Neuroscientist and author David Eagleman discusses how our brain interprets the world and what that means for us. Through storytelling, research, interviews, and experiments, David Eagleman tackles wild questions that illuminate new facets of our lives and our realities.
How can we rethink schools to meet the future? What does this have to do with the invention of the printing press, the prevalence of desk calculators, or the spread of Google? And how is this connected to the writer Goethe, a digital replica of the philosopher Aristotle, or the two lasting bequests that we should give our children? Join Eagleman this week for surprises about what AI means for the next generation.
Do you perceive red the same way I do? What is wrong with the textbook model of vision? Why do brains have so many internal feedback loops? And what does any of this have to do with Plato’s cave, Ernest Hemingway, or artificial neural networks that perceive dogs everywhere? Join Eagleman with guest Anil Seth, author of “Being You”, to explore the scientific problem of consciousness.
Meet David Eagleman - neuroscientist, author, and more. He is best known for his work on sensory substitution, time perception, brain plasticity, synesthesia, and neurolaw and is currently a neuroscientist at Stanford University. I thoroughly enjoyed picking his brain and I hope you enJOY too!
How will creative people make a living in a world with AI? Is there a different way to think about the economy of the future -- and how might it involve mystifying and elevating humans? What does the term “data dignity" mean? Join Eagleman with guest Jaron Lanier -- computer scientist, artist, futurist -- as they discuss AI's boundless creative output and how we might thoughtfully navigate into the future.
How are secrets in the brain like Abraham Lincoln’s political cabinet? Will AI in the near future hide things from you? And what does any of this have to do with political hierarchies, the formula for Coca-Cola, or deceptive chimpanzees? Join Eagleman to understand what neuroscience tells us about secrets: what they are, why they weigh on us, and how they sometimes grow into tangled webs we never meant to weave.
What are we talking about neurobiologically when we talk about love? What does it have to do with how you were raised, the symmetry of someone's face, or the smell of their underarms? What do we learn from heartbreak, rom-coms, and little rodents called prairie voles? And what is the future of love & AI? Join Eagleman for a Valentine's Day special to learn what unseen sparks in the skull set the heart ablaze.
A brain's 86 billion neurons are always chattering along with tiny electrical and chemical signals. But how can we get inside the brain to study the fine details? Can we eavesdrop on cells using other cells? What is the future of communication between brains? Join Eagleman with special guest Max Hodak, founder of Science Corp, a company pioneering stunning new methods in brain computer interfaces.
Why do you like the taste of things that your friend doesn't? Why do kids not like coffee but adults do? What does any of this have to do with smelling people’s armpits, whether women really synchronize their menstruation, whether your culture eats a lot of spicy foods, and how animals sense the world? Join Eagleman this week to understand why there's no accounting for taste.
Why is it so difficult to define intelligence? What does this have to do with being a fish in water trying to describe water? Might we humans possess one kind of intelligence in a constellation of many other types? And what does this have to do with empathy, AI, and our search for extraterrestrial life? Join Eagleman with guest Kevin Kelly as they dive into whether there might exist very different kinds of minds.
Because visual signals take time to process, we live slightly in the past. So how do we ever catch a baseball? And what does this have to do with certain visual illusions, or the view in New York City, or the things you were never taught in school, or the warp drive in Star Trek? Join Eagleman this week for a mind blowing look at the strange relationship between vision and time.
Are emotions something that happen to you, or are they bodily signals we interpret? Does everyone show emotions in the same way -- that is, are there particular markers of the face or the body that always mean anger, sadness, or joy? And what does this have to do with Charles Darwin, the truth about facial expressions, or the movie Inside Out? Join Eagleman with this week's guest, neuroscientist Lisa Feldman Barrett, author of hundreds of papers and "How Emotions are Made", for a deep dive into ...
Why are our brains so wired for love? Could you fall head over heels for a bot? Might your romantic partner be more satisfied with a 5% better version of you? How does an AI bot plug right into your deep neural circuitry, and what are the pros and cons? And what will it mean when humans you love don’t have to die, but can live on in your phone forever? Join Eagleman for a deep dive into relationships, their AI future, and what it all means for our species.
What do charlatans have to understand about human perception? Why are you so bad at recognizing a real penny among fakes? What did Eagleman have to do with the redesign of the Euro, and why did he campaign to the European Central Bank that all their bills should be blank with a single hologram in the middle? In this episode, explore the crossroads of perception and deception. Brief appearance from special guest Adam Savage.
Brains bear thoughts like a peach tree bears peaches. Even for meditators it's almost impossible to stop the firehose of words and images and ideas. But what in the world is a thought, physically? How can you hear a voice in your head when there's no one speaking in the outside world? And what does any of this have to do with a small marine animal who eats its own brain? Join Eagleman for this week's deep dive into our inner life.
How can we understand music's effect on human brains? Is music universal or does it rely on your experiences? How is music similar to a language? Can music be leveraged to help anxiety, dementia, or Parkinson's disease? What does any of this have to do with Stevie Wonder on the high hat, or the relationship between music and color? Join Eagleman with guest Daniel Levitin -- neuroscientist, musician, and author of This Is Your Brain on Music and I Heard There Was A Secret Chord ....
Does our sense of self emerge from our brain's skill at lumping things into unchanging categories? What can we learn watching a caterpillar brain transition to a butterfly brain? Can we think of a memory as a pattern that stays alive and has its own life? Does an ant colony have a sense of self? Join Eagleman and biologist Michael Levin at Tufts – one of the most energetic and original thinkers in the field -- to dive into new territories of the self.
Every cell in your body changes, so why do you have a sense of continuity of the self – as though you're the same person you were a month ago? What does this have to do with the watercraft of the Greek demigod Theseus, or the End-of-History illusion, or why you go through so much trouble to make things comfortable for your future self, even though you don't know that person? And if there really were an afterlife, what age would your deity make everyone for living out their eternities? Join this ...
Two certainties are death and taxes; a third is that people will work hard to avoid them both. But why is it so difficult to extend our lifespan? We know how to do it in worms and mice; why is it tricky in humans? Why do so few companies study longevity? What does the near future hold? What would it be like if everyone lived a much longer life? Join Eagleman this week with longevity expert Martin Borch Jensen to discuss the hopes and challenges of longevity science.
Why do brains dream, and why are dreams so bizarre? Why doesn't your clock work in your dreams? And even though you spend much of your working day looking at your cell phone and computer – why do they almost never make appearances in your dream content? Is dream content the same across cultures and across time? Are dreams experienced in black & white, or in color? Are dreams the strange love child of brain plasticity and the rotation of the planet? What is the relationship between schizophre...
What is depression? Why are brains able to slip into it? Is depression detectable in animals? Do animals have options beyond fight or flight? And what does any of this have to do with measuring depression medications in city water supplies, reward pathways in the brain, the prevalence of tuberculosis, and zapping the head with magnetic stimulation? Join today's episode with David Eagleman and his guest -- psychiatrist Jonathan Downar -- for a deep dive into the brain science behind depression an...
Why can you hear some sounds two different ways, depending on which word you’re looking at? Why do electrical outlets sometimes look like a face? How can you have rich visual experience with your eyes closed? Are some crosswalk buttons fake? Why are some pictures interpretable only once you’ve been told what to look for? And although brains are often celebrated for their parallel processing, what should they really be celebrated for? Tune in to learn what happens when the raw facts of the world ...
When he was a child, Eagleman fell off a roof and time seemed to run in slow motion. When he became a neuroscientist, he grew curious about the experience and collected hundreds of similar stories from others. But is it true that your brain can actually see in slow motion, like Neo in the Matrix? And how would you test that? Hear how he dropped volunteers from a tower to put the science to the test, and what the answer reveals about our perception, memory, and experience of the world.
What would it be like to have a vastly better memory than you do now? What if you could remember what you were wearing on any day a dozen years ago? Or who you were with, what the conversation was, and whether it rained? Would it be a blessing or a curse? And if you’re forgetting a lot of your life, what might you do to better remember it? Join Eagleman with actress Marilu Henner, one of only dozens of people in the world diagnosed with highly superior autobiographical memory.
When you imagine something -- like the sun peeking over a mountain during an early morning rainstorm -- do you see it with rich visual detail, or instead with very little internal picture? In an earlier episode we tackled the spectrum of visual imagination, from hyperphantasia to aphantasia -- and in this episode we dive even deeper with guest Joel Pearson to surface the most surprising differences between people's internal lives. How does your experience differ from other people's, and how does...
Why do you see a unified image when you open your eyes, even though each part of your visual cortex has access to only a small part of the world? What is special about the wrinkled outer layer of the brain, and what does that have to do with the way that you explore and come to understand the world? Are there new theories of how the brain operates? And in what ways is it doing something very different than current AI? Join Eagleman with guest Jeff Hawkins, theoretician and author of "A Thousand ...
How do you define what things are living and dead? You might look at a sprinting cheetah and say it's clearly alive, whereas a chunk of rock is not -- but where do we draw the line? What might we expect extraterrestrials to look like, and would we even have the capacity to recognize them? And what does any of this have to do with Frankenstein, ancient Greek philosophers, or the possibility of finding a cell phone on Mars? Join Eagleman with guest Sara Walker, theoretical physicist at Arizona Sta...
Do brains time travel? What is a prediction error? What does any of this have to do with the 2008 crash of the economy, how we keep internal price tags, or a rational approach to drug addiction in society? Join Eagleman to learn how your 3-pound universe spends its whole existence nailing down choices.
When you make a decision about what food to order, what's happening in your brain? How do you clinch long-term decisions, like hitting the gym instead of doomscrolling? And what does any of this have to do with the ancient Greeks, alien hand syndrome, and constraining a president who wants to launch a nuclear bomb? Join Eagleman this week and next to discover how your brain weighs alternatives and nails down decisions.
From the brain’s point of view, what is humor? When something is funny, why do we breathe in and out rapidly? Do other animals laugh? Why do most jokes come in threes? What do mystery novelists, magicians, and comedians have in common? Could AI be truly funny? Join Eagleman this week to appreciate the tens of reasons and millions of years behind the tickling of your neural pathways.
What does neuroscience have to do with investment, and what does that have to do with Isaac Newton, the Dutch East India company, Kodak, the way zebras herd, our emotions, and almost 200 cognitive biases? Join Eagleman with guest Mark Matson, whose new book The American Dream dives into the cognitive illusions we face when trying to make investments.
