The Brain By David Eagleman
Glauco Schlembach
DE: Let me just add one thing to that, just as one example, in the visual system you have different parts of this extended visual system, so the very basic stuff like colors and angles, that gets locked down, but your whole life you can still learn new faces, so this sort of more high level abstracted part of the visual system stays more flexible. Okay, sorry, go ahead.
Brown, B. (Host). (2020, December 2). Bren with David Eagleman on The Inside Story of the Ever-Changing Brain [Audio podcast episode]. In Unlocking Us with Bren Brown. Cadence13. -with-david-eagleman-on-the-inside-story-of-the-ever-changing-brain/
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David Eagleman (@davideagleman) is a neuroscientist at Stanford, host of Emmy-nominated PBS/BBC series The Brain, author and co-author of several books including The Runaway Species: How Human Creativity Remakes the World, and CSO of NeoSensory, a company that specializes in sensory substitution technology.
If you stop to evaluate the room where you find yourself right now, you rely on the senses at your disposal to paint a picture of the overall scene. Provided you possess the traditional five senses, your eyes are viewing these words. Your fingers are probably resting on a keyboard or are wrapped around a smartphone. Your ears may be listening to anything from a favorite Spotify playlist to children playing outside. Perhaps the taste of morning coffee lingers on your tongue while your nose is trying to guess what kind of fish some rude coworker just started warming up in the office microwave.
Cultivating an active social life is one of the best ways to maintain this level of cognitive fitness, but David points out that playing an instrument, learning a new language, juggling, or really anything that motivates us enough to get out of bed in the morning can work wonders.
David Eagleman: [00:00:00] Who you are is a combination of your genetics and every experience you've ever had. Neither of which, by the way, you had any choice over, I mean the genes you came with, and all the experiences you had as a child, the formative experiences, you had no choice over that, but that sends you off on a particular trajectory.
Jordan Harbinger: [00:00:16] Welcome to the show. I'm Jordan Harbinger. As always, I'm here with my producer Jason DeFillippo. On this episode, we're talking with my friend David Eagleman. David is a sharp cat. This guy, man, he has an amazing knowledge of the brain and he has some of the most interesting insights into how our brain works. These are the greatest insights I've read in a long time about the old noggin and it's his way of combining that insight with an exceptional ability to articulate those same insights and make them useful to you and to me is one of the main reasons why I wanted to have him on the show today.
[00:00:47] This stuff fascinates me because our brains are a large part of what makes us us. If we damage our hand, it's inconvenient. If we damage our brain -- even a little -- who we are changes in some ways so it depending on who you ask. Our brains kind of our us in some way and today we're talking about senses. They're not what you think they are. You think you can see with your eyes? Well, think again. It's your brain doing most of the work and the things you think you see, those are mostly illusions constructed by your brain. No, really you won't need eyes and you might not need ears in the future either. In fact, we might nay -- we will one day have technology that is so much better than our regular eyes and ears for what we're trying to do that we'll all have superpowers and David will tell us how this is going to work and how it already works.
[00:01:39] I got to try out the bracelet and the vest that you're going to see in Westworld this month, if you're watching that show. And that allows deaf people to actually hear using touch and we'll discover why not only our senses but our memory and therefore our identity, our concept of ourselves is almost entirely false and constructed by our brain based on, well you'll find out. We'll also explore how a blind mountain climber can see using his tongue and how we can steal ourselves against cognitive decline by learning Chinese or something to that effect. Last but not least, we'll see why flipping a coin is a great way to see which decision your subconscious brain, the computer, which has made all the calculations in the first place actually prefers. And don't forget, we have a worksheet for today's episode so you can make sure you understand everything that David and I are talking about here on the show.
David Eagleman: [00:06:40] That is true. It's true. Kids' brains are very plastic. That's the term we use in my next book called Live Wire, which won't come out until 2019 but the idea is, I'm actually suggesting that the word plasticity isn't quite the right word, but nonetheless, it's the word we use as a field, but the idea comes from the material plastic you can mold into shape and it holds onto that shape and that's what people are impressed with the brain, but in fact it's what the brain is doing is even better than that. It's like holding shape and then passing that shape on to other things and then readjusting to new stuff. Like there's this whole passing of the information that's happening, so it's even more impressive than a piece of plastic nonetheless. Nonetheless, we use the term plasticity to me just generally that I can tell you a fact and you can remember that fact a month from now, you'll remember that fact. Why? It's because there are physical changes in the structure of your brain. They're actually ongoing changes. But that's the super impressive thing that brains can do.
David Eagleman: [00:08:37] The point is, it's just completely incredible that you can take it out half the brain, as long as the kid is under six. If the kid is over six. I mean, if we took out half your brain, you'd be dead.
[00:08:45] You wouldn't survive that. But a kid under six, all the functions of the brain sort of just rewire on the available real state. So, yeah, so kids brains are really, truly much more plastic. And of course if you look at the speed that children pick up language and start getting really good and making jokes and doing subtleties and so on, probably unfortunately with Chinese you'll never be that good. You probably won't lose the accent -- the American accent Or Canadian, are you?
Jordan Harbinger: [00:09:12] No, I mean everybody thinks I am because I'm from Michigan, which is like a Canadian with shitty health care. But thank you. That means you think I'm friendly and nice.
David Eagleman: [00:09:48] So brain plasticity. Yeah. The fact is it really is much more plastic when you're young, unbelievably plastic, in fact the number of connections you have between neurons called synapses. This is something that from the day you're born, this number expands and expands as neurons connect and connect. And by the time you're two years old, that's the peak that you'll ever have. You've got an unbelievable density of connections. And from there, it's this game of stripping away the connections. It's like pruning an overgrown garden.
David Eagleman: [00:10:21] That's right. I mean, that's the good news. Also, the whole idea about brain plasticity is you learn the rules of the world, so you learn the right things to say and the way to act and how to be, and how to drive a car and how to stay on the right side of the roads. So plasticity, the benefit of it is you learn the rules of your culture and your world. The downside of it is that, you know, as you learn that and things get more in place, it's just harder to break that.
David Eagleman: [00:10:58] Exactly. We are creatures of our space and time. Okay. And if you can like imagine that you are born with exactly your same DNA and whatever you come sliding out of the womb in 1529 in Nigeria, your culture would be so different. Or in China or wherever, everything would be so different about your culture. You'd be a different person because you are obligated to learn that space in time. That's what makes you who you are.
Jordan Harbinger: [00:11:27] But I would have a better Chinese accent if that were the case, depending on where I was born I suppose. So we're really the last one's knowing what's going on in the brain. So the conscious brain is like the screen or the printer of a computer instead of the processor but we think it's the processor because that's the part that's talking to us, right?
David Eagleman: [00:11:46] That's exactly it. Yeah. Can't remember if you and I have ever talked about this before, but one analogy that I used in my book Incognito was that it's like the CEO of a major company, you know, so if you're CEO of Pepsi or United Airlines or something, you've got hundreds of thousands of people working there. You can't possibly know what's going on in everybody's cubicle and where the food's coming from, the tires for the vehicle, you don't even, you can't possibly know that. You'd only mess things up if you knew that. So your job as CEO is to kick your feet up on the desk and wait for problems to happen. And when your phone rings, then you answer and you try to solve problems. And that's exactly what the conscious mind is about. As long as things are going according to plan, no problem. But you know, if I go to that door and I reached for it and you snuck in last night, you've undrilled the doorknob and drilled it in three inches below, or suddenly I become consciously aware of the doorknob because it's violating my expectation. But otherwise I wouldn't even be aware of it. I just opened the door and I'm out.
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