Speaker 1: Welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind, the production of iHeartRadio.
Speaker 1: Hey you welcome to Stuff to Blow your Mind. My
Speaker 1: name is Robert Lamb and I'm Joe McCormick, and hey,
Speaker 1: welcome back. Rob. You were outsick earlier this week. It's
Speaker 1: good to have you back. It's good to be back now.
Speaker 1: Because you were outsick, we ended up putting a pause
Speaker 1: on an ongoing series we were doing on childhood amnesia.
Speaker 1: So we ended up running a vault episode on Tuesday,
Speaker 1: and I just wanted to assure people that we will
Speaker 1: be coming back to that subject. We will be resuming
Speaker 1: the series, probably for next week's core episodes, but because
Speaker 1: we already had it scheduled out this way, today's episode
Speaker 1: is going to be an interview, so in fact, we
Speaker 1: are talking to a return guest, the neuroscientist and author
Speaker 1: David Eagleman. This is actually the second time David has
Speaker 1: been a guest on the show. In September twenty twenty, Rob,
Speaker 1: you spoke to him about his book Live Wired, which
Speaker 1: is a popular science book on the subject of brain plasticity. Yeah. Absolutely,
Speaker 1: that was a fun episode. You can find it in
Speaker 1: the archives, and the book Live Wired is an absolute delight.
Speaker 1: If you're at all interested in anything you hear us
Speaker 1: discussing in this episode, pick up a copy of it.
Speaker 1: It's great. So this week we invited David back on
Speaker 1: the show because he now has a fantastic, brand new
Speaker 1: podcast on our very own network, on the iHeart Network,
Speaker 1: and it is called Inner Cosmos with David Eagelman. So
Speaker 1: before we get started with our interview, I thought we
Speaker 1: should just share a bit of background about David. This
Speaker 1: is from his website. That's right. David Eagelman is a
Speaker 1: neuroscientist at Stanford University and an internationally best selling author.
Speaker 1: He's the co founder of two venture backed companies, Neosensory
Speaker 1: and brain Check, and he also directs the Center for
Speaker 1: Science and Law in national nonprofit Institute. He's best known
Speaker 1: for his work on sensory substitution, time perception, brain plasticity, synesthesia,
Speaker 1: and neuro law. He is the writer presenter of the
Speaker 1: international PBS series The Brain with David Eagleman and the
Speaker 1: author of the companion book The Brain The Story of You.
Speaker 1: He's also the writer and presenter of The Creative Brain
Speaker 1: on Netflix. David Eagleman is the author of over one
Speaker 1: hundred and twenty academic publications, and many many books of
Speaker 1: popular science. Eagleman is a TED speaker, a Guggenheim Fellow,
Speaker 1: and serves on several boards, including the American Brain Foundation
Speaker 1: and the long Now Foundation. He's the Chief Scientific Advisor
Speaker 1: of the Mind Science Foundation and the winner of the
Speaker 1: Claude Shannon Luminary Award from Bell Labs and the McGovern
Speaker 1: Award for Excellence in Biomedical Communication. He serves as the
Speaker 1: academic editor for the Journal of Science in Law. Was
Speaker 1: named Science Educator of the Year by the Society for
Speaker 1: Neuroscience and was featured as one of the quote Brightest
Speaker 1: Idea Guys by Italy's Style magazine. He served as the
Speaker 1: scientific advisor on several TV shows, including Westworld and Perception,
Speaker 1: and it's been profiled on The Colbert Report, Nova Science Now,
Speaker 1: The New Yorker, CNN's Next List, and many other venues.
Speaker 1: He appears regularly on radio and television to discuss literature
Speaker 1: and science. And I guess now he is going to
Speaker 1: start having to add podcasts to his to the end
Speaker 1: of his bio here, So Rob, unless you have anything else,
Speaker 1: I think we should jump right into our conversation with
Speaker 1: David Eagleman. Hi David, welcome back to the show. Great
Speaker 1: thanks Rob for having me again. It's a pleasure to
Speaker 1: be here. And hello Joe, it's great to meet you. David. Now,
Speaker 1: you have a great new podcast series out in our
Speaker 1: cosmos through iHeart. How did you decide what path to
Speaker 1: take with the podcast format? You know, it's a great
Speaker 1: question I did. Truth is, I had not listened to
Speaker 1: many podcasts at all. Now I have, but when I
Speaker 1: first was putting this together with iHeart, I thought, look,
Speaker 1: I want to do a forty five minute hour long
Speaker 1: monologue every week. And that seemed like a terrific idea
Speaker 1: at first, and then my wife says she was going
Speaker 1: to kill me because it turns out that's a ton
Speaker 1: of work. It takes me about, I don't know, about
Speaker 1: twelve hours a week to get a good monologue that's
Speaker 1: almost an hour long. So that's how I decided on
Speaker 1: the format, because I thought it would be something special
Speaker 1: rather than you know, I've been on many different podcasts
Speaker 1: where we're doing interviews just like this and it's super fun.
Speaker 1: But I wanted to do something different. So that's how
Speaker 1: I accidentally stumbled into that format. So I figure we
Speaker 1: should give people a taste of the kind of things
Speaker 1: you talk about on your show. I got a chance
Speaker 1: to listen to the episode you did about memory and
Speaker 1: the perception of time, and I thought it was great,
Speaker 1: by the way, a really great way to kick off
Speaker 1: the show. So your starting premise in that episode was
Speaker 1: that many people who have been through intense or life
Speaker 1: threatening event, maybe falling off of a building or seeing
Speaker 1: a car speeding toward them, report afterwards that time seemed
Speaker 1: to have somehow slowed down for them during the pivotal
Speaker 1: few seconds, almost as if they were able to enter
Speaker 1: a state of slow motion or bullet time like from
Speaker 1: the Matrix. Can you talk a bit about your research
Speaker 1: on this subject and what you discovered about this perception. Yeah,
Speaker 1: so my research, of course, started off very personal, which
Speaker 1: is that I fell off of a house and it
Speaker 1: seemed like things took a long time, and that's what
Speaker 1: got me interested in this. Then when I got older
Speaker 1: and became a neuroscientist, eventually I realized that I was
Speaker 1: hearing this story not uncommonly from people who had been
Speaker 1: in a gunfight or some scary situation or car accident
Speaker 1: or whatever, and they felt that things took longer, and
Speaker 1: so I looked in the literature and there was not
Speaker 1: anything on this. So that's when I came drialized. I
Speaker 1: was going to have to do this myself and figure
Speaker 1: out how to run an experiment on this. So you know, briefly,
Speaker 1: what I did is I built a device that I
Speaker 1: hooked to people's wrists that flashed information them at the
Speaker 1: met a certain way so that I could tell how
Speaker 1: rapidly their brain was perceiving, and that way I could
Speaker 1: test whether they were actually seeing in slow motion or
Speaker 1: The whole thing was a trick of memory, meaning when
Speaker 1: you were in an intense situation, you wrote down more memories.
Speaker 1: So when you said, what has happened, which has happened
Speaker 1: that it seemed like it must have taken longer because
Speaker 1: you have all these memories. So what I did then
Speaker 1: has dropped people from one hundred and fifty foot tall
Speaker 1: tower in free fall backwards into a net below, and
Speaker 1: I measured their perception of time on the way down
Speaker 1: this way. And what I found after, you know, I
Speaker 1: did this on myself, but then we dropped twenty three participants.
Speaker 1: What I found is that it is in fact a
Speaker 1: trick of memory, which is to say, when everything is
Speaker 1: hitting the fan, your brain writes down much denser memory,
Speaker 1: and when you read that back out, your brain has
Speaker 1: to make an assumption about, you know, how much memory,
Speaker 1: how much footage maps onto how much time, and so
Speaker 1: it says, oh, wow, that must have been five seconds,
Speaker 1: even though it was only one second worth. But the
Speaker 1: point is people were not able to see in slow motion, which,
Speaker 1: by the way, was disappointing for me because I already
Speaker 1: had I was already talking with the military about building
Speaker 1: cockpits in a way that flashed information more rapidly at
Speaker 1: people when they in some intense situation. But it turns
Speaker 1: out none of that makes the difference. You can't actually
Speaker 1: get information in there faster, you can only remember it faster.
Speaker 1: So there's not actually any increased ability of perception. It's
Speaker 1: just a trick of the memory exactly. Now, it is
Speaker 1: the case that you know a lot, You can do
Speaker 1: a lot of things pre consciously, by which I mean
Speaker 1: your conscious awareness of something is always the slowest thing
Speaker 1: on the ladder to ever get any information. So by
Speaker 1: the time your brain puts together all the signals and says, okay,
Speaker 1: this is what just happened, you know, that's at least
Speaker 1: half a second to a second behind real time. But
Speaker 1: the point is your body can react much faster than that.
Speaker 1: Your body can get signals and say, whoa, I got
Speaker 1: to do something about this right away, and so you
Speaker 1: can react, you know, often much faster than you can
Speaker 1: be consciously aware. So you know, I don't know if
Speaker 1: you've been on a I mean, this is what happened
Speaker 1: to me recently. I was on a hike with a
Speaker 1: friend and a branch snapped back, and I was, you know,
Speaker 1: halfway into the move of ducking out of the way
Speaker 1: of the branch before I consciously realized it. Or my
Speaker 1: foot gets halfway to the break of my truck before
Speaker 1: I realize that there's a car pulling out of the
Speaker 1: driveway ahead of me. In other words, consciousness is always
Speaker 1: the last guy on the ladder to get any information,
Speaker 1: and your body can almost always react much faster. In fact,
Speaker 1: let me just say what more example of that, which
Speaker 1: is when I was younger, I used to play baseball,
Speaker 1: and my experience was always that, you know, I'd be
Speaker 1: waiting for the for the pitch, and then I would
Speaker 1: realize after it had happened that I had already hit
Speaker 1: the ball, and I would consciously realize, oh, I have
Speaker 1: just hit the ball. Now throw the bat and run.
Speaker 1: But you know, the whole thing, the ball moving from
Speaker 1: the mound to the plate, and the swing and the batting,
Speaker 1: that's all a really fast process, and it often happens
Speaker 1: preconsciously somewhat related to that. This raises questions about the
Speaker 1: different kinds of circumstances that would favor the perception of
Speaker 1: slow motion in intense situations or not. So. My example
Speaker 1: was there was one night years ago I was driving
Speaker 1: under an overpass and there was a sudden deafening sound
Speaker 1: and a shutter, And what my wife and I deduced
Speaker 1: later was that somehow like a brick had fallen from
Speaker 1: above and hit the roof of our car just above
Speaker 1: the windshield as we passed under at highway speed. And
Speaker 1: I don't know if somebody threw it or if it
Speaker 1: somehow just fell, but I not only don't recall a
Speaker 1: feeling of stretched time or a greater density of memories
Speaker 1: right before and after the impact, I felt almost a
Speaker 1: kind of retrospective amnesia, like a real paucity of detail,
Speaker 1: And it was like we were suddenly a good ways
Speaker 1: down the road and just trying to remember or figure
Speaker 1: out what had happened. Yeah, that's exactly right. It's because
Speaker 1: you didn't write down any memory. And this is generally
Speaker 1: because as you are taking a drive down the highway,
Speaker 1: your brain is writing down very little stuff going on.
Speaker 1: In fact, the interesting part is that although we think
Speaker 1: about memory is being like a video recorder or something,
Speaker 1: in fact it's nothing like that. You write down very
Speaker 1: little of what happens in your life, especially when you're
Speaker 1: driving on a road you've been down before. So what
Speaker 1: happened is there's the deafening crash and suddenly thinking what
Speaker 1: just happened? What just happened? And you've got nothing to
Speaker 1: draw on. There's just no footage there. And by the way,
Speaker 1: just as a very quick side note, I think this
Speaker 1: is what happens to people when they are high on marijuana.
Speaker 1: Is they say, oh, my gosh, how long have I
Speaker 1: been standing here? It's like I'm standing here forever. And
Speaker 1: it's because they're not writing down memories in the same way.
Speaker 1: So when their brain looks for how long have I
Speaker 1: been standing here, what it's looking for is footage in time,
Speaker 1: as in, Okay, I remember getting here, I remember this happening.
Speaker 1: Someone said this, and someone put the glass down and
Speaker 1: blah blah blah, so that I can estimate how long
Speaker 1: it's been there. But suddenly it can't grab onto any
Speaker 1: memories at all, and so suddenly people are lost in time. Anyway,
Speaker 1: So this is Joe exactly what happens when people suddenly
Speaker 1: are hit by a car that they don't see coming,
Speaker 1: like a car tee bones them or something. Or I
Speaker 1: might have mentioned in the podcast, I can't remember that,
Speaker 1: you know. I was once riding my bike and the
Speaker 1: wheel suddenly dropped in a pothole and I went flying
Speaker 1: over the handlebars. But because I didn't see that coming,
Speaker 1: I just had the sensation of suddenly, oh my god,
Speaker 1: what's just you know, here I'm lying on the asphalt, bloody,
Speaker 1: and I have no idea what just happened. And it's
Speaker 1: precisely because you're not running down any memories. So when
Speaker 1: your brain says, what does happened? Which has happened, there's
Speaker 1: nothing to draw on, as opposed to the brick sliding
Speaker 1: on ice towards the brick wall phenomenon, which is where
Speaker 1: you say, oh my gosh, I'm predicting what's going to
Speaker 1: happen and this is really gonna hurt, this is gonna
Speaker 1: be bad, And that's when you're writing down lots of stuff.
Speaker 1: So would you say you're more likely to have this
Speaker 1: memory density perception number one if you see the event
Speaker 1: coming ahead of time, there's there's expectation of it. But
Speaker 1: also if you're just generally in a novel or unusual situation, yeah,
Speaker 1: that's exactly right. Actually, so two aspects of that. One
Speaker 1: is that I just mentioned a moment ago that you
Speaker 1: write down very little memory, and that's because as an
Speaker 1: adult now, your brain has sort of figured out a
Speaker 1: pretty good model of the world, meaning you don't need
Speaker 1: to write stuff down because you've seen all the personalities before,
Speaker 1: you've seen different cities before, you've seen roads and people
Speaker 1: and events and television shows, and you sort of you
Speaker 1: sort of got it. But if something really novel happens,
Speaker 1: that's when your brain writes something down and says, whoa
Speaker 1: wait a minute, I'm surprised, And that's when stuff starts
Speaker 1: getting written down. So when you look back at the
Speaker 1: end of let's say a novel event, let's say you
Speaker 1: go on some really wild trip on the weekend to
Speaker 1: glopos islands and you see new things and so on,
Speaker 1: then it seems like forever since you were at work
Speaker 1: on Friday. But if you just go off for a
Speaker 1: normal weekend and you come back to work, you think, oh,
Speaker 1: I was just here because he didn't lay down any
Speaker 1: new memories over the weekend. So it is true that
Speaker 1: things that are novel generally seem to last longer. However,
Speaker 1: it should be noted that when things are actually life threatening,
Speaker 1: you have essentially an emergency response memory system that kicks
Speaker 1: into gear. That is a secondary track on which you
Speaker 1: write down memory. And this is underpinned by a part
Speaker 1: of the brain called the amygla and its job is
Speaker 1: to say, WHOA, everything is going really bad and scary here,
Speaker 1: and I got to write this down because that, after all,
Speaker 1: is the point of memory, is to make sure that
Speaker 1: you write down stuff that is important and specifically life
Speaker 1: threateningly important. So if the normal memory system, would that
Speaker 1: be the hippocampal memory system exactly, If that's the normal
Speaker 1: memory system, and then the amygdala tends to be recruited
Speaker 1: in intense situations. Do we know generally if there is
Speaker 1: any if there are any characteristic differences between how memories
Speaker 1: are recorded in the hipocampus versus the amygdala. Yeah, and
Speaker 1: it turns out it's a it's a it's a tragic one,
Speaker 1: which is that amygdala memories are uneasable, whereas hippocampal memories
Speaker 1: can be erased. So let me unpack this because there's
Speaker 1: two surprising parts here. So first of all, the fact
Speaker 1: that hippocampal memories can be erased is terrifying and weird
Speaker 1: and wild, which is, if I ask you to recall
Speaker 1: the name of your fifth grade teacher and then suddenly
Speaker 1: that brick drops off the highway bridge and hits you
Speaker 1: in the head. God forbid, let's say that happens. You
Speaker 1: will now have amnesia. For that one fact. You will
Speaker 1: not remember anything about your fifth grade teacher anymore about
Speaker 1: the at least the fifth grade teacher's name. Why. It's
Speaker 1: because the name of your fifth grade teacher is stored
Speaker 1: deep in the structure of your brain, and when I
Speaker 1: ask you to recall it, you're actually transferring it from
Speaker 1: that structural form into activity, you know, spikes in the brain.
Speaker 1: And that's how you're remembering the name of your teacher. Now,
Speaker 1: when you're done remembering it, it has to get reconsolidated
Speaker 1: back into its physical form, and if you get hit
Speaker 1: in the head during that moment, it's gone. It's now
Speaker 1: you know, it's been transferred from the physical to the
Speaker 1: you know, activity in spikes and if you you know,
Speaker 1: before it gets transferred back into the physical, it is
Speaker 1: susceptible to erasure, which is weird and terrifying. And by
Speaker 1: the way, this can also be done with protein synthesis inhibitors.
Speaker 1: So people do this in rats. They've been doing this
Speaker 1: for decades, where you know, you train a rat how
Speaker 1: to run different mazes, and then you put the rat
Speaker 1: on a particular maze where the rat has to remember, oh, yeah,
Speaker 1: that's this one, and then you just feed the rat
Speaker 1: a protein synthesis inhibitor, and now it cannot reconsolidate that
Speaker 1: memory into physical form. So number one is hypocampal memories
Speaker 1: can be erased. The number two point is that amiglo
Speaker 1: memories cannot be erased, which is to say, when you
Speaker 1: recruit the emergency control system to say, wow, this is
Speaker 1: really important, write this down, then those are permanent. Which
Speaker 1: the reason I say that's unfortunate is because those are
Speaker 1: the ones that people want to race. In other words.
Speaker 1: You know, let's say a rape victim or something like that.
Speaker 1: That is the one thing that she wants to forget
Speaker 1: more than anything, but cannot. Now, I was checking out
Speaker 1: the show as well, and I was listening to your
Speaker 1: I believe this is an episode from just earlier this
Speaker 1: week on the topic of animal uplift, which I don't
Speaker 1: think is a term that I was familiar with. Can
Speaker 1: you give us a brief taste, a brief overview of
Speaker 1: what animal uplift is. Yeah, it's this idea that you know, look,
Speaker 1: the human brain is made out of exactly the same
Speaker 1: stuff that a mouse brain, the dog brain, the giraffe brain.
Speaker 1: You know, it's all the same stuff. It's got the
Speaker 1: same anatomy, same general structure. We just have more of
Speaker 1: this wrinkly outer bit called the cortex. And but somehow
Speaker 1: we are you know, we've taken over the whole planet
Speaker 1: as a species. We've gotten off the planet, We've made
Speaker 1: vaccines and internet and quantum mechanics and so like, there's
Speaker 1: some real difference in what we are doing versus our
Speaker 1: neighbors in the animal kingdom, But the genetic differences, as
Speaker 1: you know, are not that much. I mean, we have
Speaker 1: enormous similarity with almost every Like if you're building a giraffe,
Speaker 1: you've got to build the heart and the lungs and
Speaker 1: the brain and then theophagus, and all that stuff is
Speaker 1: really the same stuff. And so it's just some small
Speaker 1: algorithmic difference in the DNA that's making our brain run
Speaker 1: in a more souped up way. Okay, the idea of
Speaker 1: animal uplift is if we can figure that out, and
Speaker 1: this won't happen, you know, for at least a few
Speaker 1: more decades, but if we can figure out, ah, here's
Speaker 1: the sequence of a's and seas and teas and geese
Speaker 1: that gives us this high intelligence. The question is should
Speaker 1: we give this to animals? Should we help animals become intelligent? Now,
Speaker 1: let me just mention this is an area that bioethicists
Speaker 1: and philosophers and neuroscientists have been talking about for a while,
Speaker 1: and there's plenty of debate about it. On one end
Speaker 1: of the spectrum. You have people say that's a terrible idea,
Speaker 1: we wouldn't want to give intelligence animals, and other people
Speaker 1: say it's a moral obligation in the same way that
Speaker 1: you know, if we know how to fix some viral
Speaker 1: disease or fix a broken leg or something. Of course
Speaker 1: you should do this for your dog instead of let
Speaker 1: your dog, you know, not have the medical advances that
Speaker 1: we have made. So anyway, it's a big debate. But
Speaker 1: this is the idea of animal uplift. You make an
Speaker 1: animal as intelligent as a human. And I just find
Speaker 1: this area fascinating. And you know, as I proposed in
Speaker 1: the podcast, what would the consequences of this be in
Speaker 1: terms of, you know, will World War five be fought
Speaker 1: by other animal species not just humans? And you know,
Speaker 1: and the way I sort of introduced the podcast is
Speaker 1: with this question of what don't my kids look back
Speaker 1: on or my grandkids. Obviously there's lots of things that
Speaker 1: will be very different about our world right now and
Speaker 1: their world and let's say fifty years from now, but
Speaker 1: one of them is will they look back and say, Wow,
Speaker 1: I can't believe there was a time when humans were
Speaker 1: the only species on Earth that was really doing anything
Speaker 1: and now we've got all these other you know, crows
Speaker 1: running unit versities, and donkeys programming computers and whatever, gophers
Speaker 1: in the Senate so on. So one idea of yours
Speaker 1: that I came across because Rob senate to me and
Speaker 1: I found really interesting was from a paper you published
Speaker 1: in twenty twenty one. I think maybe in Frontiers and Neuroscience,
Speaker 1: offering a hypothesis about the adaptive function of dreams, which
Speaker 1: you call the defensive activation theory. Could could you lay
Speaker 1: out what is the basic controversy about the biological function
Speaker 1: of dreams and how your proposed solution here would would
Speaker 1: answer this question. Yes, so it turns out there is
Speaker 1: no controversy about the purpose of dreams because nobody knows, right, everyone,
Speaker 1: I mean in the sense of everyone's got a little
Speaker 1: hypothesis about it, but really it's it's complicated, and people think, well,
Speaker 1: maybe it has something to do with learning and memory.
Speaker 1: Maybe it just has to do with, you know, energy restoration.
Speaker 1: Maybe it has to do with you know. Obviously, the
Speaker 1: Freudians thought that there was some important meaning in the
Speaker 1: content of dreams and so on, but no one really knows,
Speaker 1: and certainly no one has a quantitative hypothesis that can
Speaker 1: make predictions about dreams and how much dream time we have.
Speaker 1: But my student and I developed a theory that actually
Speaker 1: does make quantitative predictions across animal species about it predicts
Speaker 1: actually how much each animal species will dream. And to
Speaker 1: explain something to take one step back, which is about
Speaker 1: brain plasticity, which is this term that we use to
Speaker 1: explain that the brain is very malleable, the human brain
Speaker 1: in particular, and it's constantly reconfiguring its own circuitry and
Speaker 1: that's how it learns and remembers, and that's how it
Speaker 1: learns new skills and all that. So it turns out,
Speaker 1: this is what my last book, Live Wired was about,
Speaker 1: is the massive flexibility of the brain. It turns out
Speaker 1: is probably a lot of people already into it. If
Speaker 1: you go blind at a young age, the visual part
Speaker 1: of your brain gets taken over, and in fact, if
Speaker 1: you're born blind, that takeover is complete. The rest of
Speaker 1: the territories in your brain involved in hearing and touch
Speaker 1: and other things, these all take over what we would
Speaker 1: normally think of as the visual cortex, and it's no
Speaker 1: longer visual. It's now, you know, subserving other functions. Okay.
Speaker 1: One of the surprises in neuroscience was a study that
Speaker 1: came out about a decade ago from some colleagues of
Speaker 1: Mind and Harvard, where they put people in a scanner.
Speaker 1: These are normally cited people but they blindfolded them tightly,
Speaker 1: and they put them in the scanner and they were
Speaker 1: looking at their brains response to touch or to sound
Speaker 1: or things like that. And what they found, to their surprise,
Speaker 1: is that after an hour, you could start seeing the
Speaker 1: first hints of signals in the visual cortex in response
Speaker 1: to touch and sounds. So, in other words, the visual
Speaker 1: cortex was starting to get annexed from these other territories
Speaker 1: that they've touched and sound after one hour. And so
Speaker 1: this was a much more rapid kind of movement than
Speaker 1: anyone had expected. And so what my student and I
Speaker 1: immediately realized is that this is the basis of dreaming.
Speaker 1: It's because we are on a planet that rotates, and
Speaker 1: we spend half our time in the darkness, away from
Speaker 1: the light of our star. And so in the dark
Speaker 1: you can still hear and touch and taste and smell
Speaker 1: just fine, but you can't see. And obviously I'm talking
Speaker 1: about evolutionary time, you know, not our modern electricity blessed times.
Speaker 1: And so what this means is the visual system in
Speaker 1: particular has a real disadvantage, which is it is in
Speaker 1: danger of getting taken over from the other senses. And
Speaker 1: this is because of the brain's great plasticity, and so
Speaker 1: as a result, the visual system needs a way to
Speaker 1: defend its territory during the night, and that's what dreaming is.
Speaker 1: Dreaming is essentially a screensaver. It's making sure that at nighttime,
Speaker 1: when you're curled up in the corner of your cave,
Speaker 1: staying out of trouble, sleeping and sleeping as other benefits
Speaker 1: too in terms of energy restoration and so on. But
Speaker 1: when that's happening, you know, you can still feel if
Speaker 1: something touches your skin, or if you're smelling something or whatever.
Speaker 1: All that can still function in the dark, but you're
Speaker 1: not seeing anything at all. And so what happens is
Speaker 1: you've got this circuitry that just blows activity into the
Speaker 1: visual system to make sure it stays active during the night.
Speaker 1: Every ninety minutes, you have this wave of active, random
Speaker 1: activity that just gets blown in there. And because we're
Speaker 1: visual creatures, we see we have full, rich visual experience
Speaker 1: even though our eyes are closed and it's dark out,
Speaker 1: and it's because we are just making sure the brain
Speaker 1: is making sure that it's keeping this competition going so
Speaker 1: the visual system doesn't get taken over. Interestingly, dream sleep
Speaker 1: is something we find across the animal kingdom. But what
Speaker 1: we were able to demonstrate is that it correlates with
Speaker 1: how plastic the animal species is. So some animals drop
Speaker 1: out of the womb and they figure out in thirty
Speaker 1: minutes how to run, how to walk, very quickly, they
Speaker 1: reach adolescents, they can reproduce all kind of you know,
Speaker 1: they're just they're obviously very preprogrammed, let's just put it
Speaker 1: that way. But other creatures, like humans, are extremely plastic.
Speaker 1: We take forever to learn how to walk, to wean,
Speaker 1: to reproductive age, things like that, precisely because we're extremely plastic,
Speaker 1: and so we have lots of dreaming because we have
Speaker 1: to protect our visual cortex at night. But other animals
Speaker 1: that are, you know, these pre program types, they have
Speaker 1: just a tiny bit of visual dreaming, but not a lot.
Speaker 1: And by the way, I'll just mention that the amount
Speaker 1: of visual dreaming we have goes down with age. So
Speaker 1: as an infant, you're dreaming all the time, and as
Speaker 1: you get older and older, you dream less and less
Speaker 1: as a fraction of your sleep. And you know, that's
Speaker 1: just a correlation. But in theory, what that suggests is,
Speaker 1: you know, as an infant, your visual system is very
Speaker 1: highly at risk of getting taken over, and as you
Speaker 1: get older and things get more cemented into place, it's
Speaker 1: less at risk of getting taken over, so you don't
Speaker 1: need as much screen saver time. Incidentally, this kind of
Speaker 1: reminds me of studies I've read on a related subject,
Speaker 1: which is prolonged blindfolding of normally cited people who apparently
Speaker 1: it's very common for people under those circumstances to experience
Speaker 1: a lot of visual hallucinations. Does that have any relationship
Speaker 1: to what you're talking about here? It does, thank you
Speaker 1: for asking us, perfect because this is all part of
Speaker 1: the defensive activation theory, which is to say, if a
Speaker 1: system is used to having data coming in and suddenly
Speaker 1: it's not getting that data anymore, it fights back from
Speaker 1: the inside. It starts producing that data itself. So one
Speaker 1: example of this is let's say, blindfolding, or you also
Speaker 1: see this, for example in you know, when people get
Speaker 1: thrown in solitary confinement in the dark, they start having hallucinations,
Speaker 1: both auditory and visual because they're not getting that data
Speaker 1: and they're used to it, they're supposed to get it.
Speaker 1: There's also something called bonnet syndrome Charles Bonnet syndrome, which
Speaker 1: is people start losing their vision, but they don't realize
Speaker 1: that they're losing their vision because they start having hallucinations
Speaker 1: that essentially fill in for them. This is all the
Speaker 1: same issue, though, which is that the brain is used
Speaker 1: to getting certain inputs, suddenly it's not getting it anymore,
Speaker 1: and so it starts generating itself when more example is tenitis,
Speaker 1: which is ringing in the ears. This typically comes about
Speaker 1: because somebody loses hearing in some frequency or some band
Speaker 1: of frequencies, and the brain says, wait a minute, I'm
Speaker 1: not hearing anything at twelve thousand hurts anymore are so
Speaker 1: I'm going to start making myself whip and it starts
Speaker 1: making this sound by itself. So this all falls under
Speaker 1: the defensive activation theory. One of the interesting things I
Speaker 1: recall about the studies on prolonged blindfolding was that the
Speaker 1: hallucinations that were reported were not entirely random. So it
Speaker 1: wasn't just you know, people seeing strange scenes play out
Speaker 1: in front of them that they would often hallucinate stuff
Speaker 1: that you would expect to see in that place in
Speaker 1: the room based on other senses. So like if they
Speaker 1: heard someone come to the door of the room, they
Speaker 1: would hallucinate the image of that person in the door. Yeah,
Speaker 1: that's perfect. And by the way, I think this also
Speaker 1: has a lot to tell us about dream content because
Speaker 1: the thing about dreams, I love the way you put this,
Speaker 1: because you could, in theory dream about anything at all.
Speaker 1: You could dream that you are in Cambodia and that
Speaker 1: you are in the fourteen hundreds and you're a magician
Speaker 1: who's doing something. But but you know, you tend to
Speaker 1: dream about you know, your work and your spouse and
Speaker 1: your drive and whatever, you know, things that are more
Speaker 1: local to you. And and it's precisely because when you
Speaker 1: slam random activity into the visual system, the synapse is
Speaker 1: the connections that are essentially hot from the day's work. Um,
Speaker 1: you know, those those are the things that tend to
Speaker 1: get activated. And the association's very loose in a sleeping
Speaker 1: dream state. And so what happens is, you know, things
Speaker 1: can go off on weird tangents, but physics still works
Speaker 1: fine in a dream. You know, rocks don't float upwards
Speaker 1: and stuff like that, and so, um, you know, essentially
Speaker 1: you're just rebooting things that were there during the day.
Speaker 1: And and this is closely related to what you're saying about, um,
Speaker 1: you know, all the associations that your brain builds up
Speaker 1: over a lifetime. So you hear the voice and you're
Speaker 1: expecting to see that person, and that's exactly what what happens. Actually,
Speaker 1: I just want to mention one other thing about the dreams,
Speaker 1: which is people will often ask me, well, what about
Speaker 1: a blind person, how do they dream? And the answer is,
Speaker 1: blind people also dream because you have this very ancient
Speaker 1: circuitry in your head that's blasting activity into the back
Speaker 1: of the brain, the occipital cortex, which is normally the
Speaker 1: visual cortex. And people but if you're born blind, it's
Speaker 1: you know, long taken over by hearing and touch, and
Speaker 1: so a blind person's dream is all about hearing and touch.
Speaker 1: They don't see anything, but they say, oh, I was,
Speaker 1: you know, moving through the living room and I felt
Speaker 1: the furniture was rearranged, and then there was a big
Speaker 1: dog in the corner and I ran from it and
Speaker 1: I was scared. And so you know, they've got full,
Speaker 1: rich dream experience. It's just that it is not visual
Speaker 1: because that part of their brain is no longer visual.
Speaker 1: And would you well, That makes me wonder, then, if
Speaker 1: your hypothesis about the defensive activity of dreaming is correct,
Speaker 1: does that mean that that dreaming is now to protect
Speaker 1: still what would normally be used for visual processing that
Speaker 1: part of the brain, but its role in processing auditory
Speaker 1: and other stimuli A great question. Nope, it's it's that
Speaker 1: these circuits that underlie dreaming are extremely ancient, and so
Speaker 1: they are assuming that you've got perfectly fined vision, And
Speaker 1: if you don't have vision for some reason, then the
Speaker 1: circuits aren't going to change there. They're just doing a
Speaker 1: basic architectural job of saying, hey, guys, every ninety minutes,
Speaker 1: just blastom activity into the back of the brain. There,
Speaker 1: that's all they're doing. And they don't know if you're
Speaker 1: blind or not. Now, speaking about dreams, I guess it's
Speaker 1: it's not too much of a leap to start talking
Speaker 1: about about consciousness. I was wondering, where do you think
Speaker 1: we are in terms of I don't know, growling testing
Speaker 1: and even eliminating various theories concerning the nature of human consciousness. Yeah, boy,
Speaker 1: this still remains to my mind the central unsolved mystery
Speaker 1: of neuroscience. What's interesting, By the way, I wrote an article,
Speaker 1: the cover article of Discover magazine back in something like
Speaker 1: two thousand and six, called ten Unsolved Questions of Neuroscience.
Speaker 1: And what's fascinating to me is it's now twenty twenty
Speaker 1: three and they are equally as unsolved. I mean, it's
Speaker 1: it's it's funny because we're making so much progress in
Speaker 1: the field in some ways, and yet in other ways
Speaker 1: we're just facing some really tough problems. So the consciousness,
Speaker 1: you know, what is consciousness is really I think the
Speaker 1: central one. And and you know, for any listeners who
Speaker 1: are wondering what is the question, the question is how
Speaker 1: do you take eighty six billion cells and stick them
Speaker 1: together and hook them up in such a way that
Speaker 1: you have private, subjective internal experience, So you know, the
Speaker 1: smell of apple pie and the taste of feted cheese,
Speaker 1: and the pain of pain and the redness of red
Speaker 1: and so on. How does that happen? Because you know,
Speaker 1: my laptop computer has lots of signals running around, zeroes
Speaker 1: and ones running around its transistors, but presumably it's not
Speaker 1: experiencing anything. It can it can play a YouTube video
Speaker 1: for me, but presumably it doesn't find it funny the
Speaker 1: way I do. And so this is really the question
Speaker 1: of consciousness. We don't know the answer to it. I
Speaker 1: can just tell you my general feeling on this, which
Speaker 1: is when you look at the history of science, what
Speaker 1: you find is that in every era there were big
Speaker 1: pieces of information missing, and yet the scientists were in
Speaker 1: a position of having to try to explain everything not
Speaker 1: knowing some other thing. Here's an example. You know, when
Speaker 1: the pump was invented, people suddenly said, oh, I see
Speaker 1: the heart is like a pump, and then it was obvious, oh,
Speaker 1: click falls into place. But before that, everyone's trying to
Speaker 1: figure out what the heck the heart was doing, but
Speaker 1: no one had the concept of a pump. Or you know,
Speaker 1: before the magnetosphere of the Earth was discovered, you'd have
Speaker 1: no way to explain the northern lights. You'd have to
Speaker 1: make up some crazy story about the northern lights and
Speaker 1: so on. Anyway, I feel like we're in that situation
Speaker 1: now with consciousness. There's something right at the edges. We're
Speaker 1: all listening for its whispers. We can sort of feel
Speaker 1: that there's something there, but we don't know exactly what
Speaker 1: it is that we're missing that will allow us to explain.
Speaker 1: How you take a bunch of physical stuff and have
Speaker 1: it experience. Now a topic that's being discussed a lot
Speaker 1: right now is, of course, as always artificial intelligence, but
Speaker 1: specifically generative artificial intelligence, especially with so many of these
Speaker 1: text and image creative tools that are available just to
Speaker 1: the average person to experiment with and share the results of.
Speaker 1: And I was wondering, what's your take on generative artificial
Speaker 1: intelligence and how it relates or doesn't relate to human creativity. Yeah, so,
Speaker 1: actually this is my next episode because I'm fascinated by this. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I'm just so Okay, So you guys may know I'm
Speaker 1: a neuroscientist, but I'm also a writer, including of fiction.
Speaker 1: And so suddenly, when when generative I started blowing up
Speaker 1: really at the end of last year, I of course,
Speaker 1: like many artists, thought, oh my gosh, what does this
Speaker 1: mean for me? What's the what's the future for writers? Um?
Speaker 1: But actually, in my next episode, I make a four
Speaker 1: part argument why I think it'll be an important part
Speaker 1: of the symbiosis between humans and machines that eventually comes about.
Speaker 1: But it's not going to replace writers and artists. There
Speaker 1: are many reasons. You know. One thing is it can
Speaker 1: it can only do short form stuff and it doesn't
Speaker 1: very nicely. But you know, if you want to write
Speaker 1: a little blog post or a little jingle or poem
Speaker 1: or whatever like, it's great for that. But but to
Speaker 1: actually write a novel is a completely different sort of
Speaker 1: thing because what the author is doing there is plan
Speaker 1: clues and having let's say, cliffhanger that doesn't come back
Speaker 1: for two or three chapters, and you know, there's a
Speaker 1: continuity through time where what the author knows is what
Speaker 1: the end of the story is and then writes towards that.
Speaker 1: But but a I can't even do things like make
Speaker 1: up a joke because to make up a joke you
Speaker 1: have to know the punchline first and then construct the
Speaker 1: joke to meet it. But it's doing everything in the
Speaker 1: forward direction, So there are there are reasons like that.
Speaker 1: There's also make the argument that we as readers, I think,
Speaker 1: actually really care about the heartbeat behind the page, which
Speaker 1: is to say, if you offered me two books and
Speaker 1: one was written by AI and one was written by
Speaker 1: by you, Rob, and you know, I would absolutely want
Speaker 1: the one that's written by a real human because I
Speaker 1: know that you're a human with all them, you know,
Speaker 1: Limitations and anxieties and joys and ecstasies of a real human.
Speaker 1: And that's what I can about as a fellow human.
Speaker 1: And you know, part of my evidence for this is
Speaker 1: a colleague of mine here in Silicon Valley announced recently
Speaker 1: that he'd written a book that was half by him
Speaker 1: and half by chat Chypt And and I actually read
Speaker 1: most of the book and it's it's actually a good book,
Speaker 1: but I was not inspired when I heard that I
Speaker 1: read it for other reasons. I thought that sounds terrible,
Speaker 1: and I was trying to figure out why why did
Speaker 1: I feel that way? Why did I feel that it
Speaker 1: was uninteresting to me? And it has to do with
Speaker 1: this heartbeat behind behind the page that that matters. Here's
Speaker 1: the analogy that I'm thinking about nowadays is it was
Speaker 1: when cameras first came on this scene, visual painters all
Speaker 1: panicked and thought, we're done for because why would anyone
Speaker 1: want me to sit here and paint something for weeks
Speaker 1: and weeks when you can just get a perfect representation
Speaker 1: of it in a fraction of a sack with a camera.
Speaker 1: And the answer is, cameras did not kill visual painting.
Speaker 1: They just ended up filling a different neighboring niche and
Speaker 1: became their own art form. But visual paintings still exists
Speaker 1: because you can do other things with it, and I can,
Speaker 1: you know, at least write the moment. All these text
Speaker 1: generation programs are extraordinarily boring and what they come up
Speaker 1: with because they get pushed through reinforcement learning with humans
Speaker 1: so that humans say, oh, don't say that, don't say
Speaker 1: that, that that might defend someone, and so on, which is fine.
Speaker 1: I mean, I'm not opposed to that, But the thing
Speaker 1: is that good literature is stuff that really challenges us.
Speaker 1: Any good piece of literature that you find is something
Speaker 1: that's full of stuff where you think, oh, yikes, that
Speaker 1: sounds like a terrible thing that just happened. And none
Speaker 1: of these large language models are even willing to go
Speaker 1: near that or touch that. So I think they're going
Speaker 1: to be quite a distance from real literature for the
Speaker 1: foreseeable future. I would tend to think also with literary craft,
Speaker 1: a lot of what we really like about literary style
Speaker 1: is being surprised. But I wonder if a you know,
Speaker 1: surprised about like a strange word choice or a strange
Speaker 1: metaphor or something, those are the things that feel really good.
Speaker 1: But can a generative AI tell the difference between a
Speaker 1: comparison or a word choice that is strange in a
Speaker 1: pleasing and exciting way versus one that will be essentially
Speaker 1: interpreted as a hallucination or an error by the AI.
Speaker 1: Oh that's interesting, I would say, I mean, say something
Speaker 1: positive about these ais. I think probably it would be
Speaker 1: able to do that, because remember, all this doing is
Speaker 1: a statistical game of saying, Okay, what's the most probable
Speaker 1: thing to come next, and you can turn up the
Speaker 1: temperature on it so that it does things that are
Speaker 1: increasingly less probable but somehow makes sense. I had not
Speaker 1: thought about that, But I think these things might be
Speaker 1: great at making really good metaphor that are surprising, because
Speaker 1: one of the things that authors have to deal with
Speaker 1: all the time is that they recycle metaphors and it's
Speaker 1: totally you know, a soporific to the to the reader.
Speaker 1: It puts some sleep. Um, but a good author. I
Speaker 1: was just reading the other day. It was Frank Herbert
Speaker 1: who in Dune, he said something about the waves throwing
Speaker 1: white robes over the rocks. That's how he was describing
Speaker 1: the foam hitting the rocks, which is beautiful because it
Speaker 1: wakes you up in that moment you think, oh, what
Speaker 1: a nice way of describing that. But if the if
Speaker 1: one of these large language models simply says, hey, I
Speaker 1: want to make something not the most probable thing that
Speaker 1: but less probable and less probable, I'll bet it could
Speaker 1: come up with really good stuff like that that no
Speaker 1: human author has yet tried. Let me just give one example,
Speaker 1: which is when Alpha Go beat Lee Sodol, the Go
Speaker 1: champion back So I think twenty seventeen, Um, you know this,
Speaker 1: here's the best human in the world and playing the
Speaker 1: game of Go, and the AI program beats him, and
Speaker 1: everybody sort of watched that and thought, wow, wow, that's
Speaker 1: the end of that. But the most interesting part of
Speaker 1: the story was what happened next, which is Lee Sotol
Speaker 1: ended up then playing against his human opponents and took
Speaker 1: on different sorts of moves that he had seen Alpha
Speaker 1: Go play that no human had played before, Like it
Speaker 1: was just doing these weird things that were totally in
Speaker 1: the rules. They were legal, but no one had thought
Speaker 1: of doing it before. So now he started doing this
Speaker 1: and started beating his human opponents at a much higher rate.
Speaker 1: So the point is we can learn from AI, and
Speaker 1: I think there's going to be this really interesting collaboration
Speaker 1: that happens into the future where we see new things happening,
Speaker 1: and in this case, new metaphors that come out in
Speaker 1: literature and we think, wow, I would have never thought
Speaker 1: of that one, and then we can use them. Another
Speaker 1: element of literary style. Though I think about with generative
Speaker 1: AI is the role of insight in writing, and it
Speaker 1: makes me wonder what insight actually is. This is obviously
Speaker 1: something we prize, you know, when we read a novel
Speaker 1: that we really like and we say that it is true.
Speaker 1: You know there's something true in it. Obviously the story
Speaker 1: is literally fictional, it didn't happen, but it observes something
Speaker 1: about life that we perceive as like deeply correct and
Speaker 1: do I don't know, I would have an intuition that
Speaker 1: says I would come across insights like that, or things
Speaker 1: that feel like insights like that, less in generative in
Speaker 1: something generated by AI. I can't prove that, but it
Speaker 1: does raise this question of what insight is. Yeah, you know,
Speaker 1: I tell you, I think I'm signing with the AAI
Speaker 1: on this one. Because what these large language models are
Speaker 1: essentially is every human all put together. So whatever insights
Speaker 1: people have had, obviously this is all available to the
Speaker 1: language model, and so there's no reason that it can't
Speaker 1: put something together that's very insightful. And it's not that
Speaker 1: it's having the insight, it's that it gets to say, Okay, well,
Speaker 1: here's a billion people who have written stuff down, and
Speaker 1: I've noticed that, you know, a number of these maybe
Speaker 1: two hundred of these people have all said the same
Speaker 1: thing over here. And maybe Joe's never read that sentence,
Speaker 1: you know, that that paragraph, but but I there's something
Speaker 1: going on over here, and it puts it together and
Speaker 1: then you say, oh my gosh, that was really insightful,
Speaker 1: because it's not a machine telling you the story. It's
Speaker 1: a billion people telling you the story. Now, Joe and
Speaker 1: I are actually currently doing some episodes of our own
Speaker 1: podcast on the subject of infantile and nesia, you know,
Speaker 1: when why we don't remember our earliest childhood or you know,
Speaker 1: infancy and birth and so forth. And and we've we've
Speaker 1: heard from some listeners, as we inevitably knew we would,
Speaker 1: who say that they do remember their births or they
Speaker 1: do remember very early childhood. And we were just wondering
Speaker 1: what your take is on people who who have that
Speaker 1: experience or seem to have that memory, what may be
Speaker 1: going on there. Yeah, I mean, here's what we think
Speaker 1: in neuroscience generally is that, you know, memory is a
Speaker 1: is something that unpacks slowly with time. It's a cognitive
Speaker 1: development in some sense. And you know, as you guys know,
Speaker 1: it's about three years old for girls and three and
Speaker 1: a half years old for boys that they start laying
Speaker 1: down their first memories. Here's the interesting thing. Memory is
Speaker 1: a myth making machine, and we're constantly reinventing our past.
Speaker 1: And so one of the difficult things to assess when
Speaker 1: someone says, hey, I remember whatever being born or being
Speaker 1: one years old, is it's really difficult to know the
Speaker 1: degree to which they think that's true. But it's not
Speaker 1: true because we're all told stories by our parents of oh,
Speaker 1: and you are an infant, you did this hilarious thing
Speaker 1: and blah blah blah, and you hear the story once
Speaker 1: or twice and eventually comes a false memory. So I
Speaker 1: think it's very difficult to know to be able to
Speaker 1: tell this sort of thing. And of course, for someone
Speaker 1: who has a memory, it's very difficult to tell them, hey,
Speaker 1: that might be false, and you just think you remember
Speaker 1: that that makes people angry. But you know, the truth
Speaker 1: is this, This kind of stuff comes up all the
Speaker 1: time in courts of law, in the realm of eyewitness testimony,
Speaker 1: because people think that their memories are like a video
Speaker 1: recorder and they're simply not. There's a giant psychology literature
Speaker 1: on this showing all kinds of ways that that things
Speaker 1: get false, memories get introduced, and so on. You know,
Speaker 1: a colleague of mine did a really great study right
Speaker 1: after September eleventh, two thousand and one. She was in
Speaker 1: New York, and she went and interviewed a bunch of
Speaker 1: people in downtown in Midtown, New York about what they
Speaker 1: had scene on September eleventh, and then she was clever
Speaker 1: enough to also ask them to describe a memory from
Speaker 1: September tenth, the day before, like I had lunch here
Speaker 1: and I did this, and I did that. And then
Speaker 1: she went and tracked all these people down a year
Speaker 1: later and asked them to tell their memories again about
Speaker 1: September eleven September tenth of the year before, and it
Speaker 1: turns out that in both cases the memories drifted. So
Speaker 1: this comes back to the beginning of our conversation. Even
Speaker 1: Amignala memories, even the scariest memories that you have, it
Speaker 1: doesn't mean they're accurate. And so I mean, especially it
Speaker 1: doesn't surprise me at about September eleventh, because especially the
Speaker 1: more you tell a story, the more you start laying
Speaker 1: down these ruts in the road, and that becomes the story,
Speaker 1: that becomes the truth. And you know, we've all run
Speaker 1: into these things in our life where someone suddenly shows
Speaker 1: us a photograph or something that's like, that's not my memory.
Speaker 1: Look here's the thing here, and you go, oh, gosh,
Speaker 1: I had actually misremembered that that thing that happened, or
Speaker 1: where I was standing or what I was doing anyway.
Speaker 1: So this is the the concern when people say, oh,
Speaker 1: I remember whatever being born or this event when I
Speaker 1: was really young, is that we know how easy it
Speaker 1: is to believe memories that are not true. Now correct
Speaker 1: me if I'm wrong, but I think I recall reading
Speaker 1: that in some of these cases with the like where
Speaker 1: there's a big public event and people remember you, people
Speaker 1: are like asked to write down their experiences that day,
Speaker 1: and then the researchers contact them again later and have
Speaker 1: them try it again, So what do you remember about
Speaker 1: that day? Not only do they often get the details wrong,
Speaker 1: but don't they often insist that the way they remember
Speaker 1: it now is correct and what they wrote at the
Speaker 1: time was wrong. Exactly that's exactly right. Yeah, because it's
Speaker 1: so hard to disbelieve our own memories about things. You know,
Speaker 1: this is obviously at the heart of lots of spousal
Speaker 1: arguments too. You know, you have two brains, you have
Speaker 1: two different ways of remembering what precisely happened. Yes, that's
Speaker 1: exactly right. All right, Well, you already mentioned that you
Speaker 1: have the episode coming up about AI creativity. I'm definitely
Speaker 1: excited to check that one out. Is there anything else
Speaker 1: you want to tease out for listeners what else they
Speaker 1: can expect from future episodes of Inner Cosmos? Yeah? Well okay,
Speaker 1: So my next one after that is going to be
Speaker 1: is a sentient because you know, this is a big
Speaker 1: question now as these models get larger and larger and
Speaker 1: things are moving at an extraordinary pace, Now, what does
Speaker 1: sentience mean? And this is related to the question you
Speaker 1: asked me Rob about consciousness and so on. So I
Speaker 1: think this actually gives us an interesting tool into studying
Speaker 1: consciousness that we haven't had before. But I have other
Speaker 1: episodes about my One after that is about counterfeiting money
Speaker 1: and what it is that we notice about counterfeits or
Speaker 1: we do not. I have an episode on will you
Speaker 1: perceive the event that kills you? And I find this
Speaker 1: is just a topic I've been thinking about for a
Speaker 1: long time and have put together a lot of work
Speaker 1: on this about you know, if suddenly something, let's say
Speaker 1: that the brick from the pedestrian bridge over the highway
Speaker 1: fell on your head when you were in a convertible.
Speaker 1: The question is, would you perceive dying or would you
Speaker 1: be dead before you knew anything happen? And what does
Speaker 1: that look like? Does it look like you know, suddenly
Speaker 1: the footage just ends, but there's no pain, stuff like that.
Speaker 1: So I have lots and lots of episodes. Can we
Speaker 1: create new senses for humans? Which is a big part
Speaker 1: of what I've been doing over the last eight years
Speaker 1: with a company that I run called Neosensory. Yeah, and
Speaker 1: I have forty six episodes this year, all of which
Speaker 1: I've outlined, And then it's just a matter of spending
Speaker 1: the twelve hours per week of writing the hour long
Speaker 1: monologue awesome. It sounds exciting. I'm excited to check out
Speaker 1: more episodes. Great. Thank you guys so much for having me.
Speaker 1: It's been a pleasure to see all. Yeah, thanks for
Speaker 1: coming on the show. All right, well that was our
Speaker 1: conversation with David Eagleman. Once again, much appreciation to David
Speaker 1: for taking the time to chat with us today. If
Speaker 1: you want to check out his new show, and we
Speaker 1: do recommend it once again, it is called Inner Cosmos
Speaker 1: with David Eagleman. You can find it on the iHeart
Speaker 1: app or wherever you get your podcasts. Just a reminder
Speaker 1: that's Stuff to Blow Your Mind is a science podcast
Speaker 1: with core episodes on Tuesdays and Thursdays and the Stuff
Speaker 1: to Blow your Mind podcast feed On Monday's. We do
Speaker 1: listenermail episodes. On Wednesdays we do a short form artifact
Speaker 1: or monster fac episode, and on Fridays we set aside
Speaker 1: most serious concerns to just talk about a weird film
Speaker 1: on Weird House Cinema. Huge thanks to our audio producer
Speaker 1: JJ Posway. If you would like to get in touch
Speaker 1: with us with feedback on this episode or any other,
Speaker 1: to suggest a topic for the future, or just to
Speaker 1: say hello, you can email us at contact at Stuff
Speaker 1: to Blow Your Mind dot com. Stuff to Blow Your Mind.
Speaker 1: It's production of iHeart Radio. For more podcasts from my
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