David Eagleman

grow tomatoes? Hello, I'm mini driver. Welcome to Many Questions Season two. I've always loved Pruce's question that it was originally an nineteenth century parlor game where players would ask each other thirty five questions aimed at revealing the other players true nature. It's just the scientific method really. In asking different people the same set of questions, you can

make observations about which truths appear to be universal. I love this discipline, and it made me wonder, what if these questions were just the jumping off point, what greater depths would be revealed if I ask these questions as conversation starters with thought leaders and trailblazers across all these different disciplines. So I adapted prus questionnaire, and I wrote my own seven questions that I personally think a pertinent to a person's story. They are when and where were

you happiest? What is the quality you like least about yourself? What relationship, real or fictionalized, defines love for you? What question would you most like answered? What person, place, or experience has shaped you the most? What would be your last meal? And can you tell me something in your life that's grown out of a personal disaster? And I've gathered a group of really remarkable people, ones that I am honored and humbled to have had the chance to

engage with. You may not hear their answers to all seven of these questions. We've whittled it down to which question felt closest to their experience or the most surprising, or created the most fertile ground to connect. My guest

today is the neuroscientist and author David Eagleman. I'm not sure I've ever had a really long conversation with a polymath before, but you sure don't forget it when it's over, because you know, you keep waking up thinking about things they said, and expands everything from quantum of spirituality to philosophy to neuro Law and Science to coffee in I Hop, David writes about the brain and how it constructs a perception, and how different brains do so differently, and how much

that matters for society. He is, among many other things, the executive director of the Center for Science and Law, which is a nonprofit that sets out to improve the legal system by importing our knowledge about the human brain, which then gives options for rehabilitation beyond mass incarceration. He's written tons of books, and you will read and be astonished by all of them. He said something that I think about a lot. He said he was interested in

exploring the vastness of our ignorance. And he said to this kind of interest and excitement and without judgment of our human brains, which he also described, and I'm paraphrasing as the three pound meat machine who lives in the dark and basically runs everything. I hope you enjoy listening to David's brain. What relationship, real or fictionalized, de finds love for you? I think there are two ways to think about that. One is how we feel about the

love for our children. So if you think about Cormick McCarthy's The Road, for example, you know, it's a post apocalyptic world after nuclear war, and this father does everything in his power just to save his son, just to do everything you can to protect his son and keep him alive. And of course there are there are many stories like this life is Beautiful Roberto Bernini Amy getting

the title right of that one. Yeah, when he puts him in the bin at the end, Yeah, absolutely, Yeah, He's in a concentration camp with his son and he does everything you can to protect his son. So that's a kind of love that now that I'm a father, is very meaningful to me. As for romantic love, I think that would change each year of my life for me, which is to say, when we're younger, we all take these great romance fantasies to represent love, and as you

get older, more realism seeps in. So I've been married for twelve years now, and I appreciate now the way that real relationships are complex and people change over different time scales, as life changes in his career, opportunity to change. And I just recently re saw rewatched Fiddler on the Roof, you know, and he says, have you asked his wife? You know? Do you love me? And she says, do I what and so? And you know, they realized that

the romantic notions can't capture it. But other notions, uh, you know, what they do for each other, how they demonstrate their bond to one another. This does capture something important. Do you think that the romantic love, the faith based love, service based love, the love of our children? Do you think that the route that it's erroneous that we have the same word for it, because there are myriad ways

to love, right? Yeah. Raymond Carver has a short story called what We talked About When we talk about Love, and I've always it's a great short story, but I've always loved the title as well, because it's about the complexity of it, and like so many words in our language, there's just too much semantic weight that that word is trying to hold, because in fact, it is composed of

many different things. Yeah, exactly, It's composed of so many things, and which of those things matters to us that changes through the years. You know, my father, before he died, was in one of these care homes. So I met some of the other people on his hallway, much older men and women who were there, and I think they still cared about love, but it was something so different for them. It wasn't about the you know, sort of young sexy thing, it was about something else. Yeah, definitely.

It's really I'm fascinated by the different permutations of it, of devotion, and of the way in which people love differently, when the love that they have with their version of God, or with animals or with something that they do, how they love romantically changes directly depending on what their relationship with that sort of outsourced love, as it were, the love that we don't really talk about. I always think of love as romantic. I think lots of people do.

But yeah, that's right. And the other thing about love is, you know, obviously it goes into directions. So we all want to get love. We want to receive love, love in various ways, including from our dogs and so on. But we want to be good to the people that we care about and love them well. But it's hard, right, because we're made up of all these different neural networks that all have different drives and care about different things.

And so sometimes you're feeling angry, and sometimes you're feeling distracted by work, and sometimes you're feeling whatever, and so you know, we're constantly finding ourselves in situations where we

don't behave the way that we would like to. One of the books that I'm writting right now has to do with something called the Ulysses contract, which is how you can make a deal with yourself in time to constrain your behavior by doing something right now that essentially puts you in a contract so that you'll behave better in some future situation. This is what Ulysses did when he lashed himself to the mask. He knew that the sirens song would tempt him just like any mortal man,

any crash in the rocks. So what he did is the Ulysses of sound mind lashed himself to the mass so that the future Ulysses couldn't behave badly. And I find this a really interesting concept about the things that we do to make sure that we don't behave badly the future. This is this absolutely fascinating carry on carry on. Well,

you know. One example is if you're trying to get over some addiction, like you know, alcoholism, what you do is you clear all the alcohol out of your house so that on a you know, festive Saturday night or a lonely Sunday, night or something you're not going to go in. Even if you think, oh, I'm sure I

won't drink this anymore, you get rid of it. That's the Ulysses contract or, you know, for drug addicts when of the first things they're taught when they're trying to break this is never walked around with more than twenty dollars in your pocket, because at some point was going to come up to you and offer to sell you drugs,

and you'll be tempted and then you'll give in. So there are many things that we do to make sure that we can, you know, make a choice now that will pay off to keep us acting consistently with our long term decision making. I mean, I think I could definitely just put a big piece of tape over my mouth and that would be my Ulysses contracts sorted. Future me is never going to say the stuff that I am thinking that I know is going to cause trouble because I've got a massive piece of tape. And maybe

you could, like TM your name. It could be like David Eagleman Ulysses tape. I would buy that ship. But that requires a modicum of self knowledge that most people are not interested in interrogating because they don't want to think that there is something fundamentally wrong with them that it's going to affect their situation now much less in the future when the mermaids are singing and calling you into the ocean. Were so tender and we're so lost

as people. I mean, I love that you write these books that really do act as guide posts, because that's what I think they are. And I'm constantly looking for signs and signed posts because it is so fragile and tender, and that you know that you're writing a book for that. But I feel for I feel for all of us, myself included, going I just I wonder how deep I can go into who I am to know how I

could save myself from myself. Yes, exactly. So, when it comes to this issue about self interrogation and really trying to understand who we are, one of the hardest things to see is the way that we come off to other people. Because in fact, this is what one of my other books is and I'm writing right now. It's called Empire of the Invisible, and it's all about what's

going on in politics right now. Specifically, it's asking why we each believe that we have the truth and we see the truth so clearly, and everyone else is misinformed or they're a troll or whatever it is. And if I can only shout in all caps loud enough on Twitter, I could convince everyone that I am right. It's crazy to me that everybody believes this at whatever part of

the political spectrum. And by the way, in terms of relationships, we know tend to all believe this as well, which is okay, Well, I I already know how to do relationships. I'm I'm saying the right things all the time. Do you think that that kind of the surety of that empiricism that is so pervasive, is that human or is that learned? Like is that hardwired into our brains? Is

that something that was useful once when we were discovering fire? Yeah, it couldn't actually be any other way because the way we build a model of the world. Remember, your brain is locked in silence and darkness inside your skull, and all it's trying to do is put together an internal model of what is going on out there, which includes other people and how other people behave and how they'll react to what you say. And the thing is that

this internal model is inherently limited. It's only built up from the little dribbles of data that you get in during your years. And so the way the brain works is it says, okay, look, I've got this data. I've collected all this data. I know what is true, and

it's just built up from what we've taken in. Now, by the way, I will say, we're probably better off than we were historically because now we have, for example, the printing press, and so we have movies and things like that, and so you put all this together and we're exposed to literature and two stories that are much broader than our own experience. So that helps. But still, I've only read a find a number of books in

my lifetime. I've always met a finite number of people, and that has shaped my experience, just like your experiences have shaped your brain. And so that's why given that data, you say, Okay, I know what is true. This is what is true. It's very very interesting. I'm really looking forward to reading that book. What person, place, or experience most altered your life? Well, interestingly, it's almost certainly my parents. But the interesting part is that that feels invisible to us.

In other words, it's very hard to to see all of the ways of what your parents shaped you, because you knew nothing else. That was us the background furniture of the world, and you grew up against that. So that's certainly what has shaped me the most my parents. But when I was in graduate school, my thesis advisor, ain him Read Montague, was unbelievably influential on me. He you know, you come to an age when you're a

young person. I was like, I guess maybe when I entered grad school, you know, you're just leaving your parents home and you're looking for other people in the world. And he was just a great person to really admire in so many ways. He was twenty points at ahead of everybody, and he was a terrific athlete, unbelievably strong and fast and so on, and and the key thing is he gave me no charity. I mean, he spent the entirety of grad school beating me up every day.

And that was really valuable because I think, actually, maybe there's sometimes too much charity that happens because teachers are kind, or they're just too tired or whatever. So if you get something right and you don't get a hundred percent right, no one really says anything. They don't expect anything more from you, but read expected a hundred percent all the time, every time. And that was probably the most valuable thing

that's happened in my life. And then I guess the last thing I'd say is when I was a post doc, one of the people I got to work with was Francis Crick, who was the co discoverer of the structure of DNA. That in my entire life since then, I've not had another experience like that, because he was such a special person in the sense that not only was he essentially the giant of twentieth century biology, but he didn't have a life like other people. He never had to right grants and try to get a job as

a professor and whatever. So he just had this office and he would read the scientific journals all day. And I asked him, as I said, what are you looking for when you're reading there? He said, I don't know. But what he meant was he's just letting ideas come to him, and he's writing letters scientists around the world and saying, hey, why don't you do this experience? What

if you did this and this and this. He was just a person who because he'd won a Nobel prize as a young person, got to just be a giant thinker his whole life and never had to deal with the constraints that everyone else had too. Wow, how amazing, How amazing that he was your teacher? Yeah, I do think. How have things teach you? Yes, we have a big swell here in California at the moment. I don't know

if you're aware of yourself, but I am. And yesterday I went out very excited and I just took so many giant waves on my head and I was so bummed, and I kind of I came in and I sat on the beach and my friend I was like, oh, it was just the worst. And my friend went, well, do you know what you did? Like, do you know what?

Do you know what happened? I was like, well, yeah, you know that first ten footer I was too far ahead of it, and on the second one I was just dealing with being piste off about the first one, and the third one I was scared. And he was like, great, well, now you can go back out and not do all that ship that you just said, And so I did. I went back out and I took another ten waves on the head, but I did get one really amazing one. Yeah, in your life, can you tell me about something that

has grown out of a personal disaster? Uh? Yeah. When I was in the third grade, I fell off of a roof of a house that was under construction, and I almost died. Um. I fell, you know, from the roof and landed on the brick floor, face first, and I shattered my nose. But I think that's part of what made me a neuroscientist, because as I was falling, I was, first of all, having completely calm, clear thoughts.

I was thinking about Alice in Wonderland and how this must have been what it was like when she was falling down the rabbit hole. And just before that, I was thinking about, Okay, I wonder if I could still grab for the roof, and and then I realized that's tar paper and it's not gonna hold, and that's not gonna work. And you know, eventually I just turned and faced the bricks and hit. But the thing is that the whole event seemed to take a very long time.

I still remember the thoughts very clearly because it was, you know, a traumatic event. But when I got to high school and I took physics. I realized that the whole fall had taken point six of a second, and I couldn't figure that out. I couldn't understand how this thing that was so fast seemed to taking so long. It's like, I'm really interested in our perception of the world, and specifically in the perception of time and why things seemed to go in slow motion during a life threatening event.

And I ended up, you know, growing up to become a neuroscientist. And I studied that. I did these experiments where I dropped people from a hundred and fifty foot tall tower in free fall and they're caught in a net below, going seventy miles an hour, and I was able to measure aspects of their time perception on the

way down. How did you do that? What I did is I built a device that went on their wrist and it flashed information at them, visual information at them at a certain rate, and depending on how fast they were seeing the world, the question was would they be able to essentially see in slow motion? Because everybody who's ever gotten in a car accident says, oh, you know,

I was like so much. I saw the hood crumple in the rear view mirror fall off and the facial expression the other person and so on, and so I wanted to really test whether that was true, whether you could see in slow motion, and it turned out that you do not see in slow motion. It's all a retrospective trick of memory, which is to say, when you're in a life streating situation, you're laying down memories really densely. Normally you're not laying down much memory at all. You know,

I don't remember my drive home. It was just it was nothing. But when something really matters, your brain writes sound every single thing. So when you read that back out, when you say what does happen? What does happened? What just happened, you remember it in such detail that your brain estimates, I guess I was have taken longer. I was taken a long time. So it's all about the way memory is laid down. That's why we think the event took place in slow motion, whereas in fact it's

not slow motion. And I realized after I did these experiments that it has to be that way, because you know, coming back to the car accidents, which someone says, look, I know it went slow motion because I saw these things, you can just ask the person, Okay, look the passenger on the car seat next to you, who is screaming. Did it sounds like the person was actually saying because if not, then that means it was not going in

slow motion, and people have to allow that. Actually, they didn't hear things in slow motion, so it's simply that they remembered all the details, and so when their brain makes an estimate, it says, I guess that must have been five seconds, because I don't usually have that much memory. Do you think that only a traumatic event can trigger that kind of memory sequence, But because something that is intensely pleasurable and amazing do the same thing? Yeah, good question.

It can be the intensely pleasurable and amazing. It's just that's more rare. But it's an area of your brain called the limbic system and the amygdala in particular, that's involved and saying, hey, write this down. This is important, and there aren't that many things that are super important for us write down. Certainly traumatic events count, and certainly super pleasurable events a count, But otherwise most of the time you're amygla says, Okay, you know, same old stuff.

I'm not gonna bother keeping dense memories of this. That's so funny because childbirth, I don't know what your partner or wife experience, but it's so interesting. There is great swathes of the thirty seven hours that I was in labor that I remember so acutely and keenly, and they involved pain, and they also involved laughter and hilarious things that my mother and my sister said. And then there

must be ours. There were hours and hours and hours that I know I was just stumbling through pain, but I don't remember exactly. So it's it's interesting. There are parts of that thirty seven hours that are carved out in the boldest relief. So interesting. I've often wondered why my brain chose to remember those bits and not when I was sitting in the shower, you know, singing, which I know I did because they told me I did it, but I don't really remember it. Yeah, Well, what happens

during pregnancies. You've got all these hormones that are going up and down and bouncing all over the place, and for better or worse, this just teaches us what biological machines we are, which is to say, oh, when this hormone's himes and then you're remembering and you can remember that later, and then when this other thing is happening, forget it. You're just not writing anything. Now it's amazing. Yeah, it can be amazing and depressing and eye opening and

so on. I think it's the most important thing for self understanding, for understanding what is our experience in the world. I think that grief has taught me that meaning is just assigned. We assigned meaning, and the depth of our experience and the meaningfulness of our life is in direct

proportion to what meaning we assigned to it. Well, it's even worse than that, I think, which is to say, a lot of the stuff is evolutionarily dictated, and so you know, when you're a young person and you when we think, oh my god, I'm so in love and so on, that meaning we didn't really have a choice in that. That is what has allowed our species to survive.

So many things are like that. Why is it that, you know, if if there's a lemon pie in the oven that smells so good, but let's say a piece of poop on the sidewalk smells so aversive, so bad, given that they're just molecules both in both cases just molecules that are wafting through the air and attached to receptors in your nose. You know, if you study full faction how that actually works. It's just molecules in different shapes. So if I showed you the two different shapes, I said, okay,

one of these is lemon pie. One of these poop, you wouldn't know which is which you couldn't possibly And so the question is why is one so pleasurable one so aversive? And the answer has to do with the evolutionary meaning. So the lemon pie tells you, hey, there's food, there's high sugars, and they're great. I can keep this

battery powered, you know, robot meat, robot going. But the poop is full of bacteria, and things that have been figured out through revolutionary time are dangerous to your pathologic and so the shorthand that your brain does to say, oh that's aversive, don't go near that thing. And so I often wonder about this issue of all the things

that we find meaningful in life. The question is how how far does the hand of evolution reach in there and define what we find meaningful, what we don't exactly and spending time on wrapping that that probably isn't quite enough life to do that. Or maybe that is, but maybe it would just take all the fun out of it.

You know, I don't actually think so. You know. My analogy is if you and I sat down many for the next hour and I gave you a diagram, and I showed you exactly why you like the taste of let's say, chocolate, why you think that tastes so delicious. You might say, okay, good, I've got it. I understand the entire diagram. But that doesn't change your pleasure about it at all. It doesn't improve it, it it doesn't diminish it.

It's like it's a different world. I mean, if I send this to you about you know, the color purple, I said, oh, look here, you've got these color photo receptors and this happens in a visual cortex, blah blah blah. Doesn't change the fact that you look at something purple and say, oh, that's beautiful. Has having your children made

do you think about neuroscience in a different way? Yeah, Because like the Yogis talk about beginner's mind, like that that is that is a place that you are always seeking to get back to, which is what I always I've always perceived that, having watched my son grow up, that beginner's mind is the purest, most beautiful. They are so connected to whatever was pre consciousness and they've brought

that in with them. So yeah, Well, one of the things that has sort of been an interesting surprise to me is just seeing the punctuated equilibrium, by which I mean, you know, things change suddenly, as in, you know, one day your daughter can't read, and then you know, kind of a week later, she's a pretty good reader. It's just sort of these things that you work on with her for a long time, sudden change. And I've always

found this kind of thing fascinating. It's like the system finds something where it says, okay, now I got it, and now I know how to read or ride a bicycle or whatever the thing is. So that's been really interesting to me, and also to really try to get an understanding of which things are pre programmed and which things are just a matter of absorbing from the world. And you know, it's always a combination of both. You may know this, but the nature versus nurture debate is

totally dead because it's always both. You come to the table with a lot of pre programming, and you absorb the world, and you absorb your language and your culture and your neighborhood and your religion and so on. That

all becomes part of who you are. So, you know, just just really watching my kids and trying to understand that isn't really Oh, I get so worried that there was no way I could have created a scientist because of that, because my son is around music and music and music and acting and reading and poetry and plays and discussing literature and movies and this. And sure enough he comes back from this amazing school that he goes to having said, can I have base lessons? Can I

learn the base in September? And I was like yeah, totally great. And he comes home and he's already playing the bass like he can now play it. And I was like, well, I thought we were going to do the bass lessons. He was like yeah, I couldn't. I couldn't wait. It was just in there. I had to

start doing it. And I was thinking, like part of me was going this so amazing, and pop was going you poor thing, like you could have maybe built a bridge, like but there was really never any chance that you were going to be able to build a bridge because of me. You know, I'll tell you the good news, that's that you're totally right in your intuition about this. But there's two things worth noting. One is that you know, kids dropped into the world having a lot of predispositions

that might be different from yours. So you will influence your child massively, and yet your child will go off and do things that you didn't really expect. The second thing that's so wonderful about this world is the Internet and the fact that you have access to anything anytime.

So he gets lots of music from you, but boy, he can just log on and watch you know, Carl Sagan's Cosmos, or watch Neil Durass Tyson, or watch anything he wants to watch, some brain pop video or some ted Ed and suddenly be turned onto bridge building in a way that even though he didn't get it from you, he got it from ted Ed. So that's the great news about this. I mean, I would obviously walk across a bridge that a bass player had built, but you

know thousands wouldn't. Can you tell me where and when you were happiest? I hadn't experienced the other night when I decided with my two children, who are seven and ten years old, that we were going to camp out on the trampoline outside, and it was it was very cold, and we were very uncomfortable, but it was so much fun. It was just all laughter, and so it was just such a nice moment with my kids. So as far as thinking of a moment, that's my most recent one.

But I think more generally, you know, I do all my writing at eye Hoop, and these are different eye hoops all over the world actually, But yeah, I've written eight books, so I don't know, like a million words I've published so far, and every single one of those words has been done at you know, in the National House of Pancakes. How many when you were ordering moons over my heemy. Actually really just drink the coffee there. I don't need too much of the way of pancakes,

but it's just the right speed. Starbucks is too um, you know, there're too many people walking in and out, and I hope is slower, and so I just sit down for a six hour window and I just right. And that is when I am my happiest, especially when I feel like I've nailed something. I've gotten something that was just a coffin this thought in my head clear and on the page, and I've written, you know whatever, a hundred fifty seven words that are crystal clear exactly

what I mean here. That's the best feeling that I know. I know that you say you love to do that in eye hoop? Can you do that anywhere? Or do you get attached to an experience happening in a place and then associate that good feeling with that place. You can actually be anywhere. It just has to be a place that's moving at the right speed. It's y called eye hoop because you can only hop very slowly. You cannot rush like Starbucks even sounds fast. It's like stars

and Bucks and movement. I can. I'm not gonna write a coffee dash, but I love that feeling of just going in deep. Well it's the quality you like at least about yourself. Ah well, my whole life has been true. I just take on too much. And I have so

many friends that are good at being laser focused. And in fact, just this morning I was talking to a colleague of mine who also writes books, and she said, yeah, what I do is I start with the table of contents, and I write each piece and I know exactly what's going to go in the book and with the framework is. And that's not at all how I do it. I'm completely on the other end of whatever the spectrum is

that she's on. You know. I just I have ideas and I dictate into every note all day long, and I, oh, this is gonna be a paragraph here, and I here and then and then I tie stuff together with time, and I probably spend twice as much time putting something together that way and deleting whole you know, scenes and paragraphs and chapters. But that's just the way that that I write. But the problem is, I'm always I mean,

this has always been true. I write, you know, five books at once, and you know, I teach at Stanford, I'm running two companies, and I'm about to start my own podcast. That podcast is going to forty minute monologues where I'm just talking for forty minutes. And so what that means is, I'm just gonna have a ton of work on my plate. I've got a great idea. I've got a great idea. You record your podcast and then

that becomes your book. So you just record it and then you put it through some program so that it just dictates it, and then you just edit what you've said already. This is how you're going to save time. I would like to see this book. Yes, I love that idea. You know. The difficulty is with a book, it's like building a cathedral. You know, there's all this stuff. It's such a bigger kind of project. And I wish I could turn forty minute monologues into a book, but

it's uh. But perhaps if you do a hundred forty minute monologues, you will have the beginnings of a book. I'll have a lot of material, that's for sure. I've written one book, David, which is not really comfortable to anything that you've said. However, it was speaking the thoughts that then made it much nearer. It made the reality of that book much closer, so I could actually reach out and get it. It was having verbalized it. So I wonder if it would maybe speed up the process.

But you hear yourself talking about these ideas and it becomes more coherent and certainly externalized and then become something that you can actually you can grab easier and right out. I don't know no, I totally get that. You reify the ideas by saying them out loud. And then one trick that I do all the time lately is I will then take stuff that I've written and put into programs so that it speaks the text back to me, but with a totally different voice. I'd say a female

voice or British, but maybe your voice. So I'm listening like an audiobook to my own writing and I think, oh, that part sucked, and oh that logic doesn't quite match up. That's amazing. I would love that. I would use that for difficult conversations with my son. Let me just let me just rest this, let me just REases to hear

that back. That's really cool, as though you're hearing a different parents saying it and anything that's not so good actually, as I'm a single mother, that really what hel I could do it in like a man's voice, right perfect. And by the way, many authors in the past have

used this method. Wordsworth, for example, had a lazy susan on the table, you know, one of these circular jobs that spins around, and he'd have his different manuscripts on it, and he'd work on whatever manuscript until he was slowing down, and then he'd spin it and pick a different manuscript and work on that. That's exactly how I work. Whenever I'm slowing down on something, I switch projects, and as a result, I'm always working at top speed on that project.

So I think there actually is some benefit to it. That's amazing. So it sounds like that's not necessarily like a bad quality because you've done it always and you're used to it in terms of taking on a lot of things. I mean, for example, I'm in Silicon Valley and I you know, the vcs who invest do not do not like this quality about me. I think they would much rather see me as the type of person who just as wakes up thinks about this company seven. And I do think about it essentially seven, but I'm

also doing other things at the same time. You know, it has worked out, but it always feels like one of those things where I'm leaning forward as far forward as I can into the future and moving as fast as I can on fronts, and as long as it works, that's great. You know, at some point I'm going to whatever it is, I'm going to break a leg or you know, get diagnosed with something or whatever. And then everything's gonna, you know, pile up like a giant car accident.

What would your life look like if you did slow down? You know, I just don't think it's my personality. I've actually tried. In fact, when I was in college, I had this professor I really thought was wonderful, and he said, look, eagleman, life is like you are a lumberjack, and you can't go into the forest and take one thwack at each tree. You have to pick your tree and really hit that tree with it. And it sounded so wise, and I really liked this guy, and so I tried to change myself.

But that's just not who I am. David. What would be your last meal? I think I would do a protein shake, And it's only because that represents my enthusiasm about the next steps, about what's coming next, and I want to make sure my body is fit and so on for the future. So I might as well go out on a high note with my eyes still on the horizon. I think that's how I'd like to go out. You're still feeding your muscles and feeding it protein. Yeah, yeah, cool,

I like that. I like that a lot. What flavor protein shake would it be? I think chocolate. Why not? I knew you were going to say that. I knew you were going to say that. By the way, who wouldn't What question would you most like? Answered? Years ago? In two thousand four, I wrote a cover article for Discover magazine called ten Unsolved Questions of Neuroscience. And what's interesting is that those are essentially as unsolved now as

they were then, with one possible exception. Actually, but the top question for me is the question of consciousness, which is why does it feel like something to be you or me? Because the brain is built of eighty six billion neurons, which are the specialized cells of the brain, and each of these neurons is you know, sending information back and forth with these electrical spikes, and they're releasing chemicals, all kinds of camp kids stuff. But fundamentally, it's just

a big biological machine. It's just doing stuff. It's just you know, sending signals and reacting to signals, and as far as we can tell, that's all that's going on. Because when somebody damages their brain, we can make very particular predictions about what the consequences are going to be. It will change their risk aversion or their decision making, or their ability to name animals or see colors or

understand music, you know, super specific things. And so that's why when we look at hundreds of years of brain damage, we say, all right, look it's Piers. Just be a big machine there. But the question is why does it feel like something to be alive? Why do you experience the beauty of a sunset or the smell of cinnamon or the taste of feta cheese on your tongue. Why aren't we just like you know, my computer, my laptop here is sending lots of signals around back and forth,

but presumably it's not conscious. And when I watch YouTube video that I think is funny, it presumably doesn't. And it's funny. It's just sending zero, you know, it's just sending zeros and one drone. And when I shut it off at night, it doesn't lament its own death or something. So this is the question is how do you build a biological machine and have it be self aware? Is

that the fundament of possibility? And is m yeah, exactly so for anyone who doesn't though you know possibilities is this movement I started about twelve years ago, which is simply a way of me trying to capture what the scientific temperament is. Where we shine a flashlight around the possibility space, we say, look, maybe it's that, Maybe it's that,

Maybe it's that. And the reason I sort of tried to articulate this is because when you go into a bookstore, all you ever see are the books by the atheists, the new atheists, and the books by the fundamentally religious, and they're often put on the same table in the bookstores so that you can sort of choose your side and see what's But the truth is that our existence in the cosmos is so deeply mysterious that almost certainly there's something much more interesting going on that is neither

of those positions. I think you said it as well, the asteness of our ignorance. It is full of potential as opposed to full of admonishment. Yeah, when I read that, you know, being interested in celebrating the vastness of our ignorance, it was actually really dynamic as opposed to you dumb dumb. It was like you dumb dumb. Right. The part of that was surprising is that people want to pick one answer and then fight for that and say Okay, this is the right answer. Yeah. How many people are in

your movement? Can I be in it? Yeah? Please, I'd love to have. You know, the interesting part, you know, I wrote my book Some, which is a book of literary fiction, and it's forty stories of what happens after we die, and it's all made up. It's all meant to be you know, funny and interesting and then if it's meant to be taken seriously. But the part that is meant to be taken seriously is the idea of, wow, we really have no idea what this is, what our

existence is all about here? And that's what the metal lesson that emerges from the book is. And so anyway, after I said the sun and pr one day about possibilityis um um, it sort of became a thing and people started websites and Facebook groups and stuff like that. So I don't know, I haven't really checked on in a while, but I'm glad to see it's moving. I like it. I think it's great. Now I've got to

read some as well. I have conversations based on something that my mother post death, a phrase that she has coined, which is called brain share because, as she's said, to me in our conversations because she doesn't have a brain anymore, which is a huge relief, but she has to use mind so that I can feel her thoughts now. And it's so funny because a friend of mine was like, well, isn't that just your brain? Isn't that as the function of your grief? Because she died only a year ago?

And I said, well, does it really matter. I don't really know. I'll never know. It doesn't matter if I know or if I don't know. But I hear her voice very specifically, and we have these conversations which are so they're fascinating to pick over. They're not just comforting, they're strange because there's clearly an evolution either of my idea of her since she died, or of her since she died. That it's different enough that I recognize her,

but it's another version of her. Yeah. And you know, one of those fascinating things is that the job of the brain is to construct these internal models of other people. So you have an enormous number of models in your head, but you have thousands of these, you know, like oh, your neighbor from down the street years ago, and oh, your college roommate and so on. You've got little models. Some are more sophisticated than the others. So your model of your mother is you're devoting a lot of neural

real estate to that. Actually you've got a very rich model of her. Other models that are thinner of you know, your barista Starbucks or something that who don't know that well, and you have to make lots of assumptions. But the thing that has always struck me as fascinating, as you know, in neuroscience my field, you know, we've essentially spent all the time studying, Okay, how does vision work, how does hearing work, how does decision making work? And so on?

But the part that's gone under appreciated there is how social brains are. Brains are all about other brains, and so this is sort of an emerging field called social neuroscience. But the point is that a huge amount of the territory of your brain is there just to simulate your mother and your father and everybody you've ever known. Wow, all right, I'm gonna be thinking about that three t time, David. I'm so honestly just so shaft, as we say in England, to talk to you, I can't thank you enough for

your time. Well, thank you, Minnie, It's been such a pleasure to talk with you. Thank you very very much. Be sure to check out David's books, including Some Incognito and his most recent book, Live Wired, The Inside Story of the Ever Changing Brain, which was also nominated for

a Pulitzer Prize. Live Word explores not only what the brain is, but also what the brain does, and when you sit down to read it, please feel free to imagine you're having a cup of coffee at Eyehop sitting next to David while he's busy writing five other books. Mini Questions is hosted and written by Me Mini Driver, supervising producer Aaron Kaufman, Producer Morgan Levoy, Research assistant Marissa Brown. Original music Sorry Baby by Mini Driver. Additional musick by

Aaron Kaufman, Executive produced by Me Mini Driver. Special thanks to Jim Nikolay, Will Pearson, Addison No Day, Lisa Castella and Annicke Oppenheim at w kPr, de La Pescador, Kate Driver and Jason Weinberg, and for constantly solicited tech support, Henry Driver