Speaker 1: Hey, this is David Eagleman on the Inner Cosmos inbox,
Speaker 1: and I'm going to answer your questions about the brain. Okay,
Speaker 1: Christina from Minnesota asks, what do I think about the
Speaker 1: claims of the government hiding evidence of aliens? Okay, we
Speaker 1: don't really know, but I'll make a general statement from
Speaker 1: the science point of view and one from the neuroscience
Speaker 1: point of view. From the science point of view, it
Speaker 1: certainly seems unlikely that we're the only intelligence civilization in
Speaker 1: the cosmos, given that there are at least one hundred
Speaker 1: billion other galaxies, and every galaxy contains about one hundred
Speaker 1: billion stars, and any number of those may have planets
Speaker 1: rolling around them, and so the number of planets in
Speaker 1: the so called Goldilocks zone where it's not too hot,
Speaker 1: not too cold, and could theoretically sustain life, this is
Speaker 1: a mind bogglingly high number. So there's no really good
Speaker 1: reason to think that we're all alone in the universe.
Speaker 1: So I would say that whenever we have interesting data,
Speaker 1: we should all be examining it, and therefore, if the
Speaker 1: government has data, we should be putting that immediately in
Speaker 1: front of the scientific community. On the other hand, I
Speaker 1: want to emphasize a general neuroscience point, which is that
Speaker 1: just because somebody asserts something to be true doesn't necessitate
Speaker 1: that it is true. There are dozens of ways that
Speaker 1: people can be diluted or fooled, or can pursue opportunities
Speaker 1: for attention, or can misunderstand what they're seeing even with
Speaker 1: the best intentions. And so the media coverage around this,
Speaker 1: I often hear things like, Oh, this guy is a
Speaker 1: decorated soldier, and this is being taken seriously by elected officials,
Speaker 1: And let me just make a general statement. I hope
Speaker 1: this is not offensive to anybody. But we all have
Speaker 1: the same brains. And whether you are a decorated soldier
Speaker 1: or an elected public official, when you go home and
Speaker 1: you're lying in your bed and you close your eyes
Speaker 1: and you're thinking about life and insecurity is in your
Speaker 1: own death and so on, you're no different than anyone else.
Speaker 1: All the rest, the resume and the titles and so on,
Speaker 1: that's all just decorations and it doesn't mean anything. And
Speaker 1: so I hope I'm not being offensive when I say
Speaker 1: that I have met elected officials and I'm not necessarily
Speaker 1: more impressed by their intelligence and insight than I am
Speaker 1: with other people I meet. One does not have to
Speaker 1: be a genius to get elected. One just needs to
Speaker 1: want it badly enough. So the fact that a few
Speaker 1: people with titles assert something to be true has little
Speaker 1: to no bearing on whether it is actually true. So
Speaker 1: my general take on this whole thing is that the
Speaker 1: data is totally insufficient right now for us to say
Speaker 1: there we have found alien life. And as far as
Speaker 1: I can tell, there are a lot of claims about
Speaker 1: the existence of clear data, but not a thing has
Speaker 1: been demonstrated yet or unveiled to the public. So we
Speaker 1: are in a position of having only a clear data
Speaker 1: and a lot of claims, and in a court of
Speaker 1: law that would translate to little or nothing. Let me
Speaker 1: just add one more thing. Some people make the false
Speaker 1: assertion that scientists tend to be closed minded about these
Speaker 1: alien claims, But I think you would see that scientists
Speaker 1: are the most willing to dive into data and completely
Speaker 1: change their minds in an afternoon, faster than you would
Speaker 1: believe if they see something that counts as meaningful data.
Speaker 1: A lot of people just stick with their views just
Speaker 1: as a matter of political positioning, but the scientific mindset
Speaker 1: is one that is always perfectly happy to change stance,
Speaker 1: even one hundred and eighty degrees, if the data support it.
Speaker 1: So the issue right now is that we're waiting on
Speaker 1: the claimed existence of some data, and if the weight
Speaker 1: goes on long enough, eventually it's going to start to
Speaker 1: look less and less likely that the data is actually there.
Speaker 1: Claims are not sufficient to convince data is Thanks for
Speaker 1: that question, Nathan from Colorado asks, how does being a
Speaker 1: neuroscientist affect your experience of the world? Does knowing about
Speaker 1: the mechanisms of perception diminish the pleasure of your conscious experience?
Speaker 1: Terrific question. First of all, one of the weird parts
Speaker 1: about life is that we can't run a control experiment
Speaker 1: to know what life would be like from a different heads.
Speaker 1: So it's hard to know how my experiences would be
Speaker 1: different if my trajectory through life hadn't been exactly what
Speaker 1: it was. But generally I would answer you a question
Speaker 1: by saying my knowledge of neuroscience affects my own sense
Speaker 1: of experience zero, not at all. So I should unpack that,
Speaker 1: which is to say, you know, let's imagine that you
Speaker 1: love mint chocolate chip ice cream. I could write a
Speaker 1: whole book on taste receptors on your tongue and the
Speaker 1: signals they send to your gustatory cortex and where the
Speaker 1: signals go through your brain and leads to the release
Speaker 1: of dopamine and serotonin and blah blah blah. The question is,
Speaker 1: if you read the book, would you enjoy the eating
Speaker 1: of mint chocolate chip ice cream any more or any less?
Speaker 1: And my assertion is that the information might be fascinating
Speaker 1: to you, but it wouldn't change your experience at all.
Speaker 1: Why because the information exists in one place, that of molecules, neurons,
Speaker 1: and so on, and the experience of the ice cream
Speaker 1: exists at the level of your conscious experience and never
Speaker 1: the Twain shall meet. Knowing everything at one level has
Speaker 1: no influence at another level. So the fact that I'm
Speaker 1: a neuroscientist, it doesn't really change much of anything about
Speaker 1: my experience in the world. Agga from Turkey asks, what
Speaker 1: if we have no free will? Does that depress you?
Speaker 1: I've had so many emails about free will that I'm
Speaker 1: going to do an episode on that very soon. But
Speaker 1: let me just summarize what I think is an interesting
Speaker 1: concept here, which is that what all the experiments have
Speaker 1: shown about free will is that it's problematic to trust
Speaker 1: our intuitions about the freedom of our choices. At the moment.
Speaker 1: We don't have perfect experiments to entirely rule free will
Speaker 1: in or out. It's a very complex topic, and one
Speaker 1: that our science might simply be too young to nail
Speaker 1: down thoroughly. But let's entertain for a moment the prospect
Speaker 1: that there really is no free will. The brain is
Speaker 1: just a big, giant, wet machine, and when you arrive
Speaker 1: at that fork in the road, your choice is predetermined
Speaker 1: every time. If I re history a thousand times, you'd
Speaker 1: take the same turn every single time. Now, on the
Speaker 1: face of it, a life that's predictable doesn't sound like
Speaker 1: a life worth living. The good news is that the
Speaker 1: brain's unbelievable complexity means that in actuality, nothing is predictable.
Speaker 1: So in my television show The Brain, I set up
Speaker 1: a tank with rows of ping pong balls along the bottom,
Speaker 1: and each one was delicately poised on its own mouse trap,
Speaker 1: which was sprung and ready to go. So when I
Speaker 1: dropped in one more ping pong ball from the top,
Speaker 1: it's pretty straightforward to mathematically predict where that ball will land.
Speaker 1: But as soon as that ball hits the bottom, it
Speaker 1: sets off an unpredictable chain reaction. It causes other balls
Speaker 1: to believe to be flung from their mousetraps, and those
Speaker 1: balls trigger yet other balls, and the situation quickly explodes
Speaker 1: in complexity. Any error in the initial prediction, no matter
Speaker 1: how small it is, it becomes magnified as balls collide
Speaker 1: and bounce off the sides and land on other balls
Speaker 1: on mouse traps. It takes just a moment before it's
Speaker 1: completely impossible to make any kind of forecast about where
Speaker 1: the balls are going to be and how things are
Speaker 1: going to end up. Now, the thing to note about
Speaker 1: the bing pong balls on the mouse traps is that
Speaker 1: these follow totally basic physical rules that you learn in
Speaker 1: high school physics, but where they end up is totally
Speaker 1: impossible to predict in practice. Now, by analogy, your brain
Speaker 1: is comprised of billions of brain cells and trillions of
Speaker 1: signals interacting every second of your life, and so even
Speaker 1: though it's a physical system, we could never predict precisely
Speaker 1: what is going to happen next. So our brains are
Speaker 1: like the ping pong ball tank, but massively more complex.
Speaker 1: You can fit a few hund ping pong balls in
Speaker 1: the tank, But your skull houses trillions of times more
Speaker 1: interactions than the tank, and it goes on screaming with
Speaker 1: activity every second of your lifetime. And from those innumerable
Speaker 1: exchanges of energy, your thoughts, your feelings, your decisions emerge.
Speaker 1: And that's only the beginning of the unpredictability. Every individual brain,
Speaker 1: yours and mind and everyone else's, is embedded in a
Speaker 1: world of other brains. So when you're sitting across a
Speaker 1: dinner table from people, or you're sitting in a lecture hall,
Speaker 1: or or you have the reach of the internet, you
Speaker 1: can contact all the human neurons on the planet. All
Speaker 1: the neurons are influencing one another, which creates a system
Speaker 1: of unimaginable complexity. And this means that even though neurons
Speaker 1: follow straightforward physical rules, in practice, it's always going to
Speaker 1: be impossible to predict exactly what any individual is going
Speaker 1: to do next, much less than months from now, a
Speaker 1: year from now. The Titanic complexity leaves us with just
Speaker 1: enough insight to understand a simple fact, which is that
Speaker 1: our lives are steered by forces far beyond our capacity
Speaker 1: for any awareness or control, and That's why I'm not
Speaker 1: too worried if we do run like a giant machine
Speaker 1: and don't have free will, because it is truly a
Speaker 1: colossal machine, one whose size alone makes it totally unpredictable,
Speaker 1: and who's embedding among other machines makes it totally unpredictable.
Speaker 1: Keep sending in your questions to podcasts at Eagleman dot
Speaker 1: com and listen to the full episodes of Inner Cosmos
Speaker 1: wherever you listen to your podcasts, and also on YouTube,
Speaker 1: where you can leave questions or comments. Until next time,
Speaker 1: I'm David Eagleman, and this is the Inner Cosmos inbox.