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Speaker 1: Hey, welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind. My name

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Speaker 1: is Robert Lamb.

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Speaker 2: And I am Joe McCormick. And today we are bringing

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Speaker 2: you an episode from the Vault. This one originally published

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Speaker 2: April thirteenth, twenty twenty three, and this was our conversation

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Speaker 2: with David Eagleman, neuroscientist and host of the Inner Cosmos podcast.

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Speaker 2: I remember this was a very interesting chat. We hope

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Speaker 2: you enjoy it.

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Speaker 3: Welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind, a production of iHeartRadio.

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Speaker 1: Hey, welcome to Stuff to Blow your Mind. My name is.

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Speaker 2: Robert Lamb and I'm Joe McCormick, and hey, welcome back, Rob.

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Speaker 2: You were out sick earlier this week. It's good to

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Speaker 2: have you back.

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Speaker 4: It's good to be back now.

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Speaker 2: Because you were outsick, we ended up putting a pause

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Speaker 2: on an ongoing series we were doing on childhood amnesia.

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Speaker 2: We ended up running a Vault episode on Tuesday, and

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Speaker 2: I just wanted to assure people that we will be

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Speaker 2: coming back to that subject. We will be resuming the series,

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Speaker 2: probably for next week's core episodes, but because we already

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Speaker 2: had it scheduled out this way, today's episode is going

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Speaker 2: to be an interview. So in fact, we are talking

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Speaker 2: to a return guest, the neuroscientist and author David Eagleman.

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Speaker 2: This is actually the second time David has been a

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Speaker 2: guest on the show. In September twenty twenty, Rob, you

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Speaker 2: spoke to him about his book Live Wired, which is

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Speaker 2: a popular science book on the subject of brain plasticity.

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Speaker 1: Yeah. Absolutely. That was a fun episode. You can find

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Speaker 1: it in the archives, and the book Live Wired is

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Speaker 1: an absolute delight. If you're at all interested in anything

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Speaker 1: you hear us discussing in this episode, pick up a

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Speaker 1: copy of it.

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Speaker 4: It's great.

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Speaker 2: So this week we invited David back on the show

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Speaker 2: because he now has a fantastic, brand new podcast on

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Speaker 2: our very own network on the iHeart Network, and it

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Speaker 2: is called Inner Cosmos with David Eagleman. So before we

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Speaker 2: get started with our interview, I thought we should just

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Speaker 2: share a bit of background about David. This is from

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Speaker 2: his website.

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Speaker 1: That's right. David Eagleman is a neuroscientist at Stanford University

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Speaker 1: and an internationally best selling author. He's the co founder

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Speaker 1: of two venture backed companies, Neosensory and brain Check, and

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Speaker 1: he also directs the Center for Science and Law, a

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Speaker 1: national nonprofit Institute. He's best known for his work on

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Speaker 1: sensory substitution, time, perception, brain plasticity, synesthesia, and neurolaw. He

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Speaker 1: is the writer and presenter of the international PBS series

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Speaker 1: The Brain with David Eagleman and the author of the

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Speaker 1: companion book, The Brain The Story of You. He's also

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Speaker 1: the writer and presenter of The Creative Brain on Netflix.

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Speaker 2: David Eagleman is the author of over one hundred and

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Speaker 2: twenty academic publications and many many books of popular science.

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Speaker 2: Eagleman is a TED speaker, a Guggenheim Fellow, and serves

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Speaker 2: on several boards, including the America Brain Foundation and the

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Speaker 2: long Now Foundation. He's the Chief Scientific Advisor of the

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Speaker 2: Mind Science Foundation and the winner of the Claude Shannon

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Speaker 2: Luminary Award from Bell Labs and the McGovern Award for

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Speaker 2: Excellence in Biomedical Communication. He serves as the academic editor

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Speaker 2: for the Journal of Science and Law. Was named Science

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Speaker 2: Educator of the Year by this Society for Neuroscience and

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Speaker 2: was featured as one of the quote Brightest Idea Guys

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Speaker 2: by Italy's Style magazine. He served as the scientific advisor

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Speaker 2: on several TV shows, including Westworld and Perception and has

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Speaker 2: been profiled on The Colbert Report, Nova Science Now, The

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Speaker 2: New Yorker, CNN's Next List, and many other venues. He

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Speaker 2: appears regularly on radio and television to discuss literature and science,

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Speaker 2: and I guess now he is going to start having

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Speaker 2: to add podcasts to the end of his bio here, So, Robin,

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Speaker 2: unless you have anything else, I think we should jump

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Speaker 2: right into our conversation with David Eagleman.

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Speaker 1: Hi, David, welcome back to the show.

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Speaker 4: Great, Thanks Rob for having me again. It's a pleasure

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Speaker 4: to be here. And hello, Joe, it's great to meet you. David.

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Speaker 1: Now, you have a great new podcast series out Inner

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Speaker 1: Cosmos through iHeart. How did you decide what path to

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Speaker 1: take with the podcast format?

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Speaker 4: You know, it's a great question. The truth is I

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Speaker 4: had not listened to many podcasts at all. Now I have.

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Speaker 4: But when I first was putting this together with iHeart,

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Speaker 4: I thought, look, I want to do a forty five

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Speaker 4: minute to hour long monologue every week. And that seemed

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Speaker 4: like a terrific idea at first, and then my wife

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Speaker 4: said she was going to kill me because it turns

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Speaker 4: out that's a ton of work. It takes me about

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Speaker 4: kind of about twelve hours a week to get a

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Speaker 4: good monologue that's almost an hour long. So that's how

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Speaker 4: I decided on the format because I thought it would

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Speaker 4: be something special rather than you know, I've been on

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Speaker 4: many different podcasts where we're doing interviews just like this,

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Speaker 4: and it's super fun. But I wanted to do something different.

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Speaker 4: So that's how I accidentally stumbled into that format.

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Speaker 2: So I figure we should give people a taste of

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Speaker 2: the kind of things you talk about on your show.

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Speaker 2: I got a chance to listen to the episode you

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Speaker 2: did about memory and the perception of time, and I

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Speaker 2: thought it was great, by the way, a really great

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Speaker 2: way to kick off the show. So your starting premise

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Speaker 2: in that episode was that many people who have been

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Speaker 2: through intense or life threatening events, maybe falling off of

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Speaker 2: a building or seeing a car speeding toward them, report

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Speaker 2: afterwards that time seemed to have somehow slowed down for

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Speaker 2: them during the pivotal few seconds, almost as if they

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Speaker 2: were able to inter a state of slow motion or

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Speaker 2: bullet time, like from the matrix. Can you talk a

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Speaker 2: bit about your research on this subject and what you

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Speaker 2: discovered about this perception.

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Speaker 4: Yeah, so my research, of course started off very personal

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Speaker 4: which is that I fell off of a house and

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Speaker 4: it seemed like things took a long time, and that's

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Speaker 4: what got me interested in this. Then when I got older,

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Speaker 4: it became a neuroscientist. Eventually I realized that I was

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Speaker 4: hearing this story not uncommonly from people who had been

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Speaker 4: in a you know, gunfight or some scary situation or

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Speaker 4: car accident or whatever, and they felt that things took longer.

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Speaker 4: And so I looked in the literature and there was

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Speaker 4: not anything on this. So that's when I came to

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Speaker 4: realize I was going to have to do this myself

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Speaker 4: and figure out how to run an experiment on this.

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Speaker 4: So you know, briefly, what I did is I built

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Speaker 4: a device that I hooked to people's wrists that flashed

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Speaker 4: information them at them met a certain way so that

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Speaker 4: I could tell how rapidly their brain was perceiving, and

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Speaker 4: that way I could test whether they were actually seeing

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Speaker 4: in slow motion or The whole thing was a trick

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Speaker 4: of memory, meaning when you were in an intense situation,

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Speaker 4: you wrote down more memories. So when you said what

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Speaker 4: just happened, when just happened, that it seemed like it

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Speaker 4: must have taken longer because you have all these memories.

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Speaker 4: So what I did then is dropped people from one

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Speaker 4: hundred and fifty foot tall tower in free fall backwards

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Speaker 4: into a net below, and I measured their perception of

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Speaker 4: time on the way down this way. And what I

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Speaker 4: found after, you know, I didn't sell myself, but then

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Speaker 4: we dropped twenty three participants. What I found is that

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Speaker 4: it is in fact a trick of memory, which is

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Speaker 4: to say, when everything is hitting the fan, your brain

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Speaker 4: writes down much denser memory, and when you read that

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Speaker 4: back out, your brain has to make an assumption about

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Speaker 4: you know, how much memory, how much footage maps onto

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Speaker 4: how much time, and so it says, oh wow, that

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Speaker 4: must have been five seconds, even though it was only

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Speaker 4: one second worth. But the point is people were not

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Speaker 4: able to see in slow motion, which, by the way,

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Speaker 4: was disappointing for me because I already had. I was

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Speaker 4: already talking with the military about building cockpits in a

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Speaker 4: way that flashed information more rapidly at people when they

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Speaker 4: be in some intense situation. But it turns out none

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Speaker 4: of that makes the difference. You can't actually get information

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Speaker 4: there faster, you can only remember it faster, So.

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Speaker 2: There's not actually any any increased ability of perception. It's

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Speaker 2: just a trick of the memory exactly.

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Speaker 4: Now. It is the case that you know a lot.

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Speaker 4: You can do a lot of things pre consciously, by

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Speaker 4: which I mean your conscious awareness of something is always

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Speaker 4: the slowest thing on the ladder to ever get any information.

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Speaker 4: So by the time your brain puts together all the

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Speaker 4: signals and says, okay, this is what just happened. You know,

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Speaker 4: that's at least half a second to a second behind

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Speaker 4: real time. But the point is your body can react

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Speaker 4: much faster than that. Your body can get signals and say, whoa,

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Speaker 4: I got to do something about this right away, And

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Speaker 4: so you can react, you know, often much faster than

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Speaker 4: you can be consciously aware. So you know, I don't

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Speaker 4: know if you've been on a I mean, this is

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Speaker 4: what happened to me recently. I was on a hike

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Speaker 4: with a friend and a branch snapped back, and I was,

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Speaker 4: you know, halfway into the move of ducking out of

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Speaker 4: the way of the branch before I consciously realized it,

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Speaker 4: or my foot gets halfway to the break of my

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Speaker 4: truck before I realized that there's a car pulling out

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Speaker 4: of the driveway ahead of me. In other words, consciousness

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Speaker 4: is always the last guy on the ladder to get

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Speaker 4: any information, and your body can almost always react much faster.

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Speaker 4: In fact, wait, let me just say one more example

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Speaker 4: of that, which is when I was younger, I used

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Speaker 4: to play baseball, and my experience was always that, you know,

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Speaker 4: I'd be waiting for the pitch, and then I would

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Speaker 4: realize after it had happened that I had already hit

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Speaker 4: the ball. And I would consciously realize, oh, I have

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Speaker 4: just hit the ball. Now throw the bat and run.

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Speaker 4: But you know, the whole thing, the ball moving from

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Speaker 4: the mound to the plate, and the swing and the batting,

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Speaker 4: that's all really fast process and it often happens pre consciously.

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Speaker 2: Somewhat related to that, this raises questions about the different

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Speaker 2: kinds of circumstances that would favor the perception of slow

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Speaker 2: motion in intense situations or not.

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Speaker 3: So.

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Speaker 2: My example was there was one night years ago I

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Speaker 2: was driving under an overpass and there was a sudden

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Speaker 2: deafening sound and a shudder, And what my wife and

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Speaker 2: I deduced later was that somehow like a brick had

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Speaker 2: fallen from above and hit the roof of our car

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Speaker 2: just above the windshield. As we passed under a highway

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Speaker 2: speed and I don't know if somebody threw it or

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Speaker 2: if it somehow just fell, But I not only don't

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Speaker 2: recall a feeling of stretched time or a greater density

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Speaker 2: of memories right before and after the impact, I felt

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Speaker 2: almost a kind of retrospective amnesia, like a real paucity

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Speaker 2: of detail. And it was like we were suddenly a

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Speaker 2: good ways down the road and just trying to remember

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Speaker 2: or figure out what had happened.

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Speaker 4: Yeah, that's exactly right. It's because you didn't write down

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Speaker 4: any memory. And this is generally because as you are

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Speaker 4: taking a drive down the highway, your brain is writing

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Speaker 4: down very little stuff going on. In fact, the interesting

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Speaker 4: part is that although we think about memory as being

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Speaker 4: like a video recorder or something, in fact it's nothing

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Speaker 4: like that. You write down very little of what happens

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Speaker 4: in your life, especially when you're driving on a road

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Speaker 4: you've been down before. So what happened is there's the

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Speaker 4: deafening crash and suddenly you're thinking what just happened? What

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Speaker 4: just happened? And you've got nothing to draw on. There's

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Speaker 4: just no footage there. And by the way, just as

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Speaker 4: a very quick side note, I think this is what

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Speaker 4: happens to people when they are high on marijuana, is

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Speaker 4: they say, oh, my gosh, how long have I been

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Speaker 4: standing here? It feels like I'm standing here forever, And

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Speaker 4: it's because they're not writing down memories in the same way.

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Speaker 4: So when their brain looks for how long have I

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Speaker 4: been standing here, what it's looking for is footage in time,

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Speaker 4: as in, Okay, I remember getting here, I remember this happening,

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Speaker 4: someone said this. Then someone put the glass down and

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Speaker 4: blah blah blah, so that it can estimate how long

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Speaker 4: it's been there. But suddenly it can't grab on to

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Speaker 4: any memories at all, and so suddenly people are lost

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Speaker 4: in time anyway, So this is Joe exactly what happened

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Speaker 4: pins when people suddenly are hit by a car that

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Speaker 4: they don't see coming, like a car teet bones them

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Speaker 4: or something. Or I might have mentioned in the podcast,

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Speaker 4: I can't remember that, you know. I was once riding

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Speaker 4: my bike and the wheel suddenly dropped in a pothole

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Speaker 4: and I went flying over the handlebars. But because I

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Speaker 4: didn't see that coming, I just had the sensation of suddenly,

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Speaker 4: oh my god, what's is you know?

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Speaker 1: Here?

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Speaker 4: I'm lying on the asphalt, bloody, and I have no

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Speaker 4: idea what just happened. And it's precisely because you're not

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Speaker 4: running down any memories. So when your brain says what

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Speaker 4: just happened, what just happened, there's nothing to draw on,

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Speaker 4: as opposed to the brick sliding on ice towards the

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Speaker 4: brick wall phenomenon, which is where you say, oh my gosh,

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Speaker 4: I'm predicting what's going to happen and this is really

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Speaker 4: gonna hurt, this is gonna be bad, And that's when

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Speaker 4: you're writing down lots of stuff.

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Speaker 2: So would you say you're more likely to have this

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Speaker 2: memory density perception number one if you see the event

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Speaker 2: coming ahead of time, there's there's expectation of it. But

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Speaker 2: also if you're generally in a novel or unusual situation.

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Speaker 4: Yeah, that's exactly right. Actually, So two aspects of that.

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Speaker 4: One is that I just mentioned a moment ago that

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Speaker 4: you write down very little memory, and that's because as

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Speaker 4: an adult now, your brain has sort of figured out

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Speaker 4: a pretty good model of the world, meaning you don't

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Speaker 4: need to write stuff down because you've seen all the

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Speaker 4: personalities before, you've seen different cities before, you've seen roads,

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Speaker 4: and people and events and television shows and you sort

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Speaker 4: of got it. But if something really novel happens, that's

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Speaker 4: when your brain writes something down and says, WHOA, wait

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Speaker 4: a minute, I'm surprised, And that's when stuff starts getting

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Speaker 4: written down. So when you look back at the end

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Speaker 4: of let's say a novel event. Let's say you go

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Speaker 4: on some really wild trip on the weekend to Glockos

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Speaker 4: Islands and you see new things and so on, then

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Speaker 4: it seems like forever since you were at work on Friday.

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Speaker 4: But if you just go off for a normal weekend

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Speaker 4: and you come back to work, you think, oh, I

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Speaker 4: was just here because you didn't lay down any new

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Speaker 4: memories over the weekend. So it is true that things

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Speaker 4: that are novel generally seem to last longer. However, it

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Speaker 4: should be noted that when things are actually life threatening,

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Speaker 4: you have essentially an emergency response memory system that kicks

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Speaker 4: into gear. That is a secondary track on which you

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Speaker 4: write down memory. And this is underpinned by a part

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Speaker 4: of the brain called the amigla, and its job is

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Speaker 4: to say, WHOA, everything is going really bad and scary here,

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Speaker 4: and I got to write this down because that after

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Speaker 4: all is the point of memory is to make sure

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Speaker 4: that you write down stuff that is important and specifically

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Speaker 4: life threateningly important.

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Speaker 2: So if the normal memory system, would that be the

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Speaker 2: hippocampal memory system exactly? If that's the normal memory system,

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Speaker 2: and then the amygdala tends to be recruited in intense situations.

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Speaker 2: Do we know generally if there is any if there

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Speaker 2: are any characteristic differences between how memories are recorded in

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Speaker 2: the hippocampus versus the Amygdalah.

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Speaker 4: Yeah, And it turns out it's a tragic one, which

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Speaker 4: is that amygdala memories are uneaseable, whereas hippocampbel memories can

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Speaker 4: be erased. So let me unpack this because there's two

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Speaker 4: surprising parts here. So first of all, the fact that

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Speaker 4: hippocampal memories can be erased is terrifying and weird and wild.

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Speaker 4: Which is, if I ask you to recall the name

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Speaker 4: of your fifth grade teacher and then suddenly that brick

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Speaker 4: drops off the highway bridge and hits you in the head.

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Speaker 4: God forbid, let's say that happens. You will now have

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Speaker 4: amnesia for that one fact, You will not remember anything

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Speaker 4: about your fifth grade teacher anymore about the at least

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Speaker 4: the fifth grade teacher's name. Why it's because the name

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Speaker 4: of your fifth grade teacher is stored deep in the

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Speaker 4: structure of your brain, and when I ask you to

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Speaker 4: recall it, you're actually transferring it from that structural form

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Speaker 4: into activity, you know, spikes in the brain. And that's

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Speaker 4: how you're remembering the name of your teacher. Now, when

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Speaker 4: you're done remembering it, it has to get reconsolidated back

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Speaker 4: into its physical form. And if you get hit in

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Speaker 4: the head during that moment, it's gone. It's now you know,

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Speaker 4: it's been transferred from the physical to the you know,

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Speaker 4: activity in spikes. And if you you know, before it

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Speaker 4: gets transferred back into the physical, it can it is

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Speaker 4: susceptible to erasure, which is weird and terrifying. And by

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Speaker 4: the way, this can also be done with protein synthesis inhibitors.

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Speaker 4: So people do this in rats. They've been doing this

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Speaker 4: for decades, where you know, you train a rat how

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Speaker 4: to run different maases and then you put the rat

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Speaker 4: on a particular maze where the rat has to remember, oh, yeah,

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Speaker 4: that's this one, and then you just feed the rat

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Speaker 4: a protein synthesis inhibitor and now it cannot reconsolidate that

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Speaker 4: memory into physical form. So number one is hippocampal memory

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Speaker 4: can be erased. The number two point is that amigla

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Speaker 4: memories cannot be erased, which is to say, when you

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Speaker 4: recruit the emergency control system to say, wow, this is

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Speaker 4: really important, write this down. Than those are permanent, which

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Speaker 4: the reason I say that's unfortunate is because those are

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Speaker 4: the ones that people want to erase. In other words,

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Speaker 4: you know, let's say a rape victim or something like that,

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Speaker 4: that is the one thing that she wants to forget

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Speaker 4: more than anything, but cannot.

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Speaker 1: Now, I was checking out the show as well, and

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Speaker 1: I was listening to your I believe this is an

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Speaker 1: episode from just earlier this week on the topic of

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Speaker 1: animal uplift, which I don't think is a term that

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Speaker 1: I was familiar with. Can you give us a brief taste,

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Speaker 1: a brief overview of what animal uplift is.

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Speaker 4: Yeah, it's this idea that you know, look, the human

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Speaker 4: brain is made out of exactly the same stuff that

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Speaker 4: a mouse brain, the dog brain, the giraft brain. You know,

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Speaker 4: it's all the same stuff. It's got the same anatomy,

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Speaker 4: same general structure. We just have more of this wrinkly

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Speaker 4: outer bit called the cortex. But somehow we are you know,

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Speaker 4: we've taken over the whole planet as a species. We've

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Speaker 4: gotten off the planet. We've made vaccines and internet and

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Speaker 4: quantum mechanics and so like. There's some real difference in

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Speaker 4: what we are doing versus our neighbors in the animal kingdom.

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Speaker 4: But the genetic differences, as you know, are not that much.

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Speaker 4: I mean, we have enormous similarity with almost every Like

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Speaker 4: if you're building a giraffe, you got to build the

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Speaker 4: heart and the lungs and the brain and then the

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Speaker 4: esophagus and all that stuff is really the same stuff.

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Speaker 4: And so it's just some small algorithmic difference in the

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Speaker 4: DNA that's making our brain run in a more souped

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Speaker 4: up way. Okay, the idea of animal uplift is if

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Speaker 4: we can figure that out. And this won't happen, you know,

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Speaker 4: for at least a few more decades, but if we

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Speaker 4: can figure out, ah, here's the sequence of a's and

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Speaker 4: c's and t's and g's that gives us this high intelligence.

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Speaker 4: The question is should we give this to animals? Should

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Speaker 4: we help animals become intelligent? Now, let me just mention

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Speaker 4: this is an area that bioethicists and philosophers and neuroscientists

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Speaker 4: have been talking about for a while, and there's you know,

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Speaker 4: plenty of debate about it. And on one end of

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Speaker 4: the spectrum you have people say that's a terrible idea,

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Speaker 4: We wouldn't want to give intelligence to animals, and other

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Speaker 4: people say it's a moral obligation in the same way

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Speaker 4: that you know, if we know how to fix some

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Speaker 4: viral disease or fix a broken leg or something, of

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Speaker 4: course you should do this for your dog instead of

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Speaker 4: let your dog, you know, not have the medical advances

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Speaker 4: that we have made. So anyway, it's a big debate,

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Speaker 4: but this is the idea of animal uplift. You make

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Speaker 4: an animal as intelligent as a human. And I just

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Speaker 4: find this area fascinating. And you know, as I proposed

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Speaker 4: the podcast, what would the consequences of this be in

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Speaker 4: terms of, you know, will World War five be fought

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Speaker 4: by other animal species not just humans? You know, And

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Speaker 4: the way I sort of introduced the podcast is with

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Speaker 4: this question of what will my kids look back on?

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Speaker 4: Are my grandkids Obviously there's lots of things that will

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Speaker 4: be very different about our world right now and their world,

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Speaker 4: and let's say fifty years from now. But one of

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Speaker 4: them is will they look back and say, Wow, I

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Speaker 4: can't believe there was a time when humans were the

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Speaker 4: only species on Earth that was really doing anything, and

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Speaker 4: now we've got all these other you know, crows running universities,

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Speaker 4: and donkeys' programming computers and whatever, gophers in the Senate

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Speaker 4: and so on.

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Speaker 2: So one idea of yours that I came across because

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Speaker 2: Rob sent it to me and I found really interesting

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Speaker 2: was from a paper you published in twenty twenty one,

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Speaker 2: I think maybe in Frontiers and Neuroscience, offering a hypothesis

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Speaker 2: about the adaptive function of dreams, which you call the

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Speaker 2: defensive activation theory, Could you lay out what is the

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Speaker 2: basic controversy about the biological function of dreams and how

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Speaker 2: your proposed solution here would answer this question.

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Speaker 4: Yes, so it turns out there is no controversy about

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Speaker 4: the purpose of dreams because nobody knows, right, everyone, I

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Speaker 4: mean in the sense of everyone's got a little hypothesis

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Speaker 4: about it. But really it's complicated, and people think, well,

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Speaker 4: maybe it has something to do with learning and memory.

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Speaker 4: Maybe it just has to do with you know, energy restoration.

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Speaker 4: Maybe it has to do with you know, obviously the

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Speaker 4: Freudians thought that there was some important meaning in the

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Speaker 4: content of dreams and so on, but no one really knows,

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Speaker 4: and certainly no one has a quantitative hypothesis that can

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Speaker 4: make predictions about dreams and how much dream time we have.

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Speaker 4: But my student and I developed a theory that actually

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Speaker 4: does make quantitative predictions across animal species about it predicts

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Speaker 4: actually how much each animal species will dream. And to

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Speaker 4: explain something to take one step back, which is about

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Speaker 4: brain plasticity, which is this term that we use to

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Speaker 4: explain that the brain is very malleable, the human brain

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Speaker 4: in particular, and it's constantly reconfiguring its own circuitry and

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Speaker 4: that's how it learns and remembers, and that's how it

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Speaker 4: learns new skills and all that. So it turns out,

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Speaker 4: this is what my last book, Live Wired was about,

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Speaker 4: is the massive flexibility of the brain. It turns out

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Speaker 4: is probably a lot of people already into it. If

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Speaker 4: you go blind at a young age, the visual part

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Speaker 4: of your brain gets taken over, and in fact, if

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Speaker 4: you're born blind, that takeover is complete. The rest of

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Speaker 4: the territories in your brain involved in hearing and touch

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Speaker 4: and other things. These all take over what we would

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Speaker 4: normally think of as the visual cortex, and it's no

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Speaker 4: longer visual. It's now, you know, subserving other functions.

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Speaker 1: Okay.

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Speaker 4: One of the surprises in neuroscience was a study that

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Speaker 4: came out about a decade ago from some colleagues of

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Speaker 4: Mind Harvard where they put people in a scanner. These

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Speaker 4: are normally cited people, but they blindfolded them tightly and

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Speaker 4: they put them in the scanner and they were looking

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Speaker 4: at their brain's response to touch or to sound or

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Speaker 4: things like that. And what they found, to their surprise,

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Speaker 4: is that after an hour, you could start seeing the

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Speaker 4: first hints of signals in the visual cortex in response

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Speaker 4: to touch and sounds. So, in other words, the visual

434
00:23:40,760 --> 00:23:45,400
Speaker 4: cortex was starting to get annexed from these other territories

435
00:23:45,520 --> 00:23:49,199
Speaker 4: that they've touched and sound after one hour. And so

436
00:23:49,320 --> 00:23:52,439
Speaker 4: this was a much more rapid kind of movement than

437
00:23:52,520 --> 00:23:56,640
Speaker 4: anyone had expected. And so what my student and I

438
00:23:56,640 --> 00:24:03,200
Speaker 4: immediately realized is that this is the basis of dreaming.

439
00:24:03,240 --> 00:24:07,120
Speaker 4: It's because we are on a planet that rotates, and

440
00:24:07,600 --> 00:24:10,200
Speaker 4: we spend half our time in the darkness, away from

441
00:24:10,400 --> 00:24:13,120
Speaker 4: the light of our star, and so in the dark.

442
00:24:13,200 --> 00:24:15,160
Speaker 4: You can still hear and touch and taste and smell

443
00:24:15,320 --> 00:24:17,800
Speaker 4: just fine, but you can't see. And obviously I'm talking

444
00:24:17,840 --> 00:24:23,800
Speaker 4: about evolutionary time, you know, not our modern electricity blessed times.

445
00:24:24,160 --> 00:24:28,640
Speaker 4: And so what this means is the visual system in

446
00:24:28,680 --> 00:24:31,440
Speaker 4: particular has a real disadvantage, which is it is in

447
00:24:31,640 --> 00:24:35,320
Speaker 4: danger of getting taken over from the other senses. And

448
00:24:35,359 --> 00:24:38,119
Speaker 4: this is because of the brain's great plasticity, and so

449
00:24:38,240 --> 00:24:41,639
Speaker 4: as a result, the visual system needs a way to

450
00:24:41,720 --> 00:24:45,800
Speaker 4: defend its territory during the night. And that's what dreaming is.

451
00:24:45,920 --> 00:24:49,600
Speaker 4: Dreaming is essentially a screen saver. It's making sure that

452
00:24:50,200 --> 00:24:52,919
Speaker 4: at night time, when you're curled up in the corner

453
00:24:52,920 --> 00:24:56,760
Speaker 4: of your cave, staying out of trouble sleeping, and sleeping

454
00:24:56,760 --> 00:24:59,119
Speaker 4: has other benefits too, in terms of energy restoration and

455
00:24:59,119 --> 00:25:01,840
Speaker 4: so on. So when that's happening, you know, you can

456
00:25:01,880 --> 00:25:04,240
Speaker 4: still feel if some touches your skinner, if you're smelling

457
00:25:04,280 --> 00:25:06,320
Speaker 4: something or whatever. All that can still function in the dark,

458
00:25:06,359 --> 00:25:08,879
Speaker 4: but you're not seeing anything at all. And so what

459
00:25:08,920 --> 00:25:11,760
Speaker 4: happens is you've got this circuitry that just blows activity

460
00:25:11,840 --> 00:25:16,000
Speaker 4: into the visual system to make sure it stays active

461
00:25:16,040 --> 00:25:18,439
Speaker 4: during the night. Every ninety minutes, you have this wave

462
00:25:18,960 --> 00:25:21,640
Speaker 4: of active, random activity that just gets blown in there.

463
00:25:21,880 --> 00:25:24,800
Speaker 4: And because we're visual creatures, we see we have full,

464
00:25:24,880 --> 00:25:27,080
Speaker 4: rich visual experience even though our eyes are closed and

465
00:25:27,160 --> 00:25:31,520
Speaker 4: it's dark out, and it's because we are just making

466
00:25:31,560 --> 00:25:34,600
Speaker 4: sure the brain is making sure that it's keeping this

467
00:25:34,720 --> 00:25:38,320
Speaker 4: competition going so the visual system doesn't get taken over. Interestingly,

468
00:25:38,720 --> 00:25:41,600
Speaker 4: dream sleep is something we find across the animal kingdom,

469
00:25:41,960 --> 00:25:44,919
Speaker 4: but what we were able to demonstrate is that it

470
00:25:45,000 --> 00:25:48,240
Speaker 4: correlates with how plastic the animal species is. So some

471
00:25:48,760 --> 00:25:52,120
Speaker 4: animals drop out of the womb and they figure out

472
00:25:52,160 --> 00:25:54,960
Speaker 4: in thirty minutes how to run, how to walk. Very quickly,

473
00:25:55,000 --> 00:25:59,639
Speaker 4: they reach adolescence, they can reproduce, so all kinds, you know,

474
00:25:59,680 --> 00:26:02,800
Speaker 4: they're just they're obviously very pre programmed, let's just put

475
00:26:02,800 --> 00:26:06,840
Speaker 4: it that way. But other creatures like humans, are extremely plastic.

476
00:26:06,920 --> 00:26:09,560
Speaker 4: We take forever to learn how to walk, to wean

477
00:26:10,280 --> 00:26:14,320
Speaker 4: to reach reproductive age, things like that, precisely because we're

478
00:26:14,359 --> 00:26:19,160
Speaker 4: extremely plastic, and so we have lots of dreaming because

479
00:26:19,200 --> 00:26:21,800
Speaker 4: we have to protect our visual cortex at night. But

480
00:26:22,320 --> 00:26:25,600
Speaker 4: other animals that are, you know, these pre program types,

481
00:26:26,320 --> 00:26:29,080
Speaker 4: they have just a tiny bit of visual dreaming, but

482
00:26:29,480 --> 00:26:31,640
Speaker 4: not a lot. And by the way, I'll just mention

483
00:26:31,760 --> 00:26:36,040
Speaker 4: that the amount of visual dreaming we have goes down

484
00:26:36,080 --> 00:26:38,480
Speaker 4: with age. So it's an infant, you're dreaming all the time,

485
00:26:38,560 --> 00:26:40,520
Speaker 4: and as you get older and older, you dream less

486
00:26:40,520 --> 00:26:43,560
Speaker 4: and less is a fraction of your sleep. And you

487
00:26:43,600 --> 00:26:46,320
Speaker 4: know that's just a correlation. But in theory, what that

488
00:26:46,400 --> 00:26:49,840
Speaker 4: suggests is, you know, as an infant, your visual system

489
00:26:49,920 --> 00:26:53,199
Speaker 4: is very highly at risk of getting taken over, and

490
00:26:53,240 --> 00:26:55,800
Speaker 4: as you get older and things get more cemented into place,

491
00:26:55,800 --> 00:26:57,520
Speaker 4: it's less at risk of getting taken over, so you

492
00:26:57,560 --> 00:27:00,280
Speaker 4: don't need as much screensaver time and only.

493
00:27:00,320 --> 00:27:02,760
Speaker 2: This kind of reminds me of studies I've read on

494
00:27:03,240 --> 00:27:07,160
Speaker 2: a related subject, which is a prolonged blindfolding of normally

495
00:27:07,200 --> 00:27:11,680
Speaker 2: cited people who apparently it's very common for people under

496
00:27:11,720 --> 00:27:15,680
Speaker 2: those circumstances to experience a lot of visual hallucinations. Does

497
00:27:15,720 --> 00:27:18,040
Speaker 2: that have any relationship to what you're talking about here?

498
00:27:18,080 --> 00:27:20,800
Speaker 4: It does, Thank you for asking. That's perfect because this

499
00:27:20,880 --> 00:27:24,560
Speaker 4: is all part of the defensive activation theory, which is

500
00:27:24,600 --> 00:27:27,760
Speaker 4: to say, if a system is used to having data

501
00:27:27,800 --> 00:27:31,640
Speaker 4: coming in and suddenly it's not getting that data anymore,

502
00:27:32,480 --> 00:27:34,840
Speaker 4: it fights back from the inside it starts producing that

503
00:27:34,960 --> 00:27:39,160
Speaker 4: data itself. So one example of this is let's say blindfolding,

504
00:27:39,280 --> 00:27:42,720
Speaker 4: or you also see this for example in you know,

505
00:27:42,920 --> 00:27:45,640
Speaker 4: when people get thrown in solitary confinement in the dark,

506
00:27:45,680 --> 00:27:49,720
Speaker 4: they start having hallucinations both auditory and visual because they're

507
00:27:49,720 --> 00:27:51,760
Speaker 4: not getting that data and they're used to it they're

508
00:27:51,760 --> 00:27:55,160
Speaker 4: supposed to get. There's also something called Bonet syndrome Charles

509
00:27:55,240 --> 00:27:58,440
Speaker 4: Bone syndrome, which is people start losing their vision, but

510
00:27:58,480 --> 00:28:00,840
Speaker 4: they don't realize that they're losing their vision because they

511
00:28:00,960 --> 00:28:06,080
Speaker 4: start having hallucinations that essentially fill in for them. This

512
00:28:06,200 --> 00:28:08,480
Speaker 4: is all the same issue, though, which is that the

513
00:28:08,520 --> 00:28:11,160
Speaker 4: brain is used to getting certain inputs, suddenly it's not

514
00:28:11,280 --> 00:28:14,080
Speaker 4: getting it anymore, and so it starts generating in itself.

515
00:28:14,400 --> 00:28:17,640
Speaker 4: One more example is tonightis which is ringing in the ears.

516
00:28:17,960 --> 00:28:21,720
Speaker 4: This typically comes about because somebody loses hearing in some

517
00:28:22,440 --> 00:28:25,560
Speaker 4: frequency or some band of frequencies and the brain says,

518
00:28:25,560 --> 00:28:28,520
Speaker 4: wait a minute, I'm not hearing anything at twelve thousand

519
00:28:28,560 --> 00:28:32,080
Speaker 4: hurts anymore, so I'm going to start making myself and

520
00:28:32,160 --> 00:28:36,000
Speaker 4: it starts making this sound by itself. So this all

521
00:28:36,040 --> 00:28:38,040
Speaker 4: falls under the defensive activation theory.

522
00:28:39,120 --> 00:28:42,120
Speaker 2: One of the interesting things I recall about the studies

523
00:28:42,120 --> 00:28:48,200
Speaker 2: on prolonged blindfolding was that the hallucinations that were reported

524
00:28:48,240 --> 00:28:50,600
Speaker 2: were not entirely random. So it wasn't just you know,

525
00:28:50,640 --> 00:28:53,160
Speaker 2: people seeing strange scenes play out in front of them.

526
00:28:53,200 --> 00:28:57,680
Speaker 2: That they would often hallucinate stuff that you would expect

527
00:28:57,840 --> 00:29:00,360
Speaker 2: to see in that place in the room based on

528
00:29:00,400 --> 00:29:03,800
Speaker 2: other senses. So like if they heard someone come to

529
00:29:03,840 --> 00:29:06,640
Speaker 2: the door of the room, they would hallucinate the image

530
00:29:06,640 --> 00:29:07,960
Speaker 2: of that person in the door.

531
00:29:08,520 --> 00:29:12,080
Speaker 4: Yeah, that's perfect. And by the way, I think this

532
00:29:12,400 --> 00:29:15,560
Speaker 4: also has a lot to tell us about dream content

533
00:29:16,120 --> 00:29:18,960
Speaker 4: because the thing about dreams, I love the way you

534
00:29:19,000 --> 00:29:21,719
Speaker 4: put this, because you could, in theory, dream about anything

535
00:29:21,760 --> 00:29:25,920
Speaker 4: at all. You could dream that you are in Cambodia

536
00:29:26,080 --> 00:29:28,800
Speaker 4: and that you are in the fourteen hundreds and you're

537
00:29:28,920 --> 00:29:32,800
Speaker 4: a magician who's doing something. But you know, you tend

538
00:29:32,840 --> 00:29:35,160
Speaker 4: to dream about you know, your work and your spouse

539
00:29:35,200 --> 00:29:37,800
Speaker 4: and your drive and whatever, you know, things that are

540
00:29:37,800 --> 00:29:42,360
Speaker 4: more local to you. And it's precisely because when you

541
00:29:43,200 --> 00:29:47,960
Speaker 4: slam random activity into the visual system, the synapse is

542
00:29:47,960 --> 00:29:51,040
Speaker 4: the connections that are essentially hot from the day's work,

543
00:29:52,240 --> 00:29:54,280
Speaker 4: you know, those those are the things that tend to

544
00:29:54,280 --> 00:29:57,960
Speaker 4: get activated, and the association is very loose in a

545
00:29:58,200 --> 00:30:01,200
Speaker 4: sleeping dream state, and so what happens is, you know,

546
00:30:01,280 --> 00:30:05,440
Speaker 4: things can go off on weird tangents, but physics still

547
00:30:05,520 --> 00:30:07,960
Speaker 4: works fine in a dream. You know, rocks don't float

548
00:30:08,040 --> 00:30:12,120
Speaker 4: upwards and stuff like that, and so you know, essentially

549
00:30:12,160 --> 00:30:16,160
Speaker 4: you're just rebooting things that were there during the day.

550
00:30:16,520 --> 00:30:19,240
Speaker 4: And and this is closely related to what you're saying about.

551
00:30:20,640 --> 00:30:22,840
Speaker 4: You know, all the associations that your brain builds up

552
00:30:22,880 --> 00:30:25,200
Speaker 4: over a lifetime. So you hear the voice and you're

553
00:30:25,240 --> 00:30:29,440
Speaker 4: expecting to see that person, and that's exactly what happens. Actually,

554
00:30:29,480 --> 00:30:31,640
Speaker 4: I just want to mention one other thing about the dreams,

555
00:30:32,080 --> 00:30:35,680
Speaker 4: which is people will often ask me, well, what about

556
00:30:35,840 --> 00:30:38,480
Speaker 4: a blind person, how do they dream? And the answer

557
00:30:38,640 --> 00:30:41,760
Speaker 4: is blind people also dream because you have this very

558
00:30:41,840 --> 00:30:44,920
Speaker 4: ancient circuitry in your head that's blasting activity into the

559
00:30:44,960 --> 00:30:47,880
Speaker 4: back of the brain the occipital cortex, which is normally

560
00:30:47,880 --> 00:30:50,240
Speaker 4: the visual cortex. And people but if you're born blind,

561
00:30:50,640 --> 00:30:53,200
Speaker 4: it's you know, long taken over by hearing in touch,

562
00:30:53,520 --> 00:30:56,920
Speaker 4: and so a blind person's dream is all about hearing

563
00:30:56,960 --> 00:31:00,520
Speaker 4: in touch. They don't see anything, but they say, oh,

564
00:31:00,600 --> 00:31:02,480
Speaker 4: I was, you know, moving through the living room and

565
00:31:02,560 --> 00:31:04,960
Speaker 4: I felt the furniture was rearranged, and then there was

566
00:31:05,000 --> 00:31:07,360
Speaker 4: a big dog in the corner and I ran from

567
00:31:07,440 --> 00:31:09,280
Speaker 4: it and I was scared. And so, you know, they've

568
00:31:09,280 --> 00:31:12,680
Speaker 4: got full, rich dream experience. It's just that it is

569
00:31:13,360 --> 00:31:15,960
Speaker 4: not visual because that part of their brain is no

570
00:31:16,040 --> 00:31:16,760
Speaker 4: longer visual.

571
00:31:17,320 --> 00:31:20,000
Speaker 2: And would you well, that makes me wonder then if

572
00:31:20,840 --> 00:31:25,120
Speaker 2: if your hypothesis about the defensive activity of dreaming is correct,

573
00:31:25,200 --> 00:31:28,920
Speaker 2: does that mean that that dreaming is now to protect

574
00:31:29,160 --> 00:31:32,880
Speaker 2: still what would normally be used for visual processing that

575
00:31:32,920 --> 00:31:36,200
Speaker 2: part of the brain, but its role in processing auditory

576
00:31:36,240 --> 00:31:37,560
Speaker 2: and other stimuli.

577
00:31:37,840 --> 00:31:42,239
Speaker 4: A great question. No, that it's that these circuits that

578
00:31:42,360 --> 00:31:46,760
Speaker 4: underlie dreaming are extremely ancient, and so they are assuming

579
00:31:47,280 --> 00:31:50,360
Speaker 4: that you've got perfectly fine vision. And if you don't

580
00:31:50,360 --> 00:31:53,640
Speaker 4: have vision for some reason, then the circuits aren't going

581
00:31:53,720 --> 00:31:58,720
Speaker 4: to change. They're just doing a basic architectural job of saying, hey, guys,

582
00:31:58,760 --> 00:32:01,680
Speaker 4: every ninety minutes, just last some activity into the back

583
00:32:01,720 --> 00:32:02,120
Speaker 4: of the brain.

584
00:32:02,200 --> 00:32:02,440
Speaker 1: There.

585
00:32:02,680 --> 00:32:04,320
Speaker 4: That's all they're doing. And they don't know if you're

586
00:32:04,320 --> 00:32:04,880
Speaker 4: blind or not.

587
00:32:05,560 --> 00:32:09,120
Speaker 1: Now, speaking about dreams, I guess it's not too much

588
00:32:09,120 --> 00:32:12,840
Speaker 1: of a leap to start talking about consciousness. I was wondering,

589
00:32:12,960 --> 00:32:16,840
Speaker 1: where do you think we are in terms of coraling, testing,

590
00:32:16,960 --> 00:32:22,240
Speaker 1: and even eliminating various theories concerning the nature of human consciousness. Yeah?

591
00:32:22,280 --> 00:32:26,280
Speaker 4: Boy, this still remains to my mind the central unsolved

592
00:32:26,360 --> 00:32:29,040
Speaker 4: mystery of neuroscience. What's interesting, by the way, I wrote

593
00:32:29,080 --> 00:32:32,920
Speaker 4: an article, the cover article is Discover magazine back in

594
00:32:32,960 --> 00:32:36,480
Speaker 4: something like two thousand and six, called ten Unsolved Questions

595
00:32:36,480 --> 00:32:39,440
Speaker 4: of Neuroscience. And what's fascinating to me is it's now

596
00:32:39,480 --> 00:32:42,840
Speaker 4: twenty twenty three and they are equally as unsolved. I mean,

597
00:32:42,840 --> 00:32:46,640
Speaker 4: it's funny because we're making so much progress in the

598
00:32:46,640 --> 00:32:49,760
Speaker 4: field in some ways, and yet in other ways we're

599
00:32:49,800 --> 00:32:54,400
Speaker 4: just facing some really tough problems. So the consciousness, you know,

600
00:32:54,440 --> 00:32:57,680
Speaker 4: what is consciousness is really I think the central one.

601
00:32:57,960 --> 00:33:01,640
Speaker 4: And you know, for any listeners who are wondering what

602
00:33:01,800 --> 00:33:03,960
Speaker 4: is the question, the question is how do you take

603
00:33:04,000 --> 00:33:07,960
Speaker 4: eighty six billion cells and stick them together and hook

604
00:33:08,000 --> 00:33:11,040
Speaker 4: them up in such a way that you have private,

605
00:33:11,080 --> 00:33:17,479
Speaker 4: subjective internal experience. So you know, the smell of apple

606
00:33:17,560 --> 00:33:20,160
Speaker 4: pie and the taste of feta cheese, and the pain

607
00:33:20,200 --> 00:33:22,400
Speaker 4: of pain, and the redness of red and so on

608
00:33:23,240 --> 00:33:27,280
Speaker 4: how does that happen? Because you know, my laptop computer

609
00:33:28,440 --> 00:33:31,280
Speaker 4: has lots of signals running around, zeros and ones running around,

610
00:33:31,280 --> 00:33:35,160
Speaker 4: and it's transistors, but presumably it's not experiencing anything. It

611
00:33:35,200 --> 00:33:39,400
Speaker 4: can play a YouTube video for me, but presumably it

612
00:33:39,440 --> 00:33:42,120
Speaker 4: doesn't find it funny the way I do. And so

613
00:33:42,360 --> 00:33:45,560
Speaker 4: this is really the question of consciousness. We don't know

614
00:33:45,640 --> 00:33:50,120
Speaker 4: the answer to it. I can just tell you my

615
00:33:51,080 --> 00:33:54,800
Speaker 4: general feeling on this, which is when you look at

616
00:33:54,800 --> 00:33:57,360
Speaker 4: the history of science, what you find is that in

617
00:33:57,440 --> 00:34:02,040
Speaker 4: every era there were big pieces of information missing, and

618
00:34:02,560 --> 00:34:04,600
Speaker 4: yet the scientists were in a position of having to

619
00:34:04,640 --> 00:34:09,680
Speaker 4: try to explain everything not knowing some other thing. Here's

620
00:34:09,680 --> 00:34:13,120
Speaker 4: an example. You know, when the pump was invented, people

621
00:34:13,160 --> 00:34:15,680
Speaker 4: suddenly said, oh, I see the heart is like a pump,

622
00:34:15,960 --> 00:34:18,280
Speaker 4: and then it was obvious, oh, click falls into place.

623
00:34:18,520 --> 00:34:20,279
Speaker 4: But before that, everyone's trying to figure out what the

624
00:34:20,320 --> 00:34:21,680
Speaker 4: heck the heart was doing, but no one had the

625
00:34:21,719 --> 00:34:26,400
Speaker 4: concept of a pump. Or you know, before the magnetosphere

626
00:34:26,440 --> 00:34:28,400
Speaker 4: of the Earth was discovered, you'd have no way to

627
00:34:28,440 --> 00:34:31,920
Speaker 4: explain the northern lights. You'd have to make up some

628
00:34:32,080 --> 00:34:35,080
Speaker 4: crazy story about the northern lights and so on. Anyway,

629
00:34:35,400 --> 00:34:38,040
Speaker 4: I feel like we're in that situation now with consciousness.

630
00:34:38,040 --> 00:34:42,000
Speaker 4: There's something right at the edges. We're all listening for

631
00:34:42,120 --> 00:34:45,279
Speaker 4: its whispers. We can sort of feel that there's something there,

632
00:34:45,280 --> 00:34:47,520
Speaker 4: but we don't know exactly what it is that we're

633
00:34:48,040 --> 00:34:50,600
Speaker 4: missing that will allow us to explain how you take

634
00:34:50,600 --> 00:34:53,359
Speaker 4: a bunch of physical stuff and have it experience.

635
00:35:03,040 --> 00:35:06,680
Speaker 1: Now, a topic that's being discussed a lot right now is,

636
00:35:06,719 --> 00:35:12,239
Speaker 1: of course, as always artificial intelligence, but specifically generative artificial intelligence,

637
00:35:13,239 --> 00:35:16,239
Speaker 1: especially with so many of these text and image creative

638
00:35:16,280 --> 00:35:18,640
Speaker 1: tools that are available just to the average person to

639
00:35:18,719 --> 00:35:23,200
Speaker 1: experiment with and share the results of. And I was wondering,

640
00:35:23,239 --> 00:35:27,719
Speaker 1: what's your take on generative artificial intelligence and how it

641
00:35:27,800 --> 00:35:30,480
Speaker 1: relates or doesn't relate to human creativity.

642
00:35:30,800 --> 00:35:33,880
Speaker 4: Yeah, so actually this is my next episode because I'm

643
00:35:33,960 --> 00:35:38,160
Speaker 4: fascinated by this. Yeah, I'm just so Okay. So, you

644
00:35:38,200 --> 00:35:41,080
Speaker 4: guys may know I'm a neuroscientist, but I'm also a writer,

645
00:35:41,280 --> 00:35:45,600
Speaker 4: including of fiction. And so suddenly, when when generatively I

646
00:35:45,680 --> 00:35:48,799
Speaker 4: started blowing up really at the end of last year,

647
00:35:49,360 --> 00:35:51,880
Speaker 4: I of course, like many artists, thought, oh my gosh,

648
00:35:51,920 --> 00:35:54,560
Speaker 4: what does this mean for me? What's the what's the

649
00:35:54,600 --> 00:36:00,000
Speaker 4: future for writers? But actually, in my next episode, I

650
00:36:00,160 --> 00:36:03,480
Speaker 4: make a four part argument why I think it'll be

651
00:36:03,560 --> 00:36:07,080
Speaker 4: an important part of the symbiosis between humans and machines

652
00:36:07,120 --> 00:36:08,080
Speaker 4: that eventually comes about.

653
00:36:08,120 --> 00:36:09,120
Speaker 1: But it's not going to.

654
00:36:09,080 --> 00:36:12,759
Speaker 4: Replace writers and artists. There are many reasons. You know,

655
00:36:12,840 --> 00:36:14,360
Speaker 4: One thing is it can it can only do short

656
00:36:14,400 --> 00:36:16,960
Speaker 4: form stuff, and it does it very nicely. But you know,

657
00:36:16,960 --> 00:36:19,440
Speaker 4: if you want to write a little blog post or

658
00:36:19,440 --> 00:36:22,040
Speaker 4: a little jingle or poem or whatever, like, it's great

659
00:36:22,040 --> 00:36:24,840
Speaker 4: for that, but to actually write a novel is a

660
00:36:24,880 --> 00:36:27,600
Speaker 4: completely different sort of thing because what the author is

661
00:36:27,640 --> 00:36:31,320
Speaker 4: doing there is planting clues and having let's say, a

662
00:36:31,320 --> 00:36:34,600
Speaker 4: cliffhanger that doesn't come back for two or three chapters,

663
00:36:34,640 --> 00:36:38,400
Speaker 4: and you know, there's a continuity through time where what

664
00:36:38,480 --> 00:36:40,920
Speaker 4: the author knows is what the end of the story

665
00:36:41,080 --> 00:36:45,120
Speaker 4: is and then writes towards that. But AI can't even

666
00:36:45,160 --> 00:36:46,879
Speaker 4: do things like make up a joke, because to make

667
00:36:46,920 --> 00:36:48,839
Speaker 4: up a joke you have to know the punchline first

668
00:36:48,840 --> 00:36:51,439
Speaker 4: and then construct the joke to meet it. But it's

669
00:36:51,480 --> 00:36:55,440
Speaker 4: doing everything in the forward direction, so there are there

670
00:36:55,480 --> 00:36:58,680
Speaker 4: are reasons like that. There's also make the argument that

671
00:36:59,400 --> 00:37:03,000
Speaker 4: we as readers, I think, actually really care about the

672
00:37:03,040 --> 00:37:06,160
Speaker 4: heartbeat behind the page, which is to say, if you

673
00:37:06,239 --> 00:37:09,279
Speaker 4: offered me two books, and one was written by AI

674
00:37:09,440 --> 00:37:13,319
Speaker 4: and one was written by you, Rob, and you know,

675
00:37:13,400 --> 00:37:16,000
Speaker 4: I would absolutely want the one that's written by a

676
00:37:16,040 --> 00:37:20,120
Speaker 4: real human, because I know that you're a human with

677
00:37:20,160 --> 00:37:25,759
Speaker 4: all the you know, limitations and anxieties and joys and

678
00:37:25,800 --> 00:37:28,880
Speaker 4: ecstasies of a real human. And and that's what I

679
00:37:28,920 --> 00:37:33,160
Speaker 4: care about as a fellow human. And you know, part

680
00:37:33,200 --> 00:37:35,319
Speaker 4: of my evidence for this is a colleague of mine

681
00:37:35,360 --> 00:37:38,799
Speaker 4: here in Silicon Valley announced recently that he'd written a

682
00:37:38,800 --> 00:37:41,440
Speaker 4: book that was half by him and half by chat

683
00:37:41,520 --> 00:37:46,439
Speaker 4: gpt And and I actually read most of the book

684
00:37:46,440 --> 00:37:49,680
Speaker 4: and it's it's actually a good book, but I was

685
00:37:49,719 --> 00:37:52,080
Speaker 4: not inspired when I heard that I read it for

686
00:37:52,160 --> 00:37:55,799
Speaker 4: other reasons. I thought that sounds terrible, and I was

687
00:37:55,800 --> 00:37:58,000
Speaker 4: trying to figure out why why did I feel that way?

688
00:37:58,040 --> 00:38:00,840
Speaker 4: Why did I feel that it was interesting to me?

689
00:38:01,000 --> 00:38:04,640
Speaker 4: And it has to do with this heartbeat behind behind

690
00:38:04,760 --> 00:38:08,200
Speaker 4: the page that that matters. Here's the analogy that I'm

691
00:38:08,520 --> 00:38:13,359
Speaker 4: thinking about nowadays, is it was when cameras first came

692
00:38:13,400 --> 00:38:19,919
Speaker 4: on this scene, visual painters all panicked and thought we're

693
00:38:19,920 --> 00:38:22,439
Speaker 4: done for because why would anyone want me to sit

694
00:38:22,480 --> 00:38:25,560
Speaker 4: here and paint something for weeks and weeks when you

695
00:38:25,560 --> 00:38:28,360
Speaker 4: can just get a perfect representation of it in a

696
00:38:28,440 --> 00:38:31,279
Speaker 4: fraction of a second with a camera. And the answer is,

697
00:38:31,360 --> 00:38:34,040
Speaker 4: cameras did not kill visual painting. They just ended up

698
00:38:34,080 --> 00:38:38,160
Speaker 4: filling a different neighboring niche and became their own art form.

699
00:38:38,200 --> 00:38:40,680
Speaker 4: But visual painting still exists because you could do other

700
00:38:40,760 --> 00:38:44,000
Speaker 4: things with it, and I can you know, at least

701
00:38:44,160 --> 00:38:49,600
Speaker 4: right the moment, all these text generation programs are extraordinarily

702
00:38:49,880 --> 00:38:53,000
Speaker 4: boring in what they come up with, because they get

703
00:38:53,040 --> 00:38:56,719
Speaker 4: pushed through reinforcement learning with humans so that humans say, oh,

704
00:38:56,920 --> 00:38:59,040
Speaker 4: don't say that, don't say that, that might defend someone,

705
00:38:59,080 --> 00:39:00,880
Speaker 4: and so on, which is fine. I mean, I'm not

706
00:39:00,920 --> 00:39:03,480
Speaker 4: opposed to that. But the thing is that good literature

707
00:39:04,000 --> 00:39:06,759
Speaker 4: is stuff that really challenges us. Any good piece of

708
00:39:06,760 --> 00:39:09,200
Speaker 4: literature that you find is something that's full of stuff wethink.

709
00:39:09,280 --> 00:39:13,440
Speaker 4: Oh yikes, that sounds like a terrible thing that just happened.

710
00:39:13,840 --> 00:39:17,200
Speaker 4: And none of these large language models are even willing

711
00:39:17,239 --> 00:39:19,239
Speaker 4: to go near that or touch that. So I think

712
00:39:19,280 --> 00:39:21,840
Speaker 4: they're going to be quite a distance from real literature

713
00:39:21,920 --> 00:39:23,360
Speaker 4: for the foreseeable future.

714
00:39:23,719 --> 00:39:26,520
Speaker 2: I would tend to think also with literary craft. A

715
00:39:26,560 --> 00:39:30,359
Speaker 2: lot of what we really like about literary style is

716
00:39:30,760 --> 00:39:35,719
Speaker 2: being surprised. But I wonder if a you know, surprised

717
00:39:35,719 --> 00:39:39,240
Speaker 2: by like a strange word choice or a strange metaphor

718
00:39:39,360 --> 00:39:42,280
Speaker 2: or something. Those are the things that feel really good.

719
00:39:42,400 --> 00:39:46,719
Speaker 2: But can can a generative AI tell the difference between

720
00:39:46,960 --> 00:39:50,920
Speaker 2: a comparison or a word choice that is strange and

721
00:39:51,000 --> 00:39:54,239
Speaker 2: a pleasing and exciting way versus one that will be

722
00:39:54,400 --> 00:39:58,040
Speaker 2: essentially interpreted as a hallucination or an error by the AI.

723
00:39:58,760 --> 00:40:03,400
Speaker 4: That's interesting, I would say, I mean, say something positive

724
00:40:03,440 --> 00:40:06,279
Speaker 4: about these ais. I think probably it would be able

725
00:40:06,320 --> 00:40:07,920
Speaker 4: to do that, because remember, all us doing is a

726
00:40:07,960 --> 00:40:11,439
Speaker 4: statistical game of saying, Okay, what's the most probable thing

727
00:40:11,520 --> 00:40:14,920
Speaker 4: to come next, and you can turn up the temperature

728
00:40:14,960 --> 00:40:17,680
Speaker 4: on it so that it does things that are increasingly

729
00:40:17,800 --> 00:40:23,279
Speaker 4: less probable but somehow makes sense. I had not thought

730
00:40:23,280 --> 00:40:26,320
Speaker 4: about that, But I think these things might be great

731
00:40:26,600 --> 00:40:30,880
Speaker 4: at making really good metaphors that are surprising, because one

732
00:40:30,920 --> 00:40:32,400
Speaker 4: of the things that authors have to deal with all

733
00:40:32,440 --> 00:40:36,760
Speaker 4: the time is that they recycle metaphors and it's totally

734
00:40:36,960 --> 00:40:39,560
Speaker 4: you know, a soporific to the reader. It puts them

735
00:40:39,560 --> 00:40:43,560
Speaker 4: to sleep. But a good author I was just reading

736
00:40:44,160 --> 00:40:47,560
Speaker 4: the other day. It was name Frank Herbert who in

737
00:40:47,640 --> 00:40:52,920
Speaker 4: Dune he said something about the waves throwing white robes

738
00:40:53,040 --> 00:40:55,880
Speaker 4: over the rocks. That's how he was describing the foam

739
00:40:55,960 --> 00:40:58,520
Speaker 4: hitting the rocks, which is beautiful because it wakes you

740
00:40:58,600 --> 00:41:00,279
Speaker 4: up in that moment you think, oh, what a nice

741
00:41:00,280 --> 00:41:03,439
Speaker 4: way of describing that. But if one of these large

742
00:41:03,520 --> 00:41:06,480
Speaker 4: language models simply says, hey, I want to make something

743
00:41:06,520 --> 00:41:10,600
Speaker 4: not the most probable thing, but less probable, less probable,

744
00:41:10,760 --> 00:41:12,680
Speaker 4: I'll bet it could come up with really good stuff

745
00:41:12,719 --> 00:41:15,400
Speaker 4: like that that no human author has yet tried. Let

746
00:41:15,480 --> 00:41:19,120
Speaker 4: me just give it one example, which is when Alpha

747
00:41:19,200 --> 00:41:24,320
Speaker 4: Go beat le so Dole, the Go champion back and

748
00:41:24,360 --> 00:41:27,800
Speaker 4: so I think twenty seventeen. You know, here's the best

749
00:41:27,880 --> 00:41:29,560
Speaker 4: human in the world of playing the game of Go,

750
00:41:30,680 --> 00:41:34,840
Speaker 4: and the AI program beats him, and everybody sort of

751
00:41:34,880 --> 00:41:36,839
Speaker 4: watched that and thought, wow, wow, that's the end of that.

752
00:41:37,440 --> 00:41:39,680
Speaker 4: But the most interesting part of the story was what

753
00:41:39,719 --> 00:41:44,600
Speaker 4: happened next, which is le Sodole ended up then playing

754
00:41:45,239 --> 00:41:53,080
Speaker 4: against his his human opponents and took on different sorts

755
00:41:53,080 --> 00:41:55,879
Speaker 4: of moves that he had seen Alpha Go play that

756
00:41:55,960 --> 00:41:59,120
Speaker 4: no human had played before, like it was just doing

757
00:41:59,160 --> 00:42:01,680
Speaker 4: these weird things that were totally in the rules. They

758
00:42:01,680 --> 00:42:04,320
Speaker 4: were legal, but no one had thought of doing it before.

759
00:42:04,360 --> 00:42:08,560
Speaker 4: So now he started doing this and started beating his

760
00:42:08,719 --> 00:42:12,120
Speaker 4: human opponents at a much higher rate. So the point

761
00:42:12,239 --> 00:42:14,600
Speaker 4: is we can learn from AI, and I think there's

762
00:42:14,640 --> 00:42:18,000
Speaker 4: going to be this really interesting collaboration that happens into

763
00:42:18,040 --> 00:42:21,319
Speaker 4: the future where we see new things happening and in

764
00:42:21,360 --> 00:42:24,080
Speaker 4: this case, new metaphors that come out in literature and

765
00:42:24,160 --> 00:42:26,000
Speaker 4: we think, wow, I would have never thought of that one,

766
00:42:26,080 --> 00:42:29,320
Speaker 4: and then we can use them.

767
00:42:29,480 --> 00:42:32,759
Speaker 2: Another element of literary style, though, I think about with

768
00:42:33,480 --> 00:42:38,839
Speaker 2: Generative AI is the role of insight in writing, and

769
00:42:39,040 --> 00:42:42,480
Speaker 2: it makes me wonder what insight actually is. This is

770
00:42:42,520 --> 00:42:44,880
Speaker 2: obviously something we prize, you know, when we read a

771
00:42:44,920 --> 00:42:47,080
Speaker 2: novel that we really like and we say that it

772
00:42:47,239 --> 00:42:50,320
Speaker 2: is true, you know there's something true in it. Obviously

773
00:42:50,360 --> 00:42:53,279
Speaker 2: the story is literally fictional, it didn't happen, but it

774
00:42:53,680 --> 00:42:57,200
Speaker 2: observes something about life that we perceive as like deeply

775
00:42:57,280 --> 00:43:01,239
Speaker 2: correct and do I don't know, I would have an

776
00:43:01,239 --> 00:43:04,680
Speaker 2: intuition that says I would come across insights like that,

777
00:43:04,840 --> 00:43:08,000
Speaker 2: or things that feel like insights like that. Less in

778
00:43:08,160 --> 00:43:11,040
Speaker 2: generat in something generated by AI. I can't prove that,

779
00:43:11,840 --> 00:43:14,880
Speaker 2: but it does raise this question of what insight is.

780
00:43:15,560 --> 00:43:19,000
Speaker 4: Yeah, you know, I tell you, I think I'm signing

781
00:43:19,000 --> 00:43:22,640
Speaker 4: with the A on this one. Because what these large

782
00:43:22,680 --> 00:43:26,200
Speaker 4: language models are essentially is every human all put together.

783
00:43:26,560 --> 00:43:30,000
Speaker 4: So whatever insights people have had previously, this is all

784
00:43:30,040 --> 00:43:33,080
Speaker 4: available to the language model, and so there's no reason

785
00:43:33,080 --> 00:43:36,879
Speaker 4: that it can't put something together that's very insightful. And

786
00:43:36,920 --> 00:43:39,680
Speaker 4: it's not that it's having the insight, it's that it

787
00:43:39,719 --> 00:43:42,520
Speaker 4: gets to say, Okay, well, here's a billion people who

788
00:43:42,520 --> 00:43:45,960
Speaker 4: have written stuff down, and I've noticed that, you know

789
00:43:46,239 --> 00:43:48,279
Speaker 4: a number of these maybe two hundred of these people

790
00:43:48,320 --> 00:43:50,520
Speaker 4: have all said the same thing over here. And maybe

791
00:43:50,600 --> 00:43:54,520
Speaker 4: Joe's never read that sentence, you know, that paragraph, but

792
00:43:54,520 --> 00:43:57,000
Speaker 4: but I there's something going on over here, and it

793
00:43:57,040 --> 00:43:59,040
Speaker 4: puts it together and then you say, oh my gosh,

794
00:43:59,080 --> 00:44:01,839
Speaker 4: that was really insight because it's not a machine telling

795
00:44:01,840 --> 00:44:04,640
Speaker 4: you the story, it's a billion people telling you the story.

796
00:44:05,320 --> 00:44:09,200
Speaker 1: Now, Joe and I are actually currently doing some episodes

797
00:44:09,280 --> 00:44:13,000
Speaker 1: of our own podcast on the subject of infantile amnesia.

798
00:44:13,520 --> 00:44:17,200
Speaker 1: You know, why we don't remember our earliest childhood or

799
00:44:17,239 --> 00:44:21,160
Speaker 1: you know, infancy and birth and so forth. And and

800
00:44:21,560 --> 00:44:24,800
Speaker 1: we've heard from some listeners, as we inevitably knew we would,

801
00:44:25,120 --> 00:44:27,560
Speaker 1: who say that they do remember their birth, so they

802
00:44:27,600 --> 00:44:31,560
Speaker 1: do remember very early childhood. And we were just wondering

803
00:44:31,600 --> 00:44:35,440
Speaker 1: what your take is on people who who have that

804
00:44:35,520 --> 00:44:38,560
Speaker 1: experience or seem to have that memory. What may be

805
00:44:38,680 --> 00:44:39,319
Speaker 1: going on there?

806
00:44:40,040 --> 00:44:43,600
Speaker 4: Yeah, I mean, here's here's what we think in there.

807
00:44:43,760 --> 00:44:46,239
Speaker 4: Science generally is that, you know, memory is a is

808
00:44:46,280 --> 00:44:50,200
Speaker 4: something that unpacks slowly with time. It's a cognitive development

809
00:44:50,280 --> 00:44:53,399
Speaker 4: in some sense. And you know, as you guys know,

810
00:44:53,520 --> 00:44:56,200
Speaker 4: it's about three years old for girls and three and

811
00:44:56,200 --> 00:44:58,239
Speaker 4: a half years old for boys that they start laying

812
00:44:58,239 --> 00:45:01,239
Speaker 4: down their first memories. Here's the interesting thing. Memory is

813
00:45:01,320 --> 00:45:05,600
Speaker 4: a myth making machine, and we're constantly reinventing our past.

814
00:45:05,920 --> 00:45:10,719
Speaker 4: And so one of the difficult things to assess when

815
00:45:10,719 --> 00:45:14,319
Speaker 4: someone says, hey, I remember whatever being born or being

816
00:45:14,320 --> 00:45:17,319
Speaker 4: one years old, is it's really difficult to know the

817
00:45:17,400 --> 00:45:21,040
Speaker 4: degree to which they think that's true. But it's not

818
00:45:21,080 --> 00:45:23,879
Speaker 4: true because we're all told stories by our parents of oh,

819
00:45:23,960 --> 00:45:25,880
Speaker 4: and you were an infant, you did this hilarious thing

820
00:45:25,920 --> 00:45:27,759
Speaker 4: and blah blah blah, and you hear the story once

821
00:45:27,840 --> 00:45:31,319
Speaker 4: or twice, and eventually it becomes a false memory. So

822
00:45:32,680 --> 00:45:35,640
Speaker 4: I think it's very difficult to know to be able

823
00:45:35,719 --> 00:45:38,680
Speaker 4: to tell this sort of thing. And of course for

824
00:45:38,800 --> 00:45:43,800
Speaker 4: someone who has a memory, it's very difficult to tell them, Hey,

825
00:45:43,960 --> 00:45:47,400
Speaker 4: that might be false and you just think you remember that.

826
00:45:47,400 --> 00:45:51,120
Speaker 4: That makes people angry. But you know, the truth is,

827
00:45:51,160 --> 00:45:54,000
Speaker 4: this kind of stuff comes up all the time in

828
00:45:54,080 --> 00:45:57,680
Speaker 4: courts of law, in the realm of eyewitness testimony, because

829
00:45:58,840 --> 00:46:01,920
Speaker 4: people think that they're memories are like a video recorder,

830
00:46:01,960 --> 00:46:07,799
Speaker 4: and they're simply not. There's a giant psychology literature on

831
00:46:07,880 --> 00:46:12,080
Speaker 4: this showing all kinds of ways that things get false,

832
00:46:12,160 --> 00:46:15,000
Speaker 4: memories get introduced, and so on. You know, a colleague

833
00:46:15,000 --> 00:46:19,240
Speaker 4: of mine did a really great study right after September eleventh,

834
00:46:19,239 --> 00:46:22,040
Speaker 4: two thousand and one. She was in New York, and

835
00:46:22,200 --> 00:46:26,760
Speaker 4: she went and interviewed a bunch of people in downtown

836
00:46:26,800 --> 00:46:29,480
Speaker 4: in Midtown, New York about what they had just seen

837
00:46:30,200 --> 00:46:32,880
Speaker 4: on September eleventh, and then she was clever enough to

838
00:46:33,080 --> 00:46:36,400
Speaker 4: also ask them to describe a memory from September tenth,

839
00:46:36,920 --> 00:46:39,160
Speaker 4: the day before, like lunch here, and I did this,

840
00:46:39,239 --> 00:46:41,120
Speaker 4: and I did that, And then she went and tracked

841
00:46:41,120 --> 00:46:44,919
Speaker 4: all these people down a year later and asked them

842
00:46:44,920 --> 00:46:47,960
Speaker 4: to tell their memories again about September eleventh, September tenth,

843
00:46:48,160 --> 00:46:50,480
Speaker 4: of the year before, and it turns out that in

844
00:46:50,520 --> 00:46:53,719
Speaker 4: both cases the memories drifted. So this comes back to

845
00:46:53,760 --> 00:46:56,680
Speaker 4: the beginning of our conversation. Even Amigdala memories, even the

846
00:46:56,680 --> 00:46:59,360
Speaker 4: scariest memories that you have, it doesn't mean they're accurate.

847
00:47:00,120 --> 00:47:03,680
Speaker 4: And so I mean, especially it doesn't surprise me about

848
00:47:03,680 --> 00:47:06,480
Speaker 4: September eleventh, because especially the more you tell a story,

849
00:47:06,800 --> 00:47:09,520
Speaker 4: the more you start laying down these ruts in the road,

850
00:47:10,040 --> 00:47:13,359
Speaker 4: and that becomes the story that becomes the truth. And

851
00:47:13,800 --> 00:47:15,680
Speaker 4: you know, we've all run into these things in our

852
00:47:15,719 --> 00:47:18,520
Speaker 4: life where someone suddenly shows us a photograph or something

853
00:47:18,560 --> 00:47:20,239
Speaker 4: that says, wait, that's not my memory. Look here's the

854
00:47:20,280 --> 00:47:22,680
Speaker 4: thing here, and you go, oh, gosh, I had actually

855
00:47:22,719 --> 00:47:25,520
Speaker 4: misremembered that that thing that happened, or where I was

856
00:47:25,560 --> 00:47:28,520
Speaker 4: standing or what I was doing. Anyway, So this is

857
00:47:28,560 --> 00:47:32,960
Speaker 4: the concern when people say, oh, I remember whatever being

858
00:47:33,000 --> 00:47:34,920
Speaker 4: born or this event when I was really young, is

859
00:47:34,920 --> 00:47:38,760
Speaker 4: that we know how easy it is to believe memories

860
00:47:38,800 --> 00:47:39,399
Speaker 4: that are not true.

861
00:47:40,400 --> 00:47:42,560
Speaker 2: Now correct me if I'm wrong, But I think I

862
00:47:42,600 --> 00:47:45,680
Speaker 2: recall reading that. In some of these cases with the

863
00:47:45,920 --> 00:47:50,200
Speaker 2: like where there's a big public event and people remember you,

864
00:47:50,320 --> 00:47:52,920
Speaker 2: people are like asked to write down their experiences that day,

865
00:47:52,960 --> 00:47:56,319
Speaker 2: and then the researchers contact them again later and have

866
00:47:56,440 --> 00:47:58,280
Speaker 2: them try it again. You say, what do you remember

867
00:47:58,320 --> 00:48:00,759
Speaker 2: about that day? Not only do they often get details wrong,

868
00:48:00,840 --> 00:48:03,480
Speaker 2: but don't they often insist that the way they remember

869
00:48:03,520 --> 00:48:06,080
Speaker 2: it now is correct and what they wrote at the

870
00:48:06,080 --> 00:48:06,880
Speaker 2: time was wrong.

871
00:48:07,840 --> 00:48:11,839
Speaker 4: Exactly. That's exactly right, Yeah, because it's so hard to

872
00:48:11,880 --> 00:48:14,719
Speaker 4: disbelieve our own memories about things. You know, this is

873
00:48:14,760 --> 00:48:17,680
Speaker 4: obviously at the heart of lots of spousal arguments too.

874
00:48:17,840 --> 00:48:20,360
Speaker 4: You know, you have two brains, you have two different

875
00:48:20,360 --> 00:48:25,719
Speaker 4: ways of remembering what precisely happened. Yes, that's exactly right.

876
00:48:26,600 --> 00:48:28,640
Speaker 1: All right, Well, you already mentioned that you have the

877
00:48:28,680 --> 00:48:32,880
Speaker 1: episode coming up about AI creativity. I'm definitely excited to

878
00:48:32,960 --> 00:48:35,080
Speaker 1: check that one out. Is there anything else you want

879
00:48:35,120 --> 00:48:38,360
Speaker 1: to tease out for listeners what else they can expect

880
00:48:38,360 --> 00:48:41,280
Speaker 1: from future episodes of Inner Cosmos? Yeah?

881
00:48:41,320 --> 00:48:43,560
Speaker 4: Well, okay, so my next one after that is going

882
00:48:43,640 --> 00:48:47,040
Speaker 4: to be is a I sentient Because you know, this

883
00:48:47,120 --> 00:48:49,840
Speaker 4: is a big question now as these models get larger

884
00:48:49,840 --> 00:48:52,720
Speaker 4: and larger, and things are moving at an extraordinary pace. Now,

885
00:48:53,040 --> 00:48:55,160
Speaker 4: what does sentients mean? And this is related to the

886
00:48:55,239 --> 00:48:58,000
Speaker 4: question you asked me Rob about consciousness and so on.

887
00:48:58,239 --> 00:49:01,800
Speaker 4: So I think this actually gives an interesting tool into

888
00:49:02,080 --> 00:49:05,080
Speaker 4: studying consciousness that we haven't had before. But I have

889
00:49:05,160 --> 00:49:10,520
Speaker 4: other episodes about my One after that is about counterfeiting

890
00:49:10,719 --> 00:49:13,839
Speaker 4: money and what it is that we notice about counterfeits

891
00:49:14,360 --> 00:49:19,120
Speaker 4: or we do not. I have an episode on will

892
00:49:19,200 --> 00:49:23,160
Speaker 4: you perceive the event that kills you? And I find

893
00:49:23,440 --> 00:49:25,319
Speaker 4: this is just a topic I've been thinking about for

894
00:49:25,360 --> 00:49:27,120
Speaker 4: a long time and have put together a lot of

895
00:49:27,120 --> 00:49:31,839
Speaker 4: work on this about you know, if suddenly something, let's

896
00:49:31,880 --> 00:49:35,120
Speaker 4: say that the brick from the pedestrian bridge over the

897
00:49:35,160 --> 00:49:38,040
Speaker 4: highway fell on your head when you were in a convertible,

898
00:49:38,239 --> 00:49:42,000
Speaker 4: The question is, would you perceive dying or would you

899
00:49:42,080 --> 00:49:44,799
Speaker 4: be dead before you knew anything happen? And what does

900
00:49:44,880 --> 00:49:46,520
Speaker 4: that look like? Does it look like you know, suddenly

901
00:49:46,520 --> 00:49:50,239
Speaker 4: the footage just ends but there's no pain, stuff like that.

902
00:49:51,320 --> 00:49:54,399
Speaker 4: So I have lots and lots of episodes. Can we

903
00:49:54,440 --> 00:49:57,680
Speaker 4: create new senses for humans? Which is a big part

904
00:49:57,680 --> 00:49:59,320
Speaker 4: of what I've been doing over the last eight years

905
00:49:59,320 --> 00:50:04,880
Speaker 4: with company that I run called Neosensory. Yeah, and I

906
00:50:04,960 --> 00:50:08,480
Speaker 4: have forty six episodes this year, all of which I've outlined,

907
00:50:09,000 --> 00:50:12,520
Speaker 4: and then it's just a matter of spending the twelve

908
00:50:12,520 --> 00:50:15,319
Speaker 4: hours per week of writing the hour long monologue.

909
00:50:15,800 --> 00:50:19,920
Speaker 1: Awesome, it sounds exciting. I'm excited to check out more episodes.

910
00:50:20,560 --> 00:50:24,160
Speaker 4: Great. Thank you guys so much for having me. It's

911
00:50:24,200 --> 00:50:25,319
Speaker 4: been a pleasure to see all.

912
00:50:25,520 --> 00:50:28,520
Speaker 1: Yeah, thanks for coming on the show.

913
00:50:29,280 --> 00:50:31,640
Speaker 2: All right, well that was our conversation with David Eagleman.

914
00:50:32,000 --> 00:50:35,040
Speaker 2: Once again, much appreciation to David for taking the time

915
00:50:35,080 --> 00:50:37,600
Speaker 2: to chat with us today. If you want to check

916
00:50:37,600 --> 00:50:40,000
Speaker 2: out his new show, and we do recommend it once again,

917
00:50:40,080 --> 00:50:43,279
Speaker 2: it is called Inner Cosmos with David Eagleman. You can

918
00:50:43,320 --> 00:50:45,919
Speaker 2: find it on the iHeart app or wherever you get

919
00:50:45,920 --> 00:50:47,200
Speaker 2: your podcasts.

920
00:50:47,280 --> 00:50:49,759
Speaker 1: Just a reminder that's Stuff to Blow Your Mind is

921
00:50:49,880 --> 00:50:53,719
Speaker 1: a science podcast with core episodes on Tuesdays and Thursdays

922
00:50:53,719 --> 00:50:56,640
Speaker 1: in the Stuff to Blow your Mind podcast feed. On

923
00:50:56,680 --> 00:50:59,360
Speaker 1: Mondays we do listener mail episodes. On Wednesdays we do

924
00:50:59,360 --> 00:51:01,640
Speaker 1: a short form artifact or monster fack episode, and on

925
00:51:01,680 --> 00:51:03,719
Speaker 1: Fridays we set aside most serious concerns to just talk

926
00:51:03,719 --> 00:51:06,120
Speaker 1: about a weird film on Weird House Cinema.

927
00:51:06,360 --> 00:51:09,480
Speaker 2: Huge thanks to our audio producer JJ Posway. If you

928
00:51:09,480 --> 00:51:11,440
Speaker 2: would like to get in touch with us with feedback

929
00:51:11,480 --> 00:51:13,760
Speaker 2: on this episode or any other, to suggest a topic

930
00:51:13,800 --> 00:51:16,000
Speaker 2: for the future, or just to say hello, you can

931
00:51:16,040 --> 00:51:18,840
Speaker 2: email us at contact at stuff to Blow your Mind

932
00:51:18,960 --> 00:51:26,839
Speaker 2: dot com.

933
00:51:26,880 --> 00:51:29,840
Speaker 3: Stuff to Blow Your Mind is production of iHeartRadio. For

934
00:51:29,920 --> 00:51:32,720
Speaker 3: more podcasts from my Heart Radio, visit the iHeartRadio app,

935
00:51:32,840 --> 00:51:48,680
Speaker 3: Apple Podcasts, or wherever you're listening to your favorite shows.