David Eagleman: Neuroplasticity and the Livewired Brain
生物与进化技术与编程音乐与艺术AI 与机器学习历史与文明
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braindondoinggoinggotbookhumanablecoursestufffigurewholedatacaredoesngettingchangingsaidpersonbetter
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🎙️ 完整对话（2426 条）
Lex Fridman (00:00.000)
The following is a conversation with David Eagleman,
以下是与大卫·伊格曼的对话，
Lex Fridman (00:02.980)
a neuroscientist and one of the great science communicators
神经科学家和伟大的科学传播者之一
Lex Fridman (00:06.360)
of our time, exploring the beauty and mystery
我们这个时代，探索美丽与神秘
Lex Fridman (00:09.260)
of the human brain.
人类大脑的。
Lex Fridman (00:10.780)
He's an author of a lot of amazing books
他是许多精彩书籍的作者
David Eagleman (00:13.140)
about the human mind, and his new one called Livewired.
关于人类思维，以及他的新作品《Livewired》。
Lex Fridman (00:18.060)
Livewired is a work of 10 years on a topic
Livewired 是一个针对某个主题长达 10 年的作品
David Eagleman (00:21.200)
that is fascinating to me, which is neuroplasticity
这对我来说很有趣，这就是神经可塑性
Lex Fridman (00:24.700)
or the malleability of the human brain.
或人脑的可塑性。
David Eagleman (00:27.740)
Quick summary of the sponsors.
赞助商的快速摘要。
Lex Fridman (00:29.260)
Athletic Greens, BetterHelp, and Cash App.
Athletic Greens、BetterHelp 和 Cash App。
David Eagleman (00:32.700)
Click the sponsor links in the description
单击说明中的赞助商链接
Lex Fridman (00:34.500)
to get a discount and to support this podcast.
获得折扣并支持此播客。
David Eagleman (00:37.820)
As a side note, let me say that the adaptability
作为旁注，我要说的是适应性
Lex Fridman (00:41.420)
of the human mind at the biological, chemical,
人类思维的生物、化学、
David Eagleman (00:44.380)
cognitive, psychological, and even sociological levels
认知、心理、甚至社会学层面
Lex Fridman (00:48.500)
is the very thing that captivated me many years ago
正是多年前让我着迷的事情
David Eagleman (00:51.860)
when I first began to wonder how would my engineer
当我第一次开始想知道我的工程师会如何
Lex Fridman (00:54.980)
something like it in the machine.
机器里有类似的东西。
David Eagleman (00:57.760)
The open question today in the 21st century
21世纪今天的悬而未决的问题
Lex Fridman (01:00.700)
is what are the limits of this adaptability?
David Eagleman (01:03.700)
As new, smarter and smarter devices and AI systems
Lex Fridman (01:07.420)
come to life, or as better and better brain computer
David Eagleman (01:10.420)
interfaces are engineered, will our brain be able to adapt,
Lex Fridman (01:13.820)
to catch up, to excel?
David Eagleman (01:16.580)
I personally believe yes, that we're far from reaching
Lex Fridman (01:19.540)
the limitation of the human mind and the human brain,
David Eagleman (01:23.100)
just as we are far from reaching the limitations
Lex Fridman (01:26.060)
of our computational systems.
David Eagleman (01:28.860)
If you enjoy this thing, subscribe on YouTube,
Lex Fridman (01:31.420)
review it with five stars on Apple Podcast,
David Eagleman (01:33.580)
follow on Spotify, support on Patreon,
Lex Fridman (01:36.240)
or connect with me on Twitter at Lex Friedman.
David Eagleman (01:40.100)
As usual, I'll do a few minutes of ads now
Lex Fridman (01:41.980)
and no ads in the middle.
David Eagleman (01:43.460)
I try to make these interesting,
Lex Fridman (01:45.100)
but I give you timestamps so you can skip.
Lex Fridman (01:47.940)
But please do check out the sponsors
Lex Fridman (01:49.740)
by clicking the links in the description.
David Eagleman (01:51.660)
It's the best way to support this podcast.
Lex Fridman (01:55.000)
This show is brought to you by Athletic Greens,
David Eagleman (01:58.300)
the all in one daily drink to support better health
Lex Fridman (02:01.140)
and peak performance.
David Eagleman (02:02.680)
Even with a balanced diet, it's difficult to cover
Lex Fridman (02:04.800)
all of your nutritional bases.
David Eagleman (02:07.020)
That's where Athletic Greens will help.
Lex Fridman (02:09.140)
Their daily drink is like nutritional insurance
David Eagleman (02:11.820)
for your body as delivered straight to your door.
Lex Fridman (02:15.380)
As you may know, I fast often, sometimes intermittent fasting
David Eagleman (02:18.580)
for 16 hours, sometimes 24 hours,
Lex Fridman (02:21.860)
dinner to dinner, sometimes more.
David Eagleman (02:24.500)
I break the fast with Athletic Greens.
Lex Fridman (02:26.900)
It's delicious, refreshing, just makes me feel good.
David Eagleman (02:30.980)
I think it's like 50 calories, less than a gram of sugar,
Lex Fridman (02:34.380)
but has a ton of nutrients to make sure my body
David Eagleman (02:36.460)
has what it needs despite what I'm eating.
Lex Fridman (02:40.200)
Go to athleticgreens.com slash lex
David Eagleman (02:43.100)
to claim a special offer of a free vitamin D3K2 for a year.
Lex Fridman (02:49.140)
If you listen to the Joe Rogan experience,
David Eagleman (02:51.420)
you might've listened to him rant about
Lex Fridman (02:53.340)
how awesome vitamin D is for your immune system.
Lex Fridman (02:56.140)
So there you have it.
Lex Fridman (02:57.580)
So click the athleticgreens.com slash lex
David Eagleman (03:00.940)
in the description to get the free stuff
Lex Fridman (03:03.420)
and to support this podcast.
David Eagleman (03:06.400)
This show is sponsored by BetterHelp, spelled H E L P, help.
Lex Fridman (03:11.460)
Check it out at betterhelp.com slash lex.
David Eagleman (03:14.200)
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Lex Fridman (03:15.860)
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David Eagleman (03:19.340)
It's not a crisis line, it's not self help,
Lex Fridman (03:21.820)
it's professional counseling done securely online.
David Eagleman (03:25.500)
I'm a bit from the David Goggins line of creatures
Lex Fridman (03:28.100)
and so have some demons to contend with,
David Eagleman (03:30.680)
usually on long runs or all nights full of self doubt.
Lex Fridman (03:34.940)
I think suffering is essential for creation,
Lex Fridman (03:37.880)
but you can suffer beautifully
Lex Fridman (03:39.540)
in a way that doesn't destroy you.
David Eagleman (03:41.660)
For most people, I think a good therapist can help on this.
Lex Fridman (03:45.300)
So it's at least worth a try.
David Eagleman (03:47.140)
Check out their reviews, they're good.
Lex Fridman (03:49.260)
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David Eagleman (03:52.660)
You can communicate by text anytime
Lex Fridman (03:54.760)
and schedule a weekly audio and video session.
David Eagleman (03:58.280)
Check it out at betterhelp.com slash lex.
Lex Fridman (04:02.420)
This show is presented by Cash App,
David Eagleman (04:04.620)
the number one finance app in the App Store.
Lex Fridman (04:06.660)
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David Eagleman (04:09.280)
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Lex Fridman (04:11.660)
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David Eagleman (04:14.540)
Since Cash App allows you to buy Bitcoin,
Lex Fridman (04:16.880)
let me mention that cryptocurrency
David Eagleman (04:18.480)
in the context of the history of money is fascinating.
Lex Fridman (04:21.860)
I recommend Ascent of Money as a great book on this history.
David Eagleman (04:25.420)
Davidson credits on ledgers started around 30,000 years ago
Lex Fridman (04:29.980)
and the first decentralized cryptocurrency
David Eagleman (04:32.260)
released just over 10 years ago.
Lex Fridman (04:34.220)
So given that history, cryptocurrency is still very much
David Eagleman (04:37.420)
in its early days of development,
Lex Fridman (04:39.340)
but it's still aiming to
Lex Fridman (04:40.700)
and just might redefine the nature of money.
Lex Fridman (04:44.880)
So again, if you get Cash App from the App Store or Google Play
Lex Fridman (04:47.900)
and use code lexpodcast, you get $10
Lex Fridman (04:51.020)
and Cash App will also donate $10 to FIRST,
David Eagleman (04:53.940)
an organization that is helping to advance robotics
Lex Fridman (04:56.980)
and STEM education for young people around the world.
Lex Fridman (05:00.420)
And now here's my conversation with David Eagleman.
Lex Fridman (05:05.780)
You have a new book coming out on the changing brain.
Lex Fridman (05:10.360)
Can you give a high level overview of the book?
Lex Fridman (05:13.260)
It's called Livewired by the way.
David Eagleman (05:14.620)
Yeah, the thing is we typically think about the brain
Lex Fridman (05:17.780)
in terms of the metaphors we already have,
David Eagleman (05:19.500)
like hardware and software, that's how we build
Lex Fridman (05:21.820)
all our stuff, but what's happening in the brain
David Eagleman (05:24.420)
is fundamentally so different.
Lex Fridman (05:26.860)
So I coined this new term liveware,
David Eagleman (05:29.060)
which is a system that's constantly reconfiguring itself
Lex Fridman (05:32.400)
physically as it learns and adapts to the world around it.
David Eagleman (05:37.100)
It's physically changing.
Lex Fridman (05:38.660)
So it's liveware meaning like hardware but changing.
David Eagleman (05:43.620)
Yeah, exactly.
Lex Fridman (05:44.560)
Well, the hardware and the software layers are blended
Lex Fridman (05:47.500)
and so typically engineers are praised for their efficiency
Lex Fridman (05:53.660)
and making something really clean and clear,
David Eagleman (05:55.220)
like, okay, here's the hardware layer,
Lex Fridman (05:56.380)
then I'm gonna run software on top of it.
Lex Fridman (05:57.780)
And there's all sorts of universality that you get out
Lex Fridman (06:00.300)
of a piece of hardware like that that's useful.
Lex Fridman (06:02.840)
But what the brain is doing is completely different.
Lex Fridman (06:05.240)
And I am so excited about where this is all going
David Eagleman (06:08.360)
because I feel like this is where our engineering will go.
Lex Fridman (06:13.360)
So currently we build all our devices a particular way,
Lex Fridman (06:17.140)
but I can't tear half the circuitry out of your cell phone
Lex Fridman (06:20.620)
and expect it to still function.
Lex Fridman (06:22.660)
But you can do that with the brain.
Lex Fridman (06:26.460)
So just as an example, kids who are under
David Eagleman (06:29.260)
about seven years old can get one half of their brain
Lex Fridman (06:32.060)
removed, it's called a hemispherectomy, and they're fine.
David Eagleman (06:35.700)
They have a slight limp on the other side of their body,
Lex Fridman (06:37.420)
but they can function just fine that way.
Lex Fridman (06:40.540)
And this is generally true.
Lex Fridman (06:42.380)
You know, sometimes children are born without a hemisphere
Lex Fridman (06:45.220)
and their visual system rewires so that everything is
Lex Fridman (06:48.580)
on the single remaining hemisphere.
Lex Fridman (06:52.140)
What thousands of cases like this teach us
Lex Fridman (06:55.420)
is that it's a very malleable system that is simply trying
David Eagleman (06:59.940)
to accomplish the tasks in front of it by rewiring itself
Lex Fridman (07:04.060)
with the available real estate.
Lex Fridman (07:06.100)
How much of that is a quirk or a feature of evolution?
Lex Fridman (07:09.860)
Like, how hard is it to engineer?
David Eagleman (07:11.860)
Because evolution took a lot of work.
Lex Fridman (07:14.620)
Trillions of organisms had to die for it to create
David Eagleman (07:18.500)
this thing we have in our skull.
Lex Fridman (07:21.580)
Like, because you said you kind of look forward to the idea
David Eagleman (07:24.540)
that we might be engineering our systems like this
Lex Fridman (07:27.940)
in the future, like creating liveware systems.
Lex Fridman (07:30.740)
How hard do you think is it to create systems like that?
Lex Fridman (07:33.180)
Great question.
David Eagleman (07:34.020)
It has proven itself to be a difficult challenge.
Lex Fridman (07:37.060)
What I mean by that is even though it's taken evolution
David Eagleman (07:40.260)
a really long time to get where it is now,
Lex Fridman (07:44.260)
all we have to do now is peek at the blueprints.
David Eagleman (07:47.620)
It's just three pounds, this organ,
Lex Fridman (07:49.620)
and we just figure out how to do it.
Lex Fridman (07:50.860)
But that's the part that I mean is a difficult challenge
Lex Fridman (07:52.760)
because there are tens of thousands of neuroscientists,
David Eagleman (07:57.100)
we're all poking and prodding and trying to figure this out,
Lex Fridman (07:59.260)
but it's an extremely complicated system.
Lex Fridman (08:00.700)
But it's only gonna be complicated until we figure out
Lex Fridman (08:03.300)
the general principles.
David Eagleman (08:05.380)
Exactly like if you had a magic camera
Lex Fridman (08:09.420)
you could look inside the nucleus of a cell
Lex Fridman (08:10.940)
and you'd see hundreds of thousands of things
Lex Fridman (08:13.220)
moving around or whatever,
Lex Fridman (08:14.180)
and then it takes Crick and Watson to say,
Lex Fridman (08:16.060)
oh, you know what, you're just trying to maintain
David Eagleman (08:17.380)
the order of the base pairs and all the rest is details.
Lex Fridman (08:20.300)
Then it simplifies it and we come to understand something.
David Eagleman (08:23.500)
That was my goal in LiveWire,
Lex Fridman (08:25.100)
which I've written over 10 years, by the way,
David Eagleman (08:26.900)
is to try to distill things down to the principles
Lex Fridman (08:29.920)
of what plastic systems are trying to accomplish.
Lex Fridman (08:34.180)
But to even just linger, you said,
Lex Fridman (08:36.260)
it's possible to be born with just one hemisphere
Lex Fridman (08:38.820)
and you still are able to function.
Lex Fridman (08:41.940)
First of all, just to pause on that,
David Eagleman (08:43.460)
I mean, that's kind of, that's amazing.
Lex Fridman (08:47.940)
I don't know if people quite,
David Eagleman (08:50.100)
I mean, you kind of hear things here and there.
Lex Fridman (08:51.740)
This is why I'm kind of, I'm really excited about your book
David Eagleman (08:54.300)
is I don't know if there's definitive sort of popular sources
Lex Fridman (09:00.020)
to think about this stuff.
David Eagleman (09:01.500)
I mean, there's a lot of, I think from my perspective,
Lex Fridman (09:05.060)
what I heard is there's like been debates over decades
David Eagleman (09:07.940)
about how much neuroplasticity there is in the brain
Lex Fridman (09:12.060)
and so on, and people have learned a lot of things
Lex Fridman (09:14.860)
and now it's converging towards people
Lex Fridman (09:16.900)
that are understanding there's much more plastic
David Eagleman (09:20.380)
than people realize.
Lex Fridman (09:21.440)
But just like linger on that topic,
Lex Fridman (09:23.900)
like how malleable is the hardware of the human brain?
Lex Fridman (09:28.380)
Maybe you said children at each stage of life.
David Eagleman (09:32.300)
Yeah, so here's the whole thing.
Lex Fridman (09:33.680)
I think part of the confusion about plasticity
David Eagleman (09:36.960)
has been that there are studies
Lex Fridman (09:38.220)
at all sorts of different ages,
Lex Fridman (09:40.340)
and then people might read that from a distance
Lex Fridman (09:42.400)
and they think, oh, well, Fred didn't recover
David Eagleman (09:45.360)
when half his brain was taken out
Lex Fridman (09:47.060)
and so clearly you're not plastic,
Lex Fridman (09:49.020)
but then you do it with a child and they are plastic.
Lex Fridman (09:52.180)
And so part of my goal here was to pull together
David Eagleman (09:56.420)
the tens of thousands of papers on this,
Lex Fridman (09:59.060)
both from clinical work and from all the way down
David Eagleman (10:02.460)
to the molecular and understand
Lex Fridman (10:04.140)
what are the principles here?
David Eagleman (10:04.980)
The principles are that plasticity diminishes,
Lex Fridman (10:08.260)
that's no surprise.
David Eagleman (10:09.540)
By the way, maybe I should just define plasticity.
Lex Fridman (10:11.540)
It's the ability of a system to mold into a new shape
Lex Fridman (10:14.840)
and then hold that shape.
Lex Fridman (10:16.260)
That's why we make things that we call plastic
David Eagleman (10:20.740)
because they are moldable and they can hold that new shape,
Lex Fridman (10:23.620)
like a plastic toy or something.
Lex Fridman (10:25.240)
And so maybe we'll use a lot of terms that are synonymous.
Lex Fridman (10:29.480)
So something is plastic, something is malleable,
David Eagleman (10:34.460)
changing, live wire, the name of the book is like synonyms.
Lex Fridman (10:38.740)
So I'll tell you, exactly right,
Lex Fridman (10:39.880)
but I'll tell you why I chose live wire
Lex Fridman (10:41.740)
instead of plasticity.
Lex Fridman (10:42.980)
So I use the term plasticity in the book, but sparingly,
Lex Fridman (10:47.140)
because that was a term coined by William James
David Eagleman (10:51.060)
over a hundred years ago and he was, of course,
Lex Fridman (10:53.980)
very impressed with plastic manufacturing
David Eagleman (10:55.820)
that you could mold something into shape
Lex Fridman (10:57.660)
and then it holds that.
Lex Fridman (10:58.540)
But that's not what's actually happening in the brain.
Lex Fridman (11:01.420)
It's constantly rewiring your entire life.
David Eagleman (11:03.700)
You never hit an end point.
Lex Fridman (11:06.380)
The whole point is for it to keep changing.
Lex Fridman (11:08.220)
So even in the few minutes of conversation
Lex Fridman (11:11.020)
that we've been having, your brain is changing,
David Eagleman (11:12.560)
my brain is changing.
Lex Fridman (11:15.460)
Next time I see your face, I will remember,
David Eagleman (11:18.020)
oh yeah, like that time Lex and I sat together
Lex Fridman (11:19.860)
and we did these things.
David Eagleman (11:21.420)
I wonder if your brain will have like a Lex thing
Lex Fridman (11:24.020)
going on for the next few months.
David Eagleman (11:25.300)
Like it'll stay there until you get rid of it
Lex Fridman (11:27.860)
because it was useful for now.
David Eagleman (11:29.340)
Yeah, no, I'll probably never get rid of it.
Lex Fridman (11:30.820)
Let's say for some circumstance,
David Eagleman (11:32.000)
you and I don't see each other for the next 35 years.
Lex Fridman (11:34.300)
When I run into you, I'll be like, oh yeah.
David Eagleman (11:36.220)
That looks familiar.
Lex Fridman (11:37.460)
Yeah, yeah, we sat down for a podcast
David Eagleman (11:40.420)
back when there were podcasts.
Lex Fridman (11:42.460)
Exactly.
David Eagleman (11:43.300)
Back when we lived outside virtual reality.
Lex Fridman (11:46.140)
Exactly.
Lex Fridman (11:47.020)
So you chose live wire to mold a plastic.
Lex Fridman (11:50.180)
Exactly, because plastic implies,
David Eagleman (11:52.820)
I mean, it's the term that's used in the field
Lex Fridman (11:54.380)
and so that's why we need to use it still for a while.
Lex Fridman (11:57.780)
But yeah, it implies something gets molded into shape
Lex Fridman (11:59.620)
and then holds that shape forever.
Lex Fridman (12:00.780)
But in fact, the whole system is completely changing.
Lex Fridman (12:03.220)
Then back to how malleable is the human brain
David Eagleman (12:07.700)
at each stage of life.
Lex Fridman (12:08.820)
So what, just at a high level, is it malleable?
Lex Fridman (12:13.940)
So yes, and plasticity diminishes.
Lex Fridman (12:17.220)
But one of the things that I felt like
David Eagleman (12:19.900)
I was able to put together for myself
Lex Fridman (12:21.740)
after reading thousands of papers on this issue
David Eagleman (12:23.900)
is that different parts of the brain
Lex Fridman (12:26.880)
have different plasticity windows.
Lex Fridman (12:30.820)
So for example, with the visual cortex,
Lex Fridman (12:33.140)
that cements itself into place pretty quickly
David Eagleman (12:35.940)
over the course of a few years.
Lex Fridman (12:37.740)
And I argue that's because of the stability of the data.
David Eagleman (12:41.020)
In other words, what you're getting in from the world,
Lex Fridman (12:43.940)
you've got a certain number of angles, colors, shapes.
David Eagleman (12:47.220)
It's essentially the world is visually stable.
Lex Fridman (12:49.940)
So that hardens around that data.
David Eagleman (12:52.420)
As opposed to, let's say, the somatosensory cortex,
Lex Fridman (12:55.100)
which is the part that's taking information
David Eagleman (12:56.540)
from your body, or the motor cortex right next to it,
Lex Fridman (12:58.580)
which is what drives your body.
David Eagleman (13:00.380)
The fact is, bodies are always changing.
Lex Fridman (13:01.880)
You get taller over time, you get fatter, thinner,
David Eagleman (13:05.100)
over time, you might break a leg
Lex Fridman (13:06.980)
and have to limp for a while, stuff like that.
Lex Fridman (13:08.560)
So because the data there is always changing,
Lex Fridman (13:11.740)
by the way, you might get on a bicycle,
David Eagleman (13:12.900)
you might get on a surfboard, things like that.
Lex Fridman (13:15.660)
Because the data is always changing,
David Eagleman (13:16.780)
that stays more malleable.
Lex Fridman (13:19.260)
And when you look through the brain,
David Eagleman (13:20.860)
you find that it appears to be this,
Lex Fridman (13:23.940)
how stable the data is determines how fast
David Eagleman (13:26.660)
something hardens into place.
Lex Fridman (13:28.060)
But the point is, different parts of the brain
David Eagleman (13:30.000)
harden into place at different times.
Lex Fridman (13:31.940)
Do you think it's possible that,
David Eagleman (13:35.020)
depending on how much data you get on different sensors,
Lex Fridman (13:38.700)
that it stays more malleable longer?
Lex Fridman (13:41.480)
So like, if you look at different cultures
Lex Fridman (13:44.220)
that experience, like if you keep your eyes closed,
David Eagleman (13:47.580)
or maybe you're blind, I don't know,
Lex Fridman (13:48.860)
but let's say you keep your eyes closed
David Eagleman (13:51.180)
for your entire life, then the visual cortex
Lex Fridman (13:55.820)
might be much less malleable.
David Eagleman (13:58.660)
The reason I bring that up is like,
Lex Fridman (14:01.300)
well maybe we'll talk about brain computer interfaces
David Eagleman (14:03.340)
a little bit down the line, but is this,
Lex Fridman (14:08.500)
is the malleability a genetic thing,
Lex Fridman (14:11.300)
or is it more about the data, like you said, that comes in?
Lex Fridman (14:14.380)
Ah, so the malleability itself is a genetic thing.
David Eagleman (14:17.980)
The big trick that Mother Nature discovered with humans
Lex Fridman (14:20.840)
is make a system that's really flexible,
David Eagleman (14:24.220)
as opposed to most other creatures to different degrees.
Lex Fridman (14:28.100)
So if you take an alligator, it's born,
David Eagleman (14:31.220)
its brain does the same thing every generation.
Lex Fridman (14:34.180)
If you compare an alligator 100,000 years ago
David Eagleman (14:36.220)
to an alligator now, they're essentially the same.
Lex Fridman (14:39.660)
We, on the other hand, as humans,
David Eagleman (14:41.360)
drop into a world with a half baked brain,
Lex Fridman (14:44.220)
and what we require is to absorb the culture around us,
Lex Fridman (14:48.180)
and the language, and the beliefs, and the customs,
Lex Fridman (14:50.300)
and so on, that's what Mother Nature has done with us,
Lex Fridman (14:55.060)
and it's been a tremendously successful trick
Lex Fridman (14:57.340)
we've taken over the whole planet as a result of this.
Lex Fridman (15:00.120)
So that's an interesting point,
Lex Fridman (15:01.220)
I mean, just to link on it, that,
David Eagleman (15:03.140)
I mean, this is a nice feature,
Lex Fridman (15:05.400)
like if you were to design a thing
David Eagleman (15:07.060)
to survive in this world, do you put it at age zero
Lex Fridman (15:11.780)
already equipped to deal with the world
David Eagleman (15:14.580)
in a hard coded way, or do you put it,
Lex Fridman (15:17.740)
do you make it malleable and just throw it in,
David Eagleman (15:19.580)
take the risk that you're maybe going to die,
Lex Fridman (15:23.380)
but you're going to learn a lot in the process,
Lex Fridman (15:25.220)
and if you don't die, you'll learn a hell of a lot
Lex Fridman (15:27.620)
to be able to survive in the environment.
Lex Fridman (15:29.300)
So this is the experiment that Mother Nature ran,
Lex Fridman (15:31.340)
and it turns out that, for better or worse, we've won.
David Eagleman (15:34.980)
I mean, yeah, we put other animals in the zoos,
Lex Fridman (15:37.500)
and we, yeah, that's right.
David Eagleman (15:38.620)
AI might do better.
Lex Fridman (15:39.580)
Okay, fair enough, that's true.
Lex Fridman (15:41.320)
And maybe what the trick Mother Nature did
Lex Fridman (15:43.620)
is just the stepping stone to AI, but.
Lex Fridman (15:46.660)
So that's a beautiful feature of the human brain,
Lex Fridman (15:50.220)
that it's malleable, but let's,
Lex Fridman (15:52.420)
on the topic of Mother Nature, what do we start with?
Lex Fridman (15:56.380)
Like, how blank is the slate?
David Eagleman (15:58.420)
Ah, so it's not actually a blank slate.
Lex Fridman (16:01.060)
What it's, it's terrific engineering that's set up in there,
Lex Fridman (16:05.340)
but much of that engineering has to do with,
Lex Fridman (16:07.700)
okay, just make sure that things get to the right place.
David Eagleman (16:10.100)
For example, like the fibers from the eyes
Lex Fridman (16:12.260)
getting to the visual cortex,
David Eagleman (16:13.840)
or all this very complicated machinery in the ear
Lex Fridman (16:15.640)
getting to the auditory cortex, and so on.
Lex Fridman (16:17.700)
So things, first of all, there's that.
Lex Fridman (16:19.860)
And then what we also come equipped with
David Eagleman (16:21.520)
is the ability to absorb language
Lex Fridman (16:24.580)
and culture and beliefs, and so on.
Lex Fridman (16:27.060)
So you're already set up for that.
Lex Fridman (16:28.600)
So no matter what you're exposed to,
David Eagleman (16:30.020)
you will absorb some sort of language.
Lex Fridman (16:32.940)
That's the trick, is how do you engineer something
David Eagleman (16:34.980)
just enough that it's then a sponge
Lex Fridman (16:37.300)
that's ready to take in and fill in the blanks?
Lex Fridman (16:40.060)
How much of the malleability is hardware?
Lex Fridman (16:42.460)
How much is software?
Lex Fridman (16:43.300)
Is that useful at all in the brain?
Lex Fridman (16:45.100)
So what are we talking about?
Lex Fridman (16:46.980)
So there's neurons, there's synapses,
Lex Fridman (16:52.100)
and all kinds of different synapses,
Lex Fridman (16:54.060)
and there's chemical communication,
Lex Fridman (16:55.900)
like electrical signals,
Lex Fridman (16:57.060)
and there's chemical communication from the synapses.
Lex Fridman (17:04.020)
I would say the software would be the timing
Lex Fridman (17:09.020)
and the nature of the electrical signals, I guess,
Lex Fridman (17:11.540)
and the hardware would be the actual synapses.
Lex Fridman (17:14.140)
So here's the thing, this is why I really, if we can,
Lex Fridman (17:16.860)
I wanna get away from the hardware and software metaphor
David Eagleman (17:19.580)
because what happens is,
Lex Fridman (17:21.900)
as activity passes through the system, it changes things.
David Eagleman (17:25.100)
Now, the thing that computer engineers
Lex Fridman (17:27.880)
are really used to thinking about is synapses,
David Eagleman (17:30.300)
where two neurons connect.
Lex Fridman (17:31.700)
Of course, each neuron connects with 10,000 of its neighbors,
Lex Fridman (17:33.700)
but at a point where they connect,
Lex Fridman (17:36.860)
what we're all used to thinking about
David Eagleman (17:37.700)
is the changing of the strength of that connection,
Lex Fridman (17:40.820)
the synaptic weight.
Lex Fridman (17:42.240)
But in fact, everything is changing.
Lex Fridman (17:44.560)
The receptor distribution inside that neuron
Lex Fridman (17:47.440)
so that you're more or less sensitive
Lex Fridman (17:49.600)
to the neurotransmitter,
David Eagleman (17:50.760)
then the structure of the neuron itself
Lex Fridman (17:53.440)
and what's happening there,
David Eagleman (17:54.440)
all the way down to biochemical cascades inside the cell,
Lex Fridman (17:57.360)
all the way down to the nucleus,
Lex Fridman (17:59.200)
and for example, the epigenome,
Lex Fridman (18:00.920)
which is these little proteins that are attached to the DNA
David Eagleman (18:05.600)
that cause conformational changes,
Lex Fridman (18:07.680)
that cause more genes to be expressed or repressed.
David Eagleman (18:11.200)
All of these things are plastic.
Lex Fridman (18:13.640)
The reason that most people only talk
David Eagleman (18:15.960)
about the synaptic weights
Lex Fridman (18:17.560)
is because that's really all we can measure well.
Lex Fridman (18:20.560)
And all this other stuff is really, really hard to see
Lex Fridman (18:22.600)
with our current technology.
Lex Fridman (18:23.600)
So essentially, that just gets ignored.
Lex Fridman (18:25.840)
But in fact, the system is plastic
David Eagleman (18:27.720)
at all these different levels.
Lex Fridman (18:28.880)
And my way of thinking about this
David Eagleman (18:33.640)
is an analogy to pace layers.
Lex Fridman (18:37.560)
So pace layers is a concept that Stewart Brand
David Eagleman (18:40.080)
suggested about how to think about cities.
Lex Fridman (18:43.000)
So you have fashion, which changes rapidly in cities.
David Eagleman (18:46.520)
You have governance, which changes more slowly.
Lex Fridman (18:52.040)
You have the structure, the buildings of a city,
David Eagleman (18:54.440)
which changes more slowly, all the way down to nature.
Lex Fridman (18:57.760)
You've got all these different layers of things
David Eagleman (18:59.560)
that are changing at different paces, at different speeds.
Lex Fridman (19:02.680)
I've taken that idea and mapped it onto the brain,
David Eagleman (19:05.680)
which is to say you have some biochemical cascades
Lex Fridman (19:08.480)
that are just changing really rapidly
David Eagleman (19:10.120)
when something happens, all the way down to things
Lex Fridman (19:11.840)
that are more and more cemented in there.
Lex Fridman (19:14.520)
And this actually allows us to understand a lot
Lex Fridman (19:19.320)
about particular kinds of things that happen.
David Eagleman (19:20.920)
For example, one of the oldest,
Lex Fridman (19:22.160)
probably the oldest rule in neurology
David Eagleman (19:24.680)
is called Ribot's Law, which is that older memories
Lex Fridman (19:27.520)
are more stable than newer memories.
Lex Fridman (19:29.600)
So when you get old and demented,
Lex Fridman (19:32.640)
you'll be able to remember things from your young life.
David Eagleman (19:36.160)
Maybe you'll remember this podcast,
Lex Fridman (19:37.400)
but you won't remember what you did
David Eagleman (19:39.320)
a month ago or a year ago.
Lex Fridman (19:41.520)
And this is a very weird structure, right?
David Eagleman (19:43.440)
No other system works this way,
Lex Fridman (19:44.640)
where older memories are more stable than newer memories.
Lex Fridman (19:48.320)
But it's because through time,
Lex Fridman (19:52.000)
things get more and more cemented
David Eagleman (19:53.520)
into deeper layers of the system.
Lex Fridman (19:56.280)
And so this is, I think, the way we have to think
David Eagleman (19:59.880)
about the brain, not as, okay, you've got neurons,
Lex Fridman (1:00:02.180)
and psychiatrists and so on to help things change that way.
Lex Fridman (1:00:05.740)
So that's how psychiatrists sort of helped us.
Lex Fridman (1:00:07.220)
But more importantly, the role that psychiatrists have played
David Eagleman (1:00:10.500)
is that there's this sort of naive assumption
Lex Fridman (1:00:13.940)
that we all come to the table with,
David Eagleman (1:00:15.140)
which is that everyone is fundamentally just like us.
Lex Fridman (1:00:18.340)
And when you're a kid, you believe this entirely,
Lex Fridman (1:00:21.140)
but as you get older and you start realizing,
Lex Fridman (1:00:22.780)
okay, there's something called schizophrenia
Lex Fridman (1:00:25.260)
and that's a real thing.
Lex Fridman (1:00:26.300)
And to be inside that person's head is totally different
David Eagleman (1:00:29.100)
than what it is to be inside my head or their psychopathy.
Lex Fridman (1:00:32.140)
And to be inside the psychopath's head,
David Eagleman (1:00:34.900)
he doesn't care about other people.
Lex Fridman (1:00:36.300)
He doesn't care about hurting other people.
David Eagleman (1:00:37.460)
He's just doing what he needs to do to get what he needs.
Lex Fridman (1:00:40.900)
That's a different head.
David Eagleman (1:00:42.100)
There's a million different things going on
Lex Fridman (1:00:45.540)
and it is different to be inside those heads.
David Eagleman (1:00:48.860)
This is where the field of psychiatry comes in.
Lex Fridman (1:00:51.300)
Now, I think it's an interesting question
David Eagleman (1:00:53.380)
about the degree to which neuroscience is leaking into
Lex Fridman (1:00:57.020)
and taking over psychiatry
Lex Fridman (1:00:58.540)
and what the landscape will look like 50 years from now.
Lex Fridman (1:01:00.860)
It may be that psychiatry as a profession changes a lot
David Eagleman (1:01:05.860)
or maybe goes away entirely,
Lex Fridman (1:01:07.220)
and neuroscience will essentially be able
David Eagleman (1:01:09.220)
to take over some of these functions,
Lex Fridman (1:01:10.420)
but it has been extremely useful to understand
David Eagleman (1:01:14.220)
the differences between how people behave and why
Lex Fridman (1:01:18.220)
and what you can tell about what's going on
David Eagleman (1:01:19.580)
inside their brain just based on observation
Lex Fridman (1:01:22.380)
of their behavior.
David Eagleman (1:01:25.220)
This might be years ago, but I'm not sure.
Lex Fridman (1:01:28.340)
There's an Atlantic article you've written
David Eagleman (1:01:32.300)
about moving away from a distinction
Lex Fridman (1:01:34.460)
between neurological disorders,
David Eagleman (1:01:36.900)
quote unquote, brain problems,
Lex Fridman (1:01:39.100)
and psychiatric disorders or quote unquote, mind problems.
Lex Fridman (1:01:43.820)
So on that topic, how do you think about this gray area?
Lex Fridman (1:01:47.220)
Yeah, this is exactly the evolution that things are going
David Eagleman (1:01:50.580)
is there was psychiatry and then there were guys and gals
Lex Fridman (1:01:54.140)
in labs poking cells and so on.
David Eagleman (1:01:55.940)
Those were the neuroscientists.
Lex Fridman (1:01:57.020)
But yeah, I think these are moving together
David Eagleman (1:01:58.860)
for exactly the reason you just cited.
Lex Fridman (1:02:00.580)
And where this matters a lot,
David Eagleman (1:02:02.540)
the Atlantic article that I wrote
Lex Fridman (1:02:04.660)
was called The Brain on Trial,
David Eagleman (1:02:06.780)
where this matters a lot is the legal system
Lex Fridman (1:02:09.580)
because the way we run our legal system now,
Lex Fridman (1:02:12.740)
and this is true everywhere in the world,
Lex Fridman (1:02:13.900)
is someone shows up in front of the judge's bench,
David Eagleman (1:02:17.420)
or let's say there's five people
Lex Fridman (1:02:18.540)
in front of the judge's bench,
Lex Fridman (1:02:20.100)
and they've all committed the same crime.
Lex Fridman (1:02:21.380)
What we do, because we feel like, hey, this is fair,
David Eagleman (1:02:23.820)
is we say, all right, you're gonna get the same sentence.
Lex Fridman (1:02:25.580)
You'll all get three years in prison or whatever it is.
Lex Fridman (1:02:27.780)
But in fact, brains can be so different.
Lex Fridman (1:02:29.780)
This guy's got schizophrenia, this guy's a psychopath,
David Eagleman (1:02:31.580)
this guy's tweaked down on drugs, and so on and so on,
Lex Fridman (1:02:33.620)
that it actually doesn't make sense to keep doing that.
Lex Fridman (1:02:37.620)
And what we do in this country more than anywhere
Lex Fridman (1:02:41.220)
in the world is we imagine that incarceration
David Eagleman (1:02:44.100)
is a one size fits all solution.
Lex Fridman (1:02:45.500)
And you may know we have the,
David Eagleman (1:02:47.300)
America has the highest incarceration rate
Lex Fridman (1:02:49.140)
in the whole world in terms of the percentage
David Eagleman (1:02:50.860)
of our population we put behind bars.
Lex Fridman (1:02:52.860)
So there's a much more refined thing we can do
David Eagleman (1:02:56.580)
as neuroscience comes in and changes,
Lex Fridman (1:02:59.180)
and has the opportunity to change the legal system.
David Eagleman (1:03:01.900)
Which is to say, this doesn't let anybody off the hook.
Lex Fridman (1:03:03.980)
It doesn't say, oh, it's not your fault, and so on.
Lex Fridman (1:03:06.100)
But what it does is it changes the equation
Lex Fridman (1:03:09.380)
so it's not about, hey, how blameworthy are you?
Lex Fridman (1:03:12.940)
But instead is about, hey, what do we do from here?
Lex Fridman (1:03:15.220)
What's the best thing to do from here?
Lex Fridman (1:03:16.260)
So if you take somebody with schizophrenia
Lex Fridman (1:03:17.740)
and you have them break rocks in the hot summer sun
David Eagleman (1:03:21.100)
in a chain gang, that doesn't help their schizophrenia.
Lex Fridman (1:03:24.500)
That doesn't fix the problem.
David Eagleman (1:03:25.900)
If you take somebody with a drug addiction
Lex Fridman (1:03:28.020)
who's in jail for being caught with two ounces
David Eagleman (1:03:30.660)
of some illegal substance, and you put them in prison,
Lex Fridman (1:03:34.500)
it doesn't actually fix the addiction.
David Eagleman (1:03:36.020)
It doesn't help anything.
Lex Fridman (1:03:38.580)
Happily, what neuroscience and psychiatry
David Eagleman (1:03:40.580)
bring to the table is lots of really useful things
Lex Fridman (1:03:43.260)
you can do with schizophrenia, with drug addiction,
David Eagleman (1:03:45.620)
things like this.
Lex Fridman (1:03:46.940)
And that's why, so I don't know if you guys
David Eagleman (1:03:49.140)
better run a national law and profit
Lex Fridman (1:03:50.540)
called the Center for Science and Law.
Lex Fridman (1:03:52.140)
And it's all about this intersection
Lex Fridman (1:03:53.660)
of neuroscience and psychiatry.
David Eagleman (1:03:55.140)
It's the intersection of neuroscience and legal system.
Lex Fridman (1:03:57.340)
And we're trying to implement changes
David Eagleman (1:03:59.060)
in every county, in every state.
Lex Fridman (1:04:02.540)
I'll just, without going down that rabbit hole,
David Eagleman (1:04:04.700)
I'll just say one of the very simplest things to do
Lex Fridman (1:04:07.540)
is to set up specialized court systems
David Eagleman (1:04:09.140)
where you have a mental health court
Lex Fridman (1:04:12.660)
that has judges and juries with expertise
David Eagleman (1:04:14.980)
in mental illness.
Lex Fridman (1:04:15.820)
Because if you go, by the way, to a regular court
Lex Fridman (1:04:17.780)
and the person says, or the defense lawyer says,
Lex Fridman (1:04:21.220)
this person has schizophrenia, most of the jury will say,
David Eagleman (1:04:24.300)
man, I call bullshit on that.
Lex Fridman (1:04:25.780)
Why?
David Eagleman (1:04:26.620)
Because they don't know about schizophrenia.
Lex Fridman (1:04:28.660)
They don't know what it's about.
Lex Fridman (1:04:30.780)
And it turns out people who know about schizophrenia
Lex Fridman (1:04:34.500)
feel very differently as a juror
David Eagleman (1:04:35.900)
than someone who happens not to know anybody with
Lex Fridman (1:04:37.740)
schizophrenia, they think it's an excuse.
Lex Fridman (1:04:39.540)
So you have judges and juries with expertise
Lex Fridman (1:04:42.380)
in mental illness and they know the rehabilitative
David Eagleman (1:04:44.180)
strategies that are available.
Lex Fridman (1:04:45.780)
That's one thing.
David Eagleman (1:04:46.620)
Having a drug court where you have judges and juries
Lex Fridman (1:04:48.500)
with expertise in rehabilitative strategies
Lex Fridman (1:04:50.540)
and what can be done and so on.
Lex Fridman (1:04:51.860)
A specialized prostitution court and so on.
David Eagleman (1:04:54.140)
All these different things.
Lex Fridman (1:04:55.700)
By the way, this is very easy for counties
David Eagleman (1:04:57.620)
to implement this sort of thing.
Lex Fridman (1:04:59.260)
And this is, I think, where this matters
David Eagleman (1:05:01.820)
to get neuroscience into public policy.
Lex Fridman (1:05:05.020)
What's the process of injecting expertise into this?
David Eagleman (1:05:08.620)
Yeah, I'll tell you exactly what it is.
Lex Fridman (1:05:10.540)
A county needs to run out of money first.
David Eagleman (1:05:12.420)
I've seen this happen over and over.
Lex Fridman (1:05:14.460)
So what happens is a county has a completely full jail
Lex Fridman (1:05:17.220)
and they say, you know what?
Lex Fridman (1:05:18.540)
We need to build another jail.
Lex Fridman (1:05:19.780)
And then they realize, God, we don't have any money.
Lex Fridman (1:05:21.220)
We can't afford this.
David Eagleman (1:05:22.260)
We've got too many people in jail.
Lex Fridman (1:05:23.260)
And that's when they turn to,
David Eagleman (1:05:25.500)
God, we need something smarter.
Lex Fridman (1:05:26.700)
And that's when they set up specialized court systems.
David Eagleman (1:05:28.700)
Yeah.
Lex Fridman (1:05:30.940)
We're all function best when our back is against the wall.
Lex Fridman (1:05:34.300)
And that's what COVID is good for.
Lex Fridman (1:05:36.180)
It's because we've all had our routines
Lex Fridman (1:05:38.380)
and we are optimized for the things we do.
Lex Fridman (1:05:40.820)
And suddenly our backs are against the wall, all of us.
David Eagleman (1:05:43.020)
Yeah, it's really, I mean,
Lex Fridman (1:05:44.620)
one of the exciting things about COVID.
David Eagleman (1:05:47.580)
I mean, I'm a big believer in the possibility
Lex Fridman (1:05:51.940)
of what government can do for the people.
Lex Fridman (1:05:56.140)
And when it becomes too big of a bureaucracy,
Lex Fridman (1:05:59.180)
it starts functioning poorly, it starts wasting money.
David Eagleman (1:06:02.580)
It's nice to, I mean, COVID reveals that nicely.
Lex Fridman (1:06:07.140)
And lessons to be learned about who gets elected
Lex Fridman (1:06:11.700)
and who goes into government.
Lex Fridman (1:06:14.180)
Hopefully this, hopefully this inspires talented
Lex Fridman (1:06:18.860)
and young people to go into government
Lex Fridman (1:06:20.780)
to revolutionize different aspects of it.
David Eagleman (1:06:23.580)
Yeah, so that's the positive silver lining of COVID.
Lex Fridman (1:06:28.660)
I mean, I thought it'd be fun to ask you,
David Eagleman (1:06:30.740)
I don't know if you're paying attention
Lex Fridman (1:06:31.900)
to the machine learning world and GPT3.
Lex Fridman (1:06:37.100)
So the GPT3 is this language model,
Lex Fridman (1:06:39.260)
this neural network that's able to,
David Eagleman (1:06:41.180)
it has 175 billion parameters.
Lex Fridman (1:06:44.860)
So it's very large and it's trained
David Eagleman (1:06:47.820)
in an unsupervised way on the internet.
Lex Fridman (1:06:51.540)
It just reads a lot of unstructured texts
Lex Fridman (1:06:55.780)
and it's able to generate some pretty impressive things.
Lex Fridman (1:06:59.420)
The human brain compared to that has about,
David Eagleman (1:07:02.020)
you know, a thousand times more synapses.
Lex Fridman (1:07:05.980)
People get so upset when machine learning people
David Eagleman (1:07:10.060)
compare the brain and we know synapses are different.
Lex Fridman (1:07:14.380)
It was very different, very different.
Lex Fridman (1:07:16.860)
But like, do you, what do you think about GPT3?
Lex Fridman (1:07:20.580)
Here's what I think, here's what I think, a few things.
Lex Fridman (1:07:22.660)
What GPT3 is doing is extremely impressive,
Lex Fridman (1:07:25.580)
but it's very different from what the brain does.
Lex Fridman (1:07:27.620)
So it's a good impersonator, but just as one example,
Lex Fridman (1:07:33.060)
everybody takes a passage that GPT3 has written
Lex Fridman (1:07:37.500)
and they say, wow, look at this, and it's pretty good, right?
Lex Fridman (1:07:40.420)
But it's already gone through a filtering process
David Eagleman (1:07:42.420)
of humans looking at it and saying,
Lex Fridman (1:07:43.740)
okay, well that's crap, that's crap, okay.
David Eagleman (1:07:45.340)
Oh, here's a sentence that's pretty cool.
Lex Fridman (1:07:47.500)
Now here's the thing, human creativity
David Eagleman (1:07:49.940)
is about absorbing everything around it
Lex Fridman (1:07:51.740)
and remixing that and coming up with stuff.
Lex Fridman (1:07:53.420)
So in that sense, we're sort of like GPT3,
Lex Fridman (1:07:55.420)
you know, we're remixing what we've gotten in before.
Lex Fridman (1:07:59.700)
But we also know, we also have very good models
Lex Fridman (1:08:03.140)
of what it is to be another human.
Lex Fridman (1:08:04.780)
And so, you know, I don't know if you speak French
Lex Fridman (1:08:08.220)
or something, but I'm not gonna start speaking in French
Lex Fridman (1:08:09.820)
because then you'll say, wait, what are you doing?
Lex Fridman (1:08:11.500)
I don't understand it.
David Eagleman (1:08:12.420)
Instead, everything coming out of my mouth
Lex Fridman (1:08:14.700)
is meant for your ears.
David Eagleman (1:08:16.260)
I know what you'll understand.
Lex Fridman (1:08:18.140)
I know the vocabulary that you know and don't know.
David Eagleman (1:08:20.140)
I know what parts you care about.
Lex Fridman (1:08:23.740)
That's a huge part of it.
Lex Fridman (1:08:25.140)
And so of all the possible sentences I could say,
Lex Fridman (1:08:29.420)
I'm navigating this thin bandwidth
Lex Fridman (1:08:31.700)
so that it's something useful for our conversation.
Lex Fridman (1:08:34.540)
Yeah, in real time, but also throughout your life.
David Eagleman (1:08:36.740)
I mean, we're co evolving together.
Lex Fridman (1:08:39.740)
We're learning how to communicate together.
David Eagleman (1:08:42.980)
Exactly, but this is what GPT3 does not do.
Lex Fridman (1:08:46.220)
All it's doing is saying, okay,
David Eagleman (1:08:47.300)
I'm gonna take all these senses and remix stuff
Lex Fridman (1:08:49.500)
and pop some stuff out.
Lex Fridman (1:08:51.100)
But it doesn't know how to make it
Lex Fridman (1:08:52.540)
so that you, Lex, will feel like,
David Eagleman (1:08:54.340)
oh yeah, that's exactly what I needed to hear.
Lex Fridman (1:08:56.820)
That's the next sentence that I needed to know about
David Eagleman (1:08:59.700)
for something.
Lex Fridman (1:09:00.540)
Well, of course, it could be,
David Eagleman (1:09:02.860)
all the impressive results we see.
Lex Fridman (1:09:04.220)
The question is, if you raise the number of parameters,
David Eagleman (1:09:07.700)
whether it's going to be after some...
Lex Fridman (1:09:09.980)
It will not be.
David Eagleman (1:09:11.020)
It will not be.
Lex Fridman (1:09:11.860)
Raising more parameters won't...
David Eagleman (1:09:14.060)
Here's the thing.
Lex Fridman (1:09:15.180)
It's not that I don't think neural networks
David Eagleman (1:09:16.740)
can't be like the human brain,
Lex Fridman (1:09:18.100)
because I suspect they will be at some point, 50 years.
Lex Fridman (1:09:20.420)
Who knows?
Lex Fridman (1:09:21.260)
But what we are missing in artificial neural networks
David Eagleman (1:09:26.020)
is we've got this basic structure where you've got units
Lex Fridman (1:09:29.300)
and you've got synapses that are connected.
Lex Fridman (1:09:32.420)
And that's great.
Lex Fridman (1:09:33.380)
And it's done incredibly mind blowing, impressive things,
Lex Fridman (1:09:35.820)
but it's not doing the same algorithms as the human brain.
Lex Fridman (1:09:40.260)
So when I look at my children, as little kids,
David Eagleman (1:09:43.620)
as infants, they can do things that no GPT3 can do.
Lex Fridman (1:09:47.660)
They can navigate a complex room.
David Eagleman (1:09:50.620)
They can navigate social conversation with an adult.
Lex Fridman (1:09:54.900)
They can lie.
David Eagleman (1:09:55.740)
They can do a million things.
Lex Fridman (1:09:58.180)
They are active thinkers in our world and doing things.
Lex Fridman (1:10:03.180)
And this, of course, I mean, look,
Lex Fridman (1:10:04.580)
we totally agree on how incredibly awesome
David Eagleman (1:10:07.820)
artificial neural networks are right now,
Lex Fridman (1:10:09.060)
but we also know the things that they can't do well,
David Eagleman (1:10:12.780)
like be generally intelligent,
Lex Fridman (1:10:14.900)
do all these different things.
David Eagleman (1:10:16.380)
The reason about the world,
Lex Fridman (1:10:17.620)
efficiently learn, efficiently adapt.
David Eagleman (1:10:19.900)
Exactly.
Lex Fridman (1:10:20.740)
But it's still the rate of improvement.
David Eagleman (1:10:23.540)
It's, to me, it's possible that we'll be surprised.
Lex Fridman (1:10:28.100)
I agree, possible we'll be surprised.
Lex Fridman (1:10:30.020)
But what I would assert,
Lex Fridman (1:10:33.060)
and I'm glad I'm getting to say this on your podcast,
David Eagleman (1:10:36.180)
we can look back at this in two years and 10 years,
Lex Fridman (1:10:38.340)
is that we've got to be much more sophisticated
David Eagleman (1:10:41.580)
than units and synapses between them.
Lex Fridman (1:10:44.740)
Let me give you an example,
Lex Fridman (1:10:45.660)
and this is something I talk about in LiveWired,
Lex Fridman (1:10:47.220)
is despite the amazing impressiveness,
David Eagleman (1:10:50.540)
mind blowing impressiveness,
Lex Fridman (1:10:52.340)
computers don't have some basic things,
David Eagleman (1:10:54.580)
artificial neural networks don't have some basic things
Lex Fridman (1:10:56.580)
that we like caring about relevance, for example.
Lex Fridman (1:10:59.460)
So as humans, we are confronted
Lex Fridman (1:11:02.380)
with tons of data all the time,
Lex Fridman (1:11:03.900)
and we only encode particular things
Lex Fridman (1:11:05.620)
that are relevant to us.
David Eagleman (1:11:07.740)
We have this very deep sense of relevance
Lex Fridman (1:11:10.060)
that I mentioned earlier is based on survival
David Eagleman (1:11:11.900)
at the most basic level,
Lex Fridman (1:11:12.740)
but then all the things about my life and your life,
David Eagleman (1:11:16.420)
what's relevant to you, that we encode.
Lex Fridman (1:11:19.660)
This is very useful.
David Eagleman (1:11:20.500)
Computers at the moment don't have that.
Lex Fridman (1:11:21.980)
They don't even have a yen to survive
Lex Fridman (1:11:24.020)
and things like that.
Lex Fridman (1:11:24.860)
So we filled out a bunch of the junk we don't need.
David Eagleman (1:11:27.500)
We're really good at efficiently
Lex Fridman (1:11:29.900)
zooming in on things we need.
David Eagleman (1:11:32.580)
Again, could be argued, you know,
Lex Fridman (1:11:34.500)
let me put on my Freud hat.
David Eagleman (1:11:35.940)
Maybe it's, I mean, that's our conscious mind.
Lex Fridman (1:11:42.540)
There's no reason that neural networks
David Eagleman (1:11:44.060)
aren't doing the same kind of filtration.
Lex Fridman (1:11:46.140)
I mean, in the sense with GPT3 is doing,
Lex Fridman (1:11:48.500)
so there's a priming step.
Lex Fridman (1:11:50.820)
It's doing an essential kind of filtration
David Eagleman (1:11:53.420)
when you ask it to generate tweets from,
Lex Fridman (1:11:58.100)
I don't know, from an Elon Musk or something like that.
David Eagleman (1:12:00.780)
It's doing a filtration of it's throwing away
Lex Fridman (1:12:04.060)
all the parameters it doesn't need for this task.
Lex Fridman (1:12:06.900)
And it's figuring out how to do that successfully.
Lex Fridman (1:12:09.700)
And then ultimately it's not doing a very good job
David Eagleman (1:12:12.100)
right now, but it's doing a lot better job
Lex Fridman (1:12:14.340)
than we expected.
Lex Fridman (1:12:15.460)
But it won't ever do a really good job.
Lex Fridman (1:12:17.500)
And I'll tell you why.
David Eagleman (1:12:18.340)
I mean, so let's say we say,
Lex Fridman (1:12:20.100)
hey, produce an Elon Musk tweet.
Lex Fridman (1:12:21.660)
And we see like, oh, wow, it produced these three.
Lex Fridman (1:12:23.980)
That's great.
Lex Fridman (1:12:24.820)
But again, we're not seeing the 3000 produced
Lex Fridman (1:12:27.500)
that didn't really make any sense.
David Eagleman (1:12:28.900)
It's because it has no idea what it is like to be a human.
Lex Fridman (1:12:32.700)
And all the things that you might want to say
Lex Fridman (1:12:34.540)
and all the reasons you wouldn't,
Lex Fridman (1:12:35.380)
like when you go to write a tweet,
David Eagleman (1:12:37.100)
you might write something you think,
Lex Fridman (1:12:38.140)
ah, it's not gonna come off quite right
David Eagleman (1:12:39.860)
in this modern political climate or whatever.
Lex Fridman (1:12:41.580)
Like, you know, you can change things.
David Eagleman (1:12:43.340)
So.
Lex Fridman (1:12:44.180)
And it somehow boils down to fear of mortality
Lex Fridman (1:12:46.700)
and all of these human things at the end of the day,
Lex Fridman (1:12:49.940)
all contained with that tweeting experience.
David Eagleman (1:12:52.500)
Well, interestingly, the fear of mortality
Lex Fridman (1:12:55.540)
is at the bottom of this,
Lex Fridman (1:12:56.860)
but you've got all these more things like,
Lex Fridman (1:12:58.700)
you know, oh, I want to,
David Eagleman (1:13:01.220)
just in case the chairman of my department reads this,
Lex Fridman (1:13:03.180)
I want it to come off well there.
David Eagleman (1:13:04.260)
Just in case my mom looks at this tweet,
Lex Fridman (1:13:05.740)
I want to make sure she, you know, and so on.
Lex Fridman (1:13:08.220)
So those are all the things that humans are able
Lex Fridman (1:13:10.260)
to sort of throw into the calculation.
David Eagleman (1:13:13.260)
I mean.
Lex Fridman (1:13:14.820)
What it required, what it requires though,
David Eagleman (1:13:16.540)
is having a model of your chairman,
Lex Fridman (1:13:18.740)
having a model of your mother,
David Eagleman (1:13:19.820)
having a model of, you know,
Lex Fridman (1:13:22.060)
the person you want to go on a date with
David Eagleman (1:13:24.500)
who might look at your tweet and so on.
Lex Fridman (1:13:26.020)
All these things are,
David Eagleman (1:13:27.820)
you're running models of what it is like to be them.
Lex Fridman (1:13:30.980)
So in terms of the structure of the brain,
David Eagleman (1:13:34.540)
again, this may be going into speculation land.
Lex Fridman (1:13:37.140)
I hope you go along with me.
David Eagleman (1:13:39.060)
Yeah, of course.
Lex Fridman (1:13:39.900)
Yep.
David Eagleman (1:13:40.740)
Is, okay, so the brain seems to be intelligent
Lex Fridman (1:13:45.220)
and our AI systems aren't very currently.
Lex Fridman (1:13:48.380)
So where do you think intelligence arises in the brain?
Lex Fridman (1:13:52.860)
Like what is it about the brain?
Lex Fridman (1:13:55.660)
So if you mean where location wise,
Lex Fridman (1:13:58.780)
it's no single spot.
David Eagleman (1:13:59.900)
It would be equivalent to asking,
Lex Fridman (1:14:01.980)
I'm looking at New York city,
Lex Fridman (1:14:04.820)
where is the economy?
Lex Fridman (1:14:06.500)
The answer is you can't point to anywhere.
David Eagleman (1:14:08.180)
The economy is all about the interaction
Lex Fridman (1:14:09.980)
of all of the pieces and parts of the city.
Lex Fridman (1:14:12.180)
And that's what, you know, intelligence,
Lex Fridman (1:14:14.140)
whatever we mean by that in the brain
David Eagleman (1:14:15.540)
is interacting from everything going on at once.
Lex Fridman (1:14:18.220)
In terms of a structure.
Lex Fridman (1:14:19.500)
So we look humans are much smarter than fish,
Lex Fridman (1:14:23.620)
maybe not dolphins, but dolphins are mammals, right?
David Eagleman (1:14:26.700)
I assert that what we mean by smarter
Lex Fridman (1:14:28.580)
has to do with live wiring.
Lex Fridman (1:14:30.020)
So what we mean when we say, oh, we're smart
Lex Fridman (1:14:32.220)
is, oh, we can figure out a new thing
Lex Fridman (1:14:33.700)
and figure out a new pathway to get where we need to go.
Lex Fridman (1:14:36.740)
And that's because fish are essentially coming to the table
David Eagleman (1:14:39.700)
with, you know, okay, here's the hardware, go swim, mate.
Lex Fridman (1:14:43.740)
But we have the capacity to say,
David Eagleman (1:14:46.100)
okay, look, I'm gonna absorb, oh, oh,
Lex Fridman (1:14:47.580)
but you know, I saw someone else do this thing
Lex Fridman (1:14:49.260)
and I read once that you could do this other thing
Lex Fridman (1:14:51.980)
and so on.
Lex Fridman (1:14:52.820)
So do you think there's, is there something,
Lex Fridman (1:14:54.620)
I know these are mysteries,
Lex Fridman (1:14:56.700)
but like architecturally speaking,
Lex Fridman (1:15:00.140)
what feature of the brain of the live wire aspect of it
Lex Fridman (1:15:06.100)
that is really useful for intelligence?
Lex Fridman (1:15:08.140)
So like, is it the ability of neurons to reconnect?
David Eagleman (1:15:15.180)
Like, is there something,
Lex Fridman (1:15:16.220)
is there any lessons about the human brain
David Eagleman (1:15:18.180)
you think might be inspiring for us
Lex Fridman (1:15:21.020)
to take into the artificial, into the machine learning world?
David Eagleman (1:15:26.860)
Yeah, I'm actually just trying to write some up on this now
Lex Fridman (1:15:29.620)
called, you know, if you wanna build a robot,
David Eagleman (1:15:31.300)
start with the stomach.
Lex Fridman (1:15:32.460)
And what I mean by that, what I mean by that is
David Eagleman (1:15:35.380)
a robot has to care, it has to have hunger,
Lex Fridman (1:15:37.220)
it has to care about surviving, that kind of thing.
David Eagleman (1:15:40.340)
Here's an example.
Lex Fridman (1:15:41.260)
So the penultimate chapter of my book,
David Eagleman (1:15:44.180)
I titled The Wolf and the Mars Rover.
Lex Fridman (1:15:46.620)
And I just look at this simple comparison
David Eagleman (1:15:48.860)
of you look at a wolf, it gets its leg caught in a trap.
Lex Fridman (1:15:52.580)
What does it do?
David Eagleman (1:15:53.420)
It gnaws its leg off,
Lex Fridman (1:15:55.460)
and then it figures out how to walk on three legs.
David Eagleman (1:15:58.220)
No problem.
Lex Fridman (1:15:59.060)
Now, the Mars Rover Curiosity got its front wheel stuck
David Eagleman (1:16:02.180)
in some Martian soil, and it died.
Lex Fridman (1:16:05.220)
This project that cost billions of dollars died
David Eagleman (1:16:09.100)
because it got its wheels.
Lex Fridman (1:16:09.980)
Wouldn't it be terrific if we could build a robot
David Eagleman (1:16:12.740)
that chewed off its front wheel and figured out
Lex Fridman (1:16:15.260)
how to operate with a slightly different body plan?
David Eagleman (1:16:17.780)
That's the kind of thing that we wanna be able to build.
Lex Fridman (1:16:21.020)
And to get there, what we need,
David Eagleman (1:16:23.300)
the whole reason the wolf is able to do that
Lex Fridman (1:16:25.140)
is because its motor and somatosensory systems
David Eagleman (1:16:27.940)
are live wired.
Lex Fridman (1:16:28.780)
So it says, oh, you know what?
David Eagleman (1:16:29.980)
Turns out we've got a body plan that's different
Lex Fridman (1:16:31.620)
than what I thought a few minutes ago,
Lex Fridman (1:16:34.140)
but I have a yen to survive and I care about relevance,
Lex Fridman (1:16:38.820)
which in this case is getting to food,
David Eagleman (1:16:40.660)
getting back to my pack and so on.
Lex Fridman (1:16:42.580)
So I'm just gonna figure out how to operate with this.
David Eagleman (1:16:44.660)
Oh, whoops, that didn't work.
Lex Fridman (1:16:46.020)
Oh, okay, I'm kind of getting it to work.
Lex Fridman (1:16:48.500)
But the Mars Rover doesn't do that.
Lex Fridman (1:16:49.900)
It just says, oh geez, I was pre programmed.
David Eagleman (1:16:51.860)
Four wheels, now I have three, I'm screwed.
Lex Fridman (1:16:53.980)
Yeah, you know, I don't know if you're familiar
David Eagleman (1:16:55.900)
with a philosopher named Ernest Becker.
Lex Fridman (1:16:58.180)
He wrote a book called Denial of Death.
Lex Fridman (1:17:00.780)
And there's a few psychologists, Sheldon Solomon,
Lex Fridman (1:17:03.500)
I think I just spoke with him on his podcast
David Eagleman (1:17:07.260)
who developed terror management theory,
Lex Fridman (1:17:09.900)
which is like Ernest Becker is a philosopher
David Eagleman (1:17:12.940)
that basically said that fear of mortality
Lex Fridman (1:17:17.220)
is at the core of it.
David Eagleman (1:17:18.220)
Yeah.
Lex Fridman (1:17:19.060)
And so I don't know if it sounds compelling as an idea
David Eagleman (1:17:23.140)
that all of the civilization we've constructed
Lex Fridman (1:17:26.980)
is based on this, but it's.
David Eagleman (1:17:29.100)
I'm familiar with his work.
Lex Fridman (1:17:30.300)
Here's what I think.
David Eagleman (1:17:31.220)
I think that yes, fundamentally this desire to survive
Lex Fridman (1:17:35.180)
is at the core of it, I would agree with that.
Lex Fridman (1:17:37.420)
But how that expresses itself in your life
Lex Fridman (1:17:40.660)
ends up being very different.
David Eagleman (1:17:41.700)
The reason you do what you do is, I mean,
Lex Fridman (1:17:45.340)
you could list the 100 reasons why you chose
David Eagleman (1:17:47.900)
to write your tweet this way and that way.
Lex Fridman (1:17:49.300)
And it really has nothing to do with the survival part.
David Eagleman (1:17:51.340)
It has to do with, you know, trying to impress fellow humans
Lex Fridman (1:17:53.540)
and surprise them and say something.
David Eagleman (1:17:55.260)
Yeah, so many things built on top of each other,
Lex Fridman (1:17:56.940)
but it's fascinating to think
David Eagleman (1:17:58.820)
that in artificial intelligence systems,
Lex Fridman (1:18:00.900)
we wanna be able to somehow engineer this drive
David Eagleman (1:18:05.420)
for survival, for immortality.
Lex Fridman (1:18:08.300)
I mean, because as humans, we're not just about survival,
David Eagleman (1:18:11.460)
we're aware of the fact that we're going to die,
Lex Fridman (1:18:14.740)
which is a very kind of, we're aware of like space time.
David Eagleman (1:18:17.420)
Most people aren't, by the way.
Lex Fridman (1:18:18.500)
Aren't?
David Eagleman (1:18:19.340)
Aren't.
Lex Fridman (1:18:20.340)
Confucius said, he said, each person has two lives.
David Eagleman (1:18:25.980)
The second one begins when you realize
Lex Fridman (1:18:28.060)
that you have just one.
David Eagleman (1:18:29.500)
Yeah.
Lex Fridman (1:18:30.340)
But most people, it takes a long time
David Eagleman (1:18:31.340)
for most people to get there.
Lex Fridman (1:18:32.700)
I mean, you could argue this kind of Freudian thing,
David Eagleman (1:18:34.660)
which Erzbecker argues is they actually figured it out
Lex Fridman (1:18:41.660)
early on and the terror they felt
David Eagleman (1:18:44.860)
was like the reason it's been suppressed.
Lex Fridman (1:18:47.580)
And the reason most people, when I ask them
David Eagleman (1:18:49.300)
about whether they're afraid of death,
Lex Fridman (1:18:50.700)
they basically say no.
David Eagleman (1:18:53.180)
They basically say like, I'm afraid I won't get,
Lex Fridman (1:18:56.980)
like submit the paper before I die.
David Eagleman (1:18:59.820)
Like they kind of see, they see death
Lex Fridman (1:19:01.900)
as a kind of a inconvenient deadline
David Eagleman (1:19:04.780)
for a particular set of, like a book you're writing.
Lex Fridman (1:19:08.180)
As opposed to like, what the hell?
David Eagleman (1:19:10.700)
This thing ends at any moment.
Lex Fridman (1:19:14.780)
Like most people, as I've encountered,
David Eagleman (1:19:17.260)
do not meditate on the idea that like right now
Lex Fridman (1:19:20.700)
you could die.
David Eagleman (1:19:21.740)
Like right now, like in the next five minutes,
Lex Fridman (1:19:26.380)
it could be all over and, you know, meditate on that idea.
David Eagleman (1:19:29.940)
I think that somehow brings you closer
Lex Fridman (1:19:32.580)
to like the core of the motivations
Lex Fridman (1:19:36.500)
and the core of the human cognition condition.
Lex Fridman (1:19:40.140)
I think it might be the core, but like I said,
David Eagleman (1:19:41.300)
it is not what drives us day to day.
Lex Fridman (1:19:43.820)
Yeah, there's so many things on top of it,
Lex Fridman (1:19:45.540)
but it is interesting.
Lex Fridman (1:19:46.380)
I mean, as the ancient poet said,
David Eagleman (1:19:49.660)
death whispers at my ear, live for I come.
Lex Fridman (1:19:53.340)
So it's, it is certainly motivating
David Eagleman (1:19:56.100)
when we think about that.
Lex Fridman (1:19:58.060)
Okay, I've got some deadline.
David Eagleman (1:19:59.220)
I don't know exactly when it is,
Lex Fridman (1:20:00.340)
but I better make stuff happen.
David Eagleman (1:20:02.180)
It is motivating, but I don't think,
Lex Fridman (1:20:04.300)
I mean, I know for just speaking for me personally,
David Eagleman (1:20:06.780)
that's not what motivates me day to day.
Lex Fridman (1:20:08.900)
It's instead, oh, I want to get this, you know,
David Eagleman (1:20:13.380)
program up and running before this,
Lex Fridman (1:20:14.780)
or I want to make sure my coauthor isn't mad at me
David Eagleman (1:20:17.300)
because I haven't gotten this in,
Lex Fridman (1:20:18.220)
or I don't want to miss this grant deadline,
David Eagleman (1:20:19.580)
or, you know, whatever the thing is.
Lex Fridman (1:20:21.180)
Yeah, it's too distant in a sense.
David Eagleman (1:20:24.060)
Nevertheless, it is good to reconnect.
Lex Fridman (1:20:26.540)
But for the AI systems, none of that is there.
David Eagleman (1:20:31.220)
Like a neural network does not fear its mortality.
Lex Fridman (1:20:34.940)
And that seems to be somehow
David Eagleman (1:20:37.180)
fundamentally missing the point.
Lex Fridman (1:20:39.660)
I think that's missing the point,
Lex Fridman (1:20:40.700)
but I wonder, it's an interesting speculation
Lex Fridman (1:20:42.420)
about whether you can build an AI system
David Eagleman (1:20:43.700)
that is much closer to being a human
Lex Fridman (1:20:45.780)
without the mortality and survival piece,
Lex Fridman (1:20:48.380)
but just the thing of relevance,
Lex Fridman (1:20:51.140)
just I care about this versus that.
David Eagleman (1:20:52.740)
Right now, if you have a robot roll into the room,
Lex Fridman (1:20:54.780)
it's going to be frozen
David Eagleman (1:20:55.660)
because it doesn't have any reason to go there versus there.
Lex Fridman (1:20:57.700)
It doesn't have any particular set of things
David Eagleman (1:21:02.580)
about this is how I should navigate my next move
Lex Fridman (1:21:05.620)
because I want something.
David Eagleman (1:21:07.700)
Yeah, the thing about humans
Lex Fridman (1:21:10.900)
is they seem to generate goals.
David Eagleman (1:21:13.740)
They're like, you said livewired.
Lex Fridman (1:21:15.740)
I mean, it's very flexible in terms of the goals
Lex Fridman (1:21:19.980)
and creative in terms of the goals we generate
Lex Fridman (1:21:21.780)
when we enter a room.
David Eagleman (1:21:23.700)
You show up to a party without a goal,
Lex Fridman (1:21:25.540)
usually, and then you figure it out along the way.
David Eagleman (1:21:27.900)
Yes, but this goes back to the question about free will,
Lex Fridman (1:21:29.980)
which is when I walk into the party,
David Eagleman (1:21:33.340)
if you rewound it 10,000 times,
Lex Fridman (1:21:35.620)
would I go and talk to that couple over there
Lex Fridman (1:21:37.980)
versus that person?
Lex Fridman (1:21:38.980)
Like, I might do this exact same thing every time
David Eagleman (1:21:41.700)
because I've got some goal stack and I think,
Lex Fridman (1:21:44.380)
okay, well, at this party,
David Eagleman (1:21:45.820)
I really want to meet these kind of people
Lex Fridman (1:21:47.700)
or I feel awkward or whatever my goals are.
David Eagleman (1:21:51.340)
By the way, so there was something
Lex Fridman (1:21:52.620)
that I meant to mention earlier.
David Eagleman (1:21:54.580)
If you don't mind going back,
Lex Fridman (1:21:56.140)
which is this, when we were talking about BCI.
Lex Fridman (1:21:59.380)
So I don't know if you know this,
Lex Fridman (1:22:00.260)
but what I'm spending 90% of my time doing now
David Eagleman (1:22:02.620)
is running a company.
Lex Fridman (1:22:03.820)
Do you know about this?
David Eagleman (1:22:04.660)
Yes, I wasn't sure what the company is involved in.
Lex Fridman (1:22:08.100)
Right, so. Can you talk about it?
David Eagleman (1:22:09.420)
Yeah, yeah.
Lex Fridman (1:22:10.820)
So when it comes to the future of BCI,
David Eagleman (1:22:15.020)
you can put stuff into the brain invasively,
Lex Fridman (1:22:18.860)
but my interest has been how you can get data streams
David Eagleman (1:22:22.060)
into the brain noninvasively.
Lex Fridman (1:22:24.180)
So I run a company called Neosensory
Lex Fridman (1:22:26.340)
and what we build is this little wristband.
Lex Fridman (1:22:29.620)
We've built this in many different form factors.
Lex Fridman (1:22:30.580)
Oh, wow, that's it?
Lex Fridman (1:22:31.940)
Yeah, this is it.
Lex Fridman (1:22:32.780)
And it's got these vibratory motors in it.
Lex Fridman (1:22:35.420)
So these things, as I'm speaking, for example,
David Eagleman (1:22:38.220)
it's capturing my voice and running algorithms
Lex Fridman (1:22:41.060)
and then turning that into patterns of vibration here.
Lex Fridman (1:22:44.460)
So people who are deaf, for example,
Lex Fridman (1:22:48.740)
learn to hear through their skin.
Lex Fridman (1:22:50.780)
So the information is getting up to their brain this way
Lex Fridman (1:22:54.260)
and they learn how to hear.
Lex Fridman (1:22:55.820)
So it turns out on day one, people are pretty good,
Lex Fridman (1:22:58.020)
like better than you'd expect at being able to say,
Lex Fridman (1:23:00.580)
oh, that's weird, was that a dog barking?
Lex Fridman (1:23:02.540)
Was that a baby crying?
Lex Fridman (1:23:03.380)
Was that a door knock, a doorbell?
Lex Fridman (1:23:04.740)
Like people are pretty good at it,
Lex Fridman (1:23:06.500)
but with time they get better and better
Lex Fridman (1:23:09.260)
and what it becomes is a new qualia.
David Eagleman (1:23:12.380)
In other words, a new subjective internal experience.
Lex Fridman (1:23:15.380)
So on day one, they say, whoa, what was that?
David Eagleman (1:23:18.380)
Oh, oh, that was the dog barking.
Lex Fridman (1:23:20.620)
But by three months later, they say,
David Eagleman (1:23:23.420)
oh, there's a dog barking somewhere.
Lex Fridman (1:23:24.540)
Oh, there's the dog.
David Eagleman (1:23:25.540)
That's fascinating.
Lex Fridman (1:23:26.380)
And by the way, that's exactly how you learn
Lex Fridman (1:23:27.700)
how to use your ears.
Lex Fridman (1:23:29.380)
So of course you don't remember this,
Lex Fridman (1:23:30.540)
but when you were an infant, all you have are
Lex Fridman (1:23:33.100)
your eardrum vibrating causes spikes to go down,
David Eagleman (1:23:36.540)
your auditory nerves and impinging your auditory cortex.
Lex Fridman (1:23:40.940)
Your brain doesn't know what those mean automatically,
Lex Fridman (1:23:43.060)
but what happens is you learn how to hear
Lex Fridman (1:23:44.820)
by looking for correlations.
David Eagleman (1:23:46.420)
You clap your hands as a baby,
Lex Fridman (1:23:48.900)
you look at your mother's mouth moving
Lex Fridman (1:23:50.860)
and that correlates with what's going on there.
Lex Fridman (1:23:53.180)
And eventually your brain says, all right,
David Eagleman (1:23:54.860)
I'm just gonna summarize this as an internal experience,
Lex Fridman (1:23:57.940)
as a conscious experience.
Lex Fridman (1:23:59.300)
And that's exactly what happens here.
Lex Fridman (1:24:01.260)
The weird part is that you can feed data into the brain,
David Eagleman (1:24:04.140)
not through the ears, but through any channel
Lex Fridman (1:24:06.260)
that gets there.
David Eagleman (1:24:07.180)
As long as the information gets there,
Lex Fridman (1:24:08.500)
your brain figures out what to do with it.
David Eagleman (1:24:10.260)
That's fascinating.
Lex Fridman (1:24:11.340)
Like expanding the set of sensors,
David Eagleman (1:24:14.740)
it could be arbitrarily, yeah,
Lex Fridman (1:24:19.060)
it could expand arbitrarily, which is fascinating.
David Eagleman (1:24:21.220)
Well, exactly.
Lex Fridman (1:24:22.060)
And by the way, the reason I use this skin,
David Eagleman (1:24:24.500)
there's all kinds of cool stuff going on
Lex Fridman (1:24:26.300)
in the AR world with glasses.
Lex Fridman (1:24:28.140)
But the fact is your eyes are overtaxed
Lex Fridman (1:24:29.940)
and your ears are overtaxed
Lex Fridman (1:24:30.900)
and you need to be able to see and hear other stuff.
Lex Fridman (1:24:33.420)
But you're covered with the skin,
David Eagleman (1:24:34.660)
which is this incredible computational material
Lex Fridman (1:24:38.140)
with which you can feed information.
Lex Fridman (1:24:39.700)
And we don't use our skin for much of anything nowadays.
Lex Fridman (1:24:42.540)
My joke in the lab is that I say,
David Eagleman (1:24:44.260)
we don't call this the waste for nothing.
Lex Fridman (1:24:45.820)
Because originally we built this as the vest
Lex Fridman (1:24:47.380)
and you're passing in all this information that way.
Lex Fridman (1:24:51.020)
And what I'm doing here with the deaf community
David Eagleman (1:24:56.380)
is what's called sensory substitution,
Lex Fridman (1:24:59.020)
where I'm capturing sound and I'm just replacing the ears
David Eagleman (1:25:02.420)
with the skin and that works.
Lex Fridman (1:25:05.900)
One of the things I talk about LiveWire
David Eagleman (1:25:07.140)
is sensory expansion.
Lex Fridman (1:25:09.500)
So what if you took something like your visual system,
David Eagleman (1:25:11.980)
which picks up on a very thin slice
Lex Fridman (1:25:13.500)
of the electromagnetic spectrum,
Lex Fridman (1:25:15.300)
and you could see infrared or ultraviolet.
Lex Fridman (1:25:18.460)
So we've hooked that up, infrared and ultraviolet detectors,
Lex Fridman (1:25:21.100)
and I can feel what's going on.
Lex Fridman (1:25:22.780)
So just as an example, the first night I built the infrared,
David Eagleman (1:25:25.220)
one of my engineers built it, the infrared detector,
Lex Fridman (1:25:27.460)
I was walking in the dark between two houses
Lex Fridman (1:25:29.420)
and suddenly I felt all this infrared radiation.
Lex Fridman (1:25:31.780)
I was like, where's that come from?
Lex Fridman (1:25:32.860)
And I just followed my wrist and I found an infrared camera,
Lex Fridman (1:25:35.900)
a night vision camera that was,
Lex Fridman (1:25:37.780)
but I immediately, oh, there's that thing there.
Lex Fridman (1:25:40.420)
Of course, I would have never seen it,
Lex Fridman (1:25:42.060)
but now it's just part of my reality.
Lex Fridman (1:25:45.260)
That's fascinating.
David Eagleman (1:25:46.100)
Yeah, and then of course,
Lex Fridman (1:25:46.940)
what I'm really interested in is sensory addition.
Lex Fridman (1:25:49.860)
What if you could pick up on stuff
Lex Fridman (1:25:51.620)
that isn't even part of what we normally pick up on,
David Eagleman (1:25:55.060)
like the magnetic field of the earth
Lex Fridman (1:25:57.620)
or Twitter or stock market or things like that.
David Eagleman (1:26:00.660)
Or the, I don't know, some weird stuff
Lex Fridman (1:26:02.300)
like the moods of other people or something like that.
David Eagleman (1:26:04.260)
Sure, now what you need is a way to measure this.
Lex Fridman (1:26:06.540)
So as long as there's a machine that can measure it,
David Eagleman (1:26:08.180)
it's easy, it's trivial to feed this in here
Lex Fridman (1:26:09.980)
and you come to be, it comes to be part of your reality.
David Eagleman (1:26:14.300)
It's like you have another sensor.
Lex Fridman (1:26:16.220)
And that kind of thing is without doing like,
David Eagleman (1:26:19.140)
if you look in Neuralink,
Lex Fridman (1:26:20.860)
I forgot how you put it, but it was eloquent,
David Eagleman (1:26:23.700)
without getting, cutting into the brain, basically.
Lex Fridman (1:26:26.140)
Yeah, exactly, exactly.
Lex Fridman (1:26:27.300)
So this costs, at the moment, $399.
Lex Fridman (1:26:30.660)
That's not gonna kill you.
David Eagleman (1:26:32.060)
Yeah, it's not gonna kill you.
Lex Fridman (1:26:33.380)
You just put it on and when you're done, you take it off.
David Eagleman (1:26:36.540)
Yeah, and so, and the name of the company, by the way,
Lex Fridman (1:26:39.180)
is Neosensory for new senses, because the whole idea is.
David Eagleman (1:26:42.700)
Beautiful, that's.
Lex Fridman (1:26:43.540)
You can, as I said, you come to the table
David Eagleman (1:26:45.940)
with certain plug and play devices and then that's it.
Lex Fridman (1:26:48.060)
Like I can pick up on this little bit
David Eagleman (1:26:49.140)
of the electromagnetic radiation,
Lex Fridman (1:26:50.180)
you can pick up on this little frequency band
David Eagleman (1:26:53.420)
for hearing and so on, but I'm stuck there
Lex Fridman (1:26:56.220)
and there's no reason we have to be stuck there.
David Eagleman (1:26:57.820)
We can expand our umwelt by adding new senses, yeah.
Lex Fridman (1:27:01.740)
What's umwelt?
David Eagleman (1:27:02.660)
Oh, I'm sorry, the umwelt is the slice of reality
Lex Fridman (1:27:05.740)
that you pick up on.
Lex Fridman (1:27:06.580)
So each animal has its own umwelt.
Lex Fridman (1:27:09.420)
Yeah, exactly.
David Eagleman (1:27:10.780)
Nice.
Lex Fridman (1:27:11.620)
I'm sorry, I forgot to define it before.
David Eagleman (1:27:12.460)
It's such an important concept, which is to say,
Lex Fridman (1:27:17.340)
for example, if you are a tick,
David Eagleman (1:27:19.780)
you pick up on butyric gas, you pick up on odor
Lex Fridman (1:27:22.820)
and you pick up on temperature, that's it.
David Eagleman (1:27:24.100)
That's how you construct your reality
Lex Fridman (1:27:25.740)
is with those two sensors.
David Eagleman (1:27:26.860)
If you are a blind echolocating bat,
Lex Fridman (1:27:28.820)
you're picking up on air compression waves coming back,
David Eagleman (1:27:31.500)
you know, echolocation.
Lex Fridman (1:27:32.540)
If you are the black ghost knife fish,
David Eagleman (1:27:34.820)
you're picking up on changes in the electrical field
Lex Fridman (1:27:37.980)
around you with electroreception.
David Eagleman (1:27:40.420)
That's how they swim around
Lex Fridman (1:27:41.380)
and tell there's a rock there and so on.
Lex Fridman (1:27:43.020)
But that's all they pick up on.
Lex Fridman (1:27:45.060)
That's their umwelt.
David Eagleman (1:27:47.020)
That's the signals they get from the world
Lex Fridman (1:27:49.820)
from which to construct their reality.
Lex Fridman (1:27:51.300)
And they can be totally different umwelts.
Lex Fridman (1:27:53.540)
That's fantastic.
Lex Fridman (1:27:54.380)
And so our human umwelt is, you know,
Lex Fridman (1:27:57.460)
we've got little bits that we can pick up on.
David Eagleman (1:27:59.380)
One of the things I like to do with my students
Lex Fridman (1:28:01.100)
is talk about, imagine that you are a bloodhound dog, right?
David Eagleman (1:28:05.780)
You are a bloodhound dog with a huge snout
Lex Fridman (1:28:07.500)
with 200 million scent receptors in it.
Lex Fridman (1:28:09.380)
And your whole world is about smelling.
Lex Fridman (1:28:11.260)
You know, you've got slits in your nostrils,
David Eagleman (1:28:13.740)
like big nose fulls of air and so on.
Lex Fridman (1:28:15.300)
Do you have a dog?
David Eagleman (1:28:16.460)
Nope, used to.
Lex Fridman (1:28:17.300)
Used to, okay, right.
Lex Fridman (1:28:18.140)
So you know, you walk your dog around
Lex Fridman (1:28:19.340)
and your dog is smelling everything.
David Eagleman (1:28:21.020)
The whole world is full of signals
Lex Fridman (1:28:22.260)
that you do not pick up on.
Lex Fridman (1:28:23.820)
And so imagine if you were that dog
Lex Fridman (1:28:25.380)
and you looked at your human master and thought,
David Eagleman (1:28:26.940)
my God, what is it like to have
Lex Fridman (1:28:28.100)
the pitiful little nose of a human?
Lex Fridman (1:28:30.420)
How could you not know that there's a cat 100 yards away
Lex Fridman (1:28:32.740)
or that your friend was here six hours ago?
Lex Fridman (1:28:34.500)
And so the idea is because we're stuck in our own belt,
Lex Fridman (1:28:37.980)
because we have this little pitiful noses,
David Eagleman (1:28:39.180)
we think, okay, well, yeah, we're seeing reality,
Lex Fridman (1:28:41.500)
but you can have very different sorts of realities
David Eagleman (1:28:44.540)
depending on the peripheral plug and play devices
Lex Fridman (1:28:46.940)
you're equipped with.
David Eagleman (1:28:47.780)
It's fascinating to think that like,
Lex Fridman (1:28:49.660)
if we're being honest, probably our own belt
David Eagleman (1:28:52.100)
is, you know, some infinitely tiny percent
Lex Fridman (1:28:57.340)
of the possibilities of how you can sense,
David Eagleman (1:29:01.420)
quote unquote, reality, even if you could,
Lex Fridman (1:29:04.380)
I mean, there's a guy named Donald Hoffman, yeah,
David Eagleman (1:29:08.780)
who basically says we're really far away from reality
Lex Fridman (1:29:13.860)
in terms of our ability to sense anything.
David Eagleman (1:29:15.980)
Like we're very, we're almost like we're floating out there
Lex Fridman (1:29:20.700)
that's almost like completely attached
David Eagleman (1:29:22.420)
to the actual physical reality.
Lex Fridman (1:29:24.220)
It's fascinating that we can have extra senses
David Eagleman (1:29:27.060)
that could help us get a little bit closer.
Lex Fridman (1:29:29.660)
Exactly, and by the way, this has been the fruits
David Eagleman (1:29:33.340)
of science is realizing, like, for example,
Lex Fridman (1:29:36.100)
you know, you open your eyes
Lex Fridman (1:29:36.940)
and there's the world around you, right?
Lex Fridman (1:29:38.220)
But of course, depending on how you calculate it,
David Eagleman (1:29:40.100)
it's less than a 10 trillionth of the electromagnetic
Lex Fridman (1:29:42.900)
spectrum that we call visible light.
David Eagleman (1:29:45.780)
The reason I say it depends,
Lex Fridman (1:29:46.620)
because, you know, it's actually infinite
David Eagleman (1:29:47.820)
in all directions presumably.
Lex Fridman (1:29:49.220)
Yeah, and so that's exactly that.
Lex Fridman (1:29:51.260)
And then science allows you to actually look
Lex Fridman (1:29:53.620)
into the rest of it.
David Eagleman (1:29:54.980)
Exactly, so understanding how big the world is out there.
Lex Fridman (1:29:57.140)
And the same with the world of really small
Lex Fridman (1:29:59.060)
and the world of really large.
Lex Fridman (1:30:00.460)
Exactly.
David Eagleman (1:30:01.300)
That's beyond our ability to sense.
Lex Fridman (1:30:03.100)
Exactly, and so the reason I think this kind of thing
David Eagleman (1:30:04.980)
matters is because we now have an opportunity
Lex Fridman (1:30:07.740)
for the first time in human history to say,
David Eagleman (1:30:10.900)
okay, well, I'm just gonna include other things
Lex Fridman (1:30:13.060)
in my own belt.
Lex Fridman (1:30:13.900)
So I'm gonna include infrared radiation
Lex Fridman (1:30:15.700)
and have a direct perceptual experience of that.
Lex Fridman (1:30:19.020)
And so I'm very, you know, I mean,
Lex Fridman (1:30:21.340)
so, you know, I've given up my lab
Lex Fridman (1:30:22.660)
and I run this company 90% of my time now.
Lex Fridman (1:30:25.340)
That's what I'm doing.
David Eagleman (1:30:26.180)
I still teach at Stanford and I'm, you know,
Lex Fridman (1:30:27.740)
teaching courses and stuff like that.
Lex Fridman (1:30:29.660)
But this is like, this is your passion.
Lex Fridman (1:30:32.980)
The fire is on this.
David Eagleman (1:30:35.020)
Yeah, I feel like this is the most important thing
Lex Fridman (1:30:37.420)
that's happening right now.
David Eagleman (1:30:38.820)
I mean, obviously I think that,
Lex Fridman (1:30:40.100)
because that's what I'm devoting my time in my life to.
Lex Fridman (1:30:42.300)
But I mean, it's a brilliant set of ideas.
Lex Fridman (1:30:45.100)
It certainly is like, it's a step in a very vibrant future,
David Eagleman (1:30:50.100)
I would say.
Lex Fridman (1:30:50.940)
Like the possibilities there are endless.
David Eagleman (1:30:54.180)
Exactly.
Lex Fridman (1:30:55.020)
So if you ask what I think about Neuralink,
David Eagleman (1:30:57.220)
I think it's amazing what those guys are doing
Lex Fridman (1:30:59.260)
and working on,
Lex Fridman (1:31:00.100)
but I think it's not practical for almost everybody.
Lex Fridman (1:31:02.820)
For example, for people who are deaf, they buy this
David Eagleman (1:31:05.700)
and, you know, every day we're getting tons of emails
Lex Fridman (1:31:08.420)
and tweets and whatever from people saying, wow,
David Eagleman (1:31:09.980)
I picked up on this and then I had no idea that was a,
Lex Fridman (1:31:12.500)
I didn't even know that was happening out there.
Lex Fridman (1:31:14.700)
And they're coming to hear, by the way,
Lex Fridman (1:31:16.820)
this is, you know, less than a 10 year old,
David Eagleman (1:31:18.700)
by the way, this is less than a 10th of the price
Lex Fridman (1:31:20.860)
of a hearing aid and like 250 times less
David Eagleman (1:31:23.340)
than a cochlear implant.
Lex Fridman (1:31:25.220)
That's amazing.
David Eagleman (1:31:27.100)
People love hearing about what, you know,
Lex Fridman (1:31:30.660)
brilliant folks like yourself could recommend
David Eagleman (1:31:33.900)
in terms of books.
Lex Fridman (1:31:35.020)
Of course, you're an author of many books.
Lex Fridman (1:31:36.980)
So I'll, in the introduction,
Lex Fridman (1:31:38.780)
mention all the books you've written.
David Eagleman (1:31:40.300)
People should definitely read LiveWired.
Lex Fridman (1:31:42.500)
I've gotten a chance to read some of it and it's amazing.
Lex Fridman (1:31:44.820)
But is there three books, technical, fiction,
Lex Fridman (1:31:48.300)
philosophical that had an impact on you
David Eagleman (1:31:52.100)
when you were younger or today and books,
Lex Fridman (1:31:56.380)
perhaps some of which you would want to recommend
Lex Fridman (1:31:59.580)
that others read?
Lex Fridman (1:32:01.380)
You know, as an undergraduate,
David Eagleman (1:32:02.460)
I majored in British and American literature.
Lex Fridman (1:32:04.140)
That was my major because I love literature.
David Eagleman (1:32:06.780)
I grew up with literature.
Lex Fridman (1:32:08.660)
My father had these extensive bookshelves.
Lex Fridman (1:32:10.500)
And so I grew up in the mountains in New Mexico.
Lex Fridman (1:32:13.860)
And so that was mostly why I spent my time was reading books.
David Eagleman (1:32:16.100)
But, you know, I love, you know, Faulkner, Hemingway.
Lex Fridman (1:32:23.660)
I love many South American authors,
David Eagleman (1:32:26.100)
Gabriel Garcia Marquez and Italo Calvino.
Lex Fridman (1:32:28.220)
I would actually recommend Invisible Cities.
David Eagleman (1:32:29.860)
I just, I loved that book by Italo Calvino.
Lex Fridman (1:32:33.140)
Sorry, it's a book of fiction.
David Eagleman (1:32:37.020)
Anthony Dorr wrote a book called
Lex Fridman (1:32:39.100)
All the Light We Cannot See,
David Eagleman (1:32:41.020)
which actually was inspired by incognito,
Lex Fridman (1:32:44.140)
by exactly what we were talking about earlier
David Eagleman (1:32:45.940)
about how you can only see a little bit of the,
Lex Fridman (1:32:48.740)
what we call visible light in the electromagnetic radiation.
David Eagleman (1:32:51.460)
I wrote about this in incognito,
Lex Fridman (1:32:52.780)
and then he reviewed incognito for the Washington Post.
David Eagleman (1:32:54.780)
Oh no, that's awesome.
Lex Fridman (1:32:56.020)
And then he wrote this book called,
David Eagleman (1:32:57.580)
the book has nothing to do with that,
Lex Fridman (1:32:58.700)
but that's where the title comes from.
David Eagleman (1:33:00.860)
All the Light We Cannot See
Lex Fridman (1:33:01.700)
is about the rest of the spectrum.
Lex Fridman (1:33:02.940)
But the, that's an absolutely gorgeous book.
Lex Fridman (1:33:08.340)
That's a book of fiction.
David Eagleman (1:33:09.420)
Yeah, it's a book of fiction.
Lex Fridman (1:33:10.500)
What's it about?
David Eagleman (1:33:12.620)
It takes place during World War II
Lex Fridman (1:33:14.340)
about these two young people,
David Eagleman (1:33:15.420)
one of whom is blind and yeah.
Lex Fridman (1:33:18.260)
Anything else?
Lex Fridman (1:33:19.820)
So what, any, so you mentioned Hemingway?
Lex Fridman (1:33:21.940)
I mean.
Lex Fridman (1:33:22.780)
Old Man and the Sea, what's your favorite?
Lex Fridman (1:33:27.860)
Snow's a Kilimanjaro.
David Eagleman (1:33:29.380)
Oh wow, okay.
Lex Fridman (1:33:30.220)
It's a collection of short stories that I love.
David Eagleman (1:33:31.660)
As far as nonfiction goes,
Lex Fridman (1:33:33.300)
I grew up with Cosmos,
David Eagleman (1:33:35.780)
both watching the PBS series and then reading the book,
Lex Fridman (1:33:38.180)
and that influenced me a huge amount in terms of what I do.
David Eagleman (1:33:41.260)
I, from the time I was a kid,
Lex Fridman (1:33:42.980)
I felt like I want to be Carl Sagan.
David Eagleman (1:33:44.940)
Like, I just, that's what I loved.
Lex Fridman (1:33:46.140)
And in the end, I just, you know,
David Eagleman (1:33:47.940)
I studied space physics for a while as an undergrad,
Lex Fridman (1:33:50.980)
but then I, in my last semester,
David Eagleman (1:33:53.560)
discovered neuroscience last semester,
Lex Fridman (1:33:55.460)
and I just thought, wow, I'm hooked on that.
Lex Fridman (1:33:57.540)
So the Carl Sagan of the brain.
Lex Fridman (1:34:01.420)
That was my aspiration.
David Eagleman (1:34:02.260)
Is the aspiration.
Lex Fridman (1:34:03.700)
I mean, you're doing an incredible job of it.
Lex Fridman (1:34:07.900)
So you open the book live wide with a quote by Heidegger.
Lex Fridman (1:34:11.900)
Every man is born as many men and dies as a single one.
Lex Fridman (1:34:17.700)
Well, what do you mean, or what?
Lex Fridman (1:34:20.020)
I'll tell you what I meant by it.
Lex Fridman (1:34:21.620)
So he had his own reason why he was writing that,
Lex Fridman (1:34:23.740)
but I meant this in terms of brain plasticity,
David Eagleman (1:34:25.740)
in terms of the library,
Lex Fridman (1:34:26.860)
which is this issue that I mentioned before
David Eagleman (1:34:28.500)
about this, you know, this cone,
Lex Fridman (1:34:29.900)
the space time cone that we are in,
David Eagleman (1:34:31.780)
which is that when you dropped into the world,
Lex Fridman (1:34:35.740)
you, Lex, had all this different potential.
David Eagleman (1:34:37.900)
You could have been a great surfer
Lex Fridman (1:34:40.400)
or a great chess player or a,
David Eagleman (1:34:42.260)
you could have been thousands of different men
Lex Fridman (1:34:45.460)
when you grew up,
Lex Fridman (1:34:46.460)
but what you did is things that were not your choice
Lex Fridman (1:34:49.300)
and your choice along the way.
David Eagleman (1:34:50.620)
You know, you ended up navigating a particular path
Lex Fridman (1:34:52.760)
and now you're exactly who you are.
David Eagleman (1:34:54.140)
You used to have lots of potential,
Lex Fridman (1:34:55.300)
but the day you die, you will be exactly Lex.
David Eagleman (1:34:59.100)
You will be that one person, yeah.
Lex Fridman (1:35:01.580)
So on that, in that context,
David Eagleman (1:35:03.580)
I mean, first of all, it's just a beautiful,
Lex Fridman (1:35:06.580)
it's a humbling picture, but it's a beautiful one
David Eagleman (1:35:09.940)
because it's all the possible trajectories
Lex Fridman (1:35:12.700)
and you pick one and you walk down that road
Lex Fridman (1:35:14.540)
and it's the Robert Frost poem.
Lex Fridman (1:35:16.260)
But on that topic, let me ask the biggest
Lex Fridman (1:35:18.860)
and the most ridiculous question.
Lex Fridman (1:35:21.380)
So in this live, wide brain,
David Eagleman (1:35:23.300)
when we choose all these different trajectories
Lex Fridman (1:35:25.100)
and end up with one, what's the meaning of it all?
Lex Fridman (1:35:27.940)
What's, is there a why here?
Lex Fridman (1:35:32.180)
What's the meaning of life?
David Eagleman (1:35:34.100)
Yeah.
Lex Fridman (1:35:34.940)
David Engelman.
David Eagleman (1:35:36.380)
That's it.
Lex Fridman (1:35:37.220)
I mean, this is the question that everyone has attacked
David Eagleman (1:35:42.940)
from their own life or point of view,
Lex Fridman (1:35:45.300)
by which I mean, culturally,
David Eagleman (1:35:47.300)
if you grew up in a religious society,
Lex Fridman (1:35:49.180)
you have one way of attacking that question.
Lex Fridman (1:35:51.100)
So if you grew up in a secular or scientific society,
Lex Fridman (1:35:53.300)
you have a different way of attacking that question.
David Eagleman (1:35:55.460)
Obviously, I don't know, I abstain on that question.
Lex Fridman (1:35:59.660)
Yeah.
David Eagleman (1:36:00.860)
I mean, I think one of the fundamental things,
Lex Fridman (1:36:03.340)
I guess, in that, in all those possible trajectories
David Eagleman (1:36:06.260)
is you're always asking.
Lex Fridman (1:36:09.260)
I mean, that's the act of asking
Lex Fridman (1:36:11.540)
what the heck is this thing for,
Lex Fridman (1:36:14.220)
is equivalent to, or at least runs in parallel
David Eagleman (1:36:18.460)
to all the choices that you're making.
Lex Fridman (1:36:20.860)
Cause it's kind of, that's the underlying question.
David Eagleman (1:36:23.700)
Well, that's right.
Lex Fridman (1:36:24.540)
And by the way, you know,
David Eagleman (1:36:25.500)
this is the interesting thing about human psychology.
Lex Fridman (1:36:27.820)
You know, we've got all these layers of things
David Eagleman (1:36:29.460)
at which we can ask questions.
Lex Fridman (1:36:30.900)
And so if you keep asking yourself the question about,
Lex Fridman (1:36:33.740)
what is the optimal way for me to be spending my time?
Lex Fridman (1:36:36.500)
What should I be doing?
Lex Fridman (1:36:37.340)
What charity should I get involved with and so on?
Lex Fridman (1:36:39.060)
If you're asking those big questions
David Eagleman (1:36:42.500)
that steers you appropriately,
Lex Fridman (1:36:44.740)
if you're the type of person who never asks,
David Eagleman (1:36:46.540)
hey, is there something better I can be doing with my time,
Lex Fridman (1:36:48.900)
then presumably you won't optimize
David Eagleman (1:36:51.060)
whatever it is that is important to you.
Lex Fridman (1:36:53.740)
So you've, I think just in your eyes, in your work,
David Eagleman (1:36:58.060)
there's a passion that just is obvious and it's inspiring.
Lex Fridman (1:37:03.060)
It's contagious.
David Eagleman (1:37:04.380)
What, if you were to give advice to us,
Lex Fridman (1:37:09.180)
a young person today,
David Eagleman (1:37:10.700)
in the crazy chaos that we live today about life,
Lex Fridman (1:37:14.660)
about how to discover their passion,
Lex Fridman (1:37:20.820)
is there some words that you could give?
Lex Fridman (1:37:24.620)
First of all, I would say the main thing
David Eagleman (1:37:26.220)
for a young person is stay adaptable.
Lex Fridman (1:37:29.500)
And this is back to this issue of why COVID
David Eagleman (1:37:31.980)
is useful for us because it forces us off our tracks.
Lex Fridman (1:37:35.420)
The fact is the jobs that will exist 20 years from now,
David Eagleman (1:37:39.020)
we don't even have names for it.
Lex Fridman (1:37:40.100)
We can't even imagine the jobs that are gonna exist.
Lex Fridman (1:37:42.540)
And so when young people that I know go into college
Lex Fridman (1:37:44.980)
and they say, hey, what should I major in and so on,
David Eagleman (1:37:47.460)
college is and should be less and less vocational,
Lex Fridman (1:37:50.660)
as in, oh, I'm gonna learn how to do this
Lex Fridman (1:37:52.300)
and then I'm gonna do that the rest of my career.
Lex Fridman (1:37:54.100)
The world just isn't that way anymore
David Eagleman (1:37:55.620)
with the exponential speed of things.
Lex Fridman (1:37:57.820)
So the important thing is learning how to learn,
David Eagleman (1:38:00.460)
learning how to be livewired and adaptable.
Lex Fridman (1:38:03.540)
That's really key.
Lex Fridman (1:38:04.580)
And what I advise young people when I talk to them is,
Lex Fridman (1:38:09.540)
what you digest, that's what gives you the raw storehouse
David Eagleman (1:38:13.660)
of things that you can remix and be creative with.
Lex Fridman (1:38:17.380)
And so eat broadly and widely.
Lex Fridman (1:38:21.220)
And obviously this is the wonderful thing
Lex Fridman (1:38:23.020)
about the internet world we live in now
David Eagleman (1:38:24.620)
is you kind of can't help it.
Lex Fridman (1:38:25.580)
You're constantly, whoa.
David Eagleman (1:38:27.140)
You go down some mole hole of Wikipedia
Lex Fridman (1:38:28.900)
and you think, oh, I didn't even realize that was a thing.
David Eagleman (1:38:31.140)
I didn't know that existed.
Lex Fridman (1:38:32.540)
And so.
David Eagleman (1:38:33.740)
Embrace that.
Lex Fridman (1:38:34.580)
Embrace that, yeah, exactly.
Lex Fridman (1:38:36.220)
And what I tell people is just always do a gut check
Lex Fridman (1:38:39.900)
about, okay, I'm reading this paper
Lex Fridman (1:38:41.500)
and yeah, I think that, but this paper, wow,
Lex Fridman (1:38:44.260)
that really, I really cared about that in some way.
David Eagleman (1:38:47.700)
I tell them just to keep a real sniff out for that.
Lex Fridman (1:38:50.500)
And when you find those things, keep going down those paths.
David Eagleman (1:38:54.020)
Yeah, don't be afraid.
Lex Fridman (1:38:55.020)
I mean, that's one of the challenges and the downsides
David Eagleman (1:38:58.260)
of having so many beautiful options
Lex Fridman (1:39:00.060)
is that sometimes people are a little bit afraid
David Eagleman (1:39:02.860)
to really commit, but that's very true.
Lex Fridman (1:39:05.620)
If there's something that just sparks your interest
Lex Fridman (1:39:09.140)
and passion, just run with it.
Lex Fridman (1:39:10.860)
I mean, that's, it goes back to the Haider quote.
David Eagleman (1:39:14.500)
I mean, we only get this one life
Lex Fridman (1:39:16.220)
and that trajectory, it doesn't last forever.
Lex Fridman (1:39:20.140)
So just if something sparks your imagination,
Lex Fridman (1:39:23.540)
your passion is run with it.
David Eagleman (1:39:24.940)
Yeah, exactly.
Lex Fridman (1:39:26.380)
I don't think there's a more beautiful way to end it.
David Eagleman (1:39:29.940)
David, it's a huge honor to finally meet you.
Lex Fridman (1:39:32.620)
Your work is inspiring so many people.
David Eagleman (1:39:34.860)
I've talked to so many people who are passionate
Lex Fridman (1:39:36.340)
about neuroscience, about the brain, even outside
David Eagleman (1:39:39.220)
that read your book.
Lex Fridman (1:39:40.900)
So I hope you keep doing so.
David Eagleman (1:39:43.700)
I think you're already there with Carl Sagan.
Lex Fridman (1:39:46.100)
I hope you continue growing.
David Eagleman (1:39:48.340)
Yeah, it was an honor talking with you today.
Lex Fridman (1:39:50.060)
Thanks so much.
David Eagleman (1:39:50.900)
Great, you too, Lex, wonderful.
Lex Fridman (1:39:53.380)
Thanks for listening to this conversation
David Eagleman (1:39:54.900)
with David Eagleman, and thank you to our sponsors,
Lex Fridman (1:39:58.100)
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David Eagleman (1:40:01.500)
Click the sponsor links in the description
Lex Fridman (1:40:03.860)
to get a discount and to support this podcast.
David Eagleman (1:40:07.340)
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Lex Fridman (1:40:09.620)
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David Eagleman (1:40:11.860)
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Lex Fridman (1:40:14.660)
or connect with me on Twitter at Lex Friedman.
Lex Fridman (1:40:18.380)
And now let me leave you with some words
Lex Fridman (1:40:20.100)
from David Eagleman in his book,
David Eagleman (1:40:21.620)
Some Forty Tales from the Afterlives.
Lex Fridman (1:40:25.020)
Imagine for a moment there were nothing but
David Eagleman (1:40:28.020)
the product of billions of years of molecules
Lex Fridman (1:40:30.380)
coming together and ratcheting up through natural selection.
David Eagleman (1:40:35.020)
There were composed only of highways of fluids
Lex Fridman (1:40:37.380)
and chemicals sliding along roadways
David Eagleman (1:40:39.940)
within billions of dancing cells.
Lex Fridman (1:40:42.540)
The trillions of synaptic connections hum in parallel
David Eagleman (1:40:46.140)
that this vast egg like fabric of micro thin circuitry
Lex Fridman (1:40:50.220)
runs algorithms undreamt of in modern science,
Lex Fridman (1:40:54.300)
and that these neural programs give rise to
Lex Fridman (1:40:56.660)
our decision making, loves, desires, fears, and aspirations.
David Eagleman (1:41:02.900)
To me, understanding this would be a numinous experience,
Lex Fridman (1:41:07.540)
better than anything ever proposed in any holy text.
David Eagleman (1:41:11.940)
Thank you for listening and hope to see you next time.
Lex Fridman (20:03.080)
you've got synaptic weights, and that's it.
David Eagleman (20:04.880)
So, yeah, so the idea of LiveWare and LiveWired
Lex Fridman (20:08.640)
is that it's like a, it's a gradual, yeah,
David Eagleman (20:14.480)
it's a gradual spectrum between software and hardware.
Lex Fridman (20:18.240)
And so the metaphors completely doesn't make sense.
David Eagleman (20:22.000)
Cause like when you talk about software and hardware,
Lex Fridman (20:24.480)
it's really hard lines.
David Eagleman (20:26.480)
I mean, of course, software is unlike hard,
Lex Fridman (20:31.480)
but even hardware, but like, so there's two groups,
Lex Fridman (20:36.320)
but in the software world,
Lex Fridman (20:37.640)
there's levels of abstractions, right?
David Eagleman (20:39.040)
There's the operating system, there's machine code,
Lex Fridman (20:42.120)
and then it gets higher and higher levels.
Lex Fridman (20:44.520)
But somehow that's actually fundamentally different
Lex Fridman (20:46.920)
than the layers of abstractions in the hardware.
Lex Fridman (20:50.040)
But in the brain, it's all like the same.
Lex Fridman (20:53.160)
And I love the city, the city metaphor.
David Eagleman (20:55.400)
I mean, yeah, it's kind of mind blowing
Lex Fridman (20:57.880)
cause it's hard to know what to think about that.
David Eagleman (21:01.440)
Like if I were to ask the question,
Lex Fridman (21:04.160)
this is an important question for machine learning is,
Lex Fridman (21:07.520)
how does the brain learn?
Lex Fridman (21:09.720)
So essentially you're saying that,
David Eagleman (21:13.880)
I mean, it just learns on all of these different levels
Lex Fridman (21:17.160)
at all different paces.
David Eagleman (21:19.040)
Exactly right.
Lex Fridman (21:19.880)
And as a result, what happens is
David Eagleman (21:21.360)
as you practice something, you get good at something,
Lex Fridman (21:24.480)
you're physically changing the circuitry,
David Eagleman (21:26.600)
you're adapting your brain around the thing
Lex Fridman (21:30.000)
that is relevant to you.
Lex Fridman (21:31.280)
So let's say you take up, do you know how to surf?
Lex Fridman (21:34.920)
Nope.
David Eagleman (21:35.760)
Okay, great.
Lex Fridman (21:36.600)
So let's say you take up surfing now at this age.
Lex Fridman (21:39.200)
What happens is you'll be terrible at first,
Lex Fridman (21:41.080)
you don't know how to operate your body,
David Eagleman (21:42.000)
you don't know how to read the waves, things like that.
Lex Fridman (21:43.960)
And through time you get better and better.
Lex Fridman (21:45.680)
What you're doing is you're burning that
Lex Fridman (21:46.960)
into the actual circuitry of your brain.
David Eagleman (21:48.600)
You're of course conscious when you're first doing it,
Lex Fridman (21:50.800)
you're thinking about, okay, where am I doing?
Lex Fridman (21:52.120)
What's my body weight?
Lex Fridman (21:53.600)
But eventually when you become a pro at it,
David Eagleman (21:55.320)
you are not conscious of it at all.
Lex Fridman (21:57.160)
In fact, you can't even unpack what it is that you did.
David Eagleman (22:00.200)
Think about riding a bicycle.
Lex Fridman (22:01.920)
You can't describe how you're doing it,
David Eagleman (22:04.080)
you're just doing it, you're changing your balance
Lex Fridman (22:05.600)
when you come, you know, you do this to go to a stop.
Lex Fridman (22:08.040)
So this is what we're constantly doing
Lex Fridman (22:10.800)
is actually shaping our own circuitry
David Eagleman (22:14.320)
based on what is relevant for us.
Lex Fridman (22:16.000)
Survival, of course, being the top thing that's relevant.
Lex Fridman (22:18.800)
But interestingly, especially with humans,
Lex Fridman (22:21.440)
we have these particular goals in our lives,
David Eagleman (22:23.400)
computer science, neuroscience, whatever.
Lex Fridman (22:25.600)
And so we actually shape our circuitry around that.
David Eagleman (22:28.680)
I mean, you mentioned this gets slower and slower with age,
Lex Fridman (22:31.400)
but is there, like I think I've read and spoken offline,
David Eagleman (22:36.080)
even on this podcast with a developmental neurobiologist,
Lex Fridman (22:41.320)
I guess would be the right terminology,
David Eagleman (22:43.400)
is like looking at the very early,
Lex Fridman (22:45.520)
like from embryonic stem cells to the creation of the brain.
Lex Fridman (22:50.440)
And like, that's mind blowing how much stuff happens there.
Lex Fridman (22:55.320)
So it's very malleable at that stage.
Lex Fridman (22:59.280)
And then, but after that,
Lex Fridman (23:01.560)
at which point does it stop being malleable?
Lex Fridman (23:04.600)
So that's the interesting thing
Lex Fridman (23:06.040)
is that it remains malleable your whole life.
Lex Fridman (23:08.480)
So even when you're an old person,
Lex Fridman (23:10.200)
you'll be able to remember new faces and names,
David Eagleman (23:13.120)
you'll be able to learn new sorts of tasks.
Lex Fridman (23:15.680)
And thank goodness,
David Eagleman (23:16.520)
cause the world is changing rapidly
Lex Fridman (23:17.960)
in terms of technology and so on.
David Eagleman (23:19.720)
I just sent my mother an Alexa
Lex Fridman (23:21.400)
and she figured out how to go on the settings
Lex Fridman (23:23.400)
and do the thing.
Lex Fridman (23:24.240)
And I was really impressed that she was able to do it.
Lex Fridman (23:26.960)
So there are parts of the brain
Lex Fridman (23:28.520)
that remain malleable their whole life.
David Eagleman (23:30.360)
The interesting part is that really your goal
Lex Fridman (23:34.200)
is to make an internal model of the world.
David Eagleman (23:36.080)
Your goal is to say, okay,
Lex Fridman (23:39.120)
the brain is trapped in silence and darkness,
Lex Fridman (23:42.280)
and it's trying to understand
Lex Fridman (23:43.520)
how the world works out there, right?
David Eagleman (23:46.040)
I love that image.
Lex Fridman (23:47.080)
Yeah, I guess it is.
David Eagleman (23:48.240)
Yeah.
Lex Fridman (23:49.080)
You forget, it's like this lonely thing
David Eagleman (23:53.040)
is sitting in its own container
Lex Fridman (23:54.640)
and trying to actually throw a few sensors,
David Eagleman (23:57.080)
figure out what the hell's going on.
Lex Fridman (23:58.760)
You know what I sometimes think about
David Eagleman (23:59.800)
is that movie, The Martian with Matt Damon,
Lex Fridman (24:03.120)
the, I mean, it was written in a book, of course,
Lex Fridman (24:05.560)
but the movie poster shows Matt Damon
Lex Fridman (24:08.400)
all alone on the red planet.
Lex Fridman (24:09.800)
And I think, God, that's actually what it's like
Lex Fridman (24:12.520)
to be inside your head and my head and anybody's head
David Eagleman (24:16.360)
is that you're essentially on your own planet in there.
Lex Fridman (24:20.200)
And I'm essentially on my own planet.
Lex Fridman (24:21.600)
And everyone's got their own world
Lex Fridman (24:24.080)
where you've absorbed all of your experiences
David Eagleman (24:26.680)
up to this moment in your life
Lex Fridman (24:28.000)
that have made you exactly who you are
Lex Fridman (24:29.560)
and same for me and everyone.
Lex Fridman (24:31.120)
And we've got this very thin bandwidth of communication.
Lex Fridman (24:36.680)
And I'll say something like,
Lex Fridman (24:38.720)
oh yeah, that tastes just like peaches.
Lex Fridman (24:40.720)
And you'll say, oh, I know what you mean.
Lex Fridman (24:42.840)
But the experience, of course,
David Eagleman (24:44.280)
might be vastly different for us.
Lex Fridman (24:47.680)
But anyway, yes.
Lex Fridman (24:48.520)
So the brain is trapped in silence and darkness,
Lex Fridman (24:50.520)
each one of us, and what it's trying to do,
David Eagleman (24:53.280)
this is the important part,
Lex Fridman (24:54.120)
it's trying to make an internal model
David Eagleman (24:55.720)
of what's going on out there,
Lex Fridman (24:56.560)
as in how do I function in the world?
Lex Fridman (24:58.800)
How do I interact with other people?
Lex Fridman (25:00.800)
Do I say something nice and polite?
Lex Fridman (25:02.680)
Do I say something aggressive and mean?
Lex Fridman (25:04.040)
Do I, you know, all these things
David Eagleman (25:05.560)
that it's putting together about the world.
Lex Fridman (25:08.440)
And I think what happens when people get older and older,
David Eagleman (25:12.320)
it may not be that plasticity is diminishing.
Lex Fridman (25:15.480)
It may be that their internal model essentially
David Eagleman (25:18.160)
has set itself up in a way where it says,
Lex Fridman (25:20.120)
okay, I've pretty much got
David Eagleman (25:21.160)
a really good understanding of the world now,
Lex Fridman (25:22.800)
and I don't really need to change, right?
Lex Fridman (25:25.400)
So when much older people find themselves
Lex Fridman (25:28.600)
in a situation where they need to change,
David Eagleman (25:30.800)
they can actually are able to do it.
Lex Fridman (25:33.280)
It's just that I think this notion
David Eagleman (25:34.760)
that we all have that plasticity diminishes
Lex Fridman (25:36.960)
as we grow older is in part
David Eagleman (25:38.880)
because the motivation isn't there.
Lex Fridman (25:41.480)
But if you were 80 and you get fired from your job
Lex Fridman (25:44.120)
and suddenly had to figure out
Lex Fridman (25:45.720)
how to program a WordPress site or something,
David Eagleman (25:47.440)
you'd figure it out.
Lex Fridman (25:48.920)
Got it.
Lex Fridman (25:49.760)
So the capability, the possibility of change is there.
Lex Fridman (25:53.720)
But then that's the highest challenge,
David Eagleman (25:57.040)
the interesting challenge to this plasticity,
Lex Fridman (26:00.880)
to this liveware system.
David Eagleman (26:03.440)
If we could talk about brain computer interfaces
Lex Fridman (26:06.000)
and Neuralink, what are your thoughts
David Eagleman (26:09.040)
about the efforts of Elon Musk, Neuralink, BCI in general
Lex Fridman (26:13.680)
in this regard, which is adding a machine,
David Eagleman (26:18.320)
a computer, the capability of a computer
Lex Fridman (26:21.720)
to communicate with the brain
Lex Fridman (26:22.800)
and the brain to communicate with a computer
Lex Fridman (26:24.920)
at the very basic applications
Lex Fridman (26:26.800)
and then like the futuristic kind of thoughts.
Lex Fridman (26:28.880)
Yeah, first of all, it's terrific
David Eagleman (26:30.920)
that people are jumping in and doing that
Lex Fridman (26:32.360)
because it's clearly the future.
David Eagleman (26:34.480)
The interesting part is our brains have pretty good methods
Lex Fridman (26:37.280)
of interacting with technology.
Lex Fridman (26:38.760)
So maybe it's your fat thumbs on a cell phone or something,
Lex Fridman (26:41.520)
but, or maybe it's watching a YouTube video
Lex Fridman (26:44.600)
and getting into your eye that way.
Lex Fridman (26:45.840)
But we have pretty rapid ways of communicating
David Eagleman (26:48.360)
with technology and getting data.
Lex Fridman (26:49.960)
So if you actually crack open the skull
Lex Fridman (26:52.760)
and go into the inner sanctum of the brain,
Lex Fridman (26:56.520)
you might be able to get a little bit faster,
Lex Fridman (26:58.200)
but I'll tell you, I'm not so sanguine
Lex Fridman (27:03.400)
on the future of that as a business.
Lex Fridman (27:06.640)
And I'll tell you why.
Lex Fridman (27:07.480)
It's because there are various ways
David Eagleman (27:10.040)
of getting data in and out
Lex Fridman (27:11.160)
and an open head surgery is a big deal.
David Eagleman (27:14.480)
Neurosurgeons don't wanna do it
Lex Fridman (27:16.560)
because there's always risk of death
Lex Fridman (27:18.000)
and infection on the table.
Lex Fridman (27:19.640)
And also it's not clear how many people would say,
David Eagleman (27:23.200)
I'm gonna volunteer to get something in my head
Lex Fridman (27:26.000)
so that I can text faster, 20% faster.
Lex Fridman (27:29.800)
So I think it's, mother nature surrounds the brain
Lex Fridman (27:33.720)
with this armored bunker of the skull
David Eagleman (27:37.840)
because it's a very delicate material.
Lex Fridman (27:39.680)
And there's an expression in neurosurgery
David Eagleman (27:44.200)
about the brain is,
Lex Fridman (27:46.480)
the person is never the same after you open up their skull.
Lex Fridman (27:49.080)
Now, whether or not that's true or whatever, who cares?
Lex Fridman (27:51.640)
But it's a big deal to do an open head surgery.
Lex Fridman (27:54.080)
So what I'm interested in is how can we get information
Lex Fridman (27:57.520)
in and out of the brain
Lex Fridman (27:58.360)
without having to crack the skull open?
Lex Fridman (28:00.680)
Without messing with the biological part,
David Eagleman (28:03.880)
directly connecting or messing
Lex Fridman (28:06.480)
with the intricate biological thing that we got going on
Lex Fridman (28:10.440)
and it seems to be working.
Lex Fridman (28:11.920)
Yeah, exactly.
Lex Fridman (28:12.760)
And by the way, where Neuralink is going,
Lex Fridman (28:15.400)
which is wonderful, is going to be in patient cases.
David Eagleman (28:18.240)
It really matters for all kinds of surgeries
Lex Fridman (28:20.520)
that a person needs,
David Eagleman (28:21.760)
whether for Parkinson's or epilepsy or whatever.
Lex Fridman (28:24.000)
It's a terrific new technology
David Eagleman (28:25.680)
for essentially sewing electrodes in there
Lex Fridman (28:27.760)
and getting more higher density of electrodes.
Lex Fridman (28:30.000)
So that's great.
Lex Fridman (28:30.960)
I just don't think as far as the future of BCI goes,
David Eagleman (28:34.400)
I don't suspect that people will go in and say,
Lex Fridman (28:38.400)
yeah, drill a hole in my head and do this.
David Eagleman (28:40.640)
Well, it's interesting
Lex Fridman (28:41.680)
because I think there's a similar intuition
Lex Fridman (28:44.280)
but say in the world of autonomous vehicles
Lex Fridman (28:46.680)
that folks know how hard it is
Lex Fridman (28:49.400)
and it seems damn impossible.
Lex Fridman (28:51.560)
The similar intuition about,
David Eagleman (28:52.960)
I'm sticking on the Elon Musk thing
Lex Fridman (28:54.680)
is just a good, easy example.
David Eagleman (28:57.040)
Similar intuition about colonizing Mars,
Lex Fridman (28:59.680)
it like, if you really think about it,
David Eagleman (29:01.440)
it seems extremely difficult.
Lex Fridman (29:04.760)
And almost, I mean, just technically difficult
David Eagleman (29:08.960)
to a degree where you wanna ask,
Lex Fridman (29:12.000)
is it really worth doing, worth trying?
Lex Fridman (29:14.840)
And then the same is applied with BCI.
Lex Fridman (29:17.880)
But the thing about the future
David Eagleman (29:21.800)
is it's hard to predict.
Lex Fridman (29:23.720)
So the exciting thing to me with,
Lex Fridman (29:26.680)
so once it does, once if successful,
Lex Fridman (29:29.640)
it's able to help patients,
David Eagleman (29:31.640)
it may be able to discover something very surprising
Lex Fridman (29:36.680)
of our ability to directly communicate with the brain.
Lex Fridman (29:39.560)
So exactly what you're interested in is figuring out
Lex Fridman (29:42.840)
how to play with this malleable brain,
Lex Fridman (29:46.640)
but like help assist it somehow.
Lex Fridman (29:49.480)
I mean, it's such a compelling notion to me
David Eagleman (29:52.240)
that we're now working on
Lex Fridman (29:53.640)
all these exciting machine learning systems
David Eagleman (29:55.960)
that are able to learn from data.
Lex Fridman (29:59.760)
And then if we can have this other brain
David Eagleman (30:04.040)
that's a learning system,
Lex Fridman (30:05.600)
that's live wired on the human side
Lex Fridman (30:09.600)
and them to be able to communicate,
Lex Fridman (30:11.520)
it's like a self play mechanism
David Eagleman (30:14.120)
was able to beat the world champion at Go.
Lex Fridman (30:17.800)
So they can play with each other,
David Eagleman (30:19.560)
the computer and the brain, like when you sleep.
Lex Fridman (30:22.440)
I mean, there's a lot of futuristic kind of things
David Eagleman (30:24.520)
that it's just exciting possibilities,
Lex Fridman (30:27.640)
but I hear you, we understand so little
David Eagleman (30:30.240)
about the actual intricacies of the communication
Lex Fridman (30:34.080)
of the brain that it's hard to find the common language.
David Eagleman (30:38.480)
Well, interestingly, the technologies that have been built
Lex Fridman (30:45.800)
don't actually require the perfect common language.
Lex Fridman (30:48.320)
So for example, hundreds of thousands of people
Lex Fridman (30:51.080)
are walking around with artificial ears
Lex Fridman (30:52.440)
and artificial eyes,
Lex Fridman (30:53.440)
meaning cochlear implants or retinal implants.
Lex Fridman (30:56.920)
So this is, you take a essentially digital microphone,
Lex Fridman (31:00.320)
you slip an electrode strip into the inner ear
Lex Fridman (31:03.240)
and people can learn how to hear that way,
Lex Fridman (31:05.160)
or you take an electrode grid
Lex Fridman (31:06.600)
and you plug it into the retina at the back of the eye
Lex Fridman (31:09.240)
and people can learn how to see that way.
David Eagleman (31:11.160)
The interesting part is those devices
Lex Fridman (31:13.880)
don't speak exactly the natural biological language,
David Eagleman (31:17.120)
they speak the dialect of Silicon Valley.
Lex Fridman (31:19.400)
And it turns out that as recently as about 25 years ago,
David Eagleman (31:24.360)
a lot of people thought this was never gonna work.
Lex Fridman (31:26.520)
They thought it wasn't gonna work for that reason,
Lex Fridman (31:28.960)
but the brain figures it out.
Lex Fridman (31:30.360)
It's really good at saying, okay, look,
David Eagleman (31:32.200)
there's some correlation between what I can touch
Lex Fridman (31:34.200)
and feel and hear and so on,
Lex Fridman (31:35.840)
and the data that's coming in,
Lex Fridman (31:37.040)
or between I clap my hands and I have signals coming in there
Lex Fridman (31:41.520)
and it figures out how to speak any language.
Lex Fridman (31:44.240)
Oh, that's fascinating.
Lex Fridman (31:45.080)
So like no matter if it's Neuralink,
Lex Fridman (31:50.000)
so directly communicating with the brain,
David Eagleman (31:51.760)
or it's a smartphone or Google Glass,
Lex Fridman (31:54.720)
or the brain figures out the efficient way of communication.
David Eagleman (31:58.800)
Well, exactly, exactly.
Lex Fridman (32:00.200)
And what I propose is the potato head theory of evolution,
David Eagleman (32:03.680)
which is that all our eyes and nose and mouth and ears
Lex Fridman (32:08.320)
and fingertips, all this stuff is just plug and play.
Lex Fridman (32:10.760)
And the brain can figure out
Lex Fridman (32:12.760)
what to do with the data that comes in.
Lex Fridman (32:14.160)
And part of the reason that I think this is right,
Lex Fridman (32:17.600)
and I care so deeply about this,
David Eagleman (32:18.960)
is when you look across the animal kingdom,
Lex Fridman (32:20.360)
you find all kinds of weird peripheral devices plugged in,
Lex Fridman (32:23.520)
and the brain figures out what to do with the data.
Lex Fridman (32:25.760)
And I don't believe that Mother Nature
David Eagleman (32:27.360)
has to reinvent the principles of brain operation each time
Lex Fridman (32:32.360)
to say, oh, now I'm gonna have heat pits
David Eagleman (32:33.800)
to detect infrared.
Lex Fridman (32:34.640)
Now I'm gonna have something
David Eagleman (32:36.280)
to detect electroreceptors on the body.
Lex Fridman (32:39.200)
Now I'm gonna detect something
David Eagleman (32:40.040)
to pick up the magnetic field of the earth
Lex Fridman (32:42.520)
with cryptochromes in the eye.
Lex Fridman (32:43.960)
And so instead the brain says, oh, I got it.
Lex Fridman (32:45.800)
There's data coming in.
Lex Fridman (32:47.240)
Is that useful?
Lex Fridman (32:48.080)
Can I do something with it?
David Eagleman (32:48.920)
Oh, great, I'm gonna mold myself
Lex Fridman (32:50.440)
around the data that's coming in.
David Eagleman (32:52.640)
It's kind of fascinating to think that,
Lex Fridman (32:55.440)
we think of smartphones
Lex Fridman (32:56.560)
and all this new technology as novel.
Lex Fridman (32:58.760)
It's totally novel as outside of what evolution
David Eagleman (33:02.680)
ever intended or like what nature ever intended.
Lex Fridman (33:05.600)
It's fascinating to think that like the entirety
David Eagleman (33:08.400)
of the process of evolution is perfectly fine
Lex Fridman (33:10.960)
and ready for the smartphone and the internet.
David Eagleman (33:14.200)
Like it's ready.
Lex Fridman (33:15.240)
It's ready to be valuable to that.
Lex Fridman (33:17.120)
And whatever comes to cyborgs, to virtual reality,
Lex Fridman (33:21.440)
we kind of think like, this is, you know,
David Eagleman (33:23.480)
there's all these like books written about what's natural
Lex Fridman (33:27.000)
and we're like destroying our natural cells
David Eagleman (33:29.600)
by like embracing all this technology.
Lex Fridman (33:32.560)
It's kind of, you know,
David Eagleman (33:34.520)
probably not giving the brain enough credit.
Lex Fridman (33:36.480)
Like this thing is just fine with new tech.
David Eagleman (33:40.240)
Oh, exactly, it wraps itself around.
Lex Fridman (33:41.840)
And by the way, wait till you have kids.
David Eagleman (33:43.120)
You'll see the ease with which they pick up on stuff.
Lex Fridman (33:46.320)
And as Kevin Kelly said,
David Eagleman (33:50.280)
technology is what gets invented after you're born.
Lex Fridman (33:54.480)
But the stuff that already exists when you're born,
David Eagleman (33:56.280)
that's not even tech, that's just background furniture.
Lex Fridman (33:58.120)
Like the fact that the iPad exists for my son and daughter,
David Eagleman (34:00.840)
like that's just background furniture.
Lex Fridman (34:02.320)
So, yeah, it's because we have
David Eagleman (34:06.240)
this incredibly malleable system,
Lex Fridman (34:08.200)
that just absorbs whatever is going on in the world
Lex Fridman (34:10.680)
and learns what to do with it.
Lex Fridman (34:11.840)
So do you think, just to linger for a little bit more,
Lex Fridman (34:15.400)
do you think it's possible to co adjust?
Lex Fridman (34:22.160)
Like we're kind of, you know,
David Eagleman (34:25.400)
for the machine to adjust to the brain,
Lex Fridman (34:27.880)
for the brain to adjust to the machine.
David Eagleman (34:29.240)
I guess that's what's already happening.
Lex Fridman (34:31.040)
Sure, that is what's happening.
Lex Fridman (34:32.360)
So for example, when you put electrodes
Lex Fridman (34:34.640)
in the motor cortex to control a robotic arm
David Eagleman (34:37.200)
for somebody who's paralyzed,
Lex Fridman (34:39.240)
the engineers do a lot of work to figure out,
David Eagleman (34:41.080)
okay, what can we do with the algorithm here
Lex Fridman (34:42.840)
so that we can detect what's going on from these cells
Lex Fridman (34:45.640)
and figure out how to best program the robotic arm to move
Lex Fridman (34:49.760)
given the data that we're measuring from these cells.
Lex Fridman (34:51.920)
But also the brain is learning too.
Lex Fridman (34:54.560)
So, you know, the paralyzed woman says,
David Eagleman (34:57.040)
wait, I'm trying to grab this thing.
Lex Fridman (34:58.840)
And by the way, it's all about relevance.
Lex Fridman (35:00.880)
So if there's a piece of food there and she's hungry,
Lex Fridman (35:04.040)
she'll figure out how to get this food into her mouth
David Eagleman (35:08.240)
with the robotic arm because that is what matters.
Lex Fridman (35:13.240)
Well, that's, okay, first of all,
David Eagleman (35:15.520)
that paints a really promising and beautiful,
Lex Fridman (35:17.640)
for some reason, really optimistic picture
David Eagleman (35:20.160)
that, you know, our brain is able to adjust to so much.
Lex Fridman (35:26.320)
You know, so many things happened this year, 2020,
Lex Fridman (35:29.640)
that you think like, how are we ever going to deal with it?
Lex Fridman (35:32.960)
And it's somehow encouraging
Lex Fridman (35:35.680)
and inspiring that like we're going to be okay.
Lex Fridman (35:41.120)
Well, that's right.
David Eagleman (35:41.960)
I actually think, so 2020 has been an awful year
Lex Fridman (35:45.080)
for almost everybody in many ways,
Lex Fridman (35:46.960)
but the one silver lining has to do with brain plasticity,
Lex Fridman (35:50.440)
which is to say we've all been on our, you know,
David Eagleman (35:54.080)
on our gerbil wheels, we've all been in our routines.
Lex Fridman (35:56.480)
And, you know, as I mentioned,
David Eagleman (35:58.600)
our internal models are all about
Lex Fridman (36:00.760)
how do you maximally succeed?
Lex Fridman (36:02.320)
How do you optimize your operation
Lex Fridman (36:04.560)
in this circumstance where you are, right?
Lex Fridman (36:07.240)
And then all of a sudden, bang, 2020 comes,
Lex Fridman (36:09.080)
we're completely off our wheels.
David Eagleman (36:10.920)
We're having to create new things all the time
Lex Fridman (36:14.880)
and figure out how to do it.
Lex Fridman (36:15.960)
And that is terrific for brain plasticity because,
Lex Fridman (36:18.720)
and we know this because there are very large studies
David Eagleman (36:23.480)
on older people who stay cognitively active
Lex Fridman (36:26.480)
their whole lives.
David Eagleman (36:28.000)
Some fraction of them have Alzheimer's disease
Lex Fridman (36:31.760)
physically, but nobody knows that when they're alive.
David Eagleman (36:34.640)
Even though their brain is getting chewed up
Lex Fridman (36:36.000)
with the ravages of Alzheimer's,
David Eagleman (36:38.600)
cognitively they're doing just fine.
Lex Fridman (36:40.000)
Why?
David Eagleman (36:40.840)
It's because they're challenged all the time.
Lex Fridman (36:44.080)
They've got all these new things going on,
David Eagleman (36:45.520)
all this novelty, all these responsibilities,
Lex Fridman (36:47.200)
chores, social life, all these things happening.
Lex Fridman (36:49.640)
And as a result, they're constantly building new roadways,
Lex Fridman (36:52.760)
even as parts degrade.
Lex Fridman (36:54.680)
And that's the only good news is that
Lex Fridman (36:57.720)
we are in a situation where suddenly
David Eagleman (36:59.480)
we can't just operate like automata anymore.
Lex Fridman (37:02.000)
We have to think of completely new ways to do things.
Lex Fridman (37:05.520)
And that's wonderful.
Lex Fridman (37:07.880)
I don't know why this question popped into my head.
Lex Fridman (37:11.200)
It's quite absurd, but are we gonna be okay?
Lex Fridman (37:16.080)
Yeah.
David Eagleman (37:17.200)
You said this is the promising silver lining
Lex Fridman (37:19.640)
just from your own,
David Eagleman (37:20.480)
cause you've written about this and thought about this
Lex Fridman (37:22.840)
outside of maybe even the plasticity of the brain,
Lex Fridman (37:25.240)
but just this whole pandemic kind of changed the way
Lex Fridman (37:29.920)
it knocked us out of this hamster wheel like that of habit.
David Eagleman (37:35.560)
A lot of people had to reinvent themselves.
Lex Fridman (37:39.400)
Unfortunately, and I have a lot of friends
David Eagleman (37:42.240)
who either already or are going to lose their business,
Lex Fridman (37:48.160)
is basically it's taking the dreams that people have had
Lex Fridman (37:52.720)
and said this dream, this particular dream you've had
Lex Fridman (37:58.160)
will no longer be possible.
Lex Fridman (38:00.080)
So you have to find something new.
Lex Fridman (38:02.040)
What are your, are we gonna be okay?
David Eagleman (38:06.000)
Yeah, we'll be okay in the sense that,
Lex Fridman (38:08.080)
I mean, it's gonna be a rough time
David Eagleman (38:09.560)
for many or most people,
Lex Fridman (38:11.800)
but in the sense that it is sometimes useful
David Eagleman (38:18.000)
to find that what you thought was your dream
Lex Fridman (38:20.760)
was not the thing that you're going to do.
David Eagleman (38:24.520)
This is obviously the plot in lots of Hollywood movies
Lex Fridman (38:26.760)
that someone says, I'm gonna do this,
Lex Fridman (38:27.920)
and then that gets foiled
Lex Fridman (38:29.280)
and they end up doing something better.
Lex Fridman (38:31.080)
But this is true in life.
Lex Fridman (38:32.320)
I mean, in general, even though we plan our lives
David Eagleman (38:38.440)
as best we can, it's predicated on our notion of,
Lex Fridman (38:42.080)
okay, given everything that's around me,
David Eagleman (38:43.600)
this is what's possible for me next.
Lex Fridman (38:47.040)
But it takes 2020 to knock you off that
David Eagleman (38:49.400)
where you think, oh, well, actually,
Lex Fridman (38:50.840)
maybe there's something I can be doing
David Eagleman (38:52.680)
that's bigger, that's better.
Lex Fridman (38:54.320)
Yeah, you know, for me, one exciting thing,
Lex Fridman (38:56.560)
and I just talked to Grant Sanderson.
Lex Fridman (38:59.600)
I don't know if you know who he is.
David Eagleman (39:00.680)
He's a 3Blue1Brown, it's a YouTube channel.
Lex Fridman (39:03.600)
He does, he's a, if you see it, you would recognize it.
David Eagleman (39:08.200)
He's like a really famous math guy,
Lex Fridman (39:11.120)
and he's a math educator,
Lex Fridman (39:12.400)
and he does these incredible, beautiful videos.
Lex Fridman (39:15.040)
And now I see sort of at MIT,
David Eagleman (39:17.000)
folks are struggling to try to figure out,
Lex Fridman (39:19.680)
you know, if we do teach remotely,
Lex Fridman (39:21.800)
how do we do it effectively?
Lex Fridman (39:23.560)
So you have these world class researchers
Lex Fridman (39:27.960)
and professors trying to figure out
Lex Fridman (39:30.240)
how to put content online that teaches people.
Lex Fridman (39:33.760)
And to me, a possible future of that is,
Lex Fridman (39:37.720)
you know, Nobel Prize winning faculty become YouTubers.
David Eagleman (39:42.720)
Like that to me is so exciting, like what Grant said,
Lex Fridman (39:47.720)
which is like the possibility of creating canonical videos
David Eagleman (39:52.480)
on the thing you're a world expert in.
Lex Fridman (39:55.000)
You know, there's so many topics.
David Eagleman (39:56.880)
It just, the world doesn't, you know, there's faculty.
Lex Fridman (40:00.880)
I mentioned Russ Tedrick.
David Eagleman (40:02.120)
There's all these people in robotics
Lex Fridman (40:04.240)
that are experts in a particular beautiful field
David Eagleman (40:07.880)
on which there's only just papers.
Lex Fridman (40:09.840)
There's no popular book.
David Eagleman (40:12.680)
There's no clean canonical video
Lex Fridman (40:16.400)
showing the beauty of a subject.
Lex Fridman (40:18.120)
And one possibility is they try to create that
Lex Fridman (40:22.360)
and share it with the world.
David Eagleman (40:25.400)
This is the beautiful thing.
Lex Fridman (40:26.400)
This of course has been happening for a while already.
David Eagleman (40:28.880)
I mean, for example, when I go and I give book talks,
Lex Fridman (40:31.720)
often what'll happen is some 13 year old
David Eagleman (40:33.760)
will come up to me afterwards and say something,
Lex Fridman (40:35.360)
and I'll say, my God, that was so smart.
Lex Fridman (40:37.160)
Like, how did you know that?
Lex Fridman (40:38.840)
And they'll say, oh, I saw it on a Ted talk.
David Eagleman (40:40.320)
Well, what an amazing opportunity.
Lex Fridman (40:42.880)
Here you got the best person in the world on subject X
David Eagleman (40:46.440)
giving a 15 minute talk as beautifully as he or she can.
Lex Fridman (40:51.880)
And the 13 year old just grows up with that.
Lex Fridman (40:53.440)
That's just the mother's milk, right?
Lex Fridman (40:55.160)
As opposed to when we grew up,
David Eagleman (40:57.720)
you know, I had whatever homeroom teacher I had
Lex Fridman (41:00.320)
and, you know, whatever classmates I had.
Lex Fridman (41:03.200)
And hopefully that person knew what he or she was teaching
Lex Fridman (41:06.440)
and often didn't and, you know, just made things up.
Lex Fridman (41:08.760)
So the opportunity that has become extraordinary
Lex Fridman (41:12.960)
to get the best of the world.
Lex Fridman (41:14.480)
And the reason this matters, of course,
Lex Fridman (41:15.720)
is because obviously, back to plasticity,
David Eagleman (41:18.560)
the way that we, the way our brain gets molded
Lex Fridman (41:22.000)
is by absorbing everything from the world,
David Eagleman (41:24.320)
all of the knowledge and the data and so on that it can get,
Lex Fridman (41:28.520)
and then springboarding off of that.
Lex Fridman (41:33.040)
And we're in a very lucky time now
Lex Fridman (41:34.340)
because we grew up with a lot of just in case learning.
David Eagleman (41:40.340)
So, you know, just in case you ever need to know
Lex Fridman (41:42.000)
these dates in Mongolian history, here they are.
Lex Fridman (41:44.720)
But what kids are grown up with now, like my kids,
Lex Fridman (41:47.280)
is tons of just in time learning.
Lex Fridman (41:48.800)
So as soon as they're curious about something,
Lex Fridman (41:50.120)
they ask Alexa, they ask Google Home,
David Eagleman (41:51.800)
they get the answer right there
Lex Fridman (41:53.080)
in the context of their curiosity.
David Eagleman (41:54.600)
The reason this matters is because for plasticity to happen,
Lex Fridman (41:59.720)
you need to care, you need to be curious about something.
Lex Fridman (42:02.480)
And this is something, by the way,
Lex Fridman (42:03.760)
that the ancient Romans had noted.
David Eagleman (42:06.320)
They had outlined seven different levels of learning
Lex Fridman (42:08.360)
and the highest level is when you're curious about a topic.
Lex Fridman (42:10.600)
But anyway, so kids now are getting tons
Lex Fridman (42:13.200)
of just in time learning, and as a result,
David Eagleman (42:15.800)
they're gonna be so much smarter than we are.
Lex Fridman (42:18.440)
They're just, and we can already see that.
David Eagleman (42:19.760)
I mean, my boy is eight years old, my girl is five.
Lex Fridman (42:22.200)
But I mean, the things that he knows are amazing
David Eagleman (42:25.740)
because it's not just him having to do
Lex Fridman (42:27.800)
the rote memorization stuff that we did.
David Eagleman (42:29.960)
Yeah, it's just fascinating what the brain,
Lex Fridman (42:32.280)
what young brains look like now
David Eagleman (42:33.640)
because of all those TED Talks just loaded in there.
Lex Fridman (42:36.880)
And there's also, I mean, a lot of people, right,
David Eagleman (42:39.920)
kind of, there's a sense that our attention span
Lex Fridman (42:42.960)
is growing shorter, but it's complicated
David Eagleman (42:46.320)
because for example, most people, majority of people,
Lex Fridman (42:50.760)
it's the 80 plus percent of people listen
David Eagleman (42:53.000)
to the entirety of these things,
Lex Fridman (42:54.600)
two, three hours for the podcast,
David Eagleman (42:56.800)
long form podcasts are becoming more and more popular.
Lex Fridman (43:00.920)
So like that's, it's all really giant complicated mess.
Lex Fridman (43:04.240)
And the point is that the brain is able to adjust to it
Lex Fridman (43:07.440)
and somehow like form a worldview
David Eagleman (43:11.840)
within this new medium of like information that we have.
Lex Fridman (43:17.040)
You have like these short tweets
Lex Fridman (43:19.920)
and you have these three, four hour podcasts
Lex Fridman (43:22.840)
and you have Netflix movie.
David Eagleman (43:24.940)
I mean, it's just, it's adjusting to the entirety
Lex Fridman (43:27.200)
and just absorbing it and taking it all in
Lex Fridman (43:30.080)
and then pops up COVID that forces us all to be home
Lex Fridman (43:34.600)
and it all just adjusts and figures it out.
David Eagleman (43:39.200)
Yeah, yeah, exactly.
Lex Fridman (43:40.200)
It's fascinating.
David Eagleman (43:41.880)
Been talking about the brain
Lex Fridman (43:43.880)
as if it's something separate from the human
David Eagleman (43:48.400)
that carries it a little bit.
Lex Fridman (43:50.280)
Like whenever you talk about the brain,
David Eagleman (43:52.180)
it's easy to forget that that's like, that's us.
Lex Fridman (43:55.340)
Like how much do you,
Lex Fridman (43:59.620)
how much is the whole thing like predetermined?
Lex Fridman (44:04.860)
Like how much is it already encoded in there?
Lex Fridman (44:08.580)
And how much is it the, what's the hit?
Lex Fridman (44:17.020)
The actions, the decisions, the judgments, the...
Lex Fridman (44:22.220)
You mean like who you are?
Lex Fridman (44:23.300)
Who you are.
David Eagleman (44:24.140)
Oh, yeah, yeah, okay, great question.
Lex Fridman (44:25.760)
Right, so there used to be a big debate
David Eagleman (44:27.400)
about nature versus nurture.
Lex Fridman (44:28.900)
And we now know that it's always both.
David Eagleman (44:31.380)
You can't even separate them
Lex Fridman (44:32.720)
because you come to the table with a certain amount of nature
David Eagleman (44:35.500)
for example, your whole genome and so on.
Lex Fridman (44:37.740)
The experiences you have in the womb,
David Eagleman (44:39.680)
like whether your mother is smoking or drinking,
Lex Fridman (44:41.820)
things like that, whether she's stressed, so on.
David Eagleman (44:43.740)
Those all influence how you're gonna pop out of the womb.
Lex Fridman (44:47.260)
From there, everything is an interaction
David Eagleman (44:50.180)
between all of your experiences and the nature.
Lex Fridman (44:55.500)
What I mean is, I think of it like a space time cone
David Eagleman (44:59.900)
where you have, you drop into the world
Lex Fridman (45:01.820)
and depending on the experience that you have,
David Eagleman (45:03.160)
you might go off in this direction
Lex Fridman (45:04.220)
or that direction or in that direction
David Eagleman (45:05.980)
because there's interaction on the way.
Lex Fridman (45:08.460)
Your experiences determine what happens
David Eagleman (45:11.080)
with the expression of your genes.
Lex Fridman (45:12.380)
So some genes get repressed, some get expressed and so on.
Lex Fridman (45:15.980)
And you actually become a different person
Lex Fridman (45:17.620)
based on your experiences.
David Eagleman (45:18.940)
There's a whole field called epigenomics,
Lex Fridman (45:21.140)
which is, or epigenetics I should say,
David Eagleman (45:24.020)
which is about the epigenome.
Lex Fridman (45:26.400)
And that is the layer that sits on top of the DNA
Lex Fridman (45:30.380)
and causes the genes to express differently.
Lex Fridman (45:32.560)
That is directly related to the experiences that you have.
Lex Fridman (45:35.140)
So if, just as an example, they take rat pups
Lex Fridman (45:38.700)
and one group is placed away from their parents
Lex Fridman (45:41.560)
and the other group is groomed and licked
Lex Fridman (45:43.580)
and taken good care of,
David Eagleman (45:44.620)
that changes their gene expression
Lex Fridman (45:46.100)
for the rest of their life.
David Eagleman (45:46.940)
They go off in different directions
Lex Fridman (45:48.140)
in this space time cone.
Lex Fridman (45:50.940)
So yeah, this is of course why it matters
Lex Fridman (45:55.820)
that we take care of children and pour money
David Eagleman (45:58.380)
into things like education and good childcare
Lex Fridman (46:00.780)
and so on for children broadly,
David Eagleman (46:04.460)
because these formative years matter so much.
Lex Fridman (46:08.340)
So is there a free will?
David Eagleman (46:11.620)
This is a great question.
Lex Fridman (46:13.940)
I apologize for the absurd high level
David Eagleman (46:16.500)
philosophical questions.
Lex Fridman (46:17.340)
No, no, these are my favorite kind of questions.
David Eagleman (46:19.060)
Here's the thing, here's the thing.
Lex Fridman (46:20.900)
We don't know.
David Eagleman (46:21.780)
If you ask most neuroscientists,
Lex Fridman (46:23.300)
they'll say that we can't really think
David Eagleman (46:26.780)
of how you would get free will in there
Lex Fridman (46:28.660)
because as far as we can tell, it's a machine.
David Eagleman (46:30.280)
It's a very complicated machine.
Lex Fridman (46:33.420)
Enormously sophisticated, 86 billion neurons,
David Eagleman (46:36.140)
about the same number of glial cells.
Lex Fridman (46:38.140)
Each of these things is as complicated
David Eagleman (46:40.140)
as the city of San Francisco.
Lex Fridman (46:41.280)
Each neuron in your head has the entire human genome in it.
David Eagleman (46:43.500)
It's expressing millions of gene products.
Lex Fridman (46:47.580)
These are incredibly complicated biochemical cascades.
David Eagleman (46:50.000)
Each one is connected to 10,000 of its neighbors,
Lex Fridman (46:51.860)
which means you have like half a quadrillion connections
David Eagleman (46:54.960)
in the brain.
Lex Fridman (46:55.800)
So it's incredibly complicated thing,
Lex Fridman (46:58.180)
but it is fundamentally appears to just be a machine.
Lex Fridman (47:02.540)
And therefore, if there's nothing in it
David Eagleman (47:04.980)
that's not being driven by something else,
Lex Fridman (47:07.420)
then it seems it's hard to understand
David Eagleman (47:10.160)
where free will would come from.
Lex Fridman (47:12.600)
So that's the camp that pretty much all of us fall into,
Lex Fridman (47:14.860)
but I will say, our science is still quite young.
Lex Fridman (47:18.120)
And I'm a fan of the history of science,
Lex Fridman (47:20.860)
and the thing that always strikes me as interesting
Lex Fridman (47:22.780)
is when you look back at any moment in science,
David Eagleman (47:26.100)
everybody believes something is true,
Lex Fridman (47:28.500)
and they simply didn't know about
Lex Fridman (47:31.340)
what Einstein revealed or whatever.
Lex Fridman (47:33.180)
And so who knows?
Lex Fridman (47:35.140)
And they all feel like that we've,
Lex Fridman (47:37.080)
at any moment in history,
David Eagleman (47:38.620)
they all feel like we've converged to the final answer.
Lex Fridman (47:40.700)
Exactly, exactly.
David Eagleman (47:41.800)
Like all the pieces of the puzzle are there.
Lex Fridman (47:43.780)
And I think that's a funny illusion
David Eagleman (47:45.620)
that's worth getting rid of.
Lex Fridman (47:47.180)
And in fact, this is what drives good science
David Eagleman (47:49.540)
is recognizing that we don't have most of the puzzle pieces.
Lex Fridman (47:52.660)
So as far as the free will question goes, I don't know.
David Eagleman (47:55.620)
At the moment, it seems, wow,
Lex Fridman (47:57.060)
it'd be really impossible to figure out
Lex Fridman (47:58.540)
how something else could fit in there,
Lex Fridman (48:00.020)
but 100 years from now,
David Eagleman (48:02.720)
our textbooks might be very different than they are now.
Lex Fridman (48:05.620)
I mean, could I ask you to speculate
Lex Fridman (48:07.620)
where do you think free will could be squeezed into there?
Lex Fridman (48:11.060)
Like, what's that even,
David Eagleman (48:14.580)
is it possible that our brain just creates
Lex Fridman (48:16.300)
kinds of illusions that are useful for us?
Lex Fridman (48:19.880)
Or like what, where could it possibly be squeezed in?
Lex Fridman (48:24.200)
Well, let me give a speculation answer
David Eagleman (48:27.140)
to your very nice question,
Lex Fridman (48:28.740)
but don't, and the listeners of this podcast,
David Eagleman (48:32.180)
don't quote me on this.
Lex Fridman (48:33.140)
Yeah, exactly.
David Eagleman (48:33.980)
I'm not saying this is what I believe to be true,
Lex Fridman (48:35.620)
but let me just give an example.
David Eagleman (48:36.740)
I give this at the end of my book, Incognito.
Lex Fridman (48:38.940)
So the whole book of Incognito is about,
David Eagleman (48:41.340)
all the what's happening in the brain.
Lex Fridman (48:42.900)
And essentially I'm saying, look,
David Eagleman (48:44.060)
here's all the reasons to think
Lex Fridman (48:45.460)
that free will probably does not exist.
Lex Fridman (48:47.020)
But at the very end, I say, look,
Lex Fridman (48:50.580)
imagine that you are,
David Eagleman (48:53.860)
imagine that you're a Kalahari Bushman
Lex Fridman (48:56.140)
and you find a radio in the sand
Lex Fridman (48:58.900)
and you've never seen anything like this.
Lex Fridman (49:01.100)
And you look at this radio and you realize
David Eagleman (49:04.420)
that when you turn this knob, you hear voices coming from,
Lex Fridman (49:07.180)
there are voices coming from it.
Lex Fridman (49:08.700)
So being a radio materialist,
Lex Fridman (49:11.700)
you try to figure out like, how does this thing operate?
Lex Fridman (49:14.020)
So you take off the back cover
Lex Fridman (49:15.420)
and you realize there's all these wires.
Lex Fridman (49:16.780)
And when you take out some wires,
Lex Fridman (49:19.740)
the voices get garbled or stop or whatever.
Lex Fridman (49:22.140)
And so what you end up developing is a whole theory
Lex Fridman (49:24.300)
about how this connection, this pattern of wires
David Eagleman (49:26.820)
gives rise to voices.
Lex Fridman (49:29.020)
But it would never strike you that in distant cities,
David Eagleman (49:31.780)
there's a radio tower and there's invisible stuff beaming.
Lex Fridman (49:34.460)
And that's actually the origin of the voices.
Lex Fridman (49:36.780)
And this is just necessary for it.
Lex Fridman (49:38.700)
So I mentioned this just as a speculation,
David Eagleman (49:42.580)
say, look, how would we know,
Lex Fridman (49:44.100)
what we know about the brain for absolutely certain
David Eagleman (49:46.060)
is that when you damage pieces and parts of it,
Lex Fridman (49:48.580)
things get jumbled up.
Lex Fridman (49:50.580)
But how would you know if there's something else going on
Lex Fridman (49:52.680)
that we can't see like electromagnetic radiation
Lex Fridman (49:55.140)
that is what's actually generating this?
Lex Fridman (49:58.180)
Yeah, you paint a beautiful example
David Eagleman (50:01.420)
of how totally,
Lex Fridman (50:06.260)
because we don't know most of how our universe works,
Lex Fridman (50:10.300)
how totally off base we might be with our science until,
Lex Fridman (50:14.460)
I mean, yeah, I mean, that's inspiring, that's beautiful.
David Eagleman (50:19.100)
It's kind of terrifying, it's humbling.
Lex Fridman (50:21.780)
It's all of the above.
Lex Fridman (50:23.980)
And the important part just to recognize
Lex Fridman (50:26.820)
is that of course we're in the position
David Eagleman (50:28.660)
of having massive unknowns.
Lex Fridman (50:31.780)
And we have of course the known unknowns
Lex Fridman (50:36.340)
and that's all the things we're pursuing in our labs
Lex Fridman (50:38.420)
and trying to figure out that,
Lex Fridman (50:39.260)
but there's this whole space of unknown unknowns.
Lex Fridman (50:41.620)
Things we haven't even realized we haven't asked yet.
David Eagleman (50:44.020)
Let me kind of ask a weird, maybe a difficult question,
Lex Fridman (50:47.660)
part that has to do with,
David Eagleman (50:50.580)
I've been recently reading a lot about World War II.
Lex Fridman (50:54.340)
I'm currently reading a book I recommend for people,
David Eagleman (50:56.620)
which as a Jew has been difficult to read,
Lex Fridman (51:00.940)
but the rise and fall of the Third Reich.
Lex Fridman (51:04.940)
So let me just ask about like the nature of genius,
Lex Fridman (51:08.900)
the nature of evil.
David Eagleman (51:10.460)
If we look at somebody like Einstein,
Lex Fridman (51:14.220)
we look at Hitler, Stalin, modern day Jeffrey Epstein,
David Eagleman (51:19.500)
just folks who through their life have done with Einstein
Lex Fridman (51:24.500)
and works of genius and with the others I mentioned
David Eagleman (51:27.540)
have done evil on this world.
Lex Fridman (51:30.580)
What do we think about that in a livewired brain?
Lex Fridman (51:34.940)
Like how do we think about these extreme people?
Lex Fridman (51:39.580)
Here's what I'd say.
David Eagleman (51:41.700)
This is a very big and difficult question,
Lex Fridman (51:43.540)
but what I would say briefly on it is,
David Eagleman (51:47.620)
first of all, I saw a cover of Time Magazine some years ago
Lex Fridman (51:51.500)
and it was a big sagittal slice of the brain
Lex Fridman (51:55.500)
and it said something like, what makes us good and evil?
Lex Fridman (51:59.020)
And there was a little spot pointing to it
Lex Fridman (52:00.460)
and there was a picture of Gandhi
Lex Fridman (52:01.300)
and there was a little spot that was pointing to Hitler.
Lex Fridman (52:03.380)
And these Time Magazine covers always make me mad
Lex Fridman (52:05.780)
because it's so goofy to think that we're gonna find
David Eagleman (52:08.660)
some spot in the brain or something.
Lex Fridman (52:10.940)
Instead, the interesting part is because we're livewired,
David Eagleman (52:16.860)
we are all about the world and the culture around us.
Lex Fridman (52:20.580)
So somebody like Adolf Hitler got all this positive feedback
David Eagleman (52:25.740)
about what was going on and the crazier and crazier
Lex Fridman (52:28.780)
the ideas he had and he's like, let's set up death camps
Lex Fridman (52:31.980)
and murder a bunch of people and so on.
Lex Fridman (52:34.140)
Somehow he was getting positive feedback from that
Lex Fridman (52:37.340)
and all these other people, they're all spun each other up.
Lex Fridman (52:40.300)
And you look at anything like, I mean, look at the cultural
David Eagleman (52:45.300)
revolution in China or the Russian revolution
Lex Fridman (52:51.180)
or things like this where you look at these things,
Lex Fridman (52:52.620)
my God, how do people all behave like this?
Lex Fridman (52:55.300)
But it's easy to see groups of people spinning themselves up
David Eagleman (52:58.860)
in particular ways where they all say,
Lex Fridman (53:00.300)
well, would I have thought this was right
Lex Fridman (53:03.820)
in a different circumstance?
Lex Fridman (53:04.740)
I don't know, but Fred thinks it's right
Lex Fridman (53:05.940)
and Steve thinks it's right,
Lex Fridman (53:06.780)
everyone around me seems to think it's right.
Lex Fridman (53:08.180)
And so part of the maybe downside of having a livewired brain
Lex Fridman (53:13.060)
is that you can get crowds of people doing things as a group.
Lex Fridman (53:17.500)
So it's interesting to, we would pinpoint Hitler
Lex Fridman (53:20.420)
as saying that's the evil guy.
Lex Fridman (53:21.660)
But in a sense, I think it was Tolstoy who said
Lex Fridman (53:24.740)
the king becomes slave to the people.
David Eagleman (53:30.860)
In other words, Hitler was just a representation
Lex Fridman (53:34.740)
of whatever was going on with that huge crowd
David Eagleman (53:37.420)
that he was surrounded with.
Lex Fridman (53:39.420)
So I only bring that up to say that it's very difficult
David Eagleman (53:45.260)
to say what it is about this person's brain
Lex Fridman (53:48.340)
or that person's brain.
David Eagleman (53:49.180)
He obviously got feedback for what he was doing.
Lex Fridman (53:51.660)
The other thing, by the way,
David Eagleman (53:52.820)
about what we often think of as being evil in society
Lex Fridman (53:57.300)
is my lab recently published some work
David Eagleman (54:01.820)
on in groups and out groups,
Lex Fridman (54:04.620)
which is a very important part of this puzzle.
Lex Fridman (54:08.260)
So it turns out that we are very engineered
Lex Fridman (54:13.860)
to care about in groups versus out groups.
Lex Fridman (54:16.060)
And this seems to be like a really fundamental thing.
Lex Fridman (54:18.700)
So we did this experiment in my lab
David Eagleman (54:20.140)
where we brought people and we stick them in the scanner.
Lex Fridman (54:23.420)
And we, I don't know if you noticed,
Lex Fridman (54:25.020)
but we show them on the screen six hands
Lex Fridman (54:30.700)
and the computer goes around randomly picks a hand.
Lex Fridman (54:33.460)
And then you see that hand gets stabbed
Lex Fridman (54:34.980)
with a syringe needle.
Lex Fridman (54:36.060)
So you actually see a syringe needle enter the hand
Lex Fridman (54:38.260)
and come out.
Lex Fridman (54:39.100)
And it's really, what that does is that triggers
Lex Fridman (54:42.940)
parts of the pain matrix,
David Eagleman (54:44.540)
this areas in your brain that are involved
Lex Fridman (54:46.140)
in feeling physical pain.
David Eagleman (54:47.260)
Now, the interesting thing is it's not your hand
Lex Fridman (54:48.860)
that was stabbed.
Lex Fridman (54:49.940)
So what you're seeing is empathy.
Lex Fridman (54:51.620)
This is you seeing someone else's hand gets stabbed.
Lex Fridman (54:54.140)
You feel like, oh God, this is awful, right?
Lex Fridman (54:56.220)
Okay.
David Eagleman (54:57.420)
We contrast that by the way,
Lex Fridman (54:58.580)
with somebody's hand getting poked as a Q tip,
David Eagleman (55:00.820)
which is, you know, looks visually the same,
Lex Fridman (55:02.540)
but you don't have that same level of response.
David Eagleman (55:06.100)
Now what we do is we label each hand with a one word label,
Lex Fridman (55:10.980)
Christian, Jewish, Muslim, atheist, Scientologist, Hindu.
Lex Fridman (55:14.340)
And now the computer goes around, picks a hand,
Lex Fridman (55:16.940)
stabs the hand.
Lex Fridman (55:17.900)
And the question is, how much does your brain care
Lex Fridman (55:21.420)
about all the people in your out group
Lex Fridman (55:23.220)
versus the one label that happens to match you?
Lex Fridman (55:26.660)
And it turns out for everybody across all religions,
David Eagleman (55:29.140)
they care much more about their in group
Lex Fridman (55:31.020)
than their out group.
Lex Fridman (55:31.860)
And when I say they care, what I mean is
Lex Fridman (55:33.420)
you get a bigger response from their brain.
David Eagleman (55:35.580)
Everything's the same.
Lex Fridman (55:36.420)
It's the same hands.
David Eagleman (55:38.820)
It's just a one word label.
Lex Fridman (55:40.620)
You care much more about your in group than your out group.
Lex Fridman (55:42.900)
And I wish this weren't true, but this is how humans are.
Lex Fridman (55:45.700)
I wonder how fundamental that is,
David Eagleman (55:47.820)
or if it's the emergent thing about culture.
Lex Fridman (55:53.220)
Like if we lived alone with like,
David Eagleman (55:55.540)
if it's genetically built into the brain,
Lex Fridman (55:57.500)
like this longing for tribe.
Lex Fridman (56:00.300)
So I'll tell you, we addressed that.
Lex Fridman (56:02.300)
So here's what we did.
David Eagleman (56:03.260)
There are two, actually there are two other things
Lex Fridman (56:06.820)
we did as part of this study
David Eagleman (56:07.860)
that I think matter for this point.
Lex Fridman (56:09.580)
One is, so okay, so we show that you have
David Eagleman (56:11.740)
a much bigger response.
Lex Fridman (56:13.020)
And by the way, this is not a cognitive thing.
David Eagleman (56:14.460)
This is a very low level basic response
Lex Fridman (56:17.460)
to seeing pain in somebody, okay.
David Eagleman (56:19.060)
Great study by the way.
Lex Fridman (56:20.060)
Thanks, thanks, thanks.
Lex Fridman (56:21.940)
What we did next is we next have it where we say,
Lex Fridman (56:24.820)
okay, the year is 2025 and these three religions
David Eagleman (56:28.700)
are now in a war against these three religions.
Lex Fridman (56:30.780)
And it's all randomized, right?
Lex Fridman (56:31.820)
But what you see is your thing and you have two allies now
Lex Fridman (56:34.980)
against these others.
Lex Fridman (56:37.100)
And now it happens over the course of many trials,
Lex Fridman (56:38.700)
you see everybody gets stabbed at different times.
Lex Fridman (56:41.620)
And the question is, do you care more about your allies?
Lex Fridman (56:43.500)
And the answer is yes.
David Eagleman (56:44.340)
Suddenly people who a moment ago,
Lex Fridman (56:45.940)
you didn't really care when they got stabbed.
David Eagleman (56:47.300)
Now, simply with this one word thing
Lex Fridman (56:49.740)
that they're now your allies, you care more about them.
Lex Fridman (56:52.700)
But then what I wanted to do was look at
Lex Fridman (56:55.340)
how ingrained is this or how arbitrary is it?
Lex Fridman (56:57.660)
So we brought new participants in and we said,
Lex Fridman (57:01.460)
here's a coin, toss the coin.
David Eagleman (57:02.700)
If it's heads, you're an Augustinian.
Lex Fridman (57:04.140)
If it's a tails, you're a Justinian.
David Eagleman (57:06.140)
These are totally made up.
Lex Fridman (57:08.020)
Okay, so they toss it, they get whatever.
David Eagleman (57:10.100)
We give them a band that says Augustinian on it,
Lex Fridman (57:13.380)
whatever tribe they're in now, and they get in the scanner
Lex Fridman (57:16.740)
and they see a thing on the screen that says
Lex Fridman (57:18.500)
the Augustinians and Justinians are two warring tribes.
David Eagleman (57:21.100)
Then you see a bunch of hands,
Lex Fridman (57:22.180)
some are labeled Augustinians, some are Justinian.
Lex Fridman (57:24.620)
And now you care more about whichever team you're on
Lex Fridman (57:27.820)
than the other team, even though it's totally arbitrary
Lex Fridman (57:29.740)
and you know it's arbitrary
Lex Fridman (57:30.580)
because you're the one who tossed the coin.
Lex Fridman (57:32.900)
So it's a state that's very easy to find ourselves in.
Lex Fridman (57:36.980)
In other words, just before walking in the door,
David Eagleman (57:39.500)
they'd never even heard of Augustinian versus Justinian
Lex Fridman (57:41.700)
and now their brain is representing it
David Eagleman (57:43.940)
simply because they're told they're on this team.
Lex Fridman (57:46.380)
You know, now I did my own personal study of this.
Lex Fridman (57:49.620)
So once you're an Augustinian, that tends to be sticky
Lex Fridman (57:55.500)
because I've been a Packers fan,
David Eagleman (57:57.460)
grew to be a Packers fan my whole life.
Lex Fridman (57:59.100)
Now when I'm in Boston with like the Patriots,
David Eagleman (58:03.020)
it's been tough going for my livewired brain
Lex Fridman (58:05.420)
to switch to the Patriots.
Lex Fridman (58:07.980)
So once you become, it's as interesting,
Lex Fridman (58:10.020)
once the tribe is sticky.
David Eagleman (58:12.140)
Yeah, I'll admit that's true.
Lex Fridman (58:14.180)
That's it, you know.
David Eagleman (58:15.020)
You know, we never tried that about saying,
Lex Fridman (58:16.620)
okay, now you're a Justinian and you were an Augustinian.
David Eagleman (58:19.140)
We never saw how sticky it is.
Lex Fridman (58:21.820)
But there are studies of this,
David Eagleman (58:24.380)
of monkey troops on some island.
Lex Fridman (58:30.060)
And what happens is they look at the way monkeys behave
David Eagleman (58:33.580)
when they're part of this tribe
Lex Fridman (58:34.460)
and how they treat members of the other tribe of monkeys.
Lex Fridman (58:37.580)
And then what they do, I've forgotten how they do that,
Lex Fridman (58:39.500)
exactly, but they end up switching a monkey
Lex Fridman (58:42.060)
so he ends up in the other troop.
Lex Fridman (58:43.100)
And very quickly they end up becoming a part
David Eagleman (58:45.220)
of that other troop and hating and behaving badly
Lex Fridman (58:48.180)
towards the original troop.
David Eagleman (58:50.380)
These are fascinating studies, by the way.
Lex Fridman (58:52.500)
This is beautiful.
David Eagleman (58:55.020)
In your book, you have a good light bulb joke.
Lex Fridman (59:01.220)
How many psychiatrists does it take to change a light bulb?
David Eagleman (59:04.460)
Only one, but the light bulb has to want to change.
Lex Fridman (59:07.900)
Sorry.
David Eagleman (59:09.700)
I'm a sucker for a good light bulb joke.
Lex Fridman (59:11.780)
Okay, so given, you know, I've been interested
David Eagleman (59:15.100)
in psychiatry my whole life, just maybe tangentially.
Lex Fridman (59:19.140)
I've kind of early on dreamed to be a psychiatrist
David Eagleman (59:22.500)
until I understood what it entails.
Lex Fridman (59:25.660)
But, you know, is there hope for psychiatry
Lex Fridman (59:31.940)
for somebody else to help this live, wired brain to adjust?
Lex Fridman (59:37.260)
Oh yeah, I mean, in the sense that,
Lex Fridman (59:40.180)
and this has to do with this issue
Lex Fridman (59:41.180)
about us being trapped on our own planet.
David Eagleman (59:43.220)
Forget psychiatrists, just think of like
Lex Fridman (59:45.900)
when you're talking with a friend
Lex Fridman (59:47.020)
and you say, oh, I'm so upset about this.
Lex Fridman (59:48.900)
And your friend says, hey, just look at it this way.
David Eagleman (59:53.300)
You know, all we have access to under normal circumstances
Lex Fridman (59:55.780)
is just the way we're seeing something.
Lex Fridman (59:57.420)
And so it's super helpful to have friends and communities
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