Speaker 1: Welcome to Tech Stuff, a production from iHeartRadio. Hey there,
Speaker 1: and welcome to tech Stuff. I'm your host, Jonathan Strickland.
Speaker 1: I'm an executive producer with iHeartRadio and how the tech
Speaker 1: are you listeners? We have a treat today. We've got
Speaker 1: a guest on the show. He's a neuroscientist, he's a technologist.
Speaker 1: Most importantly, he's a fellow podcaster, David Eagleman, host of
Speaker 1: Inner Cosmos with David Eagleman.
Speaker 2: Welcome to the.
Speaker 3: Show, Thanks Jonathan. Great to be here.
Speaker 2: David.
Speaker 1: It's a pleasure to have you on. I think you
Speaker 1: may only be the first or second person I've ever
Speaker 1: had on the show who has done a ted talk.
Speaker 1: I've had film directors on the show. I've had production
Speaker 1: designers for things like Stranger Things on the show. But
Speaker 1: it's rare that I get a chance to sit down
Speaker 1: with a neuroscientist. So this is going to be a
Speaker 1: real pleasure, great pleasure for me too. Well, let's start
Speaker 1: off by talking a bit about Inner Cosmos, because you know,
Speaker 1: this show has launched, it's got thirty episodes out as
Speaker 1: of the time we're recording this episode, thirty I think
Speaker 1: published the day before we're recording this. That's right, And
Speaker 1: first I want to applaud you for your restraint that
Speaker 1: it took seventeen episodes before you gave us the definitive
Speaker 1: answer on what is consciousness?
Speaker 3: Yeah, well, you know the show as you well though,
Speaker 3: it's about you know, the intersection of the brain with
Speaker 3: our lives, our daily lives, and right, so it took
Speaker 3: a little while to work up consciousness. Unfortunately, we still
Speaker 3: do not have a definitive answer to that, and it's
Speaker 3: you know, this is really at the center of the
Speaker 3: mystery of neuroscience is how do you put together eighty
Speaker 3: six billion neurons and have all this you know, three
Speaker 3: pound glob of wet biological stuff that is you? But
Speaker 3: why does it feel like anything to be you? Why
Speaker 3: aren't you just you know, my Mac laptop here has
Speaker 3: a whole bunch of transistors, but presumably it doesn't find
Speaker 3: things funny or interesting or painful or curious. Yeah.
Speaker 2: Yeah.
Speaker 1: I often talk about in the sense of the ability
Speaker 1: to have an experience versus the ability of just being
Speaker 1: able to process information, and a lot of what you
Speaker 1: talk about has obvious crossover into the world of technology,
Speaker 1: but beyond that, like when we start talking about things
Speaker 1: like artificial intelligence or artificial neuron networks. Like that's where
Speaker 1: we start really having this interesting cross talk, because I
Speaker 1: get the sense that often the technologist side has maybe
Speaker 1: a superficial understanding or sometimes a complete misunderstanding of the neuroscience.
Speaker 1: But they're trying to use neuroscience to describe their technologies,
Speaker 1: and meanwhile you have neuroscientists who are often trying to
Speaker 1: straighten out the concepts, and it can become a complicated
Speaker 1: conversation where people are talking on two different levels. So
Speaker 1: one of the things I wanted to ask you actually
Speaker 1: relates to this, which is, as a neuroscientist and as
Speaker 1: a technologist, how do you actually define artificial intelligence? Because
Speaker 1: it's such an enormous discipline, and I feel like a
Speaker 1: lot of the reporting around it gets very reductive.
Speaker 3: Yeah, all great questions. Here's the thing, you know, we
Speaker 3: don't even know exactly how to define natural intelligence. What
Speaker 3: I mean is people have known, for example, since the
Speaker 3: nineteen twenties that the IQ test measures something useful and
Speaker 3: it correlates with one's success in life along various metrics
Speaker 3: career and so on. But there's a big debate about
Speaker 3: what intelligence is in humans. Is it the ability to
Speaker 3: better simulate possible futures and evaluate them. Is it the
Speaker 3: ability to squelch distractors and so on? There's lots of
Speaker 3: there's lots of different diferent ideas about what intelligence might be,
Speaker 3: but we don't know. It's probably a word that has
Speaker 3: too much semantic weight on it, meaning that it's not
Speaker 3: just one thing anyway, So when you ask the question
Speaker 3: of what is artificial intelligence, it can mean a lot
Speaker 3: of things, and people mean different things by it. And
Speaker 3: so the way we're building AI is the way we
Speaker 3: build any sort of machine where you're trying to get
Speaker 3: the machine to do something for you that you don't
Speaker 3: want to do. So, for example, you know, Google Maps
Speaker 3: knows every street, every place I should go, how a
Speaker 3: best way to get there? That is artificial intelligence in
Speaker 3: the sense that it's way better than I would be
Speaker 3: at memorizing an entire atlas, And so that's a very
Speaker 3: useful machine for me. You know, Chat, GPT compiling the
Speaker 3: world's data and being able to tell it to you
Speaker 3: in the structure of a human speaking. It's sort of
Speaker 3: like what we appreciated about Google, which is this compilation
Speaker 3: of all the world's data. But now it can just
Speaker 3: spit it out to you in various ways. Lots of
Speaker 3: ways to think about what artificial intelligence is. But I
Speaker 3: will I do want to say something, which is that
Speaker 3: you know, AI butted off from neuroscience because neuroscientists figured
Speaker 3: out a while ago, Look, you know, you've got neurons.
Speaker 3: These neurals are connected to one another. Now, as it
Speaker 3: turns out, neurons are really complicated. Each neuron is about
Speaker 3: as complicated as a city. It's got the entire human
Speaker 3: genome inute. It's trafficking millions of proteins around very complicated cascades,
Speaker 3: and it's constantly plugging and unplugging and seeking and plugging
Speaker 3: into other neurons and so on, and so people a
Speaker 3: while ago came up with this idea of an artificial
Speaker 3: neural network where they said, look, what if we just
Speaker 3: have units that are connected to each other and those
Speaker 3: those connections have particular strengths that can change. And so,
Speaker 3: as it turns out, that has been the trick that
Speaker 3: has led to this renaissance in AI that's been incredible,
Speaker 3: but it also it's departed from the biology. I would
Speaker 3: say they're now sort of oft in different directions. It's
Speaker 3: very cartoonish version of the biology. In some ways it
Speaker 3: is much better than the biology, and in other ways
Speaker 3: it's much worse. Just as an example, AI, even given
Speaker 3: the absolutely mind blowing things it's doing right now, it's
Speaker 3: not as good as let's say, a five year old
Speaker 3: is at navigating a complex room and socially manipulating adults
Speaker 3: to get what she wants, and you know, all these
Speaker 3: things that you know, getting food to her mouth when
Speaker 3: she's hungry and so on. There's a lot of things
Speaker 3: that humans can. You know, I should say that ais
Speaker 3: to there's still gonna be work ahead of it to
Speaker 3: get there.
Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah, I remember.
Speaker 1: One of my favorite stories was from a few years
Speaker 1: back when I was at south By Southwest and a
Speaker 1: roboticist was talking about a project in which they had
Speaker 1: a robot that was capable of moving through human environments
Speaker 1: and they were attempting to have the robot figure out
Speaker 1: how to open a door, and they said the process
Speaker 1: of that had the robots standing in a corridor for
Speaker 1: like three days just analyzing door and getting in the
Speaker 1: way of people who needed to go place.
Speaker 2: Like everyone hated the robot.
Speaker 1: By the end of this, but they were explaining like,
Speaker 1: this is something where as a human, once you have
Speaker 1: the experience with a door, you can start to reason
Speaker 1: out how to interact with other doors, even if the
Speaker 1: mechanism is different. Right, you can start to interpret how
Speaker 1: to interact with this barrier, and it may mean that
Speaker 1: you have to try a couple of different things before
Speaker 1: you successfully open the door, but you have an idea.
Speaker 1: But in artificial intelligence, that's something that we're only starting
Speaker 1: to approach right now. Another great example was when DHARPA
Speaker 1: did the General Challenge where they had the humanoid robots
Speaker 1: that needed to complete a series of tasks like driving
Speaker 1: a vehicle, getting out of it, walking through a door,
Speaker 1: picking up a tool, using it, and they found that
Speaker 1: one of the toughest challenges was walking through the door.
Speaker 1: There's so many videos. Don't look it up, people, it
Speaker 1: will break your heart, but so many videos are very expensive.
Speaker 1: Robots face plan think while trying to walk through a doorway,
Speaker 1: and it just shows that these these things that can
Speaker 1: come very easily to humans do not necessarily come easily
Speaker 1: to machines. Whether we're talking about an AI software running
Speaker 1: in the background or a robot.
Speaker 3: That's true, but let me jump in with one question
Speaker 3: about what we mean by come easily to humans, because
Speaker 3: what's interesting is we've had millions of years of evolution
Speaker 3: building this incredibly complex structure, the most complex thing we've
Speaker 3: ever found on the planet, the human brain, And so
Speaker 3: what seems easy to us is actually not easy at all,
Speaker 3: of course from other nature to have built. But yes,
Speaker 3: I totally agree with you. Anything physical is something that
Speaker 3: AI still has a long way to go to get.
Speaker 1: Yeah, and to your point, yes, the human brain is
Speaker 1: a phenomenon of evolution where it's what makes this comparatively
Speaker 1: easy for us when you combine, you know, compare that
Speaker 1: against a machine. I had mentioned earlier about your TED talk.
Speaker 1: I loved it because it was all about using technology
Speaker 1: to expand human senses. And also you very well, you
Speaker 1: put it extremely well about how our understanding of the
Speaker 1: world around us, our understanding of the universes, obviously funneled
Speaker 1: through our senses, which means when you look at what
Speaker 1: our senses are capable of, you realize we're experiencing the
Speaker 1: tiniest fraction of what's actually going on out there. That
Speaker 1: there are entire frequencies of the electromagnetic spectrum that we
Speaker 1: cannot observe directly, and that's just part of the limitations
Speaker 1: we have on ourselves. And that when we think about that,
Speaker 1: and we think about technology having the capacity to expand that,
Speaker 1: that's really a fascinating thing. And I thought it was
Speaker 1: great because I had also done stories about biohacking and grinders,
Speaker 1: people who are kind of taking the underground auto mechanic
Speaker 1: garage approach to this sort of thing where you might
Speaker 1: be talking about implanting magnets on your fingertips so you
Speaker 1: could sense electromagnetic fields. Usually it means directing stimuli in
Speaker 1: a way that you would pick up with one of
Speaker 1: your traditional senses, not creating a new one necessarily, sort
Speaker 1: of the same way that you would say, like infrared
Speaker 1: goggles translates information into the visual spectrum so we can
Speaker 1: see it. But I'm curious, since that talk, since you've
Speaker 1: given that talk where you were looking into different ways
Speaker 1: to bring stimuli in and have the brain interpret it
Speaker 1: and perhaps even augment or create new senses, have you
Speaker 1: done any more work along those lines since you get
Speaker 1: that talk, and I would love to hear about it.
Speaker 3: Yeah, great, great, So maybe I should back up just
Speaker 3: for one second, if for those listeners who haven't heard
Speaker 3: the toss, it was just about this issue of how
Speaker 3: the brain is locked in silence and darkness inside your skull.
Speaker 3: It doesn't see any of the world, doesn't hear any
Speaker 3: of the world. All it ever has or these little
Speaker 3: electrical spikes zipping around among neurons and then release of neurotransmitters.
Speaker 3: But that say, it's just this electrochemical world buzzing around
Speaker 3: in the dark, and yet it constructs this whole cosmos
Speaker 3: for you, you know, the colors and the lights and
Speaker 3: the joy and the smells and the tastes and the
Speaker 3: touch and all that. So this is you know, we
Speaker 3: actually mentioned this at the beginning about the mystery of consciousness.
Speaker 3: But this is what brains are good at doing, is
Speaker 3: extracting patterns and assigning meaning to those and figuring out
Speaker 3: how to navigate itself in the world. So what I
Speaker 3: got interested in is, you know, if I were to
Speaker 3: show you a little piece of you know, of the brain.
Speaker 3: Let's say I could do this in real life with
Speaker 3: you know, like drilling a little hole in there and
Speaker 3: you get to see all the action the activity inside
Speaker 3: that little piece of brain. And I said to you, hey,
Speaker 3: what part of the brain is this Is this visual
Speaker 3: information or auditory or touch or smell? You wouldn't be
Speaker 3: able to tell me. I wouldn't be able to tell
Speaker 3: you because it looks the same everywhere the cortex. The
Speaker 3: wrinklely bent on the outside of the brain is actually
Speaker 3: the same structure all across the brain, even though we
Speaker 3: tend to call this part, oh, that's your visual center,
Speaker 3: and here's your auditory system, and here's your amount of
Speaker 3: sensory system for touch and so on. In fact, it's
Speaker 3: all exactly the same structure. It's just a matter of
Speaker 3: which data cables are getting plugged into there. So that's
Speaker 3: the background. Whatever data you send in there, it figures
Speaker 3: out what to do with it and how to make
Speaker 3: it relevant. So I got interested in this question of
Speaker 3: sensory substitution, which is can we feed in completely new
Speaker 3: kinds of senses into the brain. And so what I
Speaker 3: presented at that talk, as you know, of course, Jonathan,
Speaker 3: is a vest with vibratory motors on it, and we
Speaker 3: were able to show, for example, that we could that
Speaker 3: deaf people, people who could not hear, who are profoundly
Speaker 3: or severely deaf, they could come to understand the auditory
Speaker 3: world just by patterns vibration on their skin. This is
Speaker 3: what your inner ear does. You know, when you capture
Speaker 3: air compression waves on your ear drum, that goes through
Speaker 3: a few stages, then it gets broken up from high
Speaker 3: to low frequency, then shipped off to your brain as
Speaker 3: patterns of spikes. All we're doing is capturing sound on
Speaker 3: microphones and breaking it up from high low frequency and
Speaker 3: putting that into different parts of the skin as vibrations.
Speaker 3: And it turns out that people who are deaf could
Speaker 3: come to hear this way. And so what we have done,
Speaker 3: and answer your question, what we've done since then, is
Speaker 3: we have shrunk the VEST down to a wristband and
Speaker 3: I spun this company off from my labs called Neosensory,
Speaker 3: and the wrist band does exactly the same thing as
Speaker 3: the VEST. It's capturing sound in here. It's got full
Speaker 3: computational capacity, and it has these vibratory motors along the
Speaker 3: inside of the wrist, multiple motors, and it's turning that
Speaker 3: sound into patterns of vibration on the skin of your wrist,
Speaker 3: and people who are deaf can come to hear this way.
Speaker 3: The really wild part is that after about six months
Speaker 3: when I ask them, hey, when you hear a sound,
Speaker 3: what is it? You know? Do you hear a dog
Speaker 3: mark and you feel a buzz on your wrist and
Speaker 3: you think, oh, what was that? Must be a dog
Speaker 3: where And they say, no, I just hear the dog.
Speaker 3: And I say, well, what do you mean by that?
Speaker 3: They say, I just I hear the dog out there,
Speaker 3: which is wild, right, except that's all that your ears
Speaker 3: are doing too. I mean, we've long stopped appreciating that
Speaker 3: because you've been using your ear since you were a baby.
Speaker 3: But for goodness sakes, all you have are spikes running around.
Speaker 3: And yet you think, oh, I'm hearing Eagleman's voice here
Speaker 3: from out there, whereas in fact, all of the sound
Speaker 3: is just happening in your head. It's the interpretation of
Speaker 3: an auditory signal that's happening in your consciousness. So turns
Speaker 3: out it doesn't matter how you push the information in there,
Speaker 3: you get the same thing happening there. And we also,
Speaker 3: we've done a whole We have several products on the
Speaker 3: market now and we're on risks all over the world.
Speaker 3: One of them is the you know, to replace hearing aids.
Speaker 3: So most people, as they get older they lose their
Speaker 3: high frequencies because yes, high frequencies. Yeah, you know, that
Speaker 3: has the most energy, and it kills the little cells
Speaker 3: inside your in your ear eventually, so they stop hearing
Speaker 3: high frequencies. And that's why often as people get older,
Speaker 3: they have a harder time understanding women and children because
Speaker 3: their voices tend to be a slight higher register. And
Speaker 3: so what we're doing is using exactly the same risk band.
Speaker 3: It's using cutting at ji to listen in real time
Speaker 3: for different high frequency parts of speech called phonemes. And
Speaker 3: when it detects, oh, there was an S, there was
Speaker 3: a K, there was a V, there was a T,
Speaker 3: and so on, it buzzes in different ways to tell you.
Speaker 3: And so what's happening is that somebody's ears doing fine
Speaker 3: at the medium and low frequency, and the risk band
Speaker 3: is simply clarifying what is happening at the high frequency.
Speaker 3: And so that turns out to be a really great solution.
Speaker 3: It It takes about a week or two for people
Speaker 3: to get used to it, to understand how to use
Speaker 3: it. It's all unconscious learning, but they just get better and
Speaker 3: better at understanding what's being said, and they'll just mention
Speaker 3: one other thing which was sort of as it's fascinating
Speaker 3: that it worked, which is that for which is ringing
Speaker 3: in the ears. What we do is we have people
Speaker 3: wear the wristband and we play just for ten minutes
Speaker 3: to day. We play a series of tones boom boo,
Speaker 3: boo boo, boom boom, boom boom, and as you're hearing
Speaker 3: the tones, you're feeling the buzz on the wristband. And
Speaker 3: it turns out this drives down tenatus as well as
Speaker 3: any solution that exists. And the reason is there are
Speaker 3: complicated arguments for us. But I think the simple reason
Speaker 3: this works is because you're teaching the brain what is
Speaker 3: a real sound boom boom boom boom, because you're getting
Speaker 3: verification on the wristband, but the internal ring in the ears,
Speaker 3: the bea doesn't get any confirmation and so the brain says, Okay,
Speaker 3: that's fake news and drives it down.
Speaker 1: I'm going to need to get one of these wristbands.
Speaker 1: I spent a lot of my youth going to the
Speaker 1: University of Georgia and all the little rock clubs in
Speaker 1: the surrounding area, and I have paid for my decisions.
Speaker 1: Kids use earbuds or not earbuds, ear plugs. Use earplugs
Speaker 1: when you go to the shows, because trust me, yes,
Speaker 1: trust me, we're gonna have to take a quick break,
Speaker 1: but when we come back we have more. With my
Speaker 1: conversation with David Eagleman, the other thing I wanted to
Speaker 1: point out for folks who may not have picked up
Speaker 1: on it, is that this solution where you're using this
Speaker 1: tactile feedback, where it's taking in sound and creating this
Speaker 1: not only is it unconscious learning, it obviously does not
Speaker 1: require invasive surgery. It can be orders of magnitude less
Speaker 1: expensive and thus far more accessible, which means that it's
Speaker 1: a technology that can help the heart of hearing, or
Speaker 1: beyond heart of hearing, to experience the world on a
Speaker 1: greater scale than they otherwise could, which is always a
Speaker 1: wonderful story to tell when you're talking about tech, because
Speaker 1: often we're talking about tech solutions that are not really solutions.
Speaker 1: They are convenient is for a select.
Speaker 3: Few, Yeah, thank you. I mean this is this is
Speaker 3: why we're on risks all over the world now, and
Speaker 3: lots of deaf schools in really impoverished countries as well,
Speaker 3: precisely because you know, the only other option for somebody
Speaker 3: who is deaf is a cochlear implant, which is one
Speaker 3: hundred thousand dollars and an invasive surgery. So yeah, this
Speaker 3: makes a big difference, and it works so well just
Speaker 3: to push the information into the brain via an unusual channel.
Speaker 2: It's fascinating to me.
Speaker 1: The more you think about it, the more the more
Speaker 1: you start to come to the conclusion of well, of
Speaker 1: course it works when you start to break it down,
Speaker 1: as the brain is creating everything we're experiencing. It's just
Speaker 1: it's bringing in information from various sensors, and the nature
Speaker 1: of the sensor doesn't matter as much as how the
Speaker 1: brain can synthesize that data and turn it into something
Speaker 1: that we can experience as something meaningful exactly.
Speaker 3: I mean, those two spheres on the front of your head,
Speaker 3: those are just capturing photons and turning them into spikes.
Speaker 3: In your ear, your very sophisticated ear, is just capturing
Speaker 3: air compression waves and turning into spikes. And your nose
Speaker 3: in your mouth are capturing mixtures of molecules turning those
Speaker 3: into spikes. But it's all it's all ending up in
Speaker 3: the same common currency.
Speaker 1: Well, David, one of the other things I wanted to
Speaker 1: mention to you. I recently was doing some episodes about
Speaker 1: the Ignobel Prizes, which you know, obviously a series of
Speaker 1: joke prizes that came out of a satirical science magazine.
Speaker 1: It's meant to either celebrate or sometimes raz people who
Speaker 1: have done various things in science. One of the things
Speaker 1: I thought was really interesting was they gave an Ignobel
Speaker 1: Prize to a group of people Craig Bennett, Abigail Baird,
Speaker 1: Michael Miller, and George Wolford who wrote a fascinating paper.
Speaker 1: The paper is titled Neural Correlates of Interspecies Perspective taking
Speaker 1: in the post mortem Atlantic Salmon An argument for proper
Speaker 1: multiple comparisons correction. So this study was all about how
Speaker 1: using very very sensitive equipment, mostly fMRI I actually and
Speaker 1: through misuse of statistics, it could be very easy to
Speaker 1: get false positives with things of this nature. And thus
Speaker 1: what it means is that we need to be very
Speaker 1: very careful when designing controls when we're using things like
Speaker 1: fMRI I to draw conclusions. And I'm curious as your
Speaker 1: work as a neuroscientist, as your work as a technologist,
Speaker 1: have you encountered this sort of thing where there's always
Speaker 1: this emphasis on moving fast, you know, move fast and
Speaker 1: break things and to get to the end product as
Speaker 1: quickly as possible. But in the process you have to
Speaker 1: make sure that the science is right or else the
Speaker 1: conclusions you draw, the solutions you make aren't really addressing anything.
Speaker 1: Have you encountered things of that nature?
Speaker 3: Sure, I mean spending a career in science when deals
Speaker 3: with this all the time, which is to say, you know,
Speaker 3: science constantly tries to drive forward, but it's always two
Speaker 3: steps forward, one step back in the sense I mean
Speaker 3: this fMRI paper with the salmon for anyone who does know,
Speaker 3: it's you know, they put a dead salmon in the scanner,
Speaker 3: and we're able to demonstrate that if you do this
Speaker 3: the math in a certain way, that it looks like
Speaker 3: there's activity in the salmon's brain even though there can't
Speaker 3: possibly be so. So this is actually not an indictment
Speaker 3: of functional metic residence imaging, the brain imaging technology that
Speaker 3: we use. Instead, it's just an indictment of how you
Speaker 3: do the statistics and so on. This is an incredibly
Speaker 3: complicated device fMRI, and the you know, the way you
Speaker 3: analyze the data requires, you know, a long time to
Speaker 3: get to get up to speed on it. But what
Speaker 3: it allows us to do is see what's happening in
Speaker 3: the brain, in the live brain of a human when
Speaker 3: they're doing a task or thinking about something. It's been
Speaker 3: absolutely incredible the amount of data that's come out of this.
Speaker 3: But what their paper shows is that, hey, you just
Speaker 3: have to make sure you're doing the statistics right and
Speaker 3: so on. And you know, like every field and sence,
Speaker 3: you find lots and lots of papers that are publishing
Speaker 3: right at the P equals point zero five, you know,
Speaker 3: statistical significant value, meaning that there you know, people are saying, oh,
Speaker 3: we've just spent a year during the study, and maybe
Speaker 3: it's not quite statistically significant, so there's a there's some
Speaker 3: little amount of fraud that happens. Look, let's do it
Speaker 3: this way. My mentors was Francis Crick, the guy who
Speaker 3: discovered the structure of DNA with Watson, and he, you know,
Speaker 3: he would read the journals every single week when they
Speaker 3: came out, and he said to me that he just
Speaker 3: assumes that twenty five percent of what he reads is wrong,
Speaker 3: whether by fraud or accident or whatever, doesn't matter. But
Speaker 3: this is the thing science is the only human endeavor
Speaker 3: we have that is constantly knocking down its own walls
Speaker 3: and being self correcting, So you know, think, of course
Speaker 3: there's mistakes and fraud and terrible stuff happens all the time,
Speaker 3: size but at least that gets ironed out and straightened out,
Speaker 3: whereas in every other field of human endeavor it doesn't.
Speaker 1: Yeah, I thought the paper was incredibly invaluable. It was
Speaker 1: one of those where, like I get the idea of
Speaker 1: the Ignobel Prize going to it because the whole idea
Speaker 1: of it makes you laugh and then it makes you think.
Speaker 1: But my argument was, now, this is, this is a
Speaker 1: statement to other researchers saying, just make sure that you're
Speaker 1: absolutely positive you're doing everything you know correctly with scientific rigor,
Speaker 1: that it's replicable, that it's replicable by other scientists who
Speaker 1: are not directly working on whatever it is you're working on,
Speaker 1: so that you ultimately are getting to the right conclusion,
Speaker 1: because otherwise you're going to feel that you're you're sort
Speaker 1: of wandering off the path, and perhaps worst case scenario,
Speaker 1: you could say you're wasting time, or truly, worst case scenario,
Speaker 1: you could be misleading people.
Speaker 2: You know you.
Speaker 1: Combine that with the world of like startups and Silicon
Speaker 1: Valley and the general philosophy that they have, and you
Speaker 1: can see that there's not parody between the two. And
Speaker 1: so I imagine it requires a lot of balancing to make
Speaker 1: certain that the science is there before the real big
Speaker 1: moves in technology. Otherwise you would run the danger of
Speaker 1: running into something like a Therah noose, which obviously a
Speaker 1: poster child for bad science.
Speaker 3: Yeah, exactly. I mean, again, the good news about science
Speaker 3: or startups is that if somebody is doing something that
Speaker 3: doesn't work, the truth outs. Yes, And you know, unfortunately
Speaker 3: in science all the in science and startups all the time,
Speaker 3: this stuff happens again, you know, sometimes by fraud and
Speaker 3: often by mistake or accident. But you can't keep that
Speaker 3: ship running for very long. I mean, look, you know,
Speaker 3: the big thing that happened more recently is this issue
Speaker 3: about Alzheimer's disease. And you've got these plaques and tangles
Speaker 3: and so on. It turns out that it was discovered
Speaker 3: that about thirteen years ago, this guy who published the
Speaker 3: papers that actually fraudulently doctored the photographs to make it
Speaker 3: look like something was going on there. Cut to thirteen
Speaker 3: years of research and countless millions of dollars going into
Speaker 3: researching this thing that was all predicated on a fraud,
Speaker 3: and that sucks. But you know, in thirteen years is
Speaker 3: a long time, but yeah, it gets figured out. At
Speaker 3: some point, nothing's gonna last.
Speaker 1: Yeah, yeah, it's which is that is something of a
Speaker 1: comfort to know that in the long run it all
Speaker 1: gets hashed out. I mean, obviously, if you are someone
Speaker 1: who's caught up in it, in the middle of it,
Speaker 1: it can be it can be life changing in a
Speaker 1: really negative way. But but there is there is comfort
Speaker 1: to know that the very nature of the process of
Speaker 1: science is one that will weed this stuff out. And
Speaker 1: I also argue all the time and like, you know
Speaker 1: that science works because if science didn't work, none of
Speaker 1: your technology would work. Your technology is proof science works.
Speaker 1: It is the actual manifestation, physical manifestation of science. And
Speaker 1: it's also why I get very let's say, passionate when
Speaker 1: I encounter people who are in some ways science deniers.
Speaker 1: It's it's it's unthinkable to me because I think how
Speaker 1: much of your life revolves around your interaction with things
Speaker 1: that literally would not work if science, that the scientific
Speaker 1: process didn't work.
Speaker 3: I agree with you, But let me play devil's advocate
Speaker 3: here for just a second, which is, you know, given
Speaker 3: that science is wrong some of the time, and you know,
Speaker 3: thank goodness, it's self correcting and we'll get it straightened out.
Speaker 3: I always have a little bit of I give a
Speaker 3: little wiggle room to people who say, well, how do
Speaker 3: we know that's true? You know, maybe these scientists are
Speaker 3: influenced by politics or something. And that's true too, that
Speaker 3: happens all the time. And in fact, the grant money
Speaker 3: goes towards things that any society and any moment in
Speaker 3: time finds politically interesting or expedient to do. And you know,
Speaker 3: science money doesn't go to those things that society doesn't
Speaker 3: care about.
Speaker 2: And so on.
Speaker 3: Anyway, I whenever I hear somebody saying, hey, I don't
Speaker 3: think this is true, or that, how do we know
Speaker 3: climate change? How do we know the vaccines, whatever, I
Speaker 3: always feel like, good man, keep asking the questions, and
Speaker 3: you know, and the truth will out as a result
Speaker 3: of that, and one side or the other will find
Speaker 3: out who's wrong. Right.
Speaker 1: Yeah, I'm certainly in favor of asking questions. I think
Speaker 1: I get frustrated with people who when faced with an
Speaker 1: answer that they don't like. Are They're not interested in
Speaker 1: the process that arrived to that answer. They're interested in
Speaker 1: the answer changing. Right, Yeah, yeah, fair enough, fair enough.
Speaker 3: There's lots of there's lots of wrong reasons to criticize science.
Speaker 1: But I mean, but to your point, the whole, the
Speaker 1: whole of science is all about, like, I discovered this thing.
Speaker 1: I think it's a thing. Can you look at this
Speaker 1: thing and tell me if you also think it's a thing?
Speaker 1: And if enough people think it's a thing, then we
Speaker 1: have a scientific consensus about it being a thing. And
Speaker 1: then that we can we can say we're fairly comfortable
Speaker 1: this is a thing. Maybe sometime in the future we'll discover, oh,
Speaker 1: we were totally wrong, that wasn't a thing at all,
Speaker 1: But for now we're comfortable in calling it a thing,
Speaker 1: which is a crazy genderic way of describing it.
Speaker 3: No, I like the way you describe it, but it
Speaker 3: is it is important to look. I'm totally on your
Speaker 3: side on this, but just just to fill out the
Speaker 3: other side for a moment, all we ever have in
Speaker 3: science is the weight of evidence, So we never can
Speaker 3: conclude this is the truth or this is the thing,
Speaker 3: and so all we say is, look, all the data
Speaker 3: seems to indicate, seems to point in this. For example,
Speaker 3: we all believe in quantum mechanics because it's the best
Speaker 3: theory we have. It predicts experiments correctly to fourteen decimal places.
Speaker 3: We don't know it's true. We don't know it's true.
Speaker 3: I mean, you know, there may be something in one
Speaker 3: hundred years from now. We just cover. Oh that's way better.
Speaker 3: By the way, it predicts experiments to thirty decimal places,
Speaker 3: and it's it's a totally different thing. And I mean
Speaker 3: in the same way that let's take Newtonian physics. You know,
Speaker 3: you drop a ball or what do you shoot a
Speaker 3: cannon ball or something, and it works pretty well, but
Speaker 3: it doesn't it doesn't expand to deal with things that
Speaker 3: at the very big or very small. Sure, and so
Speaker 3: we say, okay, well it's good enough for here. It's fine.
Speaker 3: But yeah, yeah, I don't know. I always there's a
Speaker 3: little piece in my heart that always is fine with
Speaker 3: people questioning anything, because really, the whole history of science
Speaker 3: is that in every generation people have thought, okay, we've
Speaker 3: got all the puzzle pieces here, we sort of know
Speaker 3: the answer, and it's never been true once ever, And
Speaker 3: just imagine trying to explain, you know, how the heart
Speaker 3: works before the discovery of electricity, or how the northern
Speaker 3: lights work before the discovery of the discovery of you know,
Speaker 3: photons and the magnetosphere around the planet and stuff like
Speaker 3: like you could you'd be making up theories, but you
Speaker 3: would be doomed to be incorrect. And so whoever was
Speaker 3: the naysayers in those days, good good on them for saying,
Speaker 3: I don't know, you know, just because all the sciences
Speaker 3: agree on this doesn't necessitate it's correct.
Speaker 1: Well, and I do think that curiosity is probably one
Speaker 1: of the most important human qualities to have, right. You
Speaker 1: need to have curiosity, You need to have that desire
Speaker 1: to learn. And like I remember, I was chatting with
Speaker 1: my niece who was asking very deep questions for an
Speaker 1: eight year old, and I was explaining things like I
Speaker 1: was explaining in big terms things like Newtonian physics and
Speaker 1: then quantum physics. And then she said, at what stage
Speaker 1: do you swap from describing something in Newtonian physics to
Speaker 1: quantum physics. I said, you have hit upon a question
Speaker 1: that no one has an answer to, and I know
Speaker 1: that's not satisfying to you. But this is where you
Speaker 1: have to know that adults don't know everything God exactly.
Speaker 3: But you know what the funny part is, it's not
Speaker 3: that your niece was asking deep questions, that she's just
Speaker 3: asking good questions. Yes, as someone looking at through the
Speaker 3: whole thing with fresh eyes, like wait, why do you
Speaker 3: guys believe in this and that? Yeah?
Speaker 2: Yeah, it's like the simpler way.
Speaker 1: I mean when I was a kid, I was asking, well,
Speaker 1: what makes that a hill and that a mountain if
Speaker 1: they're both the same height, which just gets into semantics
Speaker 1: right right, But it's great, like I'm glad that she's
Speaker 1: thinking of things in her way and that she's gonna
Speaker 1: totally leave me in the dust, which is fantastic, that's
Speaker 1: what I want to say. But exactly, you know, it's
Speaker 1: that the question seems deep to us only because we
Speaker 1: have forgotten to ask it anymore.
Speaker 3: That's the frustrating part. Is we get older because look,
Speaker 3: the job in the brain is to make an internal
Speaker 3: model of the outside world to say, okay, this is
Speaker 3: how this works, is how that works. And as we
Speaker 3: get older and older, we say, okay, I've kind of
Speaker 3: got this figured out. I know how the world works.
Speaker 3: I know how people respondated this. I know how to
Speaker 3: ride a bicycle, I know where my door is. But
Speaker 3: as a result of this, we, you know, we stop
Speaker 3: asking questions. We lose the curiosity that a child has
Speaker 3: because we kind of think we know the answers to things.
Speaker 3: And what makes good science or I say, you know,
Speaker 3: like a good scientist is anyone who just retains the natiety,
Speaker 3: the youthful, you know, acting like a child their entire
Speaker 3: lives and saying, wait a minute, how do we know that?
Speaker 2: Yeah?
Speaker 1: So I like that. I like that a lot. And
Speaker 1: those moments where it hits me, which are well, I'll
Speaker 1: say they're rare, like it does hit me occasionally, but
Speaker 1: it's always wonderful when it does. And I ask a
Speaker 1: question that I just I didn't even think to ask before,
Speaker 1: and then going down that rabbit hole can be really
Speaker 1: informative and entertaining. Even if you don't arrive at an
Speaker 1: answer that you can fully apply to whatever the question was,
Speaker 1: it's the journey along the way that can be really fascinating.
Speaker 1: It's great because, like, I have discussions with different kinds
Speaker 1: of people. So I've had discussions with scientists and I've
Speaker 1: had discussions with engineers, and it can be fun to
Speaker 1: see the different approaches people take, because engineers tend to
Speaker 1: see the world as a series of problems and they're
Speaker 1: always thinking about solutions, and scientists tend to look at
Speaker 1: the world and just ask questions about the very nature
Speaker 1: of it and how they can have a better understanding
Speaker 1: of it, and how does that fit within our current understanding?
Speaker 1: Does it fit or does it mean that we have
Speaker 1: to actually adjust our current understanding. And I learned so
Speaker 1: much by talking to these two different groups of people,
Speaker 1: and it's always a joy.
Speaker 3: Yeah, And you know, one of the things with neuroscience
Speaker 3: in particular is it's fundamentally the question of how we
Speaker 3: perceive reality at all. So, just as an example, you
Speaker 3: may know this, but I've spent a big chunk of
Speaker 3: my career studying the perception of time. And you know,
Speaker 3: this is one of those things that just seems obvious, like, oh, yeah,
Speaker 3: five minutes past, no problem, you know, or this happened
Speaker 3: before that, or you know, this is blinking at a
Speaker 3: particular rate or whatever, like you don't even think to
Speaker 3: question it. But you know, I've spent whatever twenty five
Speaker 3: years studying this really hard, and just the deeper you
Speaker 3: reach down to this system, the more it sometimes feels like,
Speaker 3: oh my gosh, it's so weird, you know, or you know,
Speaker 3: we mentioned conscious before, like the colors. Colors don't exist
Speaker 3: in the outside world, you know, there's just electromagnetic radiation
Speaker 3: of different wavelengths, and your brain assigns what we call
Speaker 3: equaliya to it, so we say, oh, that's red, that's blue,
Speaker 3: that's green. But those the colors don't exist. It's all
Speaker 3: in your head, you know. And sound doesn't exist as such.
Speaker 3: It's just air compression waves. So the world outside your
Speaker 3: head you can't even really picture it. I mean, it's
Speaker 3: just electromaic magnetic radiation and air compression waves and whatever.
Speaker 3: But but we experienced it as this colorful cacophonousts, you
Speaker 3: know place. So anyway, the more you reach down into
Speaker 3: this stuff, sometimes it feels like, oh my gosh, it's
Speaker 3: it's not even clear what's true or not true. And then,
Speaker 3: of course, with the AI having had this explosion the
Speaker 3: way it has recently, you know, in Silicon Valley, there's
Speaker 3: been this real shift from people saying they're atheists to
Speaker 3: being creationists. Creationists meaning like you know, we're an AI
Speaker 3: simulation by who the heck knows, And you know suddenly
Speaker 3: that that idea, you know, we've all talked about as
Speaker 3: our whole career is about, Hey, how do we know
Speaker 3: if we're in a simulation? And so on? But all
Speaker 3: of a sudden, it seems like, whoa, that's not as
Speaker 3: crazy as it once seemed.
Speaker 1: Yeah, David and I got a little more to talk about.
Speaker 1: But before we can get to that, let's take another
Speaker 1: quick break. If it is possible to build a system
Speaker 1: that is capable of creating a synthetic reality where the
Speaker 1: inhabitants of that synthetic reality would assume it is real.
Speaker 1: If that is in fact possible, then the chances are
Speaker 1: that some civilization at some point has done that, and
Speaker 1: that the chances that we are the civilization that will
Speaker 1: eventually get to that point. Is incredibly egotistical to suggest
Speaker 1: that if there are all these things, the more you
Speaker 1: look at it, as you're taking all these things to consideration,
Speaker 1: the odds are diminishingly likely that we're in a real
Speaker 1: reality in a simulated one.
Speaker 3: Exactly, the odds are that we're in a simulated reality. Yeah,
Speaker 3: this is Nick Bostrom's argument. So the whole notion of
Speaker 3: what is reality and why do you experience? Why do
Speaker 3: you experience things the way we are? I feel like
Speaker 3: it's that that has complexified even from the time I
Speaker 3: was whatever, from the time I was a student till now,
Speaker 3: just trying to understand what reality even is basic question.
Speaker 3: So it's interesting because the engineers have a simpler job
Speaker 3: in a sense, which is, okay, if I launch this
Speaker 3: cannonball doesn't land there, great, I can you know, refine
Speaker 3: and change the angle and terrific. But the scientists are
Speaker 3: facing really, really tough questions.
Speaker 1: Yeah, I would urge my listeners not to think about
Speaker 1: it for too long or too hard, or you'll find
Speaker 1: yourself in a spiral.
Speaker 3: I've always founded interesting by the way the bounce back,
Speaker 3: which is to say, you know, no matter how deeply
Speaker 3: you study something about reality or colors or whatever, you know,
Speaker 3: you stand up from your desk where you're reading this
Speaker 3: book or whatever, and you go out and then suddenly think, oh,
Speaker 3: that honeysuckle smells awesome. It's been such a good mood.
Speaker 3: And oh, this guy is so blue it's beautiful. Oh,
Speaker 3: and here's my beautiful wife and I feel so happy
Speaker 3: to see her, and here's my children. I'm so happy
Speaker 3: to you know, all the stuff that you just can
Speaker 3: pcluded was all illusory. You know, you can't help but
Speaker 3: experience that.
Speaker 2: Yeah.
Speaker 3: In other words, if I explained to you, if I
Speaker 3: had a way of diagramming and showing with equations so
Speaker 3: on the whole reason why you like, you know, chocolate
Speaker 3: ice cream, it would actually have no difference in your
Speaker 3: life to your enjoyment of chocolate ice cream. You would
Speaker 3: you would say, wow, I can't believe it's all mechanical
Speaker 3: and here's dopamine serotonin in this. But then you eat,
Speaker 3: You're like, wow, that sure is delicious.
Speaker 2: Yeah.
Speaker 1: Yeah, Yeah, the knowing does not diminish the experience.
Speaker 2: Yeah.
Speaker 1: I get very pragmatic about it. I think if it's
Speaker 1: a synthetic reality, if what we're in is a simulation,
Speaker 1: it makes no difference to my day to day existence.
Speaker 1: Like I still want to make sure, like my motto is,
Speaker 1: I want to leave things better than they were when
Speaker 1: I got here. If I can do that, then that
Speaker 1: at any level I can, whether the people are simulated
Speaker 1: or perhaps there's some outer reality where people are looking
Speaker 1: at it and.
Speaker 2: Saying like I did his best. He didn't know his
Speaker 2: get it right, but he tried really hard. Well, I'm
Speaker 2: going to consider that a win in the long run.
Speaker 3: Excellent. Excellent.
Speaker 1: Yeah, and I wish I could keep you here to
Speaker 1: talk about all of the different topics you've covered on
Speaker 1: Inner Cosmos, but obviously there's a whole podcast that exists
Speaker 1: for that very purpose, and would be rather ridiculous of
Speaker 1: me to have you repeat it all. I mean, there
Speaker 1: are topics that you talk about that I used to
Speaker 1: discuss on a show I did called Forward Thinking, about
Speaker 1: things like the concept that some people have bandied about,
Speaker 1: about the idea of uploading yourself into some sort of
Speaker 1: of computer system in order to maintain some semblance of
Speaker 1: digital immortality. I don't know how you specifically feel about that.
Speaker 1: I've always felt that this kind of is in the
Speaker 1: realm of techno billionaires who are absolutely terrified at the
Speaker 1: thought of ceasing to exist. But I'm curious about your
Speaker 1: own take.
Speaker 3: It's not just techno billionaires. They can do something about it,
Speaker 3: but some fractions of the population really cares about dying.
Speaker 3: They're really horrified by that. I just happened to be
Speaker 3: at the other end of the spectrum where I really
Speaker 3: don't care. It's just I mean, I just understand mortality,
Speaker 3: and you know, I know that I'll die at some
Speaker 3: point and that's that. But some people really care about
Speaker 3: figuring out. Look, could I, for example, freeze my whole
Speaker 3: body or just freeze my head? And I'm actually doing
Speaker 3: another episode on this coming up. Okay, here's a question
Speaker 3: for you. The first guy to freeze himself for the
Speaker 3: hope of getting rebooted in the future, you know, cut
Speaker 3: to five hundred years from now when people know, ah,
Speaker 3: here's how we can revivify a frozen body. What year
Speaker 3: was that guy born in the first person who's frozen
Speaker 3: like that?
Speaker 1: Gosh, oh, that's a great question. Okay, so I'm gonna
Speaker 1: just give a shot in the dark. I'm gonna say
Speaker 1: nineteen twenty.
Speaker 3: Okay, eighteen ninety eight is the first guy, and he
Speaker 3: froze himself in the late sixties. Yeah, and I didn't
Speaker 3: remember any people have been thinking about this guy thing
Speaker 3: for a long time. Or Hey, could I freeze myself
Speaker 3: and do a Hail Mary pass into the future and
Speaker 3: just hope that people then will know a lot more
Speaker 3: and we know now and they'll fig because you know,
Speaker 3: you can revivify a body of someone who's let's say,
Speaker 3: frozen in a lake. You know, they've fallen through the ice,
Speaker 3: they freeze, their heart stopped, their vitals have all stopped,
Speaker 3: and you know you can warm them up slowly and
Speaker 3: get them going again. And so we know this is possible,
Speaker 3: and yeah, so a lot of people are really interested
Speaker 3: in this. There's two ways to do it. One is
Speaker 3: you freeze the body. The other one is this issue
Speaker 3: of could you somehow extract all the interesting structure of
Speaker 3: what's going on in somebody's brain, you know, the whole
Speaker 3: reconfiguration of their network that represents their life. Could you
Speaker 3: reconstruct that digitally? It would save a lot of space
Speaker 3: and so on, And then you're and then you know,
Speaker 3: essentially run the person in a simulation. So that's that's
Speaker 3: where we might already be. But in any case, we're
Speaker 3: trying to do a simulation inside a simulation of saying,
Speaker 3: you know, could we could we reboot you in some
Speaker 3: other world? And and the thing is about the computationalacity
Speaker 3: of the planet. It's still the estimate is that to
Speaker 3: capture all the information and a brain, all the connections
Speaker 3: and exactly the three D structure would be about a
Speaker 3: zetabyte of information, which is about four times more than
Speaker 3: the computational capacity of the entire planet right now. So
Speaker 3: it's an enormous thing. But boy, and you know, in
Speaker 3: fifty years we won't even care. You'll be wearing a
Speaker 3: zetabyte on your wrist or something.
Speaker 1: So well, we know, we know in the short term
Speaker 1: who the people will be who would go for that,
Speaker 1: because it would be the people who could afford to
Speaker 1: set aside.
Speaker 2: Is that a bite of.
Speaker 1: Of processing power and computer data storage.
Speaker 3: But what's interesting is if you're the tech billionaire who
Speaker 3: gets yourself uploaded some stimulation, you are now at the
Speaker 3: be you know, you're now slave to the programmers. Yes, right,
Speaker 3: And so the programmers might say, look, we're gonna do
Speaker 3: something terrible to you here or whatever we're gonna you know,
Speaker 3: you need to send some money to us, so that
Speaker 3: because we're now controlling your entire world. Yeah, I don't know,
Speaker 3: it would be such a great pause.
Speaker 1: No, I think it ends up being myopic, which is
Speaker 1: sort of how I felt at the very start of
Speaker 1: this conversation too about that whole concept. Like, I do
Speaker 1: think it's an intense fear of mortality that ends up
Speaker 1: driving this. I think, actually, if I'm being honest, I
Speaker 1: think a lot of futurists kind of fall into that
Speaker 1: category two, specifically the ones who have talked about the
Speaker 1: concepts like the singularity and transhumanism and things, elements of
Speaker 1: which we're seeing play out to some extent, but certainly
Speaker 1: not in the form or scope that has been talked
Speaker 1: about for a couple of decades. And it's not to
Speaker 1: say that we're not going to get to a point
Speaker 1: where remarkable change isn't happening at a scale where we
Speaker 1: can't even talk about the present. Maybe that does happen,
Speaker 1: but it just seems to me that there's this underlying
Speaker 1: theme under a lot of those writings of that seems
Speaker 1: to suggest a fear of mortality. This could just be
Speaker 1: armchair psychology bypart, and maybe it's just a theory I
Speaker 1: have which I totally will own, but just it keeps
Speaker 1: coming back to me because I spent five years doing
Speaker 1: a show kind of exploring futurists and futurism thinking and
Speaker 1: that sort of things, and those were the the things
Speaker 1: that's sort of they weren't they weren't even subtext, but
Speaker 1: it seemed to be kind of an underlying motivating factor.
Speaker 3: You know, I'm not sure I see that only because
Speaker 3: I happen to not care about the mortality issue. Yeah,
Speaker 3: and yet I'm very interested in the future. I know,
Speaker 3: I spent a lot of my time thinking about futurism
Speaker 3: and so on. So they don't I don't think they
Speaker 3: necessarily go together. Being thoughtful and creative about what's happening
Speaker 3: next and where things are going feels to me like,
Speaker 3: you know, this is the best part about human brains,
Speaker 3: is our capacity to do this, to say, Wow, look,
Speaker 3: I'm gonna I'm going to simulate forward. Given all the
Speaker 3: stuff that I know, the future is probably not going
Speaker 3: to be just like the past. Instead, you're gonna have
Speaker 3: these things come together and then this other technology merge
Speaker 3: with that, and then wow, look at all these things.
Speaker 3: It leads to I mean, we're always wrong, of course, right, sure,
Speaker 3: terribly wrong. But if you look at the world's fares
Speaker 3: through the decades, like the nineteen sixty Worldfare had displays
Speaker 3: on like underwater hotels or using lasers to cut down
Speaker 3: trees or things like that, they had all kinds of
Speaker 3: amazing stuff, but nobody even thought of the Internet. I
Speaker 3: mean really one of the most is the biggest change
Speaker 3: is no one thought of that, And you get the
Speaker 3: most creative thinkers together, and yet they just they miss
Speaker 3: what are the really big changes, like cell phones or something.
Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah, I mean.
Speaker 1: Well, it's like before the transistor, no one could think
Speaker 1: about an era of maniaturization. Right, Like, if you were
Speaker 1: before the transistor, you would never have thought that a
Speaker 1: computer would be something that someone could own in their home,
Speaker 1: let alone carry in their pocket. And there'd be no way, like,
Speaker 1: you would have no frame of reference to say, because
Speaker 1: in your experience, the way coulduter's got more powerful was
Speaker 1: that they were larger, Right, So like if your computer
Speaker 1: held up, held up an entire floor over underneath Stanford,
Speaker 1: that was a really good computer. There's no way you
Speaker 1: could have one of those in your home. And I'm
Speaker 1: very much the same way. I'll think back occasionally and
Speaker 1: I'll go, wow, those knuckleheads get it all wrong, and
Speaker 1: I thought, yeah, but if I were back then, I
Speaker 1: would have gotten it wrong too, because I didn't have
Speaker 1: the knowledge that the transistor was right around the corner exactly.
Speaker 3: By the way, you know, when you said that that
Speaker 3: just suddenly a thought crossed my mind, which is it's
Speaker 3: funny that we still call this a PC a personal
Speaker 3: computer to distinguish it from you know, like I can wow,
Speaker 3: I can take it one home myself.
Speaker 1: Well, I also grew up in the seventies and eighties,
Speaker 1: so for me, like it's cemented in my head because
Speaker 1: that's how I was exposed to it. And and as
Speaker 1: I'm sure you're aware, sometimes we have a tendency to
Speaker 1: kind of arrest definitions in our head based upon when
Speaker 1: we encountered the thing for the first time. Absolutely, well, David,
Speaker 1: before we go, can you tell us a little bit
Speaker 1: more about inner cosmos for those who I mean, obviously
Speaker 1: you cover tons of different topics related to the brain,
Speaker 1: but give our listeners a little insight into what the
Speaker 1: show's all about, because I want text of listeners to
Speaker 1: definitely go and check it out.
Speaker 3: Thank you.
Speaker 2: You know.
Speaker 3: Part of what's really hard about doing the podcast but
Speaker 3: so rewarding is each week is a monologue. I just
Speaker 3: you know, for forty five minutes or an hour, I
Speaker 3: talk about some topic. But it's like I'm doing storytelling.
Speaker 3: What I'm doing is I'm plenty of other threads of
Speaker 3: history and culture and science and extrapolation in the future
Speaker 3: to address questions of various sorts, like this question of
Speaker 3: you know, could we ever upload our brains? Or will
Speaker 3: we ever do mind reading? There's all kinds of stuff
Speaker 3: in the media about you know, reading minds. Or sometimes
Speaker 3: I address mysteries like you know, why do some people
Speaker 3: think the northern lights make noise? And quick hint on
Speaker 3: that is it has to do with synesthesia, which is
Speaker 3: where someone has a blending of the senses. Or I
Speaker 3: talk about various issues about our perception of time, like
Speaker 3: does time actually run in slow motion when you're in
Speaker 3: fear for your life? This is something that happened to
Speaker 3: me when I was a kid and almost died. I
Speaker 3: fell off of a a house under construction, and then
Speaker 3: I ended up studying this as an neuroscientist known and
Speaker 3: ever studied this question before about this time slow down?
Speaker 3: And so it's all about things like this. And actually
Speaker 3: in the episode that's coming out next week, I'm talking
Speaker 3: about the dress. You remember the dress? Was it you
Speaker 3: know blue or black or white or gold? Yeah, Like
Speaker 3: I'm really unpacking that and other other memes that you
Speaker 3: may remember, Like you know, this thing, does it sound
Speaker 3: like brainstorm or green Needle. It's the same audio file
Speaker 3: but can sound like either one. Anyway, I'm putting a
Speaker 3: whole bunch of things together. What I realized, I think,
Speaker 3: is that to my knowledge, no one's ever sort of
Speaker 3: put all these together and served it up in a
Speaker 3: way where it's where you really get something deeper out
Speaker 3: of it, like, oh, yeah, I saw that meme, I
Speaker 3: saw that. Mean But what does this all mean to us?
Speaker 3: What does this mean for our brains the way we
Speaker 3: see the world. What does it mean for who we
Speaker 3: are in terms of our neural networks. One theme that
Speaker 3: if you've listened to several of the episodes, you might have
Speaker 3: already been picking up on this theme. I'm very interested
Speaker 3: in the fact that we are essentially like a team
Speaker 3: of rivals underneath the hood, meaning you're not just one thing.
Speaker 3: You've got all these different networks running and they're often
Speaker 3: in conflict. And so this is why humans are nuanced
Speaker 3: and subtle and interesting, Because you know, if I put
Speaker 3: some chocolate chip cookies in front of you, part of
Speaker 3: your brain says, hey, that's a good energy source, let's
Speaker 3: eat it, and party brain says, no, don't eat it,
Speaker 3: you'll get fat, and Party of Brains says, Okay, I'll
Speaker 3: eat it, but I'll go to the gym tonight. And
Speaker 3: you know, you can start contracting yourself and cussing with
Speaker 3: yourself and like who's talking to whom? Here? It's all you,
Speaker 3: but it's different parts of you and anyway, So all
Speaker 3: this stuff is of great interest to me, and I
Speaker 3: think is the material for storytelling and really diving into
Speaker 3: this stuff. So I just love that people care about
Speaker 3: this stuff.
Speaker 2: Yeah.
Speaker 1: To me, David, it's like, like it reminds me of
Speaker 1: conversations for some reason, I associate when I was a teenager,
Speaker 1: but because I was the nerdy teenager, I didn't you know,
Speaker 1: drink or anything. I would hang out with my friends
Speaker 1: and we just start asking questions we did not know
Speaker 1: the answers to, and like you get into all the
Speaker 1: like the stereotypical ones, like when I see red and
Speaker 1: I experienced the color red, how do I know that
Speaker 1: when you're looking at something that's red it looks the
Speaker 1: same to you as it does to me, Or maybe
Speaker 1: your red looks like blue to me, but we've both
Speaker 1: agreed that this thing is red. Therefore that's what red
Speaker 1: is to me. It's what red is to you, but
Speaker 1: our experiences are and you just gone into this deep conversation.
Speaker 3: Yeah, exactly. And by the way, this is just like
Speaker 3: with your niece who when you said she's eight years old.
Speaker 3: I mean, this is the same thing. It's that as
Speaker 3: we age, we forget to ask those questions. We just
Speaker 3: somehow stopped asking. Think, oh, I don't know the answer,
Speaker 3: and that's the end of it. And so you know,
Speaker 3: it's funny that you had mentioned that because I often think,
Speaker 3: for example, you know a few of my episodes have
Speaker 3: been about visual illusions, and this one about the dress
Speaker 3: and so includes some issues about that. But I often
Speaker 3: think that visual illusions are really interesting to ten year
Speaker 3: olds and then to neuroscientists when they grow up. But
Speaker 3: that's it, Like everyone else sort of forgets about visual
Speaker 3: illusions unless they're you know, taking three seconds to appreciate
Speaker 3: a meme on the internet. But like, why does that happen?
Speaker 3: It's an incredibly powerful inroad into what is happening in
Speaker 3: the brain to understand what's happening with an illusion anyway,
Speaker 3: So what I'm trying to do with Inner Cosmos is
Speaker 3: bring all these threads together so we can really understand ourselves,
Speaker 3: understand who we are and what our reality is.
Speaker 2: I love it.
Speaker 1: I mean it's a tall ask for a podcast, but
Speaker 1: I think you're up to the challenge.
Speaker 3: Thank you.
Speaker 2: Yeah.
Speaker 1: I highly recommend that y'all check it out. That's Inner
Speaker 1: Cosmos with David Eagleman. It's one of those things that
Speaker 1: I listened to just as a fan. Thank you terrific, well, David,
Speaker 1: Thank you for coming on the show.
Speaker 2: I really appreciate it.
Speaker 3: Thank you for having me. It's such a pleasure to
Speaker 3: be here and talk with you.
Speaker 2: Jonathan fantastic guys. That's it.
Speaker 1: Go check out the show and I'll talk to you
Speaker 1: again really soon. Tech Stuff is an iHeartRadio production. For
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