then you can get the rat to remember that and give him a protein synthesis inhibitor. And then, he will have forgotten it. In other words, you can erase the memory by taking it from cold storage to hot, where the rat's actually doing it and needs the memory, and then you can erase it. For example, if I ask you the name of your 5th grade teacher —

[00:10:04] Jordan Harbinger: Oh, man. Ms. Martin.

[00:10:05] David Eagleman: Exactly.

[00:10:06] Jordan Harbinger: Yeah.

[00:10:06] David Eagleman: When that comes to mind, now it's gone from really deep storage into you're now thinking about it, if

[00:10:12] you get hit on the head now or you take a protein synthesis inhibitor, that'll just be gone. Because when a memory becomes active, it needs to be reconsolidated. It needs to be repackaged into cold storage.

[00:10:24] Jordan Harbinger: Oh? Huh!

[00:10:24] David Eagleman: And so that's the really weird part is that memories are erasable.

[00:10:28] Jordan Harbinger: The memory doesn't exist both in my memory and in my conscious application. It moves and so it can be knocked out of there.

[00:10:34] David Eagleman: Exactly. Right. Super bizarre, yeah.

[00:10:36] Jordan Harbinger: That's weird.

[00:10:37] David Eagleman: So, that's weird.

[00:10:38] Jordan Harbinger: Yeah.

[00:10:38] David Eagleman: But the fact that amygdala memories are unerasable is really unfortunate for people with post-traumatic stress disorder, because those are the ones that you would want to erase, and you can’t.

[00:10:47] Jordan Harbinger: Right. Yeah, like Ms. Martin was somewhat traumatizing, but it wasn't nearly as bad as, I don't know, like driving my car off a cliff and being gravely injured or something, or worse, right?

[00:10:57] David Eagleman: Well, yeah. Yeah, yeah.

[00:10:58] Jordan Harbinger: That's too bad. I mean, do we know they’re unerasable or it's like, we just haven't figured that part out yet?

[00:11:03] David Eagleman: We have not figured that part out yet.

[00:11:05] Jordan Harbinger: Yeah, okay. But it's not erasable in the same way that other memories are —

[00:11:09] David Eagleman: Exactly, as far as we can tell, that’s how it goes.

[00:11:11] Jordan Harbinger: So, who knows? There's definitely therapeutic value in figuring out how to erase those “unerasable” memories.

[00:11:16] David Eagleman: Quite right. But there was that movie, what was that? Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, right? Did you ever see this movie?

[00:11:20] Jordan Harbinger: I did, but I can't remember what it was. Was it a Jim Carrey movie

[00:11:23] David Eagleman: Exactly.

[00:11:24] Jordan Harbinger: Yeah.

[00:11:24] David Eagleman: There was this movie called, Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind about erasing memories. He has some traumatic relationship or something, he decides just to erase it, which is interesting. So, if we ever got there with let's say, amygdala, traumatic memories, the question is, would you want to? You'd have to take it really seriously this question of whether you want to do it.

[00:11:42] Jordan Harbinger: You know what? there's an Adam Sandler movie, can't remember what it's called, speaking of movies, but he goes into Bed Bath & Beyond. He gets that remote where he can fast forward through life events he is not interested in. It's in the Beyond section, obviously.

[00:11:54] And he starts fast forwarding through like his kids' performances that are over games he wants to see, or arguments with his wife or whatever. He’s like, “Ahh! Let's just get this over with.” And then of course, the moral is he starts regretting this.

[00:12:07] David Eagleman: Yeah.

[00:12:07] Jordan Harbinger: The idea being that you don't really want to do that. If you were assaulted brutally and it's affected your whole life, you want to get rid of that. But you don't really want to get rid of the teacher that sort of bullied you, but maybe made you a little bit of a better person at the end of the day.

[00:12:21] David Eagleman: Yeah.

[00:12:21] Jordan Harbinger: But also, during that year, you did all this other stuff that was good for you.

[00:12:24] David Eagleman: That's right.

[00:12:24] Jordan Harbinger: Maybe you don't want to erase bootcamp from military training.

[00:12:28] David Eagleman: Exactly. Right.

[00:12:28] Jordan Harbinger: Even though it was awful, it was foundational in the same way.

[00:12:32] David Eagleman: And it's an interesting question about where to draw the line because let's say something really traumatic happened, you got assaulted or something. The question is, do you want to erase that?

[00:12:38] I mean, let's say you had the choice to erase that completely, but then you'd forget all the details about, hey, I shouldn't go to this part of the neighborhood, or whatever.

[00:12:46] Yeah you, you might just end up learning that same lesson again, and that'd be terrible.

[00:12:50] Jordan Harbinger: Right. So, is this amygdala memory, is this why people who go through crazy life events, they remember really specific details about their assailant? You know, you hear like, “He smelled like cigarettes and booze. He had a tattoo on his arm and it a with a lot of whiskers. I remember the cat had so many whiskers.” I’m like, because I see people three times a week could not describe them in that level of detail.

[00:13:10] David Eagleman: Yeah. I’d tell you, no, unfortunately. I just recorded an episode about eyewitness testimony.

[00:13:16] Jordan Harbinger: Yeah.

[00:13:16] David Eagleman: It turns out that, you know, eyewitness testimony is terrible.

[00:13:19] Jordan Harbinger: Yeah.

[00:13:19] David Eagleman: And by the way, people don't actually have good memories of this and the whiskers and the thing. Our memories are not like a recorder. We're not like your cell phone taking in zeros and ones and pinning them down. And so, eyewitness testimony is the worst technology that we allow in courts.

[00:13:36] Now, we have to allow it because for most cases, that's the only thing you can bring to bear. But happily, all the way up to the Supreme Court, people have recognized for a very long time exactly how terrible this is.

[00:13:48] But the point is, yeah, people can feel very confident that they remember, “Oh, this was the smell, the look, the cat,” whatever. And it might be completely wrong. We all know this from our own lives, anyway.

[00:13:59] Jordan Harbinger: I remember studying that in law school. And on the other hand, I saw somebody get arrested at a barbershop once while reading a newspaper about an assault. The cops came in, arrested that guy, and he threw a huge fit. And he said, “Why am I being arrested?” And they're like, “We don't talk about that.” And he said, “I want to know right now.”

[00:14:15] “I don't think you want to know right now.” And he's like, “I want to know right now. So, the female officer was like, “Well, you’re under arrest for the sexual assault of a woman in a park.” And it was the article he was reading with the other guy on the newspaper. He was interested in the article because he was the guy who committed the crime.

[00:14:30] David Eagleman: Oh, he was the guy.

[00:14:31] Jordan Harbinger: Allegedly.

[00:14:32] David Eagleman: Okay. Oh, gosh, yeah.

[00:14:33] Jordan Harbinger: But she identified him because he had a barber shear tattoo on his forearm

[00:14:36] David Eagleman: Okay.

[00:14:37] Jordan Harbinger: That's what they told him. He’s like, “That wasn't me.” He's like, “That wasn't me. I was just reading about that.” She's like, “Barber shear tattoo on the forearm, that's how we found you.

[00:14:43] David Eagleman: Right. Something like that can be very memorable. But okay, so for example, I teach the brain and the law at Stanford. I was teaching about two months ago, in about 70 kids in the class, and the back door opens, and this woman comes in. Right in the middle of me talking, she interrupts me and says, “Are you Dr. Eagleman?” And I said, “Excuse me, I'm teaching a class.” And she said —

[00:15:03] Jordan Harbinger: Yeah, no kidding.

[00:15:04] David Eagleman: “I've been emailing you and you haven't responded.”

[00:15:06] Jordan Harbinger: That’s creepy.

[00:15:07] David Eagleman: I said, “Excuse me.” I said, “Look, I'm sorry, my inbox is totally overwhelmed, but can we talk about this afterwards, please?” And she said, “I'm not leaving until I get a response,” and blah, blah. And she, for about a minute, she stood there yelling at me, and she was sort of taking a step closer and closer down the aisle towards the podium.

[00:15:21] Jordan Harbinger: Yeah, that’s creepy.

[00:15:23] David Eagleman: I said, “We are going to have to talk about this after class.” Finally, she said, “Okay, fine. I'm going to leave now, but I'm going to wait for you out there.” I kept lecturing for about 30 minutes and then I said to my students, “Hey, this is normally our break time, but I need to call security. Can you guys all take out a piece of paper and help me?”

[00:15:38] Because I was on the podium, I couldn't see, you know, I don't know what her height and weight was and so on. “Can you guys all draw her? Don't talk to each other. Draw your best picture, give a description,” and so on. And then, I collected all these pieces of paper.

[00:15:50] I said, “In this way, I can get a better view for security.” And so the pieces of paper I collected, it was everything between like five foot three and five foot nine. Her weight range over about 40 pounds, curly hair, straight hair, dark hair, gray hair. The whole gamut. And so, I didn't call security, of course.

[00:16:05] Jordan Harbinger: Right. You set this up.

[00:16:06] David Eagleman: I set this up.

[00:16:07] Jordan Harbinger: Okay, a professional actor. It's too weird, man.

[00:16:08] David Eagleman: Exactly. It was a professional actor that I hired, and the thing that I was demonstrating in the class was about eyewitness testimony, and it's so terrible, people's memories. And this was [crosstalk] that there was nothing else for them to watch except for what was going on right there.

[00:16:22] Jordan Harbinger: And it's so incredibly awkward. Surely, every single head in the room was like, “What?” And turned around and watched the whole time.

[00:16:27] David Eagleman: Oh, yeah. Everyone was staring at her. Yeah, exactly. People were thinking about, should I do something here, yeah. So then, what I do is I transitioned into my two-hour lecture on eyewitness testimony about that.

[00:16:37] But anyway, the point being that our memories are awful. There are all these things that happen. You know this from law school. There's cue overload. If there are too many things happening, your memory does a terrible job. If there's weapon focus, if somebody's holding a gun or a knife on you, you're looking at that thing, you're not looking at the person's face

[00:16:54] Jordan Harbinger: That's an interesting point. I never thought about that, but you're right. It's like, “What did he look like?” “Well, the gun was black, and it was metal.” “Okay. What does his face look like? He didn't have a mask on.” “I have no idea.”

[00:17:03] David Eagleman: Yeah, exactly.

[00:17:04] Jordan Harbinger: Yeah, interesting. What happens if one of your students bust out their cell phone and calls 911 because there's a crazy person in the lecture hall?

[00:17:10] David Eagleman: It's so interesting because people don't do that. Afterwards, several of the students said, “Oh, I thought about getting out my cell phone and filming her,” things like that. But strange, they didn’t because everyone's so caught by surprise.

[00:17:20] Jordan Harbinger: Actually, really, I’m shocked/somewhat heartening that the first instinct wasn't to film it, even though in this case it would've been appropriate, because you see these disasters where it's like, “Somebody go help that person,” and people are like, “Don't worry. I've got the whole thing on my iPhone 14 max.”

[00:17:33] David Eagleman: Well, you know, this girl won the Pulitzer Prize for filming the George Floyd thing on her cell phone.

[00:17:38] Jordan Harbinger: Oh, God.

[00:17:39] David Eagleman: Which was a little goofy to give the Pulitzer Prize for that.

[00:17:42] Jordan Harbinger: Yeah.

[00:17:42] David Eagleman: But I think if someone's at an appropriate distance where they're not directly involved in the thing, then they pull out their camera and they film.

[00:17:48] Jordan Harbinger: Sure.

[00:17:48] David Eagleman: Yeah.

[00:17:49] Jordan Harbinger: Why do our brains record that amygdala memory? Is it because the lesson is determined by the brain to be so important that it needs to go there?

[00:17:56] David Eagleman: Oh, exactly. No, that's exactly it. Most of your life is not particularly salient, but what you need is, “Hey, here is something that matters.” The whole reason that we have memory is to navigate the future, is to be able to make better predictions about the future. So, when something important happens, then you write that down.

[00:18:13] Jordan Harbinger: Mm-Hmm.

[00:18:14] David Eagleman: Yeah, that's the entire reason.

[00:18:15] Jordan Harbinger: Does this happen less as we get older? Or maybe I should ask, does it happen more when you're a kid and everything is new and exciting?

[00:18:21] David Eagleman: That's exactly right. So, when you're a kid, everything is novel. You've never seen a person like that, or you've gone to a camp like that, or caught a fish, or whatever the thing is. Everything's getting written down. This is why the end of a childhood summer; it seems to have lasted so long. But the end of adult summer, we look back, we think, “What just happened? Where did that go?”

[00:18:39] Jordan Harbinger: Yeah. Man, I remember the first African American man that I met in my grandfather's funeral. It was a guy that worked with my dad. His name was Ernie. I remember him tall. I remember his face. I remember shaking his hand and I remember looking at my hand after shaking it. And my mom goes, “I wanted to crawl in the coffin with your grandfather.” Because Ernie goes, “Yeah, it doesn't come off,” and everyone was laughing because I was like two or three.

[00:19:02] I remember shaking his hand and looking at my hand to see if maybe exactly what you're thinking right now. But I don't remember the million other African American people or different looking people that I've met in the years since.

[00:19:15] David Eagleman: Yeah, because you've got an internal model of the world, and your internal model is built up from the experiences that you've had. Essentially, what we're always trying to do is find things that are surprising to us.

[00:19:26] Jordan Harbinger: Mm-Hmm.

[00:19:26] David Eagleman: This happens a hundred times a day, where you know, “Oh, I didn't know this button was on the coffee machine.” “No, I didn't know this building was here,” whatever. And you're constantly refining your model by building new things up there.

[00:19:36] Jordan Harbinger: That has to do with the predictive nature of the brain, right?

[00:19:36] David Eagleman: Exactly.

[00:19:36] Jordan Harbinger: Okay.

[00:19:36] David Eagleman: The brain's trying to predict. This is what my next book is about. It's called Empire of the Invisible. The thing that is so striking is how limited our internal models are. But the thing that absolutely amazes me is that we don't ever recognize that we have the illusion at all times that our model is complete. Sort of, “Okay, yeah. I get the world. I know everything that's going on.”

[00:19:58] Jordan Harbinger: Mm-Hmm.

[00:19:58] David Eagleman: “Oh, there's a little surprise there. Okay, fine. Now it's complete. Now my model is complete.” We have this total illusion that we understand everything, even though almost everything in the world, you don't understand.

[00:20:09] I mean, if we went to the library, I could point out whole shelves of books that you've never even heard of the field or whatever, and you could do the same for me.

[00:20:15] Jordan Harbinger: That's because our brain, what, conserves energy by saying, “Oh, I've already seen this. I don't need to pay close attention to it.” Is that why?

[00:20:21] David Eagleman: Yeah. It's not that it says, “I've already seen this.” It's that you feel like, “Okay, I pretty much know everything there is to know.” And then I say, “Hey, Jordan. Here's a textbook on lattice gases.” And you say, “Wow, I've never even heard of that.”

[00:20:32] Jordan Harbinger: Right.

[00:20:32] David Eagleman: And you start looking and then, you read it and you say, “Okay, I've got a sense of that. Great. I've pretty much got it all covered now.”

[00:20:38] Jordan Harbinger: I feel like my son does this with new stuff. For example, this stuff here on the wall, if you're watching this on YouTube, there's this stuff on the wall. And I want people to ask themselves if they think that this is hard, soft, what the texture feels like, what's behind it. Even I was like, “Oh, it's, it's harder than I thought,” and “Oh, there's nothing behind it.” It's hollow, and that really surprised me.

[00:21:01] : My son would never have made any assumptions. I think he would've walked right up to this thing, touched it, tried to peel it back, looked at it. He really does that with everything. But he's four, not even.

[00:21:13] David Eagleman: That's how you build a model of the world is by really exploring. Yeah, the unfortunate part, I think this is probably why magic tricks can work so well on us because we are full of assumptions. You see someone's hand move and whatever, we think, “Hey, we're clever adults,” and so, we buy it. We say, “Okay. He must've just put that in the jar,” and so on.

[00:21:31] Jordan Harbinger: “It's behind your ear. It was there the whole time.” What is the lesson here? Do we seek novelty to write more memories more slowly or what?

[00:21:40] David Eagleman: Yes. Every time we discover something novel, we write that down. You are writing this stuff down every time you find something different. But, yeah, that's a general piece of advice that I always give people is seeking novelty is the most important thing we can do with our lives, because otherwise our brains get on to attract the path of least resistance, and that's where they stay.

[00:22:01] And so what happens is people, as they get to our age and certainly as they get to retirement age, they sort of feel like, “All right. I know how I want to run my life and I'm not doing anything different.” The important part is to figure out how can I challenge myself? How can I constantly be doing things in between the levels of frustrating and achievable?

[00:22:18] Jordan Harbinger: How do you do that every day? I remember one of the tips was, and I did this this morning and yesterday, switch the hand that I brushed my teeth with.

[00:22:25] David Eagleman: Yeah.

[00:22:25] Jordan Harbinger: It was a lot easier than I thought, actually.

[00:22:28] David Eagleman: Exactly. Right. I always tell people to switch their watches, driving home a different way each time. We recently moved, and so every day, I drive totally different routes to find my way home and pass different things. This stuff's easy.

[00:22:42] The other thing that's really surprisingly easy is how easy it is to change up your office or where you are. You just push your desk over the other wall, you take two paintings on the wall, and you swap 'em, stuff like that. It’s easy, but at least you're getting your brain out of the path of least resistance.

[00:22:56] Jordan Harbinger: And that causes our brain to create a new model?

[00:22:59] David Eagleman: Exactly. It causes your brain to do a little bit of extra work to say, “Ooh, this is interesting,” and blah, blah, blah. And you're not just completely on your hamster wheel

[00:23:07] Jordan Harbinger: Is that better for long-term brain health or do we not —

[00:23:11] David Eagleman: Yes.

[00:23:11] Jordan Harbinger: It is. Okay.

[00:23:11] David Eagleman: Essentially, I hate to say, but this is essentially the only thing, the best thing that we know of for brain health is just keeping your brain really active and constantly building new roadways and bridges, because as you get older, you know, you've got a fixed number of neurons, brain cells, and you've got connections between this.

[00:23:27] And as you get older, this stuff degrades. And when you hit your head on the cabinet or something, you kill some brain cells. So, it's only going one way. But if you can keep brain plasticity going by building new connections all the time, that's the best thing you can do for your health.

[00:23:42] Jordan Harbinger: You always meet those older folks that are like, “Oh, I'm learning how to use Google Docs.” And you're like, “Man, this guy's 80. He’s learning how to use Google Docs from Skillshare, or YouTube, or a class at the community center. Those people always seem sharp into their old age. And then you meet somebody who just watches TV all day, just watches The Price Is Right and Wheel of Fortune, and they're the ones who seem like they're slowing down.

[00:24:02] But I never really knew, and I guess we still don't really know, is that the cause or the effect, right? Because things are harder if you're slow, so you sit down and watch TV all day.

[00:24:10] David Eagleman: Right. And these things are always hard. For example, take someone like Robin Williams, who we learned retrospectively, had Lewy body dementia, so he had this degradation of his neural function.

[00:24:21] Jordan Harbinger: I didn't know that, actually.

[00:24:22] David Eagleman: Yeah. What's interesting is when he committed suicide and everybody assumed, “Oh, he must have been depressed.” And then everyone sort of loved this story about the comedian who suffers from depression, but that wasn't it at all. He had this degenerative disorder called Lewy body dementia.

[00:24:37] And the thing is, Robin is a guy who kept his brain super active. because he was constantly memorizing new scripts and doing this stuff. The thing is, he presumably would've done much worse, much faster had he not been pushing his brain to do all these things. The point is it can't be the solution. It can't be the thing that saves you from a degenerative disorder. But for sure he was able to keep his cognition much longer than someone else would've.

[00:25:06] Jordan Harbinger: You are listening to The Jordan Harbinger Show with our guest David Eagleman. We'll be right back.

[00:25:12] This episode is sponsored in part by BetterHelp. In our family, holiday gifts are less about wrapping paper and more about unwrapping experiences and meaningful moments. Preferring to make memories over accumulating stuff regardless of your family's gift-giving traditions? This season offers a perfect opportunity to treat yourself with the ultimate form of self-care, a little bit of therapy. And what better way to ease into it than with BetterHelp. It's like having a personal therapist without the hassle of leaving your cozy holiday hideout. With BetterHelp, you can unwrap the gift of mental wellness from the comfort of your own home, wearing your favorite holiday pajamas, if you wish. Think of it as your own emotional support hotline, minus long wait times and more a-ha moments than your average family dinner. So while you're sipping on that hot cocoa, why not give BetterHelp a try. Your mind deserves a holiday treat, too. It's entirely online, designed to be convenient, flexible, and suited to your schedule. Just fill out a brief questionnaire to get matched with a licensed therapist and switch therapist at any time. No additional charge.

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[00:26:13] Jordan Harbinger: This episode is also sponsored by ZipRecruiter. Every holiday season, there's that one friend or family member who's impossible to shop for like my brother-in-law that already has every damn gadget on the market. But if you're a business owner, you need to grow your team. Your perfect gift is simple. You want a smart hiring solution. So, look no further than ZipRecruiter. And right now, we're gifting it to you for free at ziprecruiter.com/jordan. ZipRecruiter is the gift that keeps on giving. It’s got this clever tech that zeros in on the folks who are just right for your job openings. Plus, it's like having a wingman. It nudges top candidates by telling them they're a great match for your role, giving them that little push to hit apply. And the cherry on top, you can personally invite your perfect match candidates with a click, making them feel special and boosting the chance they'll apply. It's like sending out VIP invites to your exclusive job party.

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[00:27:15] Jordan Harbinger: If you're wondering how I manage to book all these great authors, thinkers, and creators every single week, it is because of my network. And I'm teaching you how to build your network for free over at jordanharbinger.com/course. I know networking's a gross word. It sounds schmoozy, but this is not what that is. This course is easy, non-cringey, very down to earth, very not awkward, and it's certainly not cheesy. It's just practical stuff that'll make you a better connector, a better colleague, a better peer. And a few minutes a day is all it takes. Many of the guests on the show subscribe and contribute to this course, so come join us. You'll be in smart company where you belong. You can find the course at jordanharbinger.com/course.

[00:27:53] Now, back to David Eagleman.

[00:27:56] You mentioned brain injury plasticity and things like that are neurons rearrange themselves to use the available machinery in the body. I took that from one of your episodes. Does that mean that if I lose a limb, does that mean that the neurons that control, let's say my right arm, are going to be used for something else?

[00:28:13] David Eagleman: Yeah, that's exactly what happens. If you, God forbid, let's say have a motorcycle accident, you lose your arm, you have a map of the body in your brain, and the map just rearranges itself, so it doesn't have that arm anymore. And you see this across all parts of the body.

[00:28:28] For example, if you go blind, the part of your brain, the visual cortex gets taken over by neighboring senses. Now, this is more true in young brains and less true as you get older and older, but the idea is the same, which is that any rearrangement you have of data coming in or things you can control going out, the map rearranges. This is the incredible part about the fluidity of the brain.

[00:28:50] When you look at the cortex, which is the wrinkly outer bit, it looks the same everywhere even though we know from looking at the function, that this part is for hearing, and touch, and smell, and motor function and so on. But the reason it looks the same everywhere is because it is the same everywhere. It's the same stuff and it just assigns itself to whatever is important to run.

[00:29:10] Jordan Harbinger: That's first of all, amazing because it seems like that stuff could just sort of die or get disused and then you're done with it. But your brain is smart enough to go, “Well, these can be reallocated.” It's almost like —

[00:29:21] David Eagleman: Exactly.

[00:29:22] Jordan Harbinger: It's really incredible.

[00:29:23] David Eagleman: This is my last book called Livewired, and I'm using this term livewire to indicate that you can't think of it like hardware or software. It's liveware, and we are just scratching the surface of figuring out the brain secrets on this kind of stuff. There's so much more to learn, but anyone who thinks about the brain as being like a piece of hardware or software, it's just wrong. It's just missing half of the amazing stuff that the brain does.

[00:29:45] Jordan Harbinger: When I think about new technology and things like that or AI, and then you read a book about the brain or listen to your podcast about the brain, you see the gap is so enormous and you just think we're a thousand or more years away from being able to make, they're like, “This is like a brain that is part — a computer brain,” and you're like, “No way.”

[00:30:03] Like, yeah, cool. It does things. It looks like it's thinking, but it just doesn't do anything like what we're talking about with the brain. Not even close.

[00:30:12] David Eagleman: We're in this amazing time right now where we don't always know the answer to that, only because AI is moving so fast and sometimes, people discover things in AI where we think, “Hey, is that maybe part of what the brain is doing?” Now, of course, you're totally right. I mean, you have a four-year-old child, right?

[00:30:28] Jordan Harbinger: Yeah.

[00:30:28] David Eagleman: Your four-year-old can do things that AI can't do like navigate a complex room, and manipulate adults, and figure out how to get food to his mouth

[00:30:36] Jordan Harbinger: it’s so funny. But you said the manipulation, I was just thinking AI can't bounce mom off dad because, I mean, it's just not — and that's a relatively simple manipulation.

[00:30:45] David Eagleman: Exactly. And people think AI can — I'm sure there are listeners who are thinking, “Wait, AI can do that kind of manipulation?” But not exactly. This super impressive stuff with transformer models and ChatGPT for example, it's just taking a slurry of everything humans have written before and it's really good at predicting the next word and saying, “Okay, I'm going to do this next thing.”

[00:31:04] But having a goal like, “I really want the cookie they're throwing to bounce mom off dad,” we like to think AI can do this, but it doesn't do that yet. All it's doing right now is picking the next word based on the prompts that you are giving it. So, the thing that's going on with AI is we're essentially discovering new ways of building some sort of intelligence that is forking off from where human brains are.

[00:31:27] We've got brains that do these awesome, incredible things. We've got AI that's doing these awesome, incredible things, and they're becoming like different species. It's not, at least at the moment, it's not sort of solving. We're not looking at the brain and saying, “Oh, I get it. It's just a transformer model,” because it’s not. But we're inventing a new species that's going to live on this earth with us.

[00:31:46] Jordan Harbinger: It's so incredible. I wonder, you, studying the field, being at the cutting edge of this field, let's just say the brain, even though that's extremely broad, it's kind of like being an astronaut that goes to the moon and goes, “But everything else out there, I'm never going to see.” Do you ever think about that? Your whole lifetime, we're going to get to, what, some single digit percentage of understanding the brain or maybe low double digit?

[00:32:08] David Eagleman: Absolutely. And this happens in every generation. So, we can agree on this extrapolation that every generation feels like, okay, I've kind of got all the pieces and parts here, but they die not knowing any.

[00:32:19] I mean, just imagine trying to understand how muscles work before you understand the concept of electricity or understanding the northern lights before you understand about the magnetosphere and photons from the sun and whatever or understanding how the heart works before the invention of the pump

[00:32:34] Jordan Harbinger: mm-Hmm.

[00:32:34] David Eagleman: I mean, people for thousands of years had hypotheses about what the heart is doing, but they were doomed to be incorrect because they just didn't know the concept of the pump. We know for sure that we are going to end up in that position and come to our deaths not understanding any. The thing that I think about all the time, if I were granted, one wish is I would love to see the neuroscience textbooks from 500 years from now.

[00:32:57] Jordan Harbinger: Oh, man.

[00:32:58] David Eagleman: It would be so amazing to see all the stuff we're going to discover. You know, we have this book called Principles of Neuroscience, which is about 800 pages, that's sort of the textbook in the field

[00:33:06] Jordan Harbinger: Oh wow.

[00:33:07] David Eagleman: But I always make the joke that it's not principles because if it were principles, it wouldn't be 800 pages. It would be like a pamphlet. Because we haven't figured out the principles yet.

[00:33:15] What we do is just do this core dump of all the data that we're finding, we haven't figured out even the neural code yet, like what the little chattering of the neurons is saying. So anyway, yes, we have a super long way to go. I'm going to die on the moon not having seen the rest of the solar system, much less the galaxy.

[00:33:31] That said, things are moving fast, and what we're all hoping is that we can leverage AI to take these giant data sets of stuff that we've had kicking around for years and say, “Oh, yeah. Bang, here we —" We might be able to speed things up a lot.

[00:33:45] Jordan Harbinger: Yeah. I wondered if you could take all the data from something where normally you’re sitting there with 18 grad students and you're just pouring over this for years at a time. You could feed that into an AI that goes, “I remember everything like I read it five minutes ago.”

[00:33:58] And here's the thing on this note that corresponds to this footnote and this other thing from 20 years ago that nobody's really touched. These look like they might be related. Even if the AI doesn't do the work for you, it might say, “You should look at the connection between this kind of dementia and the people who have this kind of heart condition,” because it seems correlated, and we just don't even know.

[00:34:17] David Eagleman: Oh, exactly right. On one of my recent podcasts, I defined what I am taking as a new, what I'm proposing is a new way of testing AI intelligence because what we had was the touring test, which is can a computer fool a human? That's easy to do now.

[00:34:33] You can talk on ChatGPT, and you think you might be talking to another human. And then, there was the Lovelace test, which is about, can computers do something creative? Piece of cake. Dall-E and Midjourney, all this stuff.

[00:34:42] Jordan Harbinger: That's the AI art that you're seeing online. Those are the things where you think you're looking at a picture of the Revolutionary War, but then one of the soldiers is Donald Trump or something like that

[00:34:52] David Eagleman: exactly.

[00:34:52] Jordan Harbinger: I've seen that one.

[00:34:52] David Eagleman: Exactly. And so, what I'm interested in is not moving the goalposts, but what I'm pointing out is those tests aren't really that useful for us because we look at ChatGPT, and we're still stuck with the question of, okay, but is it intelligent or is it just mixing? Is it just doing a remix and predicting the next word, and it's just a big algorithm?

[00:35:10] So the test that I've proposed in the literature and on my podcast is can AI do scientific discovery? And I'm distinguishing two levels here. Level one scientific discovery is what you just said, which is piecing things together. because it's read the 35,000 neuroscience papers that come out every month and it's put things — because it remembers every paper perfectly and it puts things together. And so, I think it's going to be massively useful.

[00:35:36] And instead of having 18 grad students who are slogging through stuff and in five years they come up with one thing, instead a grad student might be able to do 10x the amount that they're doing. Level two scientific discovery is where you're actually making a new world model and you say, okay, what would it be like if I were writing the photon the way that Einstein thought about this, and then he comes up with a special theory of relativity.

[00:35:56] That kind of scientific discovery, AI cannot do right now. But that's the goal to my mind of when we would have a human level AI that's not just regurgitating what is found on the web, but it's actually inventing new things.

[00:36:10] Jordan Harbinger: Years ago on this podcast, we talked about adding new senses. This is when we were kind of looking at the — you had the VEST that was in Westworld. Can we talk about that now?

[00:36:19] David Eagleman: Yeah, yeah.

[00:36:19] Jordan Harbinger: It was two seasons ago. But we didn't really talk about adding body parts or limbs. We were talking about feeling sounds. Basically, how close are we to this? Can I add a prehensile tail?

[00:36:29] David Eagleman: Right. I wrote about this at length in Livewired, about could we add new body parts, and your brain would come to take those on? In a sense, we do this all the time. So, when you get on a skateboard or surfboard or a hang glider or a pogo stick, that's what you’re in. That becomes part of your body plan. And your brain says, “Okay, let's see the locomo —

[00:36:47] Now, I have to bounce up and down and that's how I move on this thing. Your motor system is extraordinarily flexible, even as an adult and you're always learning how to do new things. Okay. But the thing I'm really interested in is, you know, mother nature is used to things that are attached to you.

[00:37:03] But can we, with brain computer interfaces that plug directly into the brain, start controlling things at a distance? So already this is in place. For example, there are people who are paralyzed, and they have electrodes plugged into their motor cortex, and they can control a robotic arm that just happens to be on the other side of the room, and they can control this arm as though it's part of their own body.

[00:37:22] Jordan Harbinger: Yeah, that's awesome.

[00:37:23] David Eagleman: I think this becomes part of the self. In other words, the way that your brain determines what is me, has to do with what I can control. This is the hypothesis that I proposed. This is why, for example, when you look in a mirror image and you move around, you're like, “Oh yeah, that's me.” Why?

[00:37:37] Because I send out a motor command and I see that that thing moves great. That's me. And so, what's going to be really interesting is when we start controlling robots that are apart from us. And you've got this thing that's cleaning your floor and the thing that's picking up the heavy box over there and whatever. It's like an extension of you, and eventually we'll have robots of ourselves on the moon and other places and that'll be us.

[00:37:58] Jordan Harbinger: It's really incredible to think about the application of this, right? Because you're driving a forklift, it does a lot of things, but it doesn't do a lot of things. You could eventually just have the ability to control that with your mind or more probably practically a wheelchair user who is now has to get up, get into that thing, and roll up and down ramps, and things like that.

[00:38:19] And there's not always ramps. They can't travel to certain places that don't have that kind of accessibility. I can only imagine how inconvenient it is. The airport alone, I'm triggering wheelchair users who are like, “Don't get me started about the airport.” They would just be able to control this stuff with their mind.

[00:38:35] They don't have to use the joystick or blow into the microphone or whatever sort of mechanism of control. It would just be subconscious, like me walking into this room.

[00:38:44] David Eagleman: Oh, exactly. I mean, there's almost a sense in which we're already doing this, right? For example, if I want to write something to you, I want to write a text, I have to use my fingers to do that.

[00:38:52] Jordan Harbinger: Yeah.

[00:38:53] David Eagleman: Or I can just use my mouth and my throat, my larynx and breath and whatever, and just say something to you because I'm using my mind to control all this machinery and it just comes right out. That's what it would be like if you could control a robot. It's just sort of an extension of speaking or doing something.

[00:39:09] Jordan Harbinger: It seems like it would be even easier though, because my voice is still just a sound tool. What if my brain just tells your brain what I'm trying to tell you? I don't have to talk at all anymore

[00:39:18] David Eagleman: Oh, you mean brain to brain communication?

[00:39:19] Jordan Harbinger: Yeah.

[00:39:19] David Eagleman: I actually don't think we'd want that. And I'll tell you why.

[00:39:21] Jordan Harbinger: No, I mean, it sounds horrible for many reasons.

[00:39:23] David Eagleman: No, no. The reason we don't want it is because — so your brain is full of thoughts and ideas and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. And you've got this very sophisticated machinery that windows it down to one thing that's going to come out of your mouth. And that's what you communicated into the microphone.

[00:39:38] But you definitely don't want to share all your thoughts with people and have that going bi-directionally. I think having the opportunity to get things down to the mouth or to the page is actually really beneficial. But I will say, by the way, I think that paralysis because you just mentioned about people in wheelchairs, I think we're almost done with that

[00:39:56] Jordan Harbinger: Really?

[00:39:56] David Eagleman: Yeah. I think it's going to be gone in a handful of years. As in, let's say someone damages their spinal cord, like Christopher Reeves. He gets into a horse accident, damages his spinal cord. You can't get messages from the brain down to the body to control the lymph.

[00:40:09] We're just going to have a digital bridge that measures, okay, what's going on in the motor system? Okay, I'm just going to take that and I'm going to translate that down to the part of the spinal cord that's just jumping the damaged part, and then you're fine. I think what's going to happen, I don't know, 10 years, I'm not sure —

[00:40:25] Jordan Harbinger: Really that close? I mean, that's not that far off.

[00:40:27] David Eagleman: Oh, it's even closer except it's got to go through FDA approval, and all that stuff.

[00:40:30] Jordan Harbinger: Right, sure.

[00:40:30] David Eagleman: But yeah, I think there are going to be lots of companies doing this kind of thing where you're just jumping in the gap. Then, somebody gets paralyzed and goes into the hospital and they come out the next day, and they say, “Wow, that suck.”

[00:40:43] Jordan Harbinger: Yeah.

[00:40:43] David Eagleman: “That sucked for 20 hours, I couldn't move my limbs.” “Okay, fine. Now, I can move my limbs again.”

[00:40:47] Jordan Harbinger: That would be absolutely incredible.

[00:40:49] David Eagleman: Yeah. It strikes us that way. But to our children, that'll just be obvious like, “Oh God, that person had a really bad accident.” “Okay, I guess they're fine now.”

[00:40:56] Jordan Harbinger: Yeah. I think about that all the time where when I was younger, I'd go, “So wait, what did you do when you didn't have this?” And my parents would go, “We just couldn't reach our friends on the phone,” or whatever it was.

[00:41:06] David Eagleman: Right.

[00:41:07] Jordan Harbinger: I'm like, what? Yeah, I look forward to the day that my son's like, “So wait. People just died of that when they got it?

[00:41:13] David Eagleman: Or lived for 50 more years in a wheelchair.

[00:41:16] Jordan Harbinger: Yeah, if it's paralysis or like a disease like, “Yeah, we didn't have a vaccination for that. You just had to get it.” Even chickenpox, remember? You had to go get it and your mom would go, “All right, he's 12. He hasn't had it yet. I don't want it to be bad. His cousin's got chickenpox. Let's get to a play date and just get it out the way.” And you're like, “Wait, you did that to me on purpose?

[00:41:33] And now I remember my ex-girlfriend's little brother got the chickenpox vaccine and I was like, “Wait a minute. There's a chickenpox vaccine? The hell. I had to get chickenpox. I got scars from chickenpox.

[00:41:44] David Eagleman: Here's a quick question. Do you know what the thing is that has led to the most lives saved, really about from a hundred years ago. Well over a hundred years ago? What's the thing that we've changed that's led to the most lives saved?

[00:41:57] Jordan Harbinger: Gosh, it's hard to say. I mean, mosquitoes kill tons of people. But we didn't get rid of mosquitoes

[00:42:02] David Eagleman: It's control of fever and diarrhea.

[00:42:06] Jordan Harbinger: Really?

[00:42:06] David Eagleman: That's it.

[00:42:07] Jordan Harbinger: I guess that makes perfect sense.

[00:42:08] David Eagleman: Just controlling that stuff means when you get bitten by a mosquito or you get this or you get that or whatever, all these things, people would die of that.

[00:42:14] Jordan Harbinger: Oh man. I mean they still do in other places like malaria.

[00:42:16] David Eagleman: That's right. Yes. But that's right. But less and less so. I mean, happily, the whole world is elevated by very cheap ways to control those things.

[00:42:24] Jordan Harbinger: I mean, diarrhea, you can get over-the-counter stuff to control that. And by the way, if you don't have it in your travel kit, go get it today, because you never know. But fever, I hadn't thought about.

[00:42:33] You're right though. I mean, if you get a super high fever and you don't have a way to reduce that, you're looking at brain damage, and that's the best-case scenario. We can't do it. Yeah. Wow. So, this is like learning how to ride a bike except for the bike is attached to you.

[00:42:48] I wondered about the level of efficiency loss, right? Because if I'm typing, there's a major loss of efficiency compared to when I'm dictating. But then there's a major loss of efficiency if I could just look at my computer screen and think of all of the words or even the thoughts, and then something goes, “You probably mean to say this,” and it gets typed in a professional manner by, you know, rewritten by AI.

[00:43:11] David Eagleman: Yeah. I've been wondering about this. I was just at the TED conference in April, and I ran into one of my friends and he said, “Look, I've got this cool company that uses ChatGPT to take some bullet points that I — so let's say I need to send you an email, Jordan. I just have really two bullet points that I'm trying to say.

[00:43:28] It expands that and sends it off to you as, “Hey, Jordan. I hope you're well right. I hope your family's doing great. Here's the things I want to talk to you about,” blah, blah, blah. “Warm regards, David.” Okay. So, I've just typed two bullet points and you receive this thing —

[00:43:40] Jordan Harbinger: My email program does this.

[00:43:41] David Eagleman: Oh, great. Okay. But then I ran into this other guy who told me, “Hey, I've got this great company where when I receive an email, it reduces the email down to two bullet points.” And I thought —

[00:43:50] Jordan Harbinger: It does that, too, yeah.

[00:43:50] David Eagleman: And I thought, God, we're caught in this AI sandwich where, why don't I just send you the two bullet points instead of doing this whole game of expanding and reducing

[00:44:00] Jordan Harbinger: Yeah, that's going to be interesting. What does the future culture want? Does it want bullet-bullet or does it want, “Hi, David. Been a long time. Hope you're well. How's the company going?” “Hey, you still enjoying that swimming pool over there?” It's going to depend on how well you know the person.

[00:44:16] David Eagleman: Exactly. I think there are analogies to this like, writing a postal letter with curvy, cursive —

[00:44:24] Yeah. Calligraphy, yeah.

[00:44:25] I had to think of the word. It’s been that long.

[00:44:26] Jordan Harbinger: Yeah. We don't use it anymore.

[00:44:27] David Eagleman: Exactly. But that was the nice way to send you a note. Yeah, maybe we will get down to the sort of two bullet point emails with each other.

[00:44:35] Jordan Harbinger: Hopefully we figure out something that's better than email. But I don't know, man. That has stuck around since the dawn of the internet and it's been improved marginally, is it?

[00:44:46] David Eagleman: Yeah. Yeah, that's right. But the dawn of the internet is not that long ago.

[00:44:48] Jordan Harbinger: No, that’s true, like 25 years.

[00:44:49] David Eagleman: Again, if we can look 500 years in the future at how people are communicating — by the way, this issue of typing and how typing is slow, and would you want brain machine interface?

[00:44:57] Again, I don't know, because the question is, could you actually — if my mind is being read about this email, “Oh, I really want to rewrite that sentence,” blah, blah, blah. It might be just as much work as doing it with your fingers.

[00:45:13] Part of the lore of a company like Neuralink, which is doing great work, they've got an awesome thing going, be a part of the lore as, “Hey, you wouldn't have to use your fat fingers on the phone. You could just think the text message.” But I don't know at the moment how many people are going to go in for an open head surgery?

[00:45:28] Jordan Harbinger: Yeah, no.

[00:45:29] David Eagleman: So that they can communicate with their phone 50 percent faster.

[00:45:31] Jordan Harbinger: It's for sure going to be people who are like, “I am locked in this box because I have ALS,” or something like that.

[00:45:36] David Eagleman: Exactly. So, Nueralink’s going to do all kinds of beautiful, amazing things for that population, for the paralyzed population, stuff like that. But the lore of where it is going, I'm not sure of it yet.

[00:45:46] Jordan Harbinger: Yeah. I don't need to play Candy Crush using only my right brain or whatever. The risk is not worth the reward. The juice is not worth the squeeze. Let's talk about brain machine interface a little bit. I am curious, you mentioned homuncular flexibility which is a great term. It sounds completely made up somehow, although I guess every term is made up.

[00:46:05] David Eagleman: Well, I do just like most terms, yeah.

[00:46:06] Jordan Harbinger: Yeah.

[00:46:07] David Eagleman: The homunculus is this part of your brain that it just means little man in Latin, but it's the map of your body. It says, “Oh, okay. I see you got two legs you got two arms. This is what I can control.” The brain is this three-pound mission control center that lives in darkness. It doesn't know what your body looks like, but from the activity and from its interaction with the world, it figures out what your brain looks like. This is a term coined by my good friend, Jaron Lanier, who was looking at VR back in the ‘80s.

[00:46:36] Jordan Harbinger: Oh, yeah. He's been on this show actually.

[00:46:37] David Eagleman: Oh, awesome.

[00:46:37] Jordan Harbinger: Really interesting guy. He’s so brilliant. He’s so awesome.

[00:46:40] David Eagleman: Yeah. What Jaron figured out is in VR, you can give people very different kinds of bodies. He did this experiment where he turned people into an eight-legged lobster, and you control the lobster by doing different things like turning your wrists and using your arms, whatever.

[00:46:55] And people were able to figure it out, figure out how to operate a very different body. So, he coined the term homuncular flexibility. And then my good friend, Jeremy Bailenson, who runs the VR lab at Stanford, took up that mantle some years later and showed — for example, you can get in VR, and you have three arms, and two of the arms you control is your normal arms, and the third arm, you control by turning your wrists in a particular way.

[00:47:17] And people can get quite good at grabbing boxes and doing things with three arms. It just is another demonstration of this thing we've been talking about with pogo sticks and hang gliders, and whatever that the map of the body is very flexible. That's the flexibility part.

[00:47:33] Jordan Harbinger: This is The Jordan Harbinger Show with our guest David Eagleman. We'll be right back.

[00:47:38] This episode is sponsored in part by Nissan. These days, too many people have to settle for the next best thing, especially when it comes to choosing a car. But at Nissan, there's a vehicle type for everyone, for every driver who wants more. Whether you want more adventure, more electric, more action, more guts, or more turbo charged excitement, Nissan is here to make sure you get it. Because Nissan is all about giving people a whole spectrum of thrills to choose from with a diverse lineup of vehicles, from sports cars to sedans, to EVs, pickups and crossovers. With Nissan's diverse lineup, anyone can find something to help them reach their more. In my life, I'm always looking for more, more stories that resonate, people who defy odds, or in my case right now, a little more tissue because I'm sick as a dog. But that's why I love that Nissan wants to help people find their more, more freedom, more adventure, or even just more fun. So, thanks again to Nissan for sponsoring this episode of The Jordan Harbinger Show, and for the reminder to find your more. Learn more at nissanusa.com.

[00:48:27] This episode is also sponsored by Progressive. Most of you listening right now are probably multitasking. So, while you're listening to me talk, you're probably also driving, cleaning, exercising, maybe doing a little grocery shopping. But if you're not in some kind of moving vehicle, there's something else you could be doing right now, getting an auto quote from Progressive Insurance. It's easy, and you could save money by doing it right from your phone. Drivers who save by switching to Progressive saved nearly $750 on average and auto customers qualify for an average of seven discounts. Discounts for having multiple vehicles on your policy, being a homeowner, and more. So just like your favorite podcast, Progressive will be with you 24/7, 365 days a year, so you're protected no matter what. Multitask right now. Quote your car insurance at progressive.com to join the over 28 million drivers who trust Progressive. Progressive Casualty Insurance Company & Affiliates, national average 12-month savings of $744 by new customer surveyed who saved with Progressive between June 2022 and May 2023. Potential savings will vary. Discounts not available in all states and situations.

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[00:50:49] Now for the rest of my conversation with David Eagleman.

[00:50:54] This is like avatar stuff, right?

[00:50:55] David Eagleman: Yeah.

[00:50:56] Jordan Harbinger: Where the guy learns how to control the alien body.

[00:50:58] David Eagleman: Exactly.

[00:50:59] Jordan Harbinger: Man, it seems like we could inhabit a totally different species. I mean, we'd be in VR, I suppose. I. But does it feel like your real body when you're a lobster?

[00:51:08] David Eagleman: Oh, yeah.

[00:51:09] Jordan Harbinger: You get feedback from it and

[00:51:09] everything?

[00:51:09] David Eagleman: This is the crazy part. Look, I've been interested in what happens when you are in your car and your right front wheel hits the curb or something, how it feels. Kind of like when you climb in your car, it's sort of like you've just extended your body. You've got this big body. If you crash into something, it's sort of like you have just done that because the car is part of the self while you're in there

[00:51:31] Jordan Harbinger: h: It also is why we judge other bad drivers. How did you do that? Do you trip over things? Do you run into closed doors? How did u hit that thing, right?

[00:51:40] David Eagleman: Oh. I wonder if there is a correlation there about people who are klutzy, yeah.

[00:51:44] Jordan Harbinger: It's a bold statement to say that there is because — but your idea supports that, right. How did you hit that? How did you walk into that? Do you walk through closed doors? If you hit a parking block, okay, fine. You didn't see it. It's like tripping over something.

[00:51:56] David Eagleman: Yeah.

[00:51:56] Jordan Harbinger: But when you run into the front of a store, do you run into walls in your kitchen? That's a weird thing to do, and usually you don't do it without sort of

[00:52:04] David Eagleman: My assumption is that their foot slipped off the brake or something like that.

[00:52:07] Jordan Harbinger: Fine. Yeah. Okay. But sometimes, it's usually impairment of some kind, right? It could be the same thing. I want to talk about synesthesia or synesthesia. Because it seems very, by definition, very weird. And I think for people who haven't experienced it, it almost sounds fake.

[00:52:25] Like, “Oh, purple makes me taste something,” or “When I see this, I hear a sound like the northern lights.” Can you take me through that?

[00:52:33] David Eagleman: Yeah. Synesthesia is a blending of the senses, and at least 3 percent of the population has various forms of this. The most common ones being things like when you look at letters or colors of the alphabet, it triggers a color experience.

[00:52:46] For a synesthete, A might be red, and B is yellow, and C is purple, and so on. It's just self-evidently true that when they see that letter, it equates to purple. It's not a hallucination. It's not that they're seeing purple out in the world, but that just is, or you hear a sound, it puts a taste in your mouth, or you taste something, it puts a feeling on your fingertips.

[00:53:03] Any kind of cross blending of the senses, we lump that all under the umbrella of synesthesia. It's not uncommon. I started studying this, really at the turn of the millennium and built this online test, synesthete.org where people can come and we have this rigorous way of testing who's really a synesthete and who's not.

[00:53:21] And as a result, we have 68,000 rigorously verified synesthetes now that we can do all kinds of other testing on. It's been a cool field. The reason I've always liked it is because when we try to understand our own consciousness, we just take for granted that I experience consciousness the same way that you do.

[00:53:38] But in fact, there are measurable ways that we can look at, “Oh, you're actually doing it differently, and you're doing it differently,” and so on. And so, that's the interesting thing and important thing about consciousness is saying, if there are different flavors of it, then can we study what is different in my brain and your brain, and so on to really get at

[00:53:55] Jordan Harbinger: thier: 3 percent is a huge number. Isn't it left-handed people are 4 percent or something? I mean, there's almost as many people who taste purple or whatever as there are people who write with their left hand?

[00:54:04] David Eagleman: Yeah.

[00:54:05] Jordan Harbinger: That's crazy.

[00:54:06] David Eagleman: Yeah, exactly. It might actually be higher than that because one other form of synesthesia we tend to lump in there, which is probably 10 percent of the population, is what my lab is termed spatial sequence synesthesia.

[00:54:17] So that's people who, when they think about, let's say the number line, or they think about years, there's a spatial component to it. So, they say, “Okay, yeah, April would be over here, and then May is next to it but a little bit lower, and June is up over here,” and whatever. It often makes a circle around their body

[00:54:31] Jordan Harbinger: Wow.

[00:54:32] David Eagleman: Or they think about the years, and they think, “Yeah, 1971, that's behind me over there, and ’72. And then it kind of makes a sharp turn at ’75,” and blah, blah. “And the future is ahead of me.” Although, by the way, half of synesthetes who have this I've come to learn, have it the other way where the past is in front of them because they can see the past. But the future's behind them because they don't know where they're going with that.

[00:54:52] Jordan Harbinger: Right. Oh, that's interesting, man.

[00:54:54] David Eagleman: As you know, I did a recent episode of Inner Cosmos on this, and particularly I proposed this new hypothesis I have about this centuries old debate about whether the northern lights make noise, because the northern lights do not make noise.

[00:55:08] But you've had through the centuries, people making this claim. Like, “I know for absolutely certain that they make noise.” There's a paper from the 1920s in The Journal of Science and the 1930s in The Journal of Nature where people are saying, “I know that I heard the noise there,” but most people don't.

[00:55:22] So you can see where I'm going with this, which is, I think it's just a matter of synesthesia, which is to say a not uncommon form of synesthesia is where if you have big motion and movement and lights, you hear sounds from that. And so that is my proposal is that that's the explanation. Some people hear the noise when they're looking at the northern lights, but if you actually measure things with audio equipment, there is no noise.

[00:55:43] Jordan Harbinger: Oh, okay. I was going to say, maybe there's a weather condition at the time, but that doesn't —

[00:55:47] David Eagleman: No. People have been out there with audio recording devices forever, and irrespective of the weather condition, there's no noise.

[00:55:53] Jordan Harbinger: So, you and I could both be looking at the northern lights and I could go, “Wow, that sounds incredible.” And you could go, “Man, you need to stop taking whatever you're taking because you're going —

[00:56:01] David Eagleman: right.

[00:56:01] Jordan Harbinger: — because you’re going back —

[00:56:02] David Eagleman: Well, that's what I would've said 20 years ago. But now I would say, “Oh, Jordan might have synesthesia.”

[00:56:07] Jordan Harbinger: If you have synesthesia, and it's not the spatial one that you said most people — or maybe don't notice, do people normally know they have this?

[00:56:15] David Eagleman: This is the really interesting part, is that people have never heard of this and don't know that anyone sees the world differently than they do until they hear, let's say a podcast about synesthesia or reads something. I've written about this in many of my books about synesthesia, and then they say, “Whoa, wait. You don’t have it?”

[00:56:31] For example, you remember the dress? The gold and white, and blue and black?

[00:56:34] Jordan Harbinger: Blue, green, black, whatever.

[00:56:35] David Eagleman: Yeah, exactly. It just so happened that when my wife looked at it, she said, “This is dumb. What do you see here?” And I happened to see the opposite color she didn't. So then both of us had our heads blown.

[00:56:45] But if it had happened that I saw the same colors as she did, we would've ignored it for a while until other people — We all operate under the assumption that everyone's having the same experience we do. And so, if you have synesthesia, you've presumably never thought that it could be otherwise.

[00:57:01] Jordan Harbinger: Wouldn't you as you get older realize, “Oh, triangles aren't feminine,” or “The number 14 isn't a female,” or —

[00:57:09] David Eagleman: It just seems self-evidently true to you.

[00:57:11] Jordan Harbinger: Hell, yeah.

[00:57:12] David Eagleman: But here's the other thing. It probably doesn't come up in conversation for you.

[00:57:14] Jordan Harbinger: That's a good point, yeah. I don't say as are all red and then someone goes, “What are you talking about? As are green.”

[00:57:19] David Eagleman: Actually, here's the interesting side note. It was thought for a while that synesthesia’s more common in females than males. But it appears to be that females just like talking with their friends more about things, about their inner experience.

[00:57:30] Jordan Harbinger: Totally makes sense.

[00:57:31] David Eagleman: Yeah. And so, it comes up for them more.

[00:57:33] Jordan Harbinger: Right. It's not more common in women, they just notice it more because they're talking about something.

[00:57:38] David Eagleman: Because they're talking with their friends. “Hey, does that seem red to you?” And that, “Wait. What are you talking about red? There's no color.” That kind of thing.

[00:57:44] Jordan Harbinger: Huh, yeah. Gosh. Pythagoras on numbers with gender and personality, that's a little weird, personality.

[00:57:51] David Eagleman: Oh, yeah. This is a not uncommon form of synesthesia where people look at numbers. They not only have colors, but for many people they have shapes, sizes, genders, and personalities. They say, “Oh, yeah. Three is a mean old woman, and four is a naive little boy, and five is a happy young girl,” and blah.

[00:58:09] Jordan Harbinger: It's different for everybody.

[00:58:10] David Eagleman: It's different for everybody. Every synesthete has their own unique thing going on. It appears to come from cross-wiring in the brain.

[00:58:16] Jordan Harbinger: That's what I was going to ask. What causes this? It's so odd.

[00:58:19] David Eagleman: Yeah. Exactly. My lab has been looking for the genetics for this for a long time. So, we've collected up these massive family trees where synesthesia runs through the tree, and we're still working on this. And it's probably like most things, it's going to try to be polygenetic, which means there are lots of genes involved and nothing's going to be very obvious, but when we do find it. It's going to be some weird thing like, “Oh this receptor for this neurotransmitter is just one amino acid different.”

[00:58:45] And you would say, “Why the heck does that lead to colored numbers?” But it's because it leads to this very tiny change in the way these things wire, so you have a little bit more cross-wiring, a little porous border between these areas. And so, these parts are communicating.

[00:58:57] Jordan Harbinger: Would there be a reason we evolved that or is it just like, here's another flavor of human development?

[00:59:03] David Eagleman: Yeah, exactly. I think that's exactly it. Mother Nature tries everything she can, and if it's not harmful, then it doesn't get selected out. And so, it's just another way of trying out reality.

[00:59:12] Jordan Harbinger: It's just like, “Hey, this person's big toe is a little bit shorter than that one person's,” and it doesn't actually do anything other than that.

[00:59:19] David Eagleman: Exactly. Exactly. Right.

[00:59:21] Jordan Harbinger: Wow.

[00:59:21] David Eagleman: But you know, again, from other nature, the idea is trial these things out because you never know what's coming in a thousand years. Maybe there'll be something where synesthetes survive and the rest of us don't.

[00:59:30] Jordan Harbinger: Right. The brain machine interfaces work better on people with that kind of cross-wiring, and we can't figure it.

[00:59:34] David Eagleman: Exactly.

[00:59:35] Jordan Harbinger: It's so interesting. On a previous show, we talk about why we dream. I think it might've even been with you. It was about the brain defending the visual system. Can you take us through that? I love this and I have questions about it.

[00:59:49] David Eagleman: Yeah, yeah.

[00:59:49] Jordan Harbinger: Because it's weird as hell also.

[00:59:50] David Eagleman: This is, I'll just say is a general thing. This is quite satisfying for me because as a neuroscientist it felt like, okay, well we know why we dream. There are all these hypotheses about why we dream. Things like you're consolidating memories or you're practicing programs that you wouldn't have a chance to do otherwise.

[01:00:09] There were all these hypotheses and it just seemed like that was an answered question. But my student Don Vaughn and I realized some years ago when I was working on this plasticity stuff, that there was a completely different answer, and I think it's actually correct. So, what we've proposed, we published this a few years ago, is a completely new reason why we have dreams. And it has to do with this thing I mentioned before, which is if you go blind, your visual cortex gets taken over by the neighboring kingdoms of hearing and touch and so on.

[01:00:34] And so what we realized is because of the rotation of the planet, we end up in the darkness for half the cycle. And obviously I'm talking about evolutionary time where it was really dark, not electricity-blessed times. And so, your visual system is at a disadvantage when the planet rotates. You can still hear it taste and touch and smell, but you can't see anymore.

[01:00:53] What we realized is the brain needs some way to defend the territory of the visual cortex when it is dark. And that we realized is what dreaming is about. You've got these very ancient circuits that just blast random activity, individual cortex only into the visual cortex. If you look at the circuitry of dreaming, it just goes into primary visual cortex, and that’s it. And it's just defending it in the darkness every 90 minutes. It just blasts random activity for a few minutes.

[01:01:18] Jordan Harbinger: So, you could lose some visual cells overnight, and your brain decides to try to prevent them?

[01:01:24] David Eagleman: Exactly. And by the way, it's not that you're lose the cells or the neurons, and all that.

[01:01:27] Jordan Harbinger: Or the neurons rewire, yeah.

[01:01:28] David Eagleman: It's the function. Exactly.

[01:01:29] Jordan Harbinger: Sorry.

[01:01:29] David Eagleman: They rewire so that they're now taking care of hearing or touch instead of vision. So essentially dreaming is a screensaver.

[01:01:34] Jordan Harbinger: If I'm getting less REM sleep, which I have been recently for some reason, according to my aura ring, does that mean that I'm losing my vision?

[01:01:42] David Eagleman: The good news is that you are at an age where it doesn't matter too much. It's really important for

[01:01:47] Jordan Harbinger: What are you trying to say, David?

[01:01:50] David Eagleman: Babies spend half of their sleep time in REM. As you get older and older, you spend less and less of your time in REM because it just doesn't matter as much.

[01:01:57] Jordan Harbinger: That actually makes a lot more sense because my son has crazy dreams all night long and we were a little worried because he's screaming and he is getting up and he is talking, and I'm like, but it's not REM sleep time. It's early in the night. He should be in deep sleep. But that's only adults that should be in REM sleep.

[01:02:13] David Eagleman: Yeah, exactly. Yeah. Kids spend a ton of time in REM.

[01:02:15] Jordan Harbinger: That's kind of a relief. All right. How come then, here's another curve ball for you, how come sometimes in dreams, I smell, I hear, I feel things. I'm not just seeing things. Why aren't dreams like weird silent films?

[01:02:27] David Eagleman: Yeah, it's because your brain is a natural storyteller. So, when you blast activity into the primary visual cortex, it of course reaches out and goes other places, too. You can end up believing that you've heard or smelled something or whatever.

[01:02:39] But generally dreams are only visual. The weird part about our understanding of stories in dreams is that it's just a random collection of images. Essentially, it is like a silent film. But when you wake up and you roll over and tell your wife, “Whoa, I just had the weirdest dream,” that's a second level where you're imposing a narrative on top of it.

[01:03:00] You say, “Well, this happened and that happened,” and you're sort of piecing things together and gluing them. But the

[01:03:04] fact is —

[01:03:04] Jordan Harbinger: It’s like eyewitness testimony.

[01:03:05] David Eagleman: Yeah.

[01:03:06] Jordan Harbinger: It's a bunch of bullsh*t. Got it.

[01:03:07] David Eagleman: Exactly. That's the weird part. Your brain is already imposing, sort of as you get this random activity dreams, of course you don't just see spots of light when you — because all you need to do is tickle some neuron, especially something that's been hot during the day, some synaptic connection and that triggers, “Oh, yeah. Something about my 4-year-old son having a dream.” But from there, the plot can go off in different directions and that's why dreams are characterized by bizarreness

[01:03:32] Jordan Harbinger: Okay. That makes a lot more sense. If I'm blind and my visual cortex is still there, but my eyes don't work, what happens when I dream?

[01:03:41] David Eagleman: Blind people have dreams, but their dreams are about touch and feel and so on, because the activity is getting blasted into the occipital lobe. But now that part of the brain deals with hearing and touch.

[01:03:52] Jordan Harbinger: I see. So, there's still —

[01:03:53] David Eagleman: So, it's no longer visual for them.

[01:03:54] Jordan Harbinger: Right. The visual cortex is, it's just a cortex that does other things.

[01:03:58] David Eagleman: Exactly right. A blind person's dream is —

[01:04:01] Jordan Harbinger: How fascinating

[01:04:01] David Eagleman: “Hey, I was walking around this studio, but everything was rearranged, and I was touching this weird stuff on the wall, and then there was a dog barking at me and I ran away,” that's their bizarre dream. But there's no vision. It's just, you know?

[01:04:12] Jordan Harbinger: And that's true for people who are both born blind and people who've went blind over time?

[01:04:17] David Eagleman: Good question. When you're born blind, that's the case. But if you go blind later, depending on the age you go blind, there's less and less takeover of your visual cortex. So, a person who goes blind later will still have dreams that include vision in them, but they have more and more hearing and touch over time.

[01:04:34] Jordan Harbinger: Yeah, that's fascinating. Man, that would be super disappointing to wake up — because you know, when you dream something really good and you wake up and you're disappointed, it would be really awful to be like, “I can see! Oh, crap. This is a dream.”

[01:04:44] David Eagleman: Oh, yeah.

[01:04:44] Jordan Harbinger: That would be fricking annoying as hell. Although if you’re a lucid dreamer, it could be really interesting.

[01:04:48] David Eagleman: Yeah, that's right.

[01:04:49] Jordan Harbinger: I'm curious, my blind listeners what they think of this. And I'm curious, my blind listeners, if you see things or if you were not born blind, if you see things in your dreams, email me. I'm freaking dying to know, because this stuff, I don't really know why I'm so fascinated by this, but it just seems like this is my space exploration, right?

[01:05:07] There's so much going on in the brain that it's, yes, I'm interested in other galaxies or whatever, but in the brain there's all these almost superhuman capabilities that are not superhuman, that's human.

[01:05:17] David Eagleman: And you know, so this is why I called my podcast Inner Cosmos. This is a term I've been using for a long time. The idea is, actually I was majoring in space physics in college, and then I ended up — I loved it, but obviously everything is very far away. And as you mentioned earlier, I'll only get to the moon.

[01:05:32] I'll never see all the stuff that I'm studying. And I realize with the brain, it's like we've got a cornered, it's three pounds now. It is the most complex thing we've ever found in the universe. But we've got it right there and there's so many ways we can study it. And so, sailing into the Inner Cosmos is what I've devoted my life to, yeah.

[01:05:48] Jordan Harbinger: The podcast is super interesting.

[01:05:50] David Eagleman: Thank you.

[01:05:50] Jordan Harbinger: I've devoured every episode so far. I have so many more notes that we're not going to get to, so I'll have to have you back.

[01:05:56] David Eagleman: Awesome.

[01:05:56] Jordan Harbinger: We've released a few more episodes. But I do want to wrap with, and I haven't caught this episode yet, who goes to prison if somebody has a brain tumor and commits a crime? How do we handle that? What are you thinking about that?

[01:06:07] David Eagleman: Yeah. For about 17 years now, I've been running this national law and profit called the Center for Science and Law because a big interest of mine is this intersection of what we know about the brain and what we know about the legal system, what happens when they collide.

[01:06:20] This happens all the time. You and I were just talking before the show started about Charles Whitman, who in 1966 climbed the tower at UT Austin and started murdering people at random, started shooting people below. It turned out, long story short, he had a tumor in his brain pressing against the amygdala, which is involved in fear and aggression.

[01:06:40] He was killed at the scene. But the question is, what would happen if there was a mass murder, and then we found out the guy had a brain tumor? Let's say you did a neurosurgery and resected that brain tumor, and then the guy said, “Oh, my God. I'm horrified. I would never do this.” And we did every test in the world and realized, he's telling the truth.

[01:06:56] He's not the kind of guy who would do this. It was because of something that happened to him. I've been very interested in this thing. Essentially, to get the long story short, there's this spectrum of culpability. We look at people with brain tumors or really obvious problems in their brain, and we say, “Oh, gosh. Your behavior changed. We get it. It's a biological thing. It's not really your fault.”

[01:07:17] Then we've got people in the middle of the spectrum where we say, “Gosh, we think this had something to do with your biology and maybe it had to do with drugs, or maybe a drug that was given to you like a medication, or whatever. And we sort of see, it's not your fault, but we sort of still blame you.”

[01:07:32] And all the way at the other end of the spectrum, you've got the common criminal where you say, “Look, it's your fault, buddy. You did this thing.” The problem with this spectrum is that our technology defines where the line is. While on one side, we say, “Oh, gosh. We can measure this thing. It's not really your fault, it's your biology.”

[01:07:47] And on the other side of the line, we say, “It's your fault. We're going to punish you. You're going down, buddy.” And the problem is that this line changes every year

[01:07:54] Jordan Harbinger: it does.

[01:07:55] David Eagleman: Until our technology gets better.

[01:07:56] Jordan Harbinger: Yeah.

[01:07:56] David Eagleman: And so this puts us in a very weird situation where in 10 years, somebody that we've put in jail and really blamed, we're going to understand some new thing. We're going to say, “Oh, you've got this disorder that we didn't even know about. We didn't have a name for it. Now, we know about it and we get it. It's not really your fault.” So, what this tells me is that culpability, whether it is your fault, is not really the right question for the legal system to be asking.

[01:08:18] Obviously he needs to be asked, “Are you guilty or not guilty of the crime?” But are you blame worthy?

[01:08:23] Jordan Harbinger: Right. Is there malice?

[01:08:24] David Eagleman: Yeah. Are you blame worthy because of the choices that you made? This is the thing that neuroscience is changing a lot because it's not clear that we have free will. What is clear is that who you are comes about as a confluence of your genetics and your environment, neither of which you have a choice over.

[01:08:40] And so the question is, when something happens. Are you to blame or not? I think the legal system can drop that question entirely and become just a forward-looking system that says, okay, you've committed the crime. We are taking you off the streets. But what is the best way to route you forward through the system

[01:08:55] Jordan Harbinger: That makes a lot of sense, right? Because society wants to punish bad people who do bad things. But theoretically, we want to rehabilitate people who do things that they can't help but do. It's hard to wrap your mind around this. I remember in law school, this was like hours of debate and discussion.

[01:09:10] But if you go back in time, because future technology is going to be hard to wrap your mind around, but if you go backwards in time and you realize there was a time where people didn't know that consuming certain things did anything. So, imagine that you eat something that causes you to go on a crazy psychedelic trip that's violent, let's assume that that exists, is that person bad for doing the things they did during that time?

[01:09:33] They didn't know what they were consuming was going to change their mental state. Nobody knew that's how that thing operated. But then you move forward a hundred years or 20 years, if you're talking about that person's lifetime and you go, “Wow, if you do this, you can't control your actions.” That's the same thing as a tumor pressing on your brain.

[01:09:50] David Eagleman: Okay. But the answer to your particular question is, it depends whether it's your first time or second time. If I crash my car because I'm having an epileptic seizure, the law considers that not my fault. But the second time, if I know that I have epilepsy and I'm not taking the medications, then it is my fault.

[01:10:05] Jordan Harbinger: Sure.

[01:10:06] David Eagleman: So anyway, that would apply to the, to the psychedelic violent medicine.

[01:10:08] Jordan Harbinger: If you could pinpoint the problem. If you just ate something one day and you went crazy, but you've eaten that thing a hundred times with different mushrooms in it, you don't know, you might not even have made the food, right?

[01:10:19] David Eagleman: That's right. The big picture is what we do in this country, in most countries in the world, is we imagine incarceration is the one size fits all solution.

[01:10:27] Jordan Harbinger: Sure.

[01:10:27] David Eagleman: And as you well know, America has the highest percentage of the population in jail of any country in the world. We just stick to lots of people there. And I'd want to take people who do violence off the street. You have to do that.

[01:10:39] Jordan Harbinger: Yeah

[01:10:40] David Eagleman: But the question is, are there things we can do besides mass incarceration? The answer is yes. There are all kinds of rehabilitative strategies that we know about. The cheapest and easiest way that I've been campaigning for, for 16 years and been really making progress on this, is getting counties to implement specialized court systems.

[01:10:57] You have a specialized mental health court, for example. Instead of taking someone with schizophrenia, and stick them in jail, instead you say, “Look, we're going to have a judge and jury that understands everything about schizophrenia. And they know all the rehabilitative strategies that are available. They know where to go.” Great.

[01:11:11] You've got specialized drug courts where they say, “Okay, instead of sticking to jail, we know about all kinds of programs that you can do and so on and do things.” There are specialized prostitution courts because prostitution's actually a different kind of crime than other kinds of crimes. There are all kinds of that.

[01:11:25] They have specialized veterans courts which know a lot about traumatic brain injury, and what can be done and what you might do there anyway. Anyway, having specialized court systems is so cheap and easy. Counties who have done it have all had massive success. So, this is a very easy step in that direction.

[01:11:41] Jordan Harbinger: Speaking of things we're going to tell our kids about in 50 years, “Wait. You had one court for everybody?” Yeah. So, if you had some sort of problem, a judge who knew nothing about it would sentence you to 20 years in prison and it was completely unfair, and we never solved that problem.

[01:11:54] David Eagleman: Exactly. And what happens currently, a lot of counties have mandated sentencing. If you're a judge, you've got six people that you see today, all of whom have committed the same crime for totally different reasons. This guy is schizophrenia. This guy over here is a psychopath. This guy's tweaked down on drugs, this guy's on [unintelligible] so on and so on. You got completely different reasons for committing that crime. You have mandated sentencing. You say, “Okay. Look, seven years for everybody.” There it is. It just doesn't make sense.

[01:12:14] Jordan Harbinger: Yeah. Oh, man. Well, the future is indeed bright, and I would love to have you back on the show to discuss —

[01:12:19] David Eagleman: can't wait.

[01:12:19]

[01:12:19] Jordan Harbinger: The other 12 pages of notes here that we didn't even touch. David Eagleman, thank you so much.

[01:12:24] David Eagleman: Thank you, Jordan.

[01:12:26] Jordan Harbinger: You are about to hear a preview of The Jordan Harbinger Show about how technology can augment our brains and allow the blind to see and the deaf to hear.

[01:12:35] David Eagleman: The conscious mind just gets access to the very top little bit, the newspaper headlines. And the reason is, you've got almost a hundred billion neurons. Neurons are the specialized cell type in the brain.

[01:12:46] These are doing incredibly complicated things, 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.

[01:13:02] I mean, you can't keep a hundred billion things in mind, and you know, each one of these neurons is talking about 10,000 of its neighbors. I mean, just look at riding a bicycle if you really pay attention, okay, how exactly am I moving my, you'll probably crash. 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.

[01:13:19] 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. These are all zombie routines. They're just completely automatized.

[01:13:34] 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. 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.

[01:14:00] In a year from now, the human species starts proliferating into all these different kinds of experiences that can be had.

[01:14:06] Jordan Harbinger: To learn how it's possible to create completely new superhuman senses, check out Episode 655 with David Eagleman on The Jordan Harbinger Show.

[01:14:17] Always love talking about this stuff. David is a hell of a guest. He's just an awesome, awesome guy. Super exciting about the new senses and using our homuncular flexibility to get new special abilities. Maybe I'll get superhuman eyesight or even a prehensile tail. What about you guys? I'm curious, what would you get if you could add something outside your body?

[01:14:36] Would you be Doctor Octopus with whatever, eight arms? Would you just make your eyes better? Superhuman hearing would be terrible, right, because then you couldn't sleep. You'd be hearing all kinds of stuff that you don't want to hear. I don't know if that's the thing. But there's got to be so much that I'm just not thinking about.

[01:14:50] I'm not being imaginative enough with what this technology could really bring. All things Dr. David Eagleman, including his podcast, Inner Cosmos that's going to be linked in the show notes @jordanharbinger.com. Transcripts also in the show notes.

[01:15:02] We've also got our newsletter, and every week the team and I dig into an older episode of the show and dissect the lessons from it. So, if you're a fan of the show, you want to a recap of important highlights and takeaways. You just want to know what to listen to next, the newsletter is a great place to do just that. jordanharbinger.com/news is where you can find it.

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[01:15:30] This show is created an association with PodcastOne. My team is Jen Harbinger, Jase Sanderson, Robert Fogarty, Millie Ocampo, Ian Baird and Gabriel Mizrahi. Remember, we've rise by lifting others. The fee for this show as you share it with friends when you find something useful or interesting. The greatest compliment you can give us is to share the show with those you care about. If you know somebody who's really interested in the brain, maybe a little bit sci-fi, and wants to know about the latest and greatest, definitely share this episode with them because man, we are getting to the future fast. In the meantime, I hope you apply what you hear on the show so you can live what you learn, and we'll see you next time.

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