Speaker 1: Hey, welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind. My name
Speaker 1: is Robert Lamb.
Speaker 2: And I am Joe McCormick. And today we are bringing
Speaker 2: you an episode from the Vault. This one originally published
Speaker 2: April thirteenth, twenty twenty three, and this was our conversation
Speaker 2: with David Eagleman, neuroscientist and host of the Inner Cosmos podcast.
Speaker 2: I remember this was a very interesting chat. We hope
Speaker 2: you enjoy it.
Speaker 3: Welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind, a production of iHeartRadio.
Speaker 1: Hey, welcome to Stuff to Blow your Mind. My name is.
Speaker 2: Robert Lamb and I'm Joe McCormick, and hey, welcome back, Rob.
Speaker 2: You were out sick earlier this week. It's good to
Speaker 2: have you back.
Speaker 4: It's good to be back now.
Speaker 2: Because you were outsick, we ended up putting a pause
Speaker 2: on an ongoing series we were doing on childhood amnesia.
Speaker 2: We ended up running a Vault episode on Tuesday, and
Speaker 2: I just wanted to assure people that we will be
Speaker 2: coming back to that subject. We will be resuming the series,
Speaker 2: probably for next week's core episodes, but because we already
Speaker 2: had it scheduled out this way, today's episode is going
Speaker 2: to be an interview. So in fact, we are talking
Speaker 2: to a return guest, the neuroscientist and author David Eagleman.
Speaker 2: This is actually the second time David has been a
Speaker 2: guest on the show. In September twenty twenty, Rob, you
Speaker 2: spoke to him about his book Live Wired, which is
Speaker 2: a popular science book on the subject of brain plasticity.
Speaker 1: Yeah. Absolutely. That was a fun episode. You can find
Speaker 1: it in the archives, and the book Live Wired is
Speaker 1: an absolute delight. If you're at all interested in anything
Speaker 1: you hear us discussing in this episode, pick up a
Speaker 1: copy of it.
Speaker 4: It's great.
Speaker 2: So this week we invited David back on the show
Speaker 2: because he now has a fantastic, brand new podcast on
Speaker 2: our very own network on the iHeart Network, and it
Speaker 2: is called Inner Cosmos with David Eagleman. So before we
Speaker 2: get started with our interview, I thought we should just
Speaker 2: share a bit of background about David. This is from
Speaker 2: his website.
Speaker 1: That's right. David Eagleman is a neuroscientist at Stanford University
Speaker 1: and an internationally best selling author. He's the co founder
Speaker 1: of two venture backed companies, Neosensory and brain Check, and
Speaker 1: he also directs the Center for Science and Law, a
Speaker 1: national nonprofit Institute. He's best known for his work on
Speaker 1: sensory substitution, time, perception, brain plasticity, synesthesia, and neurolaw. He
Speaker 1: is the writer and presenter of the international PBS series
Speaker 1: The Brain with David Eagleman and the author of the
Speaker 1: companion book, The Brain The Story of You. He's also
Speaker 1: the writer and presenter of The Creative Brain on Netflix.
Speaker 2: David Eagleman is the author of over one hundred and
Speaker 2: twenty academic publications and many many books of popular science.
Speaker 2: Eagleman is a TED speaker, a Guggenheim Fellow, and serves
Speaker 2: on several boards, including the America Brain Foundation and the
Speaker 2: long Now Foundation. He's the Chief Scientific Advisor of the
Speaker 2: Mind Science Foundation and the winner of the Claude Shannon
Speaker 2: Luminary Award from Bell Labs and the McGovern Award for
Speaker 2: Excellence in Biomedical Communication. He serves as the academic editor
Speaker 2: for the Journal of Science and Law. Was named Science
Speaker 2: Educator of the Year by this Society for Neuroscience and
Speaker 2: was featured as one of the quote Brightest Idea Guys
Speaker 2: by Italy's Style magazine. He served as the scientific advisor
Speaker 2: on several TV shows, including Westworld and Perception and has
Speaker 2: been profiled on The Colbert Report, Nova Science Now, The
Speaker 2: New Yorker, CNN's Next List, and many other venues. He
Speaker 2: appears regularly on radio and television to discuss literature and science,
Speaker 2: and I guess now he is going to start having
Speaker 2: to add podcasts to the end of his bio here, So, Robin,
Speaker 2: unless you have anything else, I think we should jump
Speaker 2: right into our conversation with David Eagleman.
Speaker 1: Hi, David, welcome back to the show.
Speaker 4: Great, Thanks Rob for having me again. It's a pleasure
Speaker 4: to be here. And hello, Joe, it's great to meet you. David.
Speaker 1: Now, you have a great new podcast series out Inner
Speaker 1: Cosmos through iHeart. How did you decide what path to
Speaker 1: take with the podcast format?
Speaker 4: You know, it's a great question. The truth is I
Speaker 4: had not listened to many podcasts at all. Now I have.
Speaker 4: But when I first was putting this together with iHeart,
Speaker 4: I thought, look, I want to do a forty five
Speaker 4: minute to hour long monologue every week. And that seemed
Speaker 4: like a terrific idea at first, and then my wife
Speaker 4: said she was going to kill me because it turns
Speaker 4: out that's a ton of work. It takes me about
Speaker 4: kind of about twelve hours a week to get a
Speaker 4: good monologue that's almost an hour long. So that's how
Speaker 4: I decided on the format because I thought it would
Speaker 4: be something special rather than you know, I've been on
Speaker 4: many different podcasts where we're doing interviews just like this,
Speaker 4: and it's super fun. But I wanted to do something different.
Speaker 4: So that's how I accidentally stumbled into that format.
Speaker 2: So I figure we should give people a taste of
Speaker 2: the kind of things you talk about on your show.
Speaker 2: I got a chance to listen to the episode you
Speaker 2: did about memory and the perception of time, and I
Speaker 2: thought it was great, by the way, a really great
Speaker 2: way to kick off the show. So your starting premise
Speaker 2: in that episode was that many people who have been
Speaker 2: through intense or life threatening events, maybe falling off of
Speaker 2: a building or seeing a car speeding toward them, report
Speaker 2: afterwards that time seemed to have somehow slowed down for
Speaker 2: them during the pivotal few seconds, almost as if they
Speaker 2: were able to inter a state of slow motion or
Speaker 2: bullet time, like from the matrix. Can you talk a
Speaker 2: bit about your research on this subject and what you
Speaker 2: discovered about this perception.
Speaker 4: Yeah, so my research, of course started off very personal
Speaker 4: which is that I fell off of a house and
Speaker 4: it seemed like things took a long time, and that's
Speaker 4: what got me interested in this. Then when I got older,
Speaker 4: it became a neuroscientist. Eventually I realized that I was
Speaker 4: hearing this story not uncommonly from people who had been
Speaker 4: in a you know, gunfight or some scary situation or
Speaker 4: car accident or whatever, and they felt that things took longer.
Speaker 4: And so I looked in the literature and there was
Speaker 4: not anything on this. So that's when I came to
Speaker 4: realize I was going to have to do this myself
Speaker 4: and figure out how to run an experiment on this.
Speaker 4: So you know, briefly, what I did is I built
Speaker 4: a device that I hooked to people's wrists that flashed
Speaker 4: information them at them met a certain way so that
Speaker 4: I could tell how rapidly their brain was perceiving, and
Speaker 4: that way I could test whether they were actually seeing
Speaker 4: in slow motion or The whole thing was a trick
Speaker 4: of memory, meaning when you were in an intense situation,
Speaker 4: you wrote down more memories. So when you said what
Speaker 4: just happened, when just happened, that it seemed like it
Speaker 4: must have taken longer because you have all these memories.
Speaker 4: So what I did then is dropped people from one
Speaker 4: hundred and fifty foot tall tower in free fall backwards
Speaker 4: into a net below, and I measured their perception of
Speaker 4: time on the way down this way. And what I
Speaker 4: found after, you know, I didn't sell myself, but then
Speaker 4: we dropped twenty three participants. What I found is that
Speaker 4: it is in fact a trick of memory, which is
Speaker 4: to say, when everything is hitting the fan, your brain
Speaker 4: writes down much denser memory, and when you read that
Speaker 4: back out, your brain has to make an assumption about
Speaker 4: you know, how much memory, how much footage maps onto
Speaker 4: how much time, and so it says, oh wow, that
Speaker 4: must have been five seconds, even though it was only
Speaker 4: one second worth. But the point is people were not
Speaker 4: able to see in slow motion, which, by the way,
Speaker 4: was disappointing for me because I already had. I was
Speaker 4: already talking with the military about building cockpits in a
Speaker 4: way that flashed information more rapidly at people when they
Speaker 4: be in some intense situation. But it turns out none
Speaker 4: of that makes the difference. You can't actually get information
Speaker 4: there faster, you can only remember it faster, So.
Speaker 2: There's not actually any any increased ability of perception. It's
Speaker 2: just a trick of the memory exactly.
Speaker 4: Now. It is the case that you know a lot.
Speaker 4: You can do a lot of things pre consciously, by
Speaker 4: which I mean your conscious awareness of something is always
Speaker 4: the slowest thing on the ladder to ever get any information.
Speaker 4: So by the time your brain puts together all the
Speaker 4: signals and says, okay, this is what just happened. You know,
Speaker 4: that's at least half a second to a second behind
Speaker 4: real time. But the point is your body can react
Speaker 4: much faster than that. Your body can get signals and say, whoa,
Speaker 4: I got to do something about this right away, And
Speaker 4: so you can react, you know, often much faster than
Speaker 4: you can be consciously aware. So you know, I don't
Speaker 4: know if you've been on a I mean, this is
Speaker 4: what happened to me recently. I was on a hike
Speaker 4: with a friend and a branch snapped back, and I was,
Speaker 4: you know, halfway into the move of ducking out of
Speaker 4: the way of the branch before I consciously realized it,
Speaker 4: or my foot gets halfway to the break of my
Speaker 4: truck before I realized that there's a car pulling out
Speaker 4: of the driveway ahead of me. In other words, consciousness
Speaker 4: is always the last guy on the ladder to get
Speaker 4: any information, and your body can almost always react much faster.
Speaker 4: In fact, wait, let me just say one more example
Speaker 4: of that, which is when I was younger, I used
Speaker 4: to play baseball, and my experience was always that, you know,
Speaker 4: I'd be waiting for the pitch, and then I would
Speaker 4: realize after it had happened that I had already hit
Speaker 4: the ball. And I would consciously realize, oh, I have
Speaker 4: just hit the ball. Now throw the bat and run.
Speaker 4: But you know, the whole thing, the ball moving from
Speaker 4: the mound to the plate, and the swing and the batting,
Speaker 4: that's all really fast process and it often happens pre consciously.
Speaker 2: Somewhat related to that, this raises questions about the different
Speaker 2: kinds of circumstances that would favor the perception of slow
Speaker 2: motion in intense situations or not.
Speaker 3: So.
Speaker 2: My example was there was one night years ago I
Speaker 2: was driving under an overpass and there was a sudden
Speaker 2: deafening sound and a shudder, And what my wife and
Speaker 2: I deduced later was that somehow like a brick had
Speaker 2: fallen from above and hit the roof of our car
Speaker 2: just above the windshield. As we passed under a highway
Speaker 2: speed and I don't know if somebody threw it or
Speaker 2: if it somehow just fell, But I not only don't
Speaker 2: recall a feeling of stretched time or a greater density
Speaker 2: of memories right before and after the impact, I felt
Speaker 2: almost a kind of retrospective amnesia, like a real paucity
Speaker 2: of detail. And it was like we were suddenly a
Speaker 2: good ways down the road and just trying to remember
Speaker 2: or figure out what had happened.
Speaker 4: Yeah, that's exactly right. It's because you didn't write down
Speaker 4: any memory. And this is generally because as you are
Speaker 4: taking a drive down the highway, your brain is writing
Speaker 4: down very little stuff going on. In fact, the interesting
Speaker 4: part is that although we think about memory as being
Speaker 4: like a video recorder or something, in fact it's nothing
Speaker 4: like that. You write down very little of what happens
Speaker 4: in your life, especially when you're driving on a road
Speaker 4: you've been down before. So what happened is there's the
Speaker 4: deafening crash and suddenly you're thinking what just happened? What
Speaker 4: just happened? And you've got nothing to draw on. There's
Speaker 4: just no footage there. And by the way, just as
Speaker 4: a very quick side note, I think this is what
Speaker 4: happens to people when they are high on marijuana, is
Speaker 4: they say, oh, my gosh, how long have I been
Speaker 4: standing here? It feels like I'm standing here forever, And
Speaker 4: it's because they're not writing down memories in the same way.
Speaker 4: So when their brain looks for how long have I
Speaker 4: been standing here, what it's looking for is footage in time,
Speaker 4: as in, Okay, I remember getting here, I remember this happening,
Speaker 4: someone said this. Then someone put the glass down and
Speaker 4: blah blah blah, so that it can estimate how long
Speaker 4: it's been there. But suddenly it can't grab on to
Speaker 4: any memories at all, and so suddenly people are lost
Speaker 4: in time anyway, So this is Joe exactly what happened
Speaker 4: pins when people suddenly are hit by a car that
Speaker 4: they don't see coming, like a car teet bones them
Speaker 4: or something. Or I might have mentioned in the podcast,
Speaker 4: I can't remember that, you know. I was once riding
Speaker 4: my bike and the wheel suddenly dropped in a pothole
Speaker 4: and I went flying over the handlebars. But because I
Speaker 4: didn't see that coming, I just had the sensation of suddenly,
Speaker 4: oh my god, what's is you know?
Speaker 1: Here?
Speaker 4: I'm lying on the asphalt, bloody, and I have no
Speaker 4: idea what just happened. And it's precisely because you're not
Speaker 4: running down any memories. So when your brain says what
Speaker 4: just happened, what just happened, there's nothing to draw on,
Speaker 4: as opposed to the brick sliding on ice towards the
Speaker 4: brick wall phenomenon, which is where you say, oh my gosh,
Speaker 4: I'm predicting what's going to happen and this is really
Speaker 4: gonna hurt, this is gonna be bad, And that's when
Speaker 4: you're writing down lots of stuff.
Speaker 2: So would you say you're more likely to have this
Speaker 2: memory density perception number one if you see the event
Speaker 2: coming ahead of time, there's there's expectation of it. But
Speaker 2: also if you're generally in a novel or unusual situation.
Speaker 4: Yeah, that's exactly right. Actually, So two aspects of that.
Speaker 4: One is that I just mentioned a moment ago that
Speaker 4: you write down very little memory, and that's because as
Speaker 4: an adult now, your brain has sort of figured out
Speaker 4: a pretty good model of the world, meaning you don't
Speaker 4: need to write stuff down because you've seen all the
Speaker 4: personalities before, you've seen different cities before, you've seen roads,
Speaker 4: and people and events and television shows and you sort
Speaker 4: of got it. But if something really novel happens, that's
Speaker 4: when your brain writes something down and says, WHOA, wait
Speaker 4: a minute, I'm surprised, And that's when stuff starts getting
Speaker 4: written down. So when you look back at the end
Speaker 4: of let's say a novel event. Let's say you go
Speaker 4: on some really wild trip on the weekend to Glockos
Speaker 4: Islands and you see new things and so on, then
Speaker 4: it seems like forever since you were at work on Friday.
Speaker 4: But if you just go off for a normal weekend
Speaker 4: and you come back to work, you think, oh, I
Speaker 4: was just here because you didn't lay down any new
Speaker 4: memories over the weekend. So it is true that things
Speaker 4: that are novel generally seem to last longer. However, it
Speaker 4: should be noted that when things are actually life threatening,
Speaker 4: you have essentially an emergency response memory system that kicks
Speaker 4: into gear. That is a secondary track on which you
Speaker 4: write down memory. And this is underpinned by a part
Speaker 4: of the brain called the amigla, and its job is
Speaker 4: to say, WHOA, everything is going really bad and scary here,
Speaker 4: and I got to write this down because that after
Speaker 4: all is the point of memory is to make sure
Speaker 4: that you write down stuff that is important and specifically
Speaker 4: life threateningly important.
Speaker 2: So if the normal memory system, would that be the
Speaker 2: hippocampal memory system exactly? If that's the normal memory system,
Speaker 2: and then the amygdala tends to be recruited in intense situations.
Speaker 2: Do we know generally if there is any if there
Speaker 2: are any characteristic differences between how memories are recorded in
Speaker 2: the hippocampus versus the Amygdalah.
Speaker 4: Yeah, And it turns out it's a tragic one, which
Speaker 4: is that amygdala memories are uneaseable, whereas hippocampbel memories can
Speaker 4: be erased. So let me unpack this because there's two
Speaker 4: surprising parts here. So first of all, the fact that
Speaker 4: hippocampal memories can be erased is terrifying and weird and wild.
Speaker 4: Which is, if I ask you to recall the name
Speaker 4: of your fifth grade teacher and then suddenly that brick
Speaker 4: drops off the highway bridge and hits you in the head.
Speaker 4: God forbid, let's say that happens. You will now have
Speaker 4: amnesia for that one fact, You will not remember anything
Speaker 4: about your fifth grade teacher anymore about the at least
Speaker 4: the fifth grade teacher's name. Why it's because the name
Speaker 4: of your fifth grade teacher is stored deep in the
Speaker 4: structure of your brain, and when I ask you to
Speaker 4: recall it, you're actually transferring it from that structural form
Speaker 4: into activity, you know, spikes in the brain. And that's
Speaker 4: how you're remembering the name of your teacher. Now, when
Speaker 4: you're done remembering it, it has to get reconsolidated back
Speaker 4: into its physical form. And if you get hit in
Speaker 4: the head during that moment, it's gone. It's now you know,
Speaker 4: it's been transferred from the physical to the you know,
Speaker 4: activity in spikes. And if you you know, before it
Speaker 4: gets transferred back into the physical, it can it is
Speaker 4: susceptible to erasure, which is weird and terrifying. And by
Speaker 4: the way, this can also be done with protein synthesis inhibitors.
Speaker 4: So people do this in rats. They've been doing this
Speaker 4: for decades, where you know, you train a rat how
Speaker 4: to run different maases and then you put the rat
Speaker 4: on a particular maze where the rat has to remember, oh, yeah,
Speaker 4: that's this one, and then you just feed the rat
Speaker 4: a protein synthesis inhibitor and now it cannot reconsolidate that
Speaker 4: memory into physical form. So number one is hippocampal memory
Speaker 4: can be erased. The number two point is that amigla
Speaker 4: memories cannot be erased, which is to say, when you
Speaker 4: recruit the emergency control system to say, wow, this is
Speaker 4: really important, write this down. Than those are permanent, which
Speaker 4: the reason I say that's unfortunate is because those are
Speaker 4: the ones that people want to erase. In other words,
Speaker 4: you know, let's say a rape victim or something like that,
Speaker 4: that is the one thing that she wants to forget
Speaker 4: more than anything, but cannot.
Speaker 1: Now, I was checking out the show as well, and
Speaker 1: I was listening to your I believe this is an
Speaker 1: episode from just earlier this week on the topic of
Speaker 1: animal uplift, which I don't think is a term that
Speaker 1: I was familiar with. Can you give us a brief taste,
Speaker 1: a brief overview of what animal uplift is.
Speaker 4: Yeah, it's this idea that you know, look, the human
Speaker 4: brain is made out of exactly the same stuff that
Speaker 4: a mouse brain, the dog brain, the giraft brain. You know,
Speaker 4: it's all the same stuff. It's got the same anatomy,
Speaker 4: same general structure. We just have more of this wrinkly
Speaker 4: outer bit called the cortex. But somehow we are you know,
Speaker 4: we've taken over the whole planet as a species. We've
Speaker 4: gotten off the planet. We've made vaccines and internet and
Speaker 4: quantum mechanics and so like. There's some real difference in
Speaker 4: what we are doing versus our neighbors in the animal kingdom.
Speaker 4: But the genetic differences, as you know, are not that much.
Speaker 4: I mean, we have enormous similarity with almost every Like
Speaker 4: if you're building a giraffe, you got to build the
Speaker 4: heart and the lungs and the brain and then the
Speaker 4: esophagus and all that stuff is really the same stuff.
Speaker 4: And so it's just some small algorithmic difference in the
Speaker 4: DNA that's making our brain run in a more souped
Speaker 4: up way. Okay, the idea of animal uplift is if
Speaker 4: we can figure that out. And this won't happen, you know,
Speaker 4: for at least a few more decades, but if we
Speaker 4: can figure out, ah, here's the sequence of a's and
Speaker 4: c's and t's and g's that gives us this high intelligence.
Speaker 4: The question is should we give this to animals? Should
Speaker 4: we help animals become intelligent? Now, let me just mention
Speaker 4: this is an area that bioethicists and philosophers and neuroscientists
Speaker 4: have been talking about for a while, and there's you know,
Speaker 4: plenty of debate about it. And on one end of
Speaker 4: the spectrum you have people say that's a terrible idea,
Speaker 4: We wouldn't want to give intelligence to animals, and other
Speaker 4: people say it's a moral obligation in the same way
Speaker 4: that you know, if we know how to fix some
Speaker 4: viral disease or fix a broken leg or something, of
Speaker 4: course you should do this for your dog instead of
Speaker 4: let your dog, you know, not have the medical advances
Speaker 4: that we have made. So anyway, it's a big debate,
Speaker 4: but this is the idea of animal uplift. You make
Speaker 4: an animal as intelligent as a human. And I just
Speaker 4: find this area fascinating. And you know, as I proposed
Speaker 4: the podcast, what would the consequences of this be in
Speaker 4: terms of, you know, will World War five be fought
Speaker 4: by other animal species not just humans? You know, And
Speaker 4: the way I sort of introduced the podcast is with
Speaker 4: this question of what will my kids look back on?
Speaker 4: Are my grandkids Obviously there's lots of things that will
Speaker 4: be very different about our world right now and their world,
Speaker 4: and let's say fifty years from now. But one of
Speaker 4: them is will they look back and say, Wow, I
Speaker 4: can't believe there was a time when humans were the
Speaker 4: only species on Earth that was really doing anything, and
Speaker 4: now we've got all these other you know, crows running universities,
Speaker 4: and donkeys' programming computers and whatever, gophers in the Senate
Speaker 4: and so on.
Speaker 2: So one idea of yours that I came across because
Speaker 2: Rob sent it to me and I found really interesting
Speaker 2: was from a paper you published in twenty twenty one,
Speaker 2: I think maybe in Frontiers and Neuroscience, offering a hypothesis
Speaker 2: about the adaptive function of dreams, which you call the
Speaker 2: defensive activation theory, Could you lay out what is the
Speaker 2: basic controversy about the biological function of dreams and how
Speaker 2: your proposed solution here would answer this question.
Speaker 4: Yes, so it turns out there is no controversy about
Speaker 4: the purpose of dreams because nobody knows, right, everyone, I
Speaker 4: mean in the sense of everyone's got a little hypothesis
Speaker 4: about it. But really it's complicated, and people think, well,
Speaker 4: maybe it has something to do with learning and memory.
Speaker 4: Maybe it just has to do with you know, energy restoration.
Speaker 4: Maybe it has to do with you know, obviously the
Speaker 4: Freudians thought that there was some important meaning in the
Speaker 4: content of dreams and so on, but no one really knows,
Speaker 4: and certainly no one has a quantitative hypothesis that can
Speaker 4: make predictions about dreams and how much dream time we have.
Speaker 4: But my student and I developed a theory that actually
Speaker 4: does make quantitative predictions across animal species about it predicts
Speaker 4: actually how much each animal species will dream. And to
Speaker 4: explain something to take one step back, which is about
Speaker 4: brain plasticity, which is this term that we use to
Speaker 4: explain that the brain is very malleable, the human brain
Speaker 4: in particular, and it's constantly reconfiguring its own circuitry and
Speaker 4: that's how it learns and remembers, and that's how it
Speaker 4: learns new skills and all that. So it turns out,
Speaker 4: this is what my last book, Live Wired was about,
Speaker 4: is the massive flexibility of the brain. It turns out
Speaker 4: is probably a lot of people already into it. If
Speaker 4: you go blind at a young age, the visual part
Speaker 4: of your brain gets taken over, and in fact, if
Speaker 4: you're born blind, that takeover is complete. The rest of
Speaker 4: the territories in your brain involved in hearing and touch
Speaker 4: and other things. These all take over what we would
Speaker 4: normally think of as the visual cortex, and it's no
Speaker 4: longer visual. It's now, you know, subserving other functions.
Speaker 1: Okay.
Speaker 4: One of the surprises in neuroscience was a study that
Speaker 4: came out about a decade ago from some colleagues of
Speaker 4: Mind Harvard where they put people in a scanner. These
Speaker 4: are normally cited people, but they blindfolded them tightly and
Speaker 4: they put them in the scanner and they were looking
Speaker 4: at their brain's response to touch or to sound or
Speaker 4: things like that. And what they found, to their surprise,
Speaker 4: is that after an hour, you could start seeing the
Speaker 4: first hints of signals in the visual cortex in response
Speaker 4: to touch and sounds. So, in other words, the visual
Speaker 4: cortex was starting to get annexed from these other territories
Speaker 4: that they've touched and sound after one hour. And so
Speaker 4: this was a much more rapid kind of movement than
Speaker 4: anyone had expected. And so what my student and I
Speaker 4: immediately realized is that this is the basis of dreaming.
Speaker 4: It's because we are on a planet that rotates, and
Speaker 4: we spend half our time in the darkness, away from
Speaker 4: the light of our star, and so in the dark.
Speaker 4: You can still hear and touch and taste and smell
Speaker 4: just fine, but you can't see. And obviously I'm talking
Speaker 4: about evolutionary time, you know, not our modern electricity blessed times.
Speaker 4: And so what this means is the visual system in
Speaker 4: particular has a real disadvantage, which is it is in
Speaker 4: danger of getting taken over from the other senses. And
Speaker 4: this is because of the brain's great plasticity, and so
Speaker 4: as a result, the visual system needs a way to
Speaker 4: defend its territory during the night. And that's what dreaming is.
Speaker 4: Dreaming is essentially a screen saver. It's making sure that
Speaker 4: at night time, when you're curled up in the corner
Speaker 4: of your cave, staying out of trouble sleeping, and sleeping
Speaker 4: has other benefits too, in terms of energy restoration and
Speaker 4: so on. So when that's happening, you know, you can
Speaker 4: still feel if some touches your skinner, if you're smelling
Speaker 4: something or whatever. All that can still function in the dark,
Speaker 4: but you're not seeing anything at all. And so what
Speaker 4: happens is you've got this circuitry that just blows activity
Speaker 4: into the visual system to make sure it stays active
Speaker 4: during the night. Every ninety minutes, you have this wave
Speaker 4: of active, random activity that just gets blown in there.
Speaker 4: And because we're visual creatures, we see we have full,
Speaker 4: rich visual experience even though our eyes are closed and
Speaker 4: it's dark out, and it's because we are just making
Speaker 4: sure the brain is making sure that it's keeping this
Speaker 4: competition going so the visual system doesn't get taken over. Interestingly,
Speaker 4: dream sleep is something we find across the animal kingdom,
Speaker 4: but what we were able to demonstrate is that it
Speaker 4: correlates with how plastic the animal species is. So some
Speaker 4: animals drop out of the womb and they figure out
Speaker 4: in thirty minutes how to run, how to walk. Very quickly,
Speaker 4: they reach adolescence, they can reproduce, so all kinds, you know,
Speaker 4: they're just they're obviously very pre programmed, let's just put
Speaker 4: it that way. But other creatures like humans, are extremely plastic.
Speaker 4: We take forever to learn how to walk, to wean
Speaker 4: to reach reproductive age, things like that, precisely because we're
Speaker 4: extremely plastic, and so we have lots of dreaming because
Speaker 4: we have to protect our visual cortex at night. But
Speaker 4: other animals that are, you know, these pre program types,
Speaker 4: they have just a tiny bit of visual dreaming, but
Speaker 4: not a lot. And by the way, I'll just mention
Speaker 4: that the amount of visual dreaming we have goes down
Speaker 4: with age. So it's an infant, you're dreaming all the time,
Speaker 4: and as you get older and older, you dream less
Speaker 4: and less is a fraction of your sleep. And you
Speaker 4: know that's just a correlation. But in theory, what that
Speaker 4: suggests is, you know, as an infant, your visual system
Speaker 4: is very highly at risk of getting taken over, and
Speaker 4: as you get older and things get more cemented into place,
Speaker 4: it's less at risk of getting taken over, so you
Speaker 4: don't need as much screensaver time and only.
Speaker 2: This kind of reminds me of studies I've read on
Speaker 2: a related subject, which is a prolonged blindfolding of normally
Speaker 2: cited people who apparently it's very common for people under
Speaker 2: those circumstances to experience a lot of visual hallucinations. Does
Speaker 2: that have any relationship to what you're talking about here?
Speaker 4: It does, Thank you for asking. That's perfect because this
Speaker 4: is all part of the defensive activation theory, which is
Speaker 4: to say, if a system is used to having data
Speaker 4: coming in and suddenly it's not getting that data anymore,
Speaker 4: it fights back from the inside it starts producing that
Speaker 4: data itself. So one example of this is let's say blindfolding,
Speaker 4: or you also see this for example in you know,
Speaker 4: when people get thrown in solitary confinement in the dark,
Speaker 4: they start having hallucinations both auditory and visual because they're
Speaker 4: not getting that data and they're used to it they're
Speaker 4: supposed to get. There's also something called Bonet syndrome Charles
Speaker 4: Bone syndrome, which is people start losing their vision, but
Speaker 4: they don't realize that they're losing their vision because they
Speaker 4: start having hallucinations that essentially fill in for them. This
Speaker 4: is all the same issue, though, which is that the
Speaker 4: brain is used to getting certain inputs, suddenly it's not
Speaker 4: getting it anymore, and so it starts generating in itself.
Speaker 4: One more example is tonightis which is ringing in the ears.
Speaker 4: This typically comes about because somebody loses hearing in some
Speaker 4: frequency or some band of frequencies and the brain says,
Speaker 4: wait a minute, I'm not hearing anything at twelve thousand
Speaker 4: hurts anymore, so I'm going to start making myself and
Speaker 4: it starts making this sound by itself. So this all
Speaker 4: falls under the defensive activation theory.
Speaker 2: One of the interesting things I recall about the studies
Speaker 2: on prolonged blindfolding was that the hallucinations that were reported
Speaker 2: were not entirely random. So it wasn't just you know,
Speaker 2: people seeing strange scenes play out in front of them.
Speaker 2: That they would often hallucinate stuff that you would expect
Speaker 2: to see in that place in the room based on
Speaker 2: other senses. So like if they heard someone come to
Speaker 2: the door of the room, they would hallucinate the image
Speaker 2: of that person in the door.
Speaker 4: Yeah, that's perfect. And by the way, I think this
Speaker 4: also has a lot to tell us about dream content
Speaker 4: because the thing about dreams, I love the way you
Speaker 4: put this, because you could, in theory, dream about anything
Speaker 4: at all. You could dream that you are in Cambodia
Speaker 4: and that you are in the fourteen hundreds and you're
Speaker 4: a magician who's doing something. But you know, you tend
Speaker 4: to dream about you know, your work and your spouse
Speaker 4: and your drive and whatever, you know, things that are
Speaker 4: more local to you. And it's precisely because when you
Speaker 4: slam random activity into the visual system, the synapse is
Speaker 4: the connections that are essentially hot from the day's work,
Speaker 4: you know, those those are the things that tend to
Speaker 4: get activated, and the association is very loose in a
Speaker 4: sleeping dream state, and so what happens is, you know,
Speaker 4: things can go off on weird tangents, but physics still
Speaker 4: works fine in a dream. You know, rocks don't float
Speaker 4: upwards and stuff like that, and so you know, essentially
Speaker 4: you're just rebooting things that were there during the day.
Speaker 4: And and this is closely related to what you're saying about.
Speaker 4: You know, all the associations that your brain builds up
Speaker 4: over a lifetime. So you hear the voice and you're
Speaker 4: expecting to see that person, and that's exactly what happens. Actually,
Speaker 4: I just want to mention one other thing about the dreams,
Speaker 4: which is people will often ask me, well, what about
Speaker 4: a blind person, how do they dream? And the answer
Speaker 4: is blind people also dream because you have this very
Speaker 4: ancient circuitry in your head that's blasting activity into the
Speaker 4: back of the brain the occipital cortex, which is normally
Speaker 4: the visual cortex. And people but if you're born blind,
Speaker 4: it's you know, long taken over by hearing in touch,
Speaker 4: and so a blind person's dream is all about hearing
Speaker 4: in touch. They don't see anything, but they say, oh,
Speaker 4: I was, you know, moving through the living room and
Speaker 4: I felt the furniture was rearranged, and then there was
Speaker 4: a big dog in the corner and I ran from
Speaker 4: it and I was scared. And so, you know, they've
Speaker 4: got full, rich dream experience. It's just that it is
Speaker 4: not visual because that part of their brain is no
Speaker 4: longer visual.
Speaker 2: And would you well, that makes me wonder then if
Speaker 2: if your hypothesis about the defensive activity of dreaming is correct,
Speaker 2: does that mean that that dreaming is now to protect
Speaker 2: still what would normally be used for visual processing that
Speaker 2: part of the brain, but its role in processing auditory
Speaker 2: and other stimuli.
Speaker 4: A great question. No, that it's that these circuits that
Speaker 4: underlie dreaming are extremely ancient, and so they are assuming
Speaker 4: that you've got perfectly fine vision. And if you don't
Speaker 4: have vision for some reason, then the circuits aren't going
Speaker 4: to change. They're just doing a basic architectural job of saying, hey, guys,
Speaker 4: every ninety minutes, just last some activity into the back
Speaker 4: of the brain.
Speaker 1: There.
Speaker 4: That's all they're doing. And they don't know if you're
Speaker 4: blind or not.
Speaker 1: Now, speaking about dreams, I guess it's not too much
Speaker 1: of a leap to start talking about consciousness. I was wondering,
Speaker 1: where do you think we are in terms of coraling, testing,
Speaker 1: and even eliminating various theories concerning the nature of human consciousness. Yeah?
Speaker 4: Boy, this still remains to my mind the central unsolved
Speaker 4: mystery of neuroscience. What's interesting, by the way, I wrote
Speaker 4: an article, the cover article is Discover magazine back in
Speaker 4: something like two thousand and six, called ten Unsolved Questions
Speaker 4: of Neuroscience. And what's fascinating to me is it's now
Speaker 4: twenty twenty three and they are equally as unsolved. I mean,
Speaker 4: it's funny because we're making so much progress in the
Speaker 4: field in some ways, and yet in other ways we're
Speaker 4: just facing some really tough problems. So the consciousness, you know,
Speaker 4: what is consciousness is really I think the central one.
Speaker 4: And you know, for any listeners who are wondering what
Speaker 4: is the question, the question is how do you take
Speaker 4: eighty six billion cells and stick them together and hook
Speaker 4: them up in such a way that you have private,
Speaker 4: subjective internal experience. So you know, the smell of apple
Speaker 4: pie and the taste of feta cheese, and the pain
Speaker 4: of pain, and the redness of red and so on
Speaker 4: how does that happen? Because you know, my laptop computer
Speaker 4: has lots of signals running around, zeros and ones running around,
Speaker 4: and it's transistors, but presumably it's not experiencing anything. It
Speaker 4: can play a YouTube video for me, but presumably it
Speaker 4: doesn't find it funny the way I do. And so
Speaker 4: this is really the question of consciousness. We don't know
Speaker 4: the answer to it. I can just tell you my
Speaker 4: general feeling on this, which is when you look at
Speaker 4: the history of science, what you find is that in
Speaker 4: every era there were big pieces of information missing, and
Speaker 4: yet the scientists were in a position of having to
Speaker 4: try to explain everything not knowing some other thing. Here's
Speaker 4: an example. You know, when the pump was invented, people
Speaker 4: suddenly said, oh, I see the heart is like a pump,
Speaker 4: and then it was obvious, oh, click falls into place.
Speaker 4: But before that, everyone's trying to figure out what the
Speaker 4: heck the heart was doing, but no one had the
Speaker 4: concept of a pump. Or you know, before the magnetosphere
Speaker 4: of the Earth was discovered, you'd have no way to
Speaker 4: explain the northern lights. You'd have to make up some
Speaker 4: crazy story about the northern lights and so on. Anyway,
Speaker 4: I feel like we're in that situation now with consciousness.
Speaker 4: There's something right at the edges. We're all listening for
Speaker 4: its whispers. We can sort of feel that there's something there,
Speaker 4: but we don't know exactly what it is that we're
Speaker 4: missing that will allow us to explain how you take
Speaker 4: a bunch of physical stuff and have it experience.
Speaker 1: Now, a topic that's being discussed a lot right now is,
Speaker 1: of course, as always artificial intelligence, but specifically generative artificial intelligence,
Speaker 1: especially with so many of these text and image creative
Speaker 1: tools that are available just to the average person to
Speaker 1: experiment with and share the results of. And I was wondering,
Speaker 1: what's your take on generative artificial intelligence and how it
Speaker 1: relates or doesn't relate to human creativity.
Speaker 4: Yeah, so actually this is my next episode because I'm
Speaker 4: fascinated by this. Yeah, I'm just so Okay. So, you
Speaker 4: guys may know I'm a neuroscientist, but I'm also a writer,
Speaker 4: including of fiction. And so suddenly, when when generatively I
Speaker 4: started blowing up really at the end of last year,
Speaker 4: I of course, like many artists, thought, oh my gosh,
Speaker 4: what does this mean for me? What's the what's the
Speaker 4: future for writers? But actually, in my next episode, I
Speaker 4: make a four part argument why I think it'll be
Speaker 4: an important part of the symbiosis between humans and machines
Speaker 4: that eventually comes about.
Speaker 1: But it's not going to.
Speaker 4: Replace writers and artists. There are many reasons. You know,
Speaker 4: One thing is it can it can only do short
Speaker 4: form stuff, and it does it very nicely. But you know,
Speaker 4: if you want to write a little blog post or
Speaker 4: a little jingle or poem or whatever, like, it's great
Speaker 4: for that, but to actually write a novel is a
Speaker 4: completely different sort of thing because what the author is
Speaker 4: doing there is planting clues and having let's say, a
Speaker 4: cliffhanger that doesn't come back for two or three chapters,
Speaker 4: and you know, there's a continuity through time where what
Speaker 4: the author knows is what the end of the story
Speaker 4: is and then writes towards that. But AI can't even
Speaker 4: do things like make up a joke, because to make
Speaker 4: up a joke you have to know the punchline first
Speaker 4: and then construct the joke to meet it. But it's
Speaker 4: doing everything in the forward direction, so there are there
Speaker 4: are reasons like that. There's also make the argument that
Speaker 4: we as readers, I think, actually really care about the
Speaker 4: heartbeat behind the page, which is to say, if you
Speaker 4: offered me two books, and one was written by AI
Speaker 4: and one was written by you, Rob, and you know,
Speaker 4: I would absolutely want the one that's written by a
Speaker 4: real human, because I know that you're a human with
Speaker 4: all the you know, limitations and anxieties and joys and
Speaker 4: ecstasies of a real human. And and that's what I
Speaker 4: care about as a fellow human. And you know, part
Speaker 4: of my evidence for this is a colleague of mine
Speaker 4: here in Silicon Valley announced recently that he'd written a
Speaker 4: book that was half by him and half by chat
Speaker 4: gpt And and I actually read most of the book
Speaker 4: and it's it's actually a good book, but I was
Speaker 4: not inspired when I heard that I read it for
Speaker 4: other reasons. I thought that sounds terrible, and I was
Speaker 4: trying to figure out why why did I feel that way?
Speaker 4: Why did I feel that it was interesting to me?
Speaker 4: And it has to do with this heartbeat behind behind
Speaker 4: the page that that matters. Here's the analogy that I'm
Speaker 4: thinking about nowadays, is it was when cameras first came
Speaker 4: on this scene, visual painters all panicked and thought we're
Speaker 4: done for because why would anyone want me to sit
Speaker 4: here and paint something for weeks and weeks when you
Speaker 4: can just get a perfect representation of it in a
Speaker 4: fraction of a second with a camera. And the answer is,
Speaker 4: cameras did not kill visual painting. They just ended up
Speaker 4: filling a different neighboring niche and became their own art form.
Speaker 4: But visual painting still exists because you could do other
Speaker 4: things with it, and I can you know, at least
Speaker 4: right the moment, all these text generation programs are extraordinarily
Speaker 4: boring in what they come up with, because they get
Speaker 4: pushed through reinforcement learning with humans so that humans say, oh,
Speaker 4: don't say that, don't say that, that might defend someone,
Speaker 4: and so on, which is fine. I mean, I'm not
Speaker 4: opposed to that. But the thing is that good literature
Speaker 4: is stuff that really challenges us. Any good piece of
Speaker 4: literature that you find is something that's full of stuff wethink.
Speaker 4: Oh yikes, that sounds like a terrible thing that just happened.
Speaker 4: And none of these large language models are even willing
Speaker 4: to go near that or touch that. So I think
Speaker 4: they're going to be quite a distance from real literature
Speaker 4: for the foreseeable future.
Speaker 2: I would tend to think also with literary craft. A
Speaker 2: lot of what we really like about literary style is
Speaker 2: being surprised. But I wonder if a you know, surprised
Speaker 2: by like a strange word choice or a strange metaphor
Speaker 2: or something. Those are the things that feel really good.
Speaker 2: But can can a generative AI tell the difference between
Speaker 2: a comparison or a word choice that is strange and
Speaker 2: a pleasing and exciting way versus one that will be
Speaker 2: essentially interpreted as a hallucination or an error by the AI.
Speaker 4: That's interesting, I would say, I mean, say something positive
Speaker 4: about these ais. I think probably it would be able
Speaker 4: to do that, because remember, all us doing is a
Speaker 4: statistical game of saying, Okay, what's the most probable thing
Speaker 4: to come next, and you can turn up the temperature
Speaker 4: on it so that it does things that are increasingly
Speaker 4: less probable but somehow makes sense. I had not thought
Speaker 4: about that, But I think these things might be great
Speaker 4: at making really good metaphors that are surprising, because one
Speaker 4: of the things that authors have to deal with all
Speaker 4: the time is that they recycle metaphors and it's totally
Speaker 4: you know, a soporific to the reader. It puts them
Speaker 4: to sleep. But a good author I was just reading
Speaker 4: the other day. It was name Frank Herbert who in
Speaker 4: Dune he said something about the waves throwing white robes
Speaker 4: over the rocks. That's how he was describing the foam
Speaker 4: hitting the rocks, which is beautiful because it wakes you
Speaker 4: up in that moment you think, oh, what a nice
Speaker 4: way of describing that. But if one of these large
Speaker 4: language models simply says, hey, I want to make something
Speaker 4: not the most probable thing, but less probable, less probable,
Speaker 4: I'll bet it could come up with really good stuff
Speaker 4: like that that no human author has yet tried. Let
Speaker 4: me just give it one example, which is when Alpha
Speaker 4: Go beat le so Dole, the Go champion back and
Speaker 4: so I think twenty seventeen. You know, here's the best
Speaker 4: human in the world of playing the game of Go,
Speaker 4: and the AI program beats him, and everybody sort of
Speaker 4: watched that and thought, wow, wow, that's the end of that.
Speaker 4: But the most interesting part of the story was what
Speaker 4: happened next, which is le Sodole ended up then playing
Speaker 4: against his his human opponents and took on different sorts
Speaker 4: of moves that he had seen Alpha Go play that
Speaker 4: no human had played before, like it was just doing
Speaker 4: these weird things that were totally in the rules. They
Speaker 4: were legal, but no one had thought of doing it before.
Speaker 4: So now he started doing this and started beating his
Speaker 4: human opponents at a much higher rate. So the point
Speaker 4: is we can learn from AI, and I think there's
Speaker 4: going to be this really interesting collaboration that happens into
Speaker 4: the future where we see new things happening and in
Speaker 4: this case, new metaphors that come out in literature and
Speaker 4: we think, wow, I would have never thought of that one,
Speaker 4: and then we can use them.
Speaker 2: Another element of literary style, though, I think about with
Speaker 2: Generative AI is the role of insight in writing, and
Speaker 2: it makes me wonder what insight actually is. This is
Speaker 2: obviously something we prize, you know, when we read a
Speaker 2: novel that we really like and we say that it
Speaker 2: is true, you know there's something true in it. Obviously
Speaker 2: the story is literally fictional, it didn't happen, but it
Speaker 2: observes something about life that we perceive as like deeply
Speaker 2: correct and do I don't know, I would have an
Speaker 2: intuition that says I would come across insights like that,
Speaker 2: or things that feel like insights like that. Less in
Speaker 2: generat in something generated by AI. I can't prove that,
Speaker 2: but it does raise this question of what insight is.
Speaker 4: Yeah, you know, I tell you, I think I'm signing
Speaker 4: with the A on this one. Because what these large
Speaker 4: language models are essentially is every human all put together.
Speaker 4: So whatever insights people have had previously, this is all
Speaker 4: available to the language model, and so there's no reason
Speaker 4: that it can't put something together that's very insightful. And
Speaker 4: it's not that it's having the insight, it's that it
Speaker 4: gets to say, Okay, well, here's a billion people who
Speaker 4: have written stuff down, and I've noticed that, you know
Speaker 4: a number of these maybe two hundred of these people
Speaker 4: have all said the same thing over here. And maybe
Speaker 4: Joe's never read that sentence, you know, that paragraph, but
Speaker 4: but I there's something going on over here, and it
Speaker 4: puts it together and then you say, oh my gosh,
Speaker 4: that was really insight because it's not a machine telling
Speaker 4: you the story, it's a billion people telling you the story.
Speaker 1: Now, Joe and I are actually currently doing some episodes
Speaker 1: of our own podcast on the subject of infantile amnesia.
Speaker 1: You know, why we don't remember our earliest childhood or
Speaker 1: you know, infancy and birth and so forth. And and
Speaker 1: we've heard from some listeners, as we inevitably knew we would,
Speaker 1: who say that they do remember their birth, so they
Speaker 1: do remember very early childhood. And we were just wondering
Speaker 1: what your take is on people who who have that
Speaker 1: experience or seem to have that memory. What may be
Speaker 1: going on there?
Speaker 4: Yeah, I mean, here's here's what we think in there.
Speaker 4: Science generally is that, you know, memory is a is
Speaker 4: something that unpacks slowly with time. It's a cognitive development
Speaker 4: in some sense. And you know, as you guys know,
Speaker 4: it's about three years old for girls and three and
Speaker 4: a half years old for boys that they start laying
Speaker 4: down their first memories. Here's the interesting thing. Memory is
Speaker 4: a myth making machine, and we're constantly reinventing our past.
Speaker 4: And so one of the difficult things to assess when
Speaker 4: someone says, hey, I remember whatever being born or being
Speaker 4: one years old, is it's really difficult to know the
Speaker 4: degree to which they think that's true. But it's not
Speaker 4: true because we're all told stories by our parents of oh,
Speaker 4: and you were an infant, you did this hilarious thing
Speaker 4: and blah blah blah, and you hear the story once
Speaker 4: or twice, and eventually it becomes a false memory. So
Speaker 4: I think it's very difficult to know to be able
Speaker 4: to tell this sort of thing. And of course for
Speaker 4: someone who has a memory, it's very difficult to tell them, Hey,
Speaker 4: that might be false and you just think you remember that.
Speaker 4: That makes people angry. But you know, the truth is,
Speaker 4: this kind of stuff comes up all the time in
Speaker 4: courts of law, in the realm of eyewitness testimony, because
Speaker 4: people think that they're memories are like a video recorder,
Speaker 4: and they're simply not. There's a giant psychology literature on
Speaker 4: this showing all kinds of ways that things get false,
Speaker 4: memories get introduced, and so on. You know, a colleague
Speaker 4: of mine did a really great study right after September eleventh,
Speaker 4: two thousand and one. She was in New York, and
Speaker 4: she went and interviewed a bunch of people in downtown
Speaker 4: in Midtown, New York about what they had just seen
Speaker 4: on September eleventh, and then she was clever enough to
Speaker 4: also ask them to describe a memory from September tenth,
Speaker 4: the day before, like lunch here, and I did this,
Speaker 4: and I did that, And then she went and tracked
Speaker 4: all these people down a year later and asked them
Speaker 4: to tell their memories again about September eleventh, September tenth,
Speaker 4: of the year before, and it turns out that in
Speaker 4: both cases the memories drifted. So this comes back to
Speaker 4: the beginning of our conversation. Even Amigdala memories, even the
Speaker 4: scariest memories that you have, it doesn't mean they're accurate.
Speaker 4: And so I mean, especially it doesn't surprise me about
Speaker 4: September eleventh, because especially the more you tell a story,
Speaker 4: the more you start laying down these ruts in the road,
Speaker 4: and that becomes the story that becomes the truth. And
Speaker 4: you know, we've all run into these things in our
Speaker 4: life where someone suddenly shows us a photograph or something
Speaker 4: that says, wait, that's not my memory. Look here's the
Speaker 4: thing here, and you go, oh, gosh, I had actually
Speaker 4: misremembered that that thing that happened, or where I was
Speaker 4: standing or what I was doing. Anyway, So this is
Speaker 4: the concern when people say, oh, I remember whatever being
Speaker 4: born or this event when I was really young, is
Speaker 4: that we know how easy it is to believe memories
Speaker 4: that are not true.
Speaker 2: Now correct me if I'm wrong, But I think I
Speaker 2: recall reading that. In some of these cases with the
Speaker 2: like where there's a big public event and people remember you,
Speaker 2: people are like asked to write down their experiences that day,
Speaker 2: and then the researchers contact them again later and have
Speaker 2: them try it again. You say, what do you remember
Speaker 2: about that day? Not only do they often get details wrong,
Speaker 2: but don't they often insist that the way they remember
Speaker 2: it now is correct and what they wrote at the
Speaker 2: time was wrong.
Speaker 4: Exactly. That's exactly right, Yeah, because it's so hard to
Speaker 4: disbelieve our own memories about things. You know, this is
Speaker 4: obviously at the heart of lots of spousal arguments too.
Speaker 4: You know, you have two brains, you have two different
Speaker 4: ways of remembering what precisely happened. Yes, that's exactly right.
Speaker 1: All right, Well, you already mentioned that you have the
Speaker 1: episode coming up about AI creativity. I'm definitely excited to
Speaker 1: check that one out. Is there anything else you want
Speaker 1: to tease out for listeners what else they can expect
Speaker 1: from future episodes of Inner Cosmos? Yeah?
Speaker 4: Well, okay, so my next one after that is going
Speaker 4: to be is a I sentient Because you know, this
Speaker 4: is a big question now as these models get larger
Speaker 4: and larger, and things are moving at an extraordinary pace. Now,
Speaker 4: what does sentients mean? And this is related to the
Speaker 4: question you asked me Rob about consciousness and so on.
Speaker 4: So I think this actually gives an interesting tool into
Speaker 4: studying consciousness that we haven't had before. But I have
Speaker 4: other episodes about my One after that is about counterfeiting
Speaker 4: money and what it is that we notice about counterfeits
Speaker 4: or we do not. I have an episode on will
Speaker 4: you perceive the event that kills you? And I find
Speaker 4: this is just a topic I've been thinking about for
Speaker 4: a long time and have put together a lot of
Speaker 4: work on this about you know, if suddenly something, let's
Speaker 4: say that the brick from the pedestrian bridge over the
Speaker 4: highway fell on your head when you were in a convertible,
Speaker 4: The question is, would you perceive dying or would you
Speaker 4: be dead before you knew anything happen? And what does
Speaker 4: that look like? Does it look like you know, suddenly
Speaker 4: the footage just ends but there's no pain, stuff like that.
Speaker 4: So I have lots and lots of episodes. Can we
Speaker 4: create new senses for humans? Which is a big part
Speaker 4: of what I've been doing over the last eight years
Speaker 4: with company that I run called Neosensory. Yeah, and I
Speaker 4: have forty six episodes this year, all of which I've outlined,
Speaker 4: and then it's just a matter of spending the twelve
Speaker 4: hours per week of writing the hour long monologue.
Speaker 1: Awesome, it sounds exciting. I'm excited to check out more episodes.
Speaker 4: Great. Thank you guys so much for having me. It's
Speaker 4: been a pleasure to see all.
Speaker 1: Yeah, thanks for coming on the show.
Speaker 2: All right, well that was our conversation with David Eagleman.
Speaker 2: Once again, much appreciation to David for taking the time
Speaker 2: to chat with us today. If you want to check
Speaker 2: out his new show, and we do recommend it once again,
Speaker 2: it is called Inner Cosmos with David Eagleman. You can
Speaker 2: find it on the iHeart app or wherever you get
Speaker 2: your podcasts.
Speaker 1: Just a reminder that's Stuff to Blow Your Mind is
Speaker 1: a science podcast with core episodes on Tuesdays and Thursdays
Speaker 1: in the Stuff to Blow your Mind podcast feed. On
Speaker 1: Mondays we do listener mail episodes. On Wednesdays we do
Speaker 1: a short form artifact or monster fack episode, and on
Speaker 1: Fridays we set aside most serious concerns to just talk
Speaker 1: about a weird film on Weird House Cinema.
Speaker 2: Huge thanks to our audio producer JJ Posway. If you
Speaker 2: would like to get in touch with us with feedback
Speaker 2: on this episode or any other, to suggest a topic
Speaker 2: for the future, or just to say hello, you can
Speaker 2: email us at contact at stuff to Blow your Mind
Speaker 2: dot com.
Speaker 3: Stuff to Blow Your Mind is production of iHeartRadio. For
Speaker 3: more podcasts from my Heart Radio, visit the iHeartRadio app,
Speaker 3: Apple Podcasts, or wherever you're listening to your favorite shows.