Ep102 "Could you ever know what it’s like to be someone else?" (Part 1)

know what it's like to be someone else? Why are we all so different? And is it possible that those gaps are unbridgable. We'll examine this from the point of view of neuroscience and philosophy and literature, and then technology. Can new tech ever allow us to better understand what it is to be someone else? Or is there an inherent impossibility? So let's start with a simple question, what is it like to be a bat? Now? This is an interesting question because bats are so different from us.

They are mammals like us, but in many ways their lives are unrecognizably foreign to our own. They sleep upside down, but more importantly, they navigate through their dark caverns by emitting little shrieks, and then their extremely sensitive ears pick up on the echoes from that, and they figure out the dimensional structure of the world in which they're flying. And they can do this with terrific resolutions, such that they can catch a flying moth just with this echolocation

in the pitch black. So in nineteen seventy four, the philosopher Thomas Nagel wrote an essay by this title, What Is It Like To Be a Bat? And it quickly became one of the most famous thought experiments in modern philosophy, because it challenges something fundamental about one of our intuitions. He suggested that no matter how much we study another being's brain or behavior or sensory experiences, we can't ever truly grasp what their subjective experience feels like from the inside.

Nagel used the bat as his example, because seeing the world through echolocation is a perfectly good sensory solution, but it's totally foreign to cited humans. His point was that we can study the process of echolocation scientifically, and we can analyze how it works, and we can simulate it with machines, and we can measure how a bat's brain responds to these signals, but we can't feel it. We can't step inside a bat's world and know what it is like to move through space by sound. We can

understand it intellectually, but not experientially. And that brings us to the question of this episode and the next one. Can you ever truly know what it is like to be something else, like another creature? But more importantly, can you ever really know what it's like to be another person? Not just sympathize with them, but really inhabit their world from the inside out, know what it's like to be them. When we're children, we think this is self. It's evidently

true that everyone is like us on the inside. But as we get older, we recognize more and more differences, and the question becomes more nuanced, because, as I've talked about on many episodes, people can be very different from one to the next on the inside. So we're gonna dive deep into that and what it means. But first let's get back to Nagel and bats to set the table. Nagel's proposal was that there's something about subjective experience that's

just not accessible from the outside. So essentially, he said, look, even if we had the most detailed scientific account of the mental processes in the bat, even if we could write down every neuron in the bat's brain and exactly what the activity is doing, and even point to the genes involved, and we could model the way that echolocation works and simulate the bat's behavior perfectly, still we wouldn't have answered the question what it is like to be

that bat? And this is the problem of the subjective character of experience. It's not about behavior or function or brain states. It's about what it feels like to be a conscious creature, and that what it feels like quality. This is what we call qualitia, the internal experience of something. Now, qualia turn out to be really tough for science. Why because science aims for objectivity. It tries to strip away individual perspectives so that we can find truths that are

universally valid. But conscious experience just doesn't cooperate with that. Consciousness is defined by perspective. It's the one thing that can't be fully described in third person terms. There's no outside view of the inside experience. So Nagel pointed to bats simply because their sensory world is so different from ours that it forces us to confront the limits of our imagination. We can imagine what it would be like

for us to behave like a bat. We can imagine hanging upside down, or eating insects, or maybe even using sonar as a tool. But that's not what he's asking. He's asking what is it like for the bat to be the bat? And that he says is something we'll never know, not even in principle. And this reminds us that knowledge comes in different forms. There's the kind of knowledge we can write down and measure and test, and then there's the kind that lives only in the first person,

in the me in the subjective point of view. And that second kind, that inner experience, isn't something we can share or translate fully, even with the best science. So this returns us to the question, can you ever truly know what it's like to be another person? Even when we're talking about someone we know intimately, we're up against a wall because experience is totally private. And maybe this

is not just a philosophical or scientific challenge. Maybe this is a human challenge, because no matter how we try, there is a part of every person, every mind that is forever out of reach. So let's zoom out for a minute to make clear how much difference there is between everyone's experience in the world. So let me start

with just a simple personal example. Many years ago, during my postdoctoral fellowship, I dated a young woman and even though she was often quite sad inside, she had a very stunning Hollywood smile that she would paste on and

it would light up the room every time she did. So. One day we went into a restaurant together and we had to get to the back, but it was packed, so we had to wind our way through a crowded maze of tables to get to the back, and the only way we could squeeze through was with me scooching in right behind her, And because I was taller than she was, I could see over her head as we wound our way through, So she was the front guard and I was mostly hidden behind her, and what I

saw was like a VR experience. Suddenly I was seeing the world through a different set of eyes because she had turned on her smile, and as we wound through the crowd, everyone looked up at her and smiled back and moved their chairs out of the way. It's not that people weren't normally perfectly nice to me alone as well, but there was a noticeable difference here. It was like I was wearing the costume of someone else, and I saw the world through her eyes and how people looked

at her and reacted to her. I saw how she experienced the social realm. Now that told me something about her experience of the world, But still the question remains about her experience on the inside. What is that like to her? We can extrapolate make some guess is but how accurate are we? Of course? Lots of people experience the world differently. Take height. What would it be like if you were looking up at people at a cocktail

party because you were quite short? Or what's it like if you're looking down on people because you're quite tall? Does that change your social experience of the world. What would it be like if you had much stronger arms or legs and could do things yourself that you thought you couldn't, or vice versa. What if you were the opposite gender or looked very different than you do now? There are a thousand little ways in which the body that you're trapped in subtly changes your experience in the world.

But again, that's just the starting point for your internal life. And if you've been listening to this podcast for a while, you know that one of my main interests is about the differences in our internal lives. The world looks and sounds and feels a bit different to you than the person sitting next to you. Many of my episodes have explored this question the astonishing variety of internal experiences that

people have. For example, take synesthesia. Some people will look at letters or numbers on a page and that will trigger an experience of color, or that listen to music and that will trigger swirling visual forms, or they'll taste something and that'll put a feeling on their fingertips. This isn't metaphorical stuff. This is a real experience that a fraction of the population has. Their senses are crosswired in a way that makes their inner world different from someone else's.

If you're interested in synesthesia, I talk about that at length in episode four, or you've heard me talk about other ways in which we might see things in our imagination. One example of this is the spectrum from hyperfantasia to a fantasia, which I talk about in episode fifty nine or hyperfantasic, you visualize things with great clarity, almost like a movie. If you are a fantasic, you don't form

any mental images. Let's say I ask you to imagine a yellow dog running in a shallow creek in the woods. The hyperfantagic person visually imagines that with great detail, almost like they're watching it. A fantagic person sees nothing, no dog, no color, no visual sense of shape or motion. Everyone in the population is spread somewhere along the spectrum and having different experiences on the inside. And there are dozens of things like this. I've previously talked about word aversion

in episode twenty six. Word aversion is the immediate emotional disgust that some people feel when they hear particular words like moist or tissue or slacks or panties or nugget. For most people, these words are just vocabulary, but for other people they trigger an immediate visceral response like discuss or anxiety. The point is across the population, even something as simple as how you experience a word can be very different from one brain to another. When we start

looking for examples like these. In neuroscience, things like synesthesia or a fantasia or word a version. We just find more and more examples. The differences in people's internal worlds are real, and they're measurable, as has been done by my lab and dozens of others. And I'm attaching some studies to the show notes, and these differences between people, they're not just about preferences or histories or what we

pay attention to. It's about the raw feel of experience itself, how we perceive the world, how we process it, how we represent it internally. And the more we learn about these differences, the more are humble we have to become, because it turns out that what you think of as being a normal human is just one point on a vast spectrum of human minds. Now, this doesn't stop us from trying to step into another person's shoes. And this is the notion of empathy, which is something our brains

do automatically. Empathy is our brain's ability to simulate what someone else is going through, and researchers typically divide this into emotional empathy, which is your ability to share the emotional experiences of someone else, and cognitive empathy, understanding the other person's perspective or their mental state. Now, even though empathy seems like just a feeling you experience, it's of course,

under the hood a biological algorithm. Now you may have heard of mirror neurons, which are neurons that become active when you perform some action and also when you see

someone else do that same action. I mention these because many people erroneously think that the mirror neuron system is the basis of empathy, but in fact, empathy involves much more than that, because you also need a whole collection of regions that integrate emotional information and social information and tell you what are the really salient things to pay

attention to. So nowadays you can put together hundreds of brain imaging studies fMRI to see that there's a whole network of brain regions that come online when you're considering the emotions of another person, regions like the anterior insula and the anterior singulate cortex, and the amygdala and the

inferior frontal gyrus. Okay, the details don't matter for today's purpose, except to say that all these areas consistently come online during tasks that require you to simulate another person's state, like if you see them experience pain or distress. Even though you're not experiencing that, your brain runs the simulation. Now, why do we have such a rich system for simulating other people in our heads. It's because biologically, empathy is not just a nice to have, it's a survival tool.

It helps us connect and cooperate and parent and navigate the complexities of social life. And in that sense, it's not just emotional intelligence we're talking about. It's neural engineering evolved for living together in large groups. And this is why we flinch when we see someone else in pain, and also why laughter spreads so easily through a crowd. It's because when we witness another person's emotional state, our brains simulate it, creating a kind of inner echo of

what they're feeling. It's not the real thing, but it's a rough sketch. And this capacity for empathy is very useful for what's known as theory of mind, which I talked about in episode seventy two. This is the cognitive ability to understand that other people have thoughts and feelings and perspectives different from yours. Little kids don't have theory of mind, but it develops through early childhood and that moment when a Toddler realizes that another mind is not

the same as theirs. This marks the beginning of perspective taking. This is the foundation of social connection and storytelling and even deception, because without theory of mind, you'd be stuck in your own mental bubble. And by the way, having good theory of mind is something we keep refining our whole lives. Some people become especially fluent in it, especially

people like actors or therapists or even parents. Other people struggle with theory of mind, not because they're cruel, but because the skill of imagining someone else's internal world takes practice and effort and humility and the right kind of neural circuitry. So we are as species who tries to model one another. We try to step into each other's shoes, but we're really not so good at it. Mostly we just assume that everyone else is like us on the inside.

When you really look at empathy, you can see that what we're really doing is imposing our models on what we think the other person is feeling. As a really good example of this, I've noticed this with videos of robots produced by a company called Boston Dynamics. You might have seen these. They are these robots that look like metal dogs, and one of the things the company wanted to show is that these dogs are robust against being

knocked off course. So the robot dog is running forward in the video and someone comes out and kicks it, and the robot's legs do a quick scramble, and even though it tilts to the side, it manages to stay upright and it keeps going, which is very impressive. But here's the thing. I've seen dozens of people watch these videos and they WinCE. Their empathy is stoked. And I get it. It looks like a creature, it looks like a sentient being, and it's getting kicked. It's really difficult

to watch this and not feel an empathic sting. But I think what this illustrates is our propensity to imagine that other things feel the way we do, even when there's really no good reason to imagine that we're looking at anything other than a collection of nuts and bolts and wires in the case of this robot. So, in other words, our feelings of empathy are a massively important

part of our success as a species. Details presumably say more about us than they do about the accuracy of the feeling in other words, how much your assumptions about the inner life of the other is right on target. I'll give you another example of the weirdness of this

our responses to reading or watching fiction. One of the classes I teach at Stanford is called Literature and the Brain, and an issue I always talk about with amazement is the fact that we shed tears, or we laugh out loud, or we worry or we agonize over the pain of somebody else, someone we know is not real. You're reading about let's say John Snow in Game of Thrones, and you're aware that the whole world he's in isn't even real.

The author can tell us, look, this is fiction. There can be a giant sign in front of you that says this is a string of words depicting a world that is totally made up, And it won't stop tears running down your cheek once something bad happens to John snow Now. I'll come back to literature and empathy in a moment, because I think literature is one of our most important tools for expanding the fence lines of our empathy.

But for now, I'm just making the point that simply because you feel that someone else must be feeling the same thing you are. You might be talking about a robot or an explicitly made up character, and you'll still impose what you believe is this is what that person must be feeling. And obviously it's not just with robots or fictional characters. We empathize more with people we assume are more like us, and that might not be accurate.

So in episode twenty, I talked about neuroimaging experiments in my lab where we put people into the brain scanner and we showed them six hands, and one of the hands gets selected by the computer and you see that hand get stabbed with a syringe needle. This activates a net work in your brain that we summarize as the pain matrix. And as I mentioned before, this is the neural basis of empathy. You're having this fireworks show in your brain light up, even though it wasn't your hand

that got stabbed. You're just watching someone else's hand, and yet you are simulating the pain involved. But here's the key thing. We then labeled each hand with a one word label Christian, Jewish, Muslim, Scientologist, atheist, Hindu, and now the computer picks the hands one at a time. And you see them get stabbed with this syringe needle. And the question is do you care as much if it's any of the members of your out group versus the

label of your in group. So we studied one hundred and five people on this and the answer was clear. Your brain has a large empathic response when you see the hand with your group label get stabbed, and it just doesn't muster the same degree of response when it's anyone else getting stabbed. And this was equally true across all the groups, including the atheists, who cared more when

they saw the atheist hand get stabbed. So in earlier episodes I talked all about the meaning of this from a societal point of view, but for today I want to emphasize that whatever your religion is or your non religion, there are literally millions or billions of people who belong to that label too with you, and they are all as different as can be, and the spread is enormous, And so the idea that you would care for those millions of people more than other millions of people suggests

again that your empathy is not so much about climbing into someone else's head, but instead about imposing your model onto the external world. So whether that's for robots or for John Snow or your group label, it really just represents your internal world more than an actual bridge that reaches a cross and connects with another. And this I

think illuminates an important facet of our human experience. We started off with the question of whether you can ever truly know what it's like to be someone else, And on the surface, it seems like we do this all the time. We empathize, we imagine, we say things like I know exactly how you feel. But do we actually when we say to someone that we know how they feel. We mean it as a comfort, But sometimes it misses the mark because even though two people can go through

something similar, the emotional landscape can be entirely different. Think about somebody that you know really well, maybe your partner, and think about some moment in their life that was emotionally charged, some loss or some triumph. You might have even been there, but did you experience it exactly as they did, or is it possible there was something else going on inside there in her cosmos? So here's an example. A listener recently wrote into me about losing his father.

He described sitting at the hospital bedside, holding his father's hand, feeling the warmth drain away. A friend of his, who had also lost a parent, worked to comfort him by saying, I know exactly how you feel. But instead of feeling seen, he felt misunderstood, because in that moment, his grief was raw and specific, tied to a lifetime of private memories and smells and words and rituals. His friend's grief was

real too, but it wasn't the same. This is where the question of understanding a bat or another person matters, because we share space, we share language, but we can't always share perspective. Even when we use the same words, like grief or joy or fear, what those as words refer to feels different inside of you and me and everyone we know. As another example, you and I might both bite into an orange and say it tastes sweet, But your sweetness is not necessarily my sweetness. It's a

private event dressed up in public language. Now take that idea and stretch it to more complex experiences. What is it like to grow up in a war zone, to live with chronic pain, to navigate the world in a body or a mind that's profoundly different from yours? We can ask questions, we can listen, we can learn, but we also have to acknowledge that there is a hidden interior to every life. And this is something that no brain scan, no survey, no biology jargon is ever going

to fully capture. So probably the best thing to do with a friend or loved one is not to assume that you've been there too, but to be willing to say, haven't been there, but I'm here with you now. Now this whole episode so far, I've been emphasizing how poor we are at expanding our models to know what it is like to me someone else, Even among humans' experience is just not fully shareable. Empathy isn't mind melding what we have our approximations. These are efforts to close the gap,

but these aren't bridges that actually close it. And yet, although we can never do it perfectly, we can get better at it through life experience. And one of the ways this can be magnified is through the reading of literary fiction. There have been a number of studies showing that reading literary fiction, especially complex character driven stories, can improve people's abilities to understand other people's thoughts and emotions.

One study from twenty thirteen, published in the journal Science, found that people who read even a short excerpt of literary fiction scored better on tests of theory of mind the ability to infer other people's beliefs and desires and emotions. The comparison group, by the way, read nonfiction or popular genre fiction. The idea is that good fiction asks you to inhabit unfamiliar minds. You track subtle emotional shifts, you

decode social cues, you grapple with ambiguous motives. You're simulating other people's minds, and you're getting concentrated practice at it. What we find in the brain scanner is that when you're reading, this engages the default mode network, which is involved in self reflect and imagining other perspectives, and it engages other areas that are tied to empathy and social reasoning. So every time you get lost in a novel, you're training your brain to be a little bit better at

knowing what it's like to be other people. President Barack Obama did an interview with The New York Times in twenty seventeen, and he said, I think that I found myself better able to imagine what's going on in the lives of people throughout my presidency because of not just a specific novel, but the act of reading fiction. It exercises those muscles, and I think that has been helpful. End quote. This is what literature is good at. We get to experience life from a different point of view.

And this can sometimes apply to nonfiction too. Take Helen Keller, a woman who is deaf and blind. She wrote about how her reality was shaped by the actile world of touch and vibration, not by the vision and hearing that most of us take for granted. When we read her, we aren't accessing her world directly. We're just catching reflections of it. But nonetheless it expands our otherwise naturally small view of things. It exercises those muscles, and it makes

us cognitively broader. In the book To Kill a Mockingbird, the character Atticus Finch says, quote, you never really understand a person until you consider things from his point of view, until you climb inside of his skin and walk around in it. End quote. Now, as we've said, you're not really walking around in their skin, but you can get better at trying it. But I was thinking about that idea of climbing inside someone's skin and walking around in it.

And this idea leads to one of the most intriguing frontiers in empathy research today, which is virtual reality. Because VR can tempt, imp rarely place you in someone else's shoes, not metaphorically, but perceptually, and researchers have started to use this as a way to see if they can enhance empathy. So in one line of studies, people put on a VR headset and they experienced life as a person from

a different background. So, for example, you can inhabit the body of someone of a different race, or a different gender, or different ability. You don't just look at them, You look down and you see your body as theirs. You move your hands and their hands move. It's an embodied simulation, and these studies showed that it can measurably increase people's empathy.

A similar study comes from my colleagues at Stanford. You put on VR goggles and you get to experience what it's like to become homeless, to lose your home, your belongings, your place in the world. So they run the VR experience and then afterward people report greater concern for homelessness, and they are significantly more likely to sign petitions for

housing initiatives. What makes virtual reality powerful in these studies is that it bypasses the usual roots of reading or listening or imagining, and instead it plugs into your perspective at a sensory level. Your brain thinks, I know I'm not this person, but it feels like I am, and empathy begins to take root. So today's episode set the table for something very important, which is the question of

the limits of our objective understanding. We began with Thomas Nagel's question what is it like to be a bat? Which illustrated the difficulty or maybe the impossibility, of ever being able to answer that question, because even if we can measure everything about the bat's neurons and firing patterns, it doesn't tell us what it's like to be on the inside to be the bat. And we then looked

at what this means for understand inning other people. We all like to imagine that our empathy lets us step into the shoes of another person, but as we see from our empathic responses to robots or fictional characters, it's not necessarily that we're having a mind to mind connection, but instead empathy is an expression of our own internal model you're imagining what the other person feels, but that may or may not have much relation to the reality

of it. And the study I told you about with the labeled hands getting stabbed with a syringe needle, it turns out everyone cares more about their own in group than whatever their outgroups are, and so that suggests that empathy isn't even a terribly sophisticated model, but instead is

greatly swayed by whether people remind us of ourselves. So when we're tempted to say I know exactly how you feel, maybe we should pause, because what we really mean is I can imagine my version of your experience, and that's not necessarily the same thing, but maybe it's enough to try to reach, even knowing that we're never going to fully arrive, because while we can't fully be someone else, the attempt to understand them, even knowing it's incomplete, can

still be helpful because the project of human connection isn't actually about perfect simulation. It's about making room in our minds for perspectives that will never fully grasp And this leads to a little bit of hope because we can get practice at expanding our fence lines, as seen in the reading of literature and even experiencing other lives VR This sort of exercise can provably expand our internal models, at least a little bit, giving us a richer sense

of different people in different situations. Reading and experiencing it makes our empathy a bit wider. But I want to come back now to the question I started with, Could you ever know what it is like to be someone else? Today's episode suggests it's not so easy, But there's an interesting question that struck me from the time I was a kid, and the longer I've studied neuroscience, the more

the question seems relevant to me. Could technology ever allow us to know what it's really like to be someone else? Could we use new techniques or even techniques that will exist in the distant future that would allow us to change the firing patterns in our brains to make those patterns like someone else. Could we do this with electrodes or with nanobots or do we have old fashioned ways of doing this with pharmacology that could shed light on this?

And what does this have to do with replaying someone else's memories or a future with dreams? Celebrities who have dreams that go viral or the idea of hooking two brains directly together so people can experience each other's reas reality. Want to know the answers, Please join me next week for part two of Could You ever Really Know what It's like to be someone else? I can't wait to see you. Then go to eagleman dot com slash podcast

for more information and to find further reading. Send me an email at podcasts at eagleman dot com with questions or discussion. Join my substack at David Eigleman dot substack dot com and check out and subscribe to Inner Cosmos on YouTube for videos of each episode and to leave comments Until next time. I'm David Eagleman and this is Inner Cosmos.