Speaker 1: And my grandfather was born in three. I had a
Speaker 1: proper Victorian for a grandfather. So my grandchild was born
Speaker 1: eighteen seventy nine. What. Yeah, he was fifty years old
Speaker 1: when he had my father, and my father was getting
Speaker 1: close to fifty when he heard me, that's bananas. That
Speaker 1: was really interesting being taught to grow tomatoes by a
Speaker 1: ninety seven year old grandpa. And my mother was always
Speaker 1: working jokes about are you sure girls are allowed to
Speaker 1: grow tomatoes? Hello, I'm mini driver. Welcome to Many Questions
Speaker 1: Season two. I've always loved Pruce's question that it was
Speaker 1: originally an nineteenth century parlor game where players would ask
Speaker 1: each other thirty five questions aimed at revealing the other
Speaker 1: players true nature. It's just the scientific method really. In
Speaker 1: asking different people the same set of questions, you can
Speaker 1: make observations about which truths appear to be universal. I
Speaker 1: love this discipline, and it made me wonder, what if
Speaker 1: these questions were just the jumping off point, what greater
Speaker 1: depths would be revealed if I ask these questions as
Speaker 1: conversation starters with thought leaders and trailblazers across all these
Speaker 1: different disciplines. So I adapted prus questionnaire, and I wrote
Speaker 1: my own seven questions that I personally think a pertinent
Speaker 1: to a person's story. They are when and where were
Speaker 1: you happiest? What is the quality you like least about yourself?
Speaker 1: What relationship, real or fictionalized, defines love for you? What
Speaker 1: question would you most like answered? What person, place, or
Speaker 1: experience has shaped you the most? What would be your
Speaker 1: last meal? And can you tell me something in your
Speaker 1: life that's grown out of a personal disaster? And I've
Speaker 1: gathered a group of really remarkable people, ones that I
Speaker 1: am honored and humbled to have had the chance to
Speaker 1: engage with. You may not hear their answers to all
Speaker 1: seven of these questions. We've whittled it down to which
Speaker 1: question felt closest to their experience or the most surprising,
Speaker 1: or created the most fertile ground to connect. My guest
Speaker 1: today is the neuroscientist and author David Eagleman. I'm not
Speaker 1: sure I've ever had a really long conversation with a
Speaker 1: polymath before, but you sure don't forget it when it's over,
Speaker 1: because you know, you keep waking up thinking about things
Speaker 1: they said, and expands everything from quantum of spirituality to
Speaker 1: philosophy to neuro Law and Science to coffee in I Hop,
Speaker 1: David writes about the brain and how it constructs a perception,
Speaker 1: and how different brains do so differently, and how much
Speaker 1: that matters for society. He is, among many other things,
Speaker 1: the executive director of the Center for Science and Law,
Speaker 1: which is a nonprofit that sets out to improve the
Speaker 1: legal system by importing our knowledge about the human brain,
Speaker 1: which then gives options for rehabilitation beyond mass incarceration. He's
Speaker 1: written tons of books, and you will read and be
Speaker 1: astonished by all of them. He said something that I
Speaker 1: think about a lot. He said he was interested in
Speaker 1: exploring the vastness of our ignorance. And he said to
Speaker 1: this kind of interest and excitement and without judgment of
Speaker 1: our human brains, which he also described, and I'm paraphrasing
Speaker 1: as the three pound meat machine who lives in the
Speaker 1: dark and basically runs everything. I hope you enjoy listening
Speaker 1: to David's brain. What relationship, real or fictionalized, de finds
Speaker 1: love for you? I think there are two ways to
Speaker 1: think about that. One is how we feel about the
Speaker 1: love for our children. So if you think about Cormick
Speaker 1: McCarthy's The Road, for example, you know, it's a post
Speaker 1: apocalyptic world after nuclear war, and this father does everything
Speaker 1: in his power just to save his son, just to
Speaker 1: do everything you can to protect his son and keep
Speaker 1: him alive. And of course there are there are many
Speaker 1: stories like this life is Beautiful Roberto Bernini Amy getting
Speaker 1: the title right of that one. Yeah, when he puts
Speaker 1: him in the bin at the end, Yeah, absolutely, Yeah,
Speaker 1: He's in a concentration camp with his son and he
Speaker 1: does everything you can to protect his son. So that's
Speaker 1: a kind of love that now that I'm a father,
Speaker 1: is very meaningful to me. As for romantic love, I
Speaker 1: think that would change each year of my life for me,
Speaker 1: which is to say, when we're younger, we all take
Speaker 1: these great romance fantasies to represent love, and as you
Speaker 1: get older, more realism seeps in. So I've been married
Speaker 1: for twelve years now, and I appreciate now the way
Speaker 1: that real relationships are complex and people change over different
Speaker 1: time scales, as life changes in his career, opportunity to change.
Speaker 1: And I just recently re saw rewatched Fiddler on the Roof,
Speaker 1: you know, and he says, have you asked his wife?
Speaker 1: You know? Do you love me? And she says, do
Speaker 1: I what and so? And you know, they realized that
Speaker 1: the romantic notions can't capture it. But other notions, uh,
Speaker 1: you know, what they do for each other, how they
Speaker 1: demonstrate their bond to one another. This does capture something important.
Speaker 1: Do you think that the romantic love, the faith based love,
Speaker 1: service based love, the love of our children? Do you
Speaker 1: think that the route that it's erroneous that we have
Speaker 1: the same word for it, because there are myriad ways
Speaker 1: to love, right? Yeah. Raymond Carver has a short story
Speaker 1: called what We talked About When we talk about Love,
Speaker 1: and I've always it's a great short story, but I've
Speaker 1: always loved the title as well, because it's about the
Speaker 1: complexity of it, and like so many words in our language,
Speaker 1: there's just too much semantic weight that that word is
Speaker 1: trying to hold, because in fact, it is composed of
Speaker 1: many different things. Yeah, exactly, It's composed of so many things,
Speaker 1: and which of those things matters to us that changes
Speaker 1: through the years. You know, my father, before he died,
Speaker 1: was in one of these care homes. So I met
Speaker 1: some of the other people on his hallway, much older
Speaker 1: men and women who were there, and I think they
Speaker 1: still cared about love, but it was something so different
Speaker 1: for them. It wasn't about the you know, sort of
Speaker 1: young sexy thing, it was about something else. Yeah, definitely.
Speaker 1: It's really I'm fascinated by the different permutations of it,
Speaker 1: of devotion, and of the way in which people love differently,
Speaker 1: when the love that they have with their version of God,
Speaker 1: or with animals or with something that they do, how
Speaker 1: they love romantically changes directly depending on what their relationship
Speaker 1: with that sort of outsourced love, as it were, the
Speaker 1: love that we don't really talk about. I always think
Speaker 1: of love as romantic. I think lots of people do.
Speaker 1: But yeah, that's right. And the other thing about love is,
Speaker 1: you know, obviously it goes into directions. So we all
Speaker 1: want to get love. We want to receive love, love
Speaker 1: in various ways, including from our dogs and so on.
Speaker 1: But we want to be good to the people that
Speaker 1: we care about and love them well. But it's hard, right,
Speaker 1: because we're made up of all these different neural networks
Speaker 1: that all have different drives and care about different things.
Speaker 1: And so sometimes you're feeling angry, and sometimes you're feeling
Speaker 1: distracted by work, and sometimes you're feeling whatever, and so
Speaker 1: you know, we're constantly finding ourselves in situations where we
Speaker 1: don't behave the way that we would like to. One
Speaker 1: of the books that I'm writting right now has to
Speaker 1: do with something called the Ulysses contract, which is how
Speaker 1: you can make a deal with yourself in time to
Speaker 1: constrain your behavior by doing something right now that essentially
Speaker 1: puts you in a contract so that you'll behave better
Speaker 1: in some future situation. This is what Ulysses did when
Speaker 1: he lashed himself to the mask. He knew that the
Speaker 1: sirens song would tempt him just like any mortal man,
Speaker 1: any crash in the rocks. So what he did is
Speaker 1: the Ulysses of sound mind lashed himself to the mass
Speaker 1: so that the future Ulysses couldn't behave badly. And I
Speaker 1: find this a really interesting concept about the things that
Speaker 1: we do to make sure that we don't behave badly
Speaker 1: the future. This is this absolutely fascinating carry on carry on. Well,
Speaker 1: you know. One example is if you're trying to get
Speaker 1: over some addiction, like you know, alcoholism, what you do
Speaker 1: is you clear all the alcohol out of your house
Speaker 1: so that on a you know, festive Saturday night or
Speaker 1: a lonely Sunday, night or something you're not going to
Speaker 1: go in. Even if you think, oh, I'm sure I
Speaker 1: won't drink this anymore, you get rid of it. That's
Speaker 1: the Ulysses contract or, you know, for drug addicts when
Speaker 1: of the first things they're taught when they're trying to
Speaker 1: break this is never walked around with more than twenty
Speaker 1: dollars in your pocket, because at some point was going
Speaker 1: to come up to you and offer to sell you drugs,
Speaker 1: and you'll be tempted and then you'll give in. So
Speaker 1: there are many things that we do to make sure
Speaker 1: that we can, you know, make a choice now that
Speaker 1: will pay off to keep us acting consistently with our
Speaker 1: long term decision making. I mean, I think I could
Speaker 1: definitely just put a big piece of tape over my
Speaker 1: mouth and that would be my Ulysses contracts sorted. Future
Speaker 1: me is never going to say the stuff that I
Speaker 1: am thinking that I know is going to cause trouble
Speaker 1: because I've got a massive piece of tape. And maybe
Speaker 1: you could, like TM your name. It could be like
Speaker 1: David Eagleman Ulysses tape. I would buy that ship. But
Speaker 1: that requires a modicum of self knowledge that most people
Speaker 1: are not interested in interrogating because they don't want to
Speaker 1: think that there is something fundamentally wrong with them that
Speaker 1: it's going to affect their situation now much less in
Speaker 1: the future when the mermaids are singing and calling you
Speaker 1: into the ocean. Were so tender and we're so lost
Speaker 1: as people. I mean, I love that you write these
Speaker 1: books that really do act as guide posts, because that's
Speaker 1: what I think they are. And I'm constantly looking for
Speaker 1: signs and signed posts because it is so fragile and tender,
Speaker 1: and that you know that you're writing a book for that.
Speaker 1: But I feel for I feel for all of us,
Speaker 1: myself included, going I just I wonder how deep I
Speaker 1: can go into who I am to know how I
Speaker 1: could save myself from myself. Yes, exactly. So, when it
Speaker 1: comes to this issue about self interrogation and really trying
Speaker 1: to understand who we are, one of the hardest things
Speaker 1: to see is the way that we come off to
Speaker 1: other people. Because in fact, this is what one of
Speaker 1: my other books is and I'm writing right now. It's
Speaker 1: called Empire of the Invisible, and it's all about what's
Speaker 1: going on in politics right now. Specifically, it's asking why
Speaker 1: we each believe that we have the truth and we
Speaker 1: see the truth so clearly, and everyone else is misinformed
Speaker 1: or they're a troll or whatever it is. And if
Speaker 1: I can only shout in all caps loud enough on Twitter,
Speaker 1: I could convince everyone that I am right. It's crazy
Speaker 1: to me that everybody believes this at whatever part of
Speaker 1: the political spectrum. And by the way, in terms of relationships,
Speaker 1: we know tend to all believe this as well, which
Speaker 1: is okay, Well, I I already know how to do relationships.
Speaker 1: I'm I'm saying the right things all the time. Do
Speaker 1: you think that that kind of the surety of that
Speaker 1: empiricism that is so pervasive, is that human or is
Speaker 1: that learned? Like is that hardwired into our brains? Is
Speaker 1: that something that was useful once when we were discovering fire? Yeah,
Speaker 1: it couldn't actually be any other way because the way
Speaker 1: we build a model of the world. Remember, your brain
Speaker 1: is locked in silence and darkness inside your skull, and
Speaker 1: all it's trying to do is put together an internal
Speaker 1: model of what is going on out there, which includes
Speaker 1: other people and how other people behave and how they'll
Speaker 1: react to what you say. And the thing is that
Speaker 1: this internal model is inherently limited. It's only built up
Speaker 1: from the little dribbles of data that you get in
Speaker 1: during your years. And so the way the brain works
Speaker 1: is it says, okay, look, I've got this data. I've
Speaker 1: collected all this data. I know what is true, and
Speaker 1: it's just built up from what we've taken in. Now,
Speaker 1: by the way, I will say, we're probably better off
Speaker 1: than we were historically because now we have, for example,
Speaker 1: the printing press, and so we have movies and things
Speaker 1: like that, and so you put all this together and
Speaker 1: we're exposed to literature and two stories that are much
Speaker 1: broader than our own experience. So that helps. But still,
Speaker 1: I've only read a find a number of books in
Speaker 1: my lifetime. I've always met a finite number of people,
Speaker 1: and that has shaped my experience, just like your experiences
Speaker 1: have shaped your brain. And so that's why given that data,
Speaker 1: you say, Okay, I know what is true. This is
Speaker 1: what is true. It's very very interesting. I'm really looking
Speaker 1: forward to reading that book. What person, place, or experience
Speaker 1: most altered your life? Well, interestingly, it's almost certainly my parents.
Speaker 1: But the interesting part is that that feels invisible to us.
Speaker 1: In other words, it's very hard to to see all
Speaker 1: of the ways of what your parents shaped you, because
Speaker 1: you knew nothing else. That was us the background furniture
Speaker 1: of the world, and you grew up against that. So
Speaker 1: that's certainly what has shaped me the most my parents.
Speaker 1: But when I was in graduate school, my thesis advisor,
Speaker 1: ain him Read Montague, was unbelievably influential on me. He
Speaker 1: you know, you come to an age when you're a
Speaker 1: young person. I was like, I guess maybe when I
Speaker 1: entered grad school, you know, you're just leaving your parents
Speaker 1: home and you're looking for other people in the world.
Speaker 1: And he was just a great person to really admire
Speaker 1: in so many ways. He was twenty points at ahead
Speaker 1: of everybody, and he was a terrific athlete, unbelievably strong
Speaker 1: and fast and so on, and and the key thing
Speaker 1: is he gave me no charity. I mean, he spent
Speaker 1: the entirety of grad school beating me up every day.
Speaker 1: And that was really valuable because I think, actually, maybe
Speaker 1: there's sometimes too much charity that happens because teachers are kind,
Speaker 1: or they're just too tired or whatever. So if you
Speaker 1: get something right and you don't get a hundred percent right,
Speaker 1: no one really says anything. They don't expect anything more
Speaker 1: from you, but read expected a hundred percent all the time,
Speaker 1: every time. And that was probably the most valuable thing
Speaker 1: that's happened in my life. And then I guess the
Speaker 1: last thing I'd say is when I was a post doc,
Speaker 1: one of the people I got to work with was
Speaker 1: Francis Crick, who was the co discoverer of the structure
Speaker 1: of DNA. That in my entire life since then, I've
Speaker 1: not had another experience like that, because he was such
Speaker 1: a special person in the sense that not only was
Speaker 1: he essentially the giant of twentieth century biology, but he
Speaker 1: didn't have a life like other people. He never had
Speaker 1: to right grants and try to get a job as
Speaker 1: a professor and whatever. So he just had this office
Speaker 1: and he would read the scientific journals all day. And
Speaker 1: I asked him, as I said, what are you looking
Speaker 1: for when you're reading there? He said, I don't know.
Speaker 1: But what he meant was he's just letting ideas come
Speaker 1: to him, and he's writing letters scientists around the world
Speaker 1: and saying, hey, why don't you do this experience? What
Speaker 1: if you did this and this and this. He was
Speaker 1: just a person who because he'd won a Nobel prize
Speaker 1: as a young person, got to just be a giant
Speaker 1: thinker his whole life and never had to deal with
Speaker 1: the constraints that everyone else had too. Wow, how amazing,
Speaker 1: How amazing that he was your teacher? Yeah, I do think.
Speaker 1: How have things teach you? Yes, we have a big
Speaker 1: swell here in California at the moment. I don't know
Speaker 1: if you're aware of yourself, but I am. And yesterday
Speaker 1: I went out very excited and I just took so
Speaker 1: many giant waves on my head and I was so bummed,
Speaker 1: and I kind of I came in and I sat
Speaker 1: on the beach and my friend I was like, oh,
Speaker 1: it was just the worst. And my friend went, well,
Speaker 1: do you know what you did? Like, do you know what?
Speaker 1: Do you know what happened? I was like, well, yeah,
Speaker 1: you know that first ten footer I was too far
Speaker 1: ahead of it, and on the second one I was
Speaker 1: just dealing with being piste off about the first one,
Speaker 1: and the third one I was scared. And he was like, great, well,
Speaker 1: now you can go back out and not do all
Speaker 1: that ship that you just said, And so I did.
Speaker 1: I went back out and I took another ten waves
Speaker 1: on the head, but I did get one really amazing one. Yeah,
Speaker 1: in your life, can you tell me about something that
Speaker 1: has grown out of a personal disaster? Uh? Yeah. When
Speaker 1: I was in the third grade, I fell off of
Speaker 1: a roof of a house that was under construction, and
Speaker 1: I almost died. Um. I fell, you know, from the
Speaker 1: roof and landed on the brick floor, face first, and
Speaker 1: I shattered my nose. But I think that's part of
Speaker 1: what made me a neuroscientist, because as I was falling,
Speaker 1: I was, first of all, having completely calm, clear thoughts.
Speaker 1: I was thinking about Alice in Wonderland and how this
Speaker 1: must have been what it was like when she was
Speaker 1: falling down the rabbit hole. And just before that, I
Speaker 1: was thinking about, Okay, I wonder if I could still
Speaker 1: grab for the roof, and and then I realized that's
Speaker 1: tar paper and it's not gonna hold, and that's not
Speaker 1: gonna work. And you know, eventually I just turned and
Speaker 1: faced the bricks and hit. But the thing is that
Speaker 1: the whole event seemed to take a very long time.
Speaker 1: I still remember the thoughts very clearly because it was,
Speaker 1: you know, a traumatic event. But when I got to
Speaker 1: high school and I took physics. I realized that the
Speaker 1: whole fall had taken point six of a second, and
Speaker 1: I couldn't figure that out. I couldn't understand how this
Speaker 1: thing that was so fast seemed to taking so long.
Speaker 1: It's like, I'm really interested in our perception of the world,
Speaker 1: and specifically in the perception of time and why things
Speaker 1: seemed to go in slow motion during a life threatening event.
Speaker 1: And I ended up, you know, growing up to become
Speaker 1: a neuroscientist. And I studied that. I did these experiments
Speaker 1: where I dropped people from a hundred and fifty foot
Speaker 1: tall tower in free fall and they're caught in a
Speaker 1: net below, going seventy miles an hour, and I was
Speaker 1: able to measure aspects of their time perception on the
Speaker 1: way down. How did you do that? What I did
Speaker 1: is I built a device that went on their wrist
Speaker 1: and it flashed information at them, visual information at them
Speaker 1: at a certain rate, and depending on how fast they
Speaker 1: were seeing the world, the question was would they be
Speaker 1: able to essentially see in slow motion? Because everybody who's
Speaker 1: ever gotten in a car accident says, oh, you know,
Speaker 1: I was like so much. I saw the hood crumple
Speaker 1: in the rear view mirror fall off and the facial
Speaker 1: expression the other person and so on, and so I
Speaker 1: wanted to really test whether that was true, whether you
Speaker 1: could see in slow motion, and it turned out that
Speaker 1: you do not see in slow motion. It's all a
Speaker 1: retrospective trick of memory, which is to say, when you're
Speaker 1: in a life streating situation, you're laying down memories really densely.
Speaker 1: Normally you're not laying down much memory at all. You know,
Speaker 1: I don't remember my drive home. It was just it
Speaker 1: was nothing. But when something really matters, your brain writes
Speaker 1: sound every single thing. So when you read that back out,
Speaker 1: when you say what does happen? What does happened? What
Speaker 1: just happened, you remember it in such detail that your
Speaker 1: brain estimates, I guess I was have taken longer. I
Speaker 1: was taken a long time. So it's all about the
Speaker 1: way memory is laid down. That's why we think the
Speaker 1: event took place in slow motion, whereas in fact it's
Speaker 1: not slow motion. And I realized after I did these
Speaker 1: experiments that it has to be that way, because you know,
Speaker 1: coming back to the car accidents, which someone says, look,
Speaker 1: I know it went slow motion because I saw these things,
Speaker 1: you can just ask the person, Okay, look the passenger
Speaker 1: on the car seat next to you, who is screaming.
Speaker 1: Did it sounds like the person was actually saying because
Speaker 1: if not, then that means it was not going in
Speaker 1: slow motion, and people have to allow that. Actually, they
Speaker 1: didn't hear things in slow motion, so it's simply that
Speaker 1: they remembered all the details, and so when their brain
Speaker 1: makes an estimate, it says, I guess that must have
Speaker 1: been five seconds, because I don't usually have that much memory.
Speaker 1: Do you think that only a traumatic event can trigger
Speaker 1: that kind of memory sequence, But because something that is
Speaker 1: intensely pleasurable and amazing do the same thing? Yeah, good question.
Speaker 1: It can be the intensely pleasurable and amazing. It's just
Speaker 1: that's more rare. But it's an area of your brain
Speaker 1: called the limbic system and the amygdala in particular, that's
Speaker 1: involved and saying, hey, write this down. This is important,
Speaker 1: and there aren't that many things that are super important
Speaker 1: for us write down. Certainly traumatic events count, and certainly
Speaker 1: super pleasurable events a count, But otherwise most of the
Speaker 1: time you're amygla says, Okay, you know, same old stuff.
Speaker 1: I'm not gonna bother keeping dense memories of this. That's
Speaker 1: so funny because childbirth, I don't know what your partner
Speaker 1: or wife experience, but it's so interesting. There is great
Speaker 1: swathes of the thirty seven hours that I was in
Speaker 1: labor that I remember so acutely and keenly, and they
Speaker 1: involved pain, and they also involved laughter and hilarious things
Speaker 1: that my mother and my sister said. And then there
Speaker 1: must be ours. There were hours and hours and hours
Speaker 1: that I know I was just stumbling through pain, but
Speaker 1: I don't remember exactly. So it's it's interesting. There are
Speaker 1: parts of that thirty seven hours that are carved out
Speaker 1: in the boldest relief. So interesting. I've often wondered why
Speaker 1: my brain chose to remember those bits and not when
Speaker 1: I was sitting in the shower, you know, singing, which
Speaker 1: I know I did because they told me I did it,
Speaker 1: but I don't really remember it. Yeah, Well, what happens
Speaker 1: during pregnancies. You've got all these hormones that are going
Speaker 1: up and down and bouncing all over the place, and
Speaker 1: for better or worse, this just teaches us what biological
Speaker 1: machines we are, which is to say, oh, when this
Speaker 1: hormone's himes and then you're remembering and you can remember
Speaker 1: that later, and then when this other thing is happening,
Speaker 1: forget it. You're just not writing anything. Now it's amazing. Yeah,
Speaker 1: it can be amazing and depressing and eye opening and
Speaker 1: so on. I think it's the most important thing for
Speaker 1: self understanding, for understanding what is our experience in the world.
Speaker 1: I think that grief has taught me that meaning is
Speaker 1: just assigned. We assigned meaning, and the depth of our
Speaker 1: experience and the meaningfulness of our life is in direct
Speaker 1: proportion to what meaning we assigned to it. Well, it's
Speaker 1: even worse than that, I think, which is to say,
Speaker 1: a lot of the stuff is evolutionarily dictated, and so
Speaker 1: you know, when you're a young person and you when
Speaker 1: we think, oh my god, I'm so in love and
Speaker 1: so on, that meaning we didn't really have a choice
Speaker 1: in that. That is what has allowed our species to survive.
Speaker 1: So many things are like that. Why is it that,
Speaker 1: you know, if if there's a lemon pie in the
Speaker 1: oven that smells so good, but let's say a piece
Speaker 1: of poop on the sidewalk smells so aversive, so bad,
Speaker 1: given that they're just molecules both in both cases just
Speaker 1: molecules that are wafting through the air and attached to
Speaker 1: receptors in your nose. You know, if you study full
Speaker 1: faction how that actually works. It's just molecules in different shapes.
Speaker 1: So if I showed you the two different shapes, I said, okay,
Speaker 1: one of these is lemon pie. One of these poop,
Speaker 1: you wouldn't know which is which you couldn't possibly And
Speaker 1: so the question is why is one so pleasurable one
Speaker 1: so aversive? And the answer has to do with the
Speaker 1: evolutionary meaning. So the lemon pie tells you, hey, there's food,
Speaker 1: there's high sugars, and they're great. I can keep this
Speaker 1: battery powered, you know, robot meat, robot going. But the
Speaker 1: poop is full of bacteria, and things that have been
Speaker 1: figured out through revolutionary time are dangerous to your pathologic
Speaker 1: and so the shorthand that your brain does to say,
Speaker 1: oh that's aversive, don't go near that thing. And so
Speaker 1: I often wonder about this issue of all the things
Speaker 1: that we find meaningful in life. The question is how
Speaker 1: how far does the hand of evolution reach in there
Speaker 1: and define what we find meaningful, what we don't exactly
Speaker 1: and spending time on wrapping that that probably isn't quite
Speaker 1: enough life to do that. Or maybe that is, but
Speaker 1: maybe it would just take all the fun out of it.
Speaker 1: You know, I don't actually think so. You know. My
Speaker 1: analogy is if you and I sat down many for
Speaker 1: the next hour and I gave you a diagram, and
Speaker 1: I showed you exactly why you like the taste of
Speaker 1: let's say, chocolate, why you think that tastes so delicious.
Speaker 1: You might say, okay, good, I've got it. I understand
Speaker 1: the entire diagram. But that doesn't change your pleasure about
Speaker 1: it at all. It doesn't improve it, it it doesn't diminish it.
Speaker 1: It's like it's a different world. I mean, if I
Speaker 1: send this to you about you know, the color purple,
Speaker 1: I said, oh, look here, you've got these color photo
Speaker 1: receptors and this happens in a visual cortex, blah blah blah.
Speaker 1: Doesn't change the fact that you look at something purple
Speaker 1: and say, oh, that's beautiful. Has having your children made
Speaker 1: do you think about neuroscience in a different way? Yeah,
Speaker 1: Because like the Yogis talk about beginner's mind, like that
Speaker 1: that is that is a place that you are always
Speaker 1: seeking to get back to, which is what I always
Speaker 1: I've always perceived that, having watched my son grow up,
Speaker 1: that beginner's mind is the purest, most beautiful. They are
Speaker 1: so connected to whatever was pre consciousness and they've brought
Speaker 1: that in with them. So yeah, Well, one of the
Speaker 1: things that has sort of been an interesting surprise to
Speaker 1: me is just seeing the punctuated equilibrium, by which I mean,
Speaker 1: you know, things change suddenly, as in, you know, one
Speaker 1: day your daughter can't read, and then you know, kind
Speaker 1: of a week later, she's a pretty good reader. It's
Speaker 1: just sort of these things that you work on with
Speaker 1: her for a long time, sudden change. And I've always
Speaker 1: found this kind of thing fascinating. It's like the system
Speaker 1: finds something where it says, okay, now I got it,
Speaker 1: and now I know how to read or ride a
Speaker 1: bicycle or whatever the thing is. So that's been really
Speaker 1: interesting to me, and also to really try to get
Speaker 1: an understanding of which things are pre programmed and which
Speaker 1: things are just a matter of absorbing from the world.
Speaker 1: And you know, it's always a combination of both. You
Speaker 1: may know this, but the nature versus nurture debate is
Speaker 1: totally dead because it's always both. You come to the
Speaker 1: table with a lot of pre programming, and you absorb
Speaker 1: the world, and you absorb your language and your culture
Speaker 1: and your neighborhood and your religion and so on. That
Speaker 1: all becomes part of who you are. So, you know,
Speaker 1: just just really watching my kids and trying to understand
Speaker 1: that isn't really Oh, I get so worried that there
Speaker 1: was no way I could have created a scientist because
Speaker 1: of that, because my son is around music and music
Speaker 1: and music and acting and reading and poetry and plays
Speaker 1: and discussing literature and movies and this. And sure enough
Speaker 1: he comes back from this amazing school that he goes
Speaker 1: to having said, can I have base lessons? Can I
Speaker 1: learn the base in September? And I was like yeah,
Speaker 1: totally great. And he comes home and he's already playing
Speaker 1: the bass like he can now play it. And I
Speaker 1: was like, well, I thought we were going to do
Speaker 1: the bass lessons. He was like yeah, I couldn't. I
Speaker 1: couldn't wait. It was just in there. I had to
Speaker 1: start doing it. And I was thinking, like part of
Speaker 1: me was going this so amazing, and pop was going
Speaker 1: you poor thing, like you could have maybe built a bridge,
Speaker 1: like but there was really never any chance that you
Speaker 1: were going to be able to build a bridge because
Speaker 1: of me. You know, I'll tell you the good news,
Speaker 1: that's that you're totally right in your intuition about this.
Speaker 1: But there's two things worth noting. One is that you know,
Speaker 1: kids dropped into the world having a lot of predispositions
Speaker 1: that might be different from yours. So you will influence
Speaker 1: your child massively, and yet your child will go off
Speaker 1: and do things that you didn't really expect. The second
Speaker 1: thing that's so wonderful about this world is the Internet
Speaker 1: and the fact that you have access to anything anytime.
Speaker 1: So he gets lots of music from you, but boy,
Speaker 1: he can just log on and watch you know, Carl
Speaker 1: Sagan's Cosmos, or watch Neil Durass Tyson, or watch anything
Speaker 1: he wants to watch, some brain pop video or some
Speaker 1: ted Ed and suddenly be turned onto bridge building in
Speaker 1: a way that even though he didn't get it from you,
Speaker 1: he got it from ted Ed. So that's the great
Speaker 1: news about this. I mean, I would obviously walk across
Speaker 1: a bridge that a bass player had built, but you
Speaker 1: know thousands wouldn't. Can you tell me where and when
Speaker 1: you were happiest? I hadn't experienced the other night when
Speaker 1: I decided with my two children, who are seven and
Speaker 1: ten years old, that we were going to camp out
Speaker 1: on the trampoline outside, and it was it was very cold,
Speaker 1: and we were very uncomfortable, but it was so much fun.
Speaker 1: It was just all laughter, and so it was just
Speaker 1: such a nice moment with my kids. So as far
Speaker 1: as thinking of a moment, that's my most recent one.
Speaker 1: But I think more generally, you know, I do all
Speaker 1: my writing at eye Hoop, and these are different eye
Speaker 1: hoops all over the world actually, But yeah, I've written
Speaker 1: eight books, so I don't know, like a million words
Speaker 1: I've published so far, and every single one of those
Speaker 1: words has been done at you know, in the National
Speaker 1: House of Pancakes. How many when you were ordering moons
Speaker 1: over my heemy. Actually really just drink the coffee there.
Speaker 1: I don't need too much of the way of pancakes,
Speaker 1: but it's just the right speed. Starbucks is too um,
Speaker 1: you know, there're too many people walking in and out,
Speaker 1: and I hope is slower, and so I just sit
Speaker 1: down for a six hour window and I just right.
Speaker 1: And that is when I am my happiest, especially when
Speaker 1: I feel like I've nailed something. I've gotten something that
Speaker 1: was just a coffin this thought in my head clear
Speaker 1: and on the page, and I've written, you know whatever,
Speaker 1: a hundred fifty seven words that are crystal clear exactly
Speaker 1: what I mean here. That's the best feeling that I know.
Speaker 1: I know that you say you love to do that
Speaker 1: in eye hoop? Can you do that anywhere? Or do
Speaker 1: you get attached to an experience happening in a place
Speaker 1: and then associate that good feeling with that place. You
Speaker 1: can actually be anywhere. It just has to be a
Speaker 1: place that's moving at the right speed. It's y called
Speaker 1: eye hoop because you can only hop very slowly. You
Speaker 1: cannot rush like Starbucks even sounds fast. It's like stars
Speaker 1: and Bucks and movement. I can. I'm not gonna write
Speaker 1: a coffee dash, but I love that feeling of just
Speaker 1: going in deep. Well it's the quality you like at
Speaker 1: least about yourself. Ah well, my whole life has been true.
Speaker 1: I just take on too much. And I have so
Speaker 1: many friends that are good at being laser focused. And
Speaker 1: in fact, just this morning I was talking to a
Speaker 1: colleague of mine who also writes books, and she said, yeah,
Speaker 1: what I do is I start with the table of contents,
Speaker 1: and I write each piece and I know exactly what's
Speaker 1: going to go in the book and with the framework is.
Speaker 1: And that's not at all how I do it. I'm
Speaker 1: completely on the other end of whatever the spectrum is
Speaker 1: that she's on. You know. I just I have ideas
Speaker 1: and I dictate into every note all day long, and I, oh,
Speaker 1: this is gonna be a paragraph here, and I here
Speaker 1: and then and then I tie stuff together with time,
Speaker 1: and I probably spend twice as much time putting something
Speaker 1: together that way and deleting whole you know, scenes and
Speaker 1: paragraphs and chapters. But that's just the way that that
Speaker 1: I write. But the problem is, I'm always I mean,
Speaker 1: this has always been true. I write, you know, five
Speaker 1: books at once, and you know, I teach at Stanford,
Speaker 1: I'm running two companies, and I'm about to start my
Speaker 1: own podcast. That podcast is going to forty minute monologues
Speaker 1: where I'm just talking for forty minutes. And so what
Speaker 1: that means is, I'm just gonna have a ton of
Speaker 1: work on my plate. I've got a great idea. I've
Speaker 1: got a great idea. You record your podcast and then
Speaker 1: that becomes your book. So you just record it and
Speaker 1: then you put it through some program so that it
Speaker 1: just dictates it, and then you just edit what you've
Speaker 1: said already. This is how you're going to save time.
Speaker 1: I would like to see this book. Yes, I love
Speaker 1: that idea. You know. The difficulty is with a book,
Speaker 1: it's like building a cathedral. You know, there's all this stuff.
Speaker 1: It's such a bigger kind of project. And I wish
Speaker 1: I could turn forty minute monologues into a book, but
Speaker 1: it's uh. But perhaps if you do a hundred forty
Speaker 1: minute monologues, you will have the beginnings of a book.
Speaker 1: I'll have a lot of material, that's for sure. I've
Speaker 1: written one book, David, which is not really comfortable to
Speaker 1: anything that you've said. However, it was speaking the thoughts
Speaker 1: that then made it much nearer. It made the reality
Speaker 1: of that book much closer, so I could actually reach
Speaker 1: out and get it. It was having verbalized it. So
Speaker 1: I wonder if it would maybe speed up the process.
Speaker 1: But you hear yourself talking about these ideas and it
Speaker 1: becomes more coherent and certainly externalized and then become something
Speaker 1: that you can actually you can grab easier and right out.
Speaker 1: I don't know no, I totally get that. You reify
Speaker 1: the ideas by saying them out loud. And then one
Speaker 1: trick that I do all the time lately is I
Speaker 1: will then take stuff that I've written and put into
Speaker 1: programs so that it speaks the text back to me,
Speaker 1: but with a totally different voice. I'd say a female
Speaker 1: voice or British, but maybe your voice. So I'm listening
Speaker 1: like an audiobook to my own writing and I think, oh,
Speaker 1: that part sucked, and oh that logic doesn't quite match up.
Speaker 1: That's amazing. I would love that. I would use that
Speaker 1: for difficult conversations with my son. Let me just let
Speaker 1: me just rest this, let me just REases to hear
Speaker 1: that back. That's really cool, as though you're hearing a
Speaker 1: different parents saying it and anything that's not so good actually,
Speaker 1: as I'm a single mother, that really what hel I
Speaker 1: could do it in like a man's voice, right perfect.
Speaker 1: And by the way, many authors in the past have
Speaker 1: used this method. Wordsworth, for example, had a lazy susan
Speaker 1: on the table, you know, one of these circular jobs
Speaker 1: that spins around, and he'd have his different manuscripts on it,
Speaker 1: and he'd work on whatever manuscript until he was slowing down,
Speaker 1: and then he'd spin it and pick a different manuscript
Speaker 1: and work on that. That's exactly how I work. Whenever
Speaker 1: I'm slowing down on something, I switch projects, and as
Speaker 1: a result, I'm always working at top speed on that project.
Speaker 1: So I think there actually is some benefit to it.
Speaker 1: That's amazing. So it sounds like that's not necessarily like
Speaker 1: a bad quality because you've done it always and you're
Speaker 1: used to it in terms of taking on a lot
Speaker 1: of things. I mean, for example, I'm in Silicon Valley
Speaker 1: and I you know, the vcs who invest do not
Speaker 1: do not like this quality about me. I think they
Speaker 1: would much rather see me as the type of person
Speaker 1: who just as wakes up thinks about this company seven.
Speaker 1: And I do think about it essentially seven, but I'm
Speaker 1: also doing other things at the same time. You know,
Speaker 1: it has worked out, but it always feels like one
Speaker 1: of those things where I'm leaning forward as far forward
Speaker 1: as I can into the future and moving as fast
Speaker 1: as I can on fronts, and as long as it works,
Speaker 1: that's great. You know, at some point I'm going to
Speaker 1: whatever it is, I'm going to break a leg or
Speaker 1: you know, get diagnosed with something or whatever. And then
Speaker 1: everything's gonna, you know, pile up like a giant car accident.
Speaker 1: What would your life look like if you did slow down?
Speaker 1: You know, I just don't think it's my personality. I've
Speaker 1: actually tried. In fact, when I was in college, I
Speaker 1: had this professor I really thought was wonderful, and he said, look, eagleman,
Speaker 1: life is like you are a lumberjack, and you can't
Speaker 1: go into the forest and take one thwack at each tree.
Speaker 1: You have to pick your tree and really hit that
Speaker 1: tree with it. And it sounded so wise, and I
Speaker 1: really liked this guy, and so I tried to change myself.
Speaker 1: But that's just not who I am. David. What would
Speaker 1: be your last meal? I think I would do a
Speaker 1: protein shake, And it's only because that represents my enthusiasm
Speaker 1: about the next steps, about what's coming next, and I
Speaker 1: want to make sure my body is fit and so
Speaker 1: on for the future. So I might as well go
Speaker 1: out on a high note with my eyes still on
Speaker 1: the horizon. I think that's how I'd like to go out.
Speaker 1: You're still feeding your muscles and feeding it protein. Yeah, yeah, cool,
Speaker 1: I like that. I like that a lot. What flavor
Speaker 1: protein shake would it be? I think chocolate. Why not?
Speaker 1: I knew you were going to say that. I knew
Speaker 1: you were going to say that. By the way, who
Speaker 1: wouldn't What question would you most like? Answered? Years ago?
Speaker 1: In two thousand four, I wrote a cover article for
Speaker 1: Discover magazine called ten Unsolved Questions of Neuroscience. And what's
Speaker 1: interesting is that those are essentially as unsolved now as
Speaker 1: they were then, with one possible exception. Actually, but the
Speaker 1: top question for me is the question of consciousness, which
Speaker 1: is why does it feel like something to be you
Speaker 1: or me? Because the brain is built of eighty six
Speaker 1: billion neurons, which are the specialized cells of the brain,
Speaker 1: and each of these neurons is you know, sending information
Speaker 1: back and forth with these electrical spikes, and they're releasing chemicals,
Speaker 1: all kinds of camp kids stuff. But fundamentally, it's just
Speaker 1: a big biological machine. It's just doing stuff. It's just
Speaker 1: you know, sending signals and reacting to signals, and as
Speaker 1: far as we can tell, that's all that's going on.
Speaker 1: Because when somebody damages their brain, we can make very
Speaker 1: particular predictions about what the consequences are going to be.
Speaker 1: It will change their risk aversion or their decision making,
Speaker 1: or their ability to name animals or see colors or
Speaker 1: understand music, you know, super specific things. And so that's
Speaker 1: why when we look at hundreds of years of brain damage,
Speaker 1: we say, all right, look it's Piers. Just be a
Speaker 1: big machine there. But the question is why does it
Speaker 1: feel like something to be alive? Why do you experience
Speaker 1: the beauty of a sunset or the smell of cinnamon
Speaker 1: or the taste of feta cheese on your tongue. Why
Speaker 1: aren't we just like you know, my computer, my laptop
Speaker 1: here is sending lots of signals around back and forth,
Speaker 1: but presumably it's not conscious. And when I watch YouTube
Speaker 1: video that I think is funny, it presumably doesn't. And
Speaker 1: it's funny. It's just sending zero, you know, it's just
Speaker 1: sending zeros and one drone. And when I shut it
Speaker 1: off at night, it doesn't lament its own death or something.
Speaker 1: So this is the question is how do you build
Speaker 1: a biological machine and have it be self aware? Is
Speaker 1: that the fundament of possibility? And is m yeah, exactly
Speaker 1: so for anyone who doesn't though you know possibilities is
Speaker 1: this movement I started about twelve years ago, which is
Speaker 1: simply a way of me trying to capture what the
Speaker 1: scientific temperament is. Where we shine a flashlight around the
Speaker 1: possibility space, we say, look, maybe it's that, Maybe it's that,
Speaker 1: Maybe it's that. And the reason I sort of tried
Speaker 1: to articulate this is because when you go into a bookstore,
Speaker 1: all you ever see are the books by the atheists,
Speaker 1: the new atheists, and the books by the fundamentally religious,
Speaker 1: and they're often put on the same table in the
Speaker 1: bookstores so that you can sort of choose your side
Speaker 1: and see what's But the truth is that our existence
Speaker 1: in the cosmos is so deeply mysterious that almost certainly
Speaker 1: there's something much more interesting going on that is neither
Speaker 1: of those positions. I think you said it as well,
Speaker 1: the asteness of our ignorance. It is full of potential
Speaker 1: as opposed to full of admonishment. Yeah, when I read that,
Speaker 1: you know, being interested in celebrating the vastness of our ignorance,
Speaker 1: it was actually really dynamic as opposed to you dumb dumb.
Speaker 1: It was like you dumb dumb. Right. The part of
Speaker 1: that was surprising is that people want to pick one
Speaker 1: answer and then fight for that and say Okay, this
Speaker 1: is the right answer. Yeah. How many people are in
Speaker 1: your movement? Can I be in it? Yeah? Please, I'd
Speaker 1: love to have. You know, the interesting part, you know,
Speaker 1: I wrote my book Some, which is a book of
Speaker 1: literary fiction, and it's forty stories of what happens after
Speaker 1: we die, and it's all made up. It's all meant
Speaker 1: to be you know, funny and interesting and then if
Speaker 1: it's meant to be taken seriously. But the part that
Speaker 1: is meant to be taken seriously is the idea of, wow,
Speaker 1: we really have no idea what this is, what our
Speaker 1: existence is all about here? And that's what the metal
Speaker 1: lesson that emerges from the book is. And so anyway,
Speaker 1: after I said the sun and pr one day about
Speaker 1: possibilityis um um, it sort of became a thing and
Speaker 1: people started websites and Facebook groups and stuff like that.
Speaker 1: So I don't know, I haven't really checked on in
Speaker 1: a while, but I'm glad to see it's moving. I
Speaker 1: like it. I think it's great. Now I've got to
Speaker 1: read some as well. I have conversations based on something
Speaker 1: that my mother post death, a phrase that she has coined,
Speaker 1: which is called brain share because, as she's said, to
Speaker 1: me in our conversations because she doesn't have a brain anymore,
Speaker 1: which is a huge relief, but she has to use
Speaker 1: mind so that I can feel her thoughts now. And
Speaker 1: it's so funny because a friend of mine was like, well,
Speaker 1: isn't that just your brain? Isn't that as the function
Speaker 1: of your grief? Because she died only a year ago?
Speaker 1: And I said, well, does it really matter. I don't
Speaker 1: really know. I'll never know. It doesn't matter if I
Speaker 1: know or if I don't know. But I hear her
Speaker 1: voice very specifically, and we have these conversations which are
Speaker 1: so they're fascinating to pick over. They're not just comforting,
Speaker 1: they're strange because there's clearly an evolution either of my
Speaker 1: idea of her since she died, or of her since
Speaker 1: she died. That it's different enough that I recognize her,
Speaker 1: but it's another version of her. Yeah. And you know,
Speaker 1: one of those fascinating things is that the job of
Speaker 1: the brain is to construct these internal models of other people.
Speaker 1: So you have an enormous number of models in your head,
Speaker 1: but you have thousands of these, you know, like oh,
Speaker 1: your neighbor from down the street years ago, and oh,
Speaker 1: your college roommate and so on. You've got little models.
Speaker 1: Some are more sophisticated than the others. So your model
Speaker 1: of your mother is you're devoting a lot of neural
Speaker 1: real estate to that. Actually you've got a very rich
Speaker 1: model of her. Other models that are thinner of you know,
Speaker 1: your barista Starbucks or something that who don't know that well,
Speaker 1: and you have to make lots of assumptions. But the
Speaker 1: thing that has always struck me as fascinating, as you know,
Speaker 1: in neuroscience my field, you know, we've essentially spent all
Speaker 1: the time studying, Okay, how does vision work, how does
Speaker 1: hearing work, how does decision making work? And so on?
Speaker 1: But the part that's gone under appreciated there is how
Speaker 1: social brains are. Brains are all about other brains, and
Speaker 1: so this is sort of an emerging field called social neuroscience.
Speaker 1: But the point is that a huge amount of the
Speaker 1: territory of your brain is there just to simulate your
Speaker 1: mother and your father and everybody you've ever known. Wow,
Speaker 1: all right, I'm gonna be thinking about that three t time, David.
Speaker 1: I'm so honestly just so shaft, as we say in England,
Speaker 1: to talk to you, I can't thank you enough for
Speaker 1: your time. Well, thank you, Minnie, It's been such a
Speaker 1: pleasure to talk with you. Thank you very very much.
Speaker 1: Be sure to check out David's books, including Some Incognito
Speaker 1: and his most recent book, Live Wired, The Inside Story
Speaker 1: of the Ever Changing Brain, which was also nominated for
Speaker 1: a Pulitzer Prize. Live Word explores not only what the
Speaker 1: brain is, but also what the brain does, and when
Speaker 1: you sit down to read it, please feel free to
Speaker 1: imagine you're having a cup of coffee at Eyehop sitting
Speaker 1: next to David while he's busy writing five other books.
Speaker 1: Mini Questions is hosted and written by Me Mini Driver,
Speaker 1: supervising producer Aaron Kaufman, Producer Morgan Levoy, Research assistant Marissa Brown.
Speaker 1: Original music Sorry Baby by Mini Driver. Additional musick by
Speaker 1: Aaron Kaufman, Executive produced by Me Mini Driver. Special thanks
Speaker 1: to Jim Nikolay, Will Pearson, Addison No Day, Lisa Castella
Speaker 1: and Annicke Oppenheim at w kPr, de La Pescador, Kate
Speaker 1: Driver and Jason Weinberg, and for constantly solicited tech support,
Speaker 1: Henry Driver