Stuff To Blow Your MindFrom the Vault: Inner Cosmos, with David Eagleman
In this classic episode of Stuff to Blow Your Mind, neuroscientist and author David Eagleman drops by the show to discuss his new podcast series “Inner Cosmos” with Robert and Joe, along with some general discussion on the human brain. (Originally published 04/13/2023)
Hey, welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind. My name is Robert Lamb.
And I am Joe McCormick. And today we are bringing you an episode from the Vault. This one originally published April thirteenth, twenty twenty three, and this was our conversation with David Eagleman, neuroscientist and host of the Inner Cosmos podcast. I remember this was a very interesting chat. We hope you enjoy it.
Welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind, a production of iHeartRadio.
Hey, welcome to Stuff to Blow your Mind. My name is.
Robert Lamb and I'm Joe McCormick, and hey, welcome back, Rob. You were out sick earlier this week. It's good to have you back.
It's good to be back now.
Because you were outsick, we ended up putting a pause on an ongoing series we were doing on childhood amnesia. We ended up running a Vault episode on Tuesday, and I just wanted to assure people that we will be coming back to that subject. We will be resuming the series, probably for next week's core episodes, but because we already had it scheduled out this way, today's episode is going to be an interview. So in fact, we are talking to a return guest, the neuroscientist and author David Eagleman. This is actually the second time David has been a guest on the show. In September twenty twenty, Rob, you spoke to him about his book Live Wired, which is a popular science book on the subject of brain plasticity.
Yeah. Absolutely. That was a fun episode. You can find it in the archives, and the book Live Wired is an absolute delight. If you're at all interested in anything you hear us discussing in this episode, pick up a copy of it.
It's great.
So this week we invited David back on the show because he now has a fantastic, brand new podcast on our very own network on the iHeart Network, and it is called Inner Cosmos with David Eagleman. So before we get started with our interview, I thought we should just share a bit of background about David. This is from his website.
That's right. David Eagleman is a neuroscientist at Stanford University and an internationally best selling author. He's the co founder of two venture backed companies, Neosensory and brain Check, and he also directs the Center for Science and Law, a national nonprofit Institute. He's best known for his work on sensory substitution, time, perception, brain plasticity, synesthesia, and neurolaw. He is the writer and presenter of the international PBS series The Brain with David Eagleman and the author of the companion book, The Brain The Story of You. He's also the writer and presenter of The Creative Brain on Netflix.
David Eagleman is the author of over one hundred and twenty academic publications and many many books of popular science. Eagleman is a TED speaker, a Guggenheim Fellow, and serves on several boards, including the America Brain Foundation and the long Now Foundation. He's the Chief Scientific Advisor of the Mind Science Foundation and the winner of the Claude Shannon Luminary Award from Bell Labs and the McGovern Award for Excellence in Biomedical Communication. He serves as the academic editor for the Journal of Science and Law. Was named Science Educator of the Year by this Society for Neuroscience and was featured as one of the quote Brightest Idea Guys by Italy's Style magazine. He served as the scientific advisor on several TV shows, including Westworld and Perception and has been profiled on The Colbert Report, Nova Science Now, The New Yorker, CNN's Next List, and many other venues. He appears regularly on radio and television to discuss literature and science, and I guess now he is going to start having to add podcasts to the end of his bio here, So, Robin, unless you have anything else, I think we should jump right into our conversation with David Eagleman.
Hi, David, welcome back to the show.
Great, Thanks Rob for having me again. It's a pleasure to be here. And hello, Joe, it's great to meet you. David.
Now, you have a great new podcast series out Inner Cosmos through iHeart. How did you decide what path to take with the podcast format?
You know, it's a great question. The truth is I had not listened to many podcasts at all. Now I have. But when I first was putting this together with iHeart, I thought, look, I want to do a forty five minute to hour long monologue every week. And that seemed like a terrific idea at first, and then my wife said she was going to kill me because it turns out that's a ton of work. It takes me about kind of about twelve hours a week to get a good monologue that's almost an hour long. So that's how I decided on the format because I thought it would be something special rather than you know, I've been on many different podcasts where we're doing interviews just like this, and it's super fun. But I wanted to do something different. So that's how I accidentally stumbled into that format.
So I figure we should give people a taste of the kind of things you talk about on your show. I got a chance to listen to the episode you did about memory and the perception of time, and I thought it was great, by the way, a really great way to kick off the show. So your starting premise in that episode was that many people who have been through intense or life threatening events, maybe falling off of a building or seeing a car speeding toward them, report afterwards that time seemed to have somehow slowed down for them during the pivotal few seconds, almost as if they were able to inter a state of slow motion or bullet time, like from the matrix. Can you talk a bit about your research on this subject and what you discovered about this perception.
Yeah, so my research, of course started off very personal which is that I fell off of a house and it seemed like things took a long time, and that's what got me interested in this. Then when I got older, it became a neuroscientist. Eventually I realized that I was hearing this story not uncommonly from people who had been in a you know, gunfight or some scary situation or car accident or whatever, and they felt that things took longer. And so I looked in the literature and there was not anything on this. So that's when I came to realize I was going to have to do this myself and figure out how to run an experiment on this. So you know, briefly, what I did is I built a device that I hooked to people's wrists that flashed information them at them met a certain way so that I could tell how rapidly their brain was perceiving, and that way I could test whether they were actually seeing in slow motion or The whole thing was a trick of memory, meaning when you were in an intense situation, you wrote down more memories. So when you said what just happened, when just happened, that it seemed like it must have taken longer because you have all these memories. So what I did then is dropped people from one hundred and fifty foot tall tower in free fall backwards into a net below, and I measured their perception of time on the way down this way. And what I found after, you know, I didn't sell myself, but then we dropped twenty three participants. What I found is that it is in fact a trick of memory, which is to say, when everything is hitting the fan, your brain writes down much denser memory, and when you read that back out, your brain has to make an assumption about you know, how much memory, how much footage maps onto how much time, and so it says, oh wow, that must have been five seconds, even though it was only one second worth. But the point is people were not able to see in slow motion, which, by the way, was disappointing for me because I already had. I was already talking with the military about building cockpits in a way that flashed information more rapidly at people when they be in some intense situation. But it turns out none of that makes the difference. You can't actually get information there faster, you can only remember it faster, So.
There's not actually any any increased ability of perception. It's just a trick of the memory exactly.
Now. It is the case that you know a lot. You can do a lot of things pre consciously, by which I mean your conscious awareness of something is always the slowest thing on the ladder to ever get any information. So by the time your brain puts together all the signals and says, okay, this is what just happened. You know, that's at least half a second to a second behind real time. But the point is your body can react much faster than that. Your body can get signals and say, whoa, I got to do something about this right away, And so you can react, you know, often much faster than you can be consciously aware. So you know, I don't know if you've been on a I mean, this is what happened to me recently. I was on a hike with a friend and a branch snapped back, and I was, you know, halfway into the move of ducking out of the way of the branch before I consciously realized it, or my foot gets halfway to the break of my truck before I realized that there's a car pulling out of the driveway ahead of me. In other words, consciousness is always the last guy on the ladder to get any information, and your body can almost always react much faster. In fact, wait, let me just say one more example of that, which is when I was younger, I used to play baseball, and my experience was always that, you know, I'd be waiting for the pitch, and then I would realize after it had happened that I had already hit the ball. And I would consciously realize, oh, I have just hit the ball. Now throw the bat and run. But you know, the whole thing, the ball moving from the mound to the plate, and the swing and the batting, that's all really fast process and it often happens pre consciously.
Somewhat related to that, this raises questions about the different kinds of circumstances that would favor the perception of slow motion in intense situations or not.
So.
My example was there was one night years ago I was driving under an overpass and there was a sudden deafening sound and a shudder, And what my wife and I deduced later was that somehow like a brick had fallen from above and hit the roof of our car just above the windshield. As we passed under a highway speed and I don't know if somebody threw it or if it somehow just fell, But I not only don't recall a feeling of stretched time or a greater density of memories right before and after the impact, I felt almost a kind of retrospective amnesia, like a real paucity of detail. And it was like we were suddenly a good ways down the road and just trying to remember or figure out what had happened.
Yeah, that's exactly right. It's because you didn't write down any memory. And this is generally because as you are taking a drive down the highway, your brain is writing down very little stuff going on. In fact, the interesting part is that although we think about memory as being like a video recorder or something, in fact it's nothing like that. You write down very little of what happens in your life, especially when you're driving on a road you've been down before. So what happened is there's the deafening crash and suddenly you're thinking what just happened? What just happened? And you've got nothing to draw on. There's just no footage there. And by the way, just as a very quick side note, I think this is what happens to people when they are high on marijuana, is they say, oh, my gosh, how long have I been standing here? It feels like I'm standing here forever, And it's because they're not writing down memories in the same way. So when their brain looks for how long have I been standing here, what it's looking for is footage in time, as in, Okay, I remember getting here, I remember this happening, someone said this. Then someone put the glass down and blah blah blah, so that it can estimate how long it's been there. But suddenly it can't grab on to any memories at all, and so suddenly people are lost in time anyway, So this is Joe exactly what happened pins when people suddenly are hit by a car that they don't see coming, like a car teet bones them or something. Or I might have mentioned in the podcast, I can't remember that, you know. I was once riding my bike and the wheel suddenly dropped in a pothole and I went flying over the handlebars. But because I didn't see that coming, I just had the sensation of suddenly, oh my god, what's is you know?
Here?
I'm lying on the asphalt, bloody, and I have no idea what just happened. And it's precisely because you're not running down any memories. So when your brain says what just happened, what just happened, there's nothing to draw on, as opposed to the brick sliding on ice towards the brick wall phenomenon, which is where you say, oh my gosh, I'm predicting what's going to happen and this is really gonna hurt, this is gonna be bad, And that's when you're writing down lots of stuff.
So would you say you're more likely to have this memory density perception number one if you see the event coming ahead of time, there's there's expectation of it. But also if you're generally in a novel or unusual situation.
Yeah, that's exactly right. Actually, So two aspects of that. One is that I just mentioned a moment ago that you write down very little memory, and that's because as an adult now, your brain has sort of figured out a pretty good model of the world, meaning you don't need to write stuff down because you've seen all the personalities before, you've seen different cities before, you've seen roads, and people and events and television shows and you sort of got it. But if something really novel happens, that's when your brain writes something down and says, WHOA, wait a minute, I'm surprised, And that's when stuff starts getting written down. So when you look back at the end of let's say a novel event. Let's say you go on some really wild trip on the weekend to Glockos Islands and you see new things and so on, then it seems like forever since you were at work on Friday. But if you just go off for a normal weekend and you come back to work, you think, oh, I was just here because you didn't lay down any new memories over the weekend. So it is true that things that are novel generally seem to last longer. However, it should be noted that when things are actually life threatening, you have essentially an emergency response memory system that kicks into gear. That is a secondary track on which you write down memory. And this is underpinned by a part of the brain called the amigla, and its job is to say, WHOA, everything is going really bad and scary here, and I got to write this down because that after all is the point of memory is to make sure that you write down stuff that is important and specifically life threateningly important.
So if the normal memory system, would that be the hippocampal memory system exactly? If that's the normal memory system, and then the amygdala tends to be recruited in intense situations. Do we know generally if there is any if there are any characteristic differences between how memories are recorded in the hippocampus versus the Amygdalah.
Yeah, And it turns out it's a tragic one, which is that amygdala memories are uneaseable, whereas hippocampbel memories can be erased. So let me unpack this because there's two surprising parts here. So first of all, the fact that hippocampal memories can be erased is terrifying and weird and wild. Which is, if I ask you to recall the name of your fifth grade teacher and then suddenly that brick drops off the highway bridge and hits you in the head. God forbid, let's say that happens. You will now have amnesia for that one fact, You will not remember anything about your fifth grade teacher anymore about the at least the fifth grade teacher's name. Why it's because the name of your fifth grade teacher is stored deep in the structure of your brain, and when I ask you to recall it, you're actually transferring it from that structural form into activity, you know, spikes in the brain. And that's how you're remembering the name of your teacher. Now, when you're done remembering it, it has to get reconsolidated back into its physical form. And if you get hit in the head during that moment, it's gone. It's now you know, it's been transferred from the physical to the you know, activity in spikes. And if you you know, before it gets transferred back into the physical, it can it is susceptible to erasure, which is weird and terrifying. And by the way, this can also be done with protein synthesis inhibitors. So people do this in rats. They've been doing this for decades, where you know, you train a rat how to run different maases and then you put the rat on a particular maze where the rat has to remember, oh, yeah, that's this one, and then you just feed the rat a protein synthesis inhibitor and now it cannot reconsolidate that memory into physical form. So number one is hippocampal memory can be erased. The number two point is that amigla memories cannot be erased, which is to say, when you recruit the emergency control system to say, wow, this is really important, write this down. Than those are permanent, which the reason I say that's unfortunate is because those are the ones that people want to erase. In other words, you know, let's say a rape victim or something like that, that is the one thing that she wants to forget more than anything, but cannot.
Now, I was checking out the show as well, and I was listening to your I believe this is an episode from just earlier this week on the topic of animal uplift, which I don't think is a term that I was familiar with. Can you give us a brief taste, a brief overview of what animal uplift is.
Yeah, it's this idea that you know, look, the human brain is made out of exactly the same stuff that a mouse brain, the dog brain, the giraft brain. You know, it's all the same stuff. It's got the same anatomy, same general structure. We just have more of this wrinkly outer bit called the cortex. But somehow we are you know, we've taken over the whole planet as a species. We've gotten off the planet. We've made vaccines and internet and quantum mechanics and so like. There's some real difference in what we are doing versus our neighbors in the animal kingdom. But the genetic differences, as you know, are not that much. I mean, we have enormous similarity with almost every Like if you're building a giraffe, you got to build the heart and the lungs and the brain and then the esophagus and all that stuff is really the same stuff. And so it's just some small algorithmic difference in the DNA that's making our brain run in a more souped up way. Okay, the idea of animal uplift is if we can figure that out. And this won't happen, you know, for at least a few more decades, but if we can figure out, ah, here's the sequence of a's and c's and t's and g's that gives us this high intelligence. The question is should we give this to animals? Should we help animals become intelligent? Now, let me just mention this is an area that bioethicists and philosophers and neuroscientists have been talking about for a while, and there's you know, plenty of debate about it. And on one end of the spectrum you have people say that's a terrible idea, We wouldn't want to give intelligence to animals, and other people say it's a moral obligation in the same way that you know, if we know how to fix some viral disease or fix a broken leg or something, of course you should do this for your dog instead of let your dog, you know, not have the medical advances that we have made. So anyway, it's a big debate, but this is the idea of animal uplift. You make an animal as intelligent as a human. And I just find this area fascinating. And you know, as I proposed the podcast, what would the consequences of this be in terms of, you know, will World War five be fought by other animal species not just humans? You know, And the way I sort of introduced the podcast is with this question of what will my kids look back on? Are my grandkids Obviously there's lots of things that will be very different about our world right now and their world, and let's say fifty years from now. But one of them is will they look back and say, Wow, I can't believe there was a time when humans were the only species on Earth that was really doing anything, and now we've got all these other you know, crows running universities, and donkeys' programming computers and whatever, gophers in the Senate and so on.
So one idea of yours that I came across because Rob sent it to me and I found really interesting was from a paper you published in twenty twenty one, I think maybe in Frontiers and Neuroscience, offering a hypothesis about the adaptive function of dreams, which you call the defensive activation theory, Could you lay out what is the basic controversy about the biological function of dreams and how your proposed solution here would answer this question.
Yes, so it turns out there is no controversy about the purpose of dreams because nobody knows, right, everyone, I mean in the sense of everyone's got a little hypothesis about it. But really it's complicated, and people think, well, maybe it has something to do with learning and memory. Maybe it just has to do with you know, energy restoration. Maybe it has to do with you know, obviously the Freudians thought that there was some important meaning in the content of dreams and so on, but no one really knows, and certainly no one has a quantitative hypothesis that can make predictions about dreams and how much dream time we have. But my student and I developed a theory that actually does make quantitative predictions across animal species about it predicts actually how much each animal species will dream. And to explain something to take one step back, which is about brain plasticity, which is this term that we use to explain that the brain is very malleable, the human brain in particular, and it's constantly reconfiguring its own circuitry and that's how it learns and remembers, and that's how it learns new skills and all that. So it turns out, this is what my last book, Live Wired was about, is the massive flexibility of the brain. It turns out is probably a lot of people already into it. If you go blind at a young age, the visual part of your brain gets taken over, and in fact, if you're born blind, that takeover is complete. The rest of the territories in your brain involved in hearing and touch and other things. These all take over what we would normally think of as the visual cortex, and it's no longer visual. It's now, you know, subserving other functions.
Okay.
One of the surprises in neuroscience was a study that came out about a decade ago from some colleagues of Mind Harvard where they put people in a scanner. These are normally cited people, but they blindfolded them tightly and they put them in the scanner and they were looking at their brain's response to touch or to sound or things like that. And what they found, to their surprise, is that after an hour, you could start seeing the first hints of signals in the visual cortex in response to touch and sounds. So, in other words, the visual cortex was starting to get annexed from these other territories that they've touched and sound after one hour. And so this was a much more rapid kind of movement than anyone had expected. And so what my student and I immediately realized is that this is the basis of dreaming. It's because we are on a planet that rotates, and we spend half our time in the darkness, away from the light of our star, and so in the dark. You can still hear and touch and taste and smell just fine, but you can't see. And obviously I'm talking about evolutionary time, you know, not our modern electricity blessed times. And so what this means is the visual system in particular has a real disadvantage, which is it is in danger of getting taken over from the other senses. And this is because of the brain's great plasticity, and so as a result, the visual system needs a way to defend its territory during the night. And that's what dreaming is. Dreaming is essentially a screen saver. It's making sure that at night time, when you're curled up in the corner of your cave, staying out of trouble sleeping, and sleeping has other benefits too, in terms of energy restoration and so on. So when that's happening, you know, you can still feel if some touches your skinner, if you're smelling something or whatever. All that can still function in the dark, but you're not seeing anything at all. And so what happens is you've got this circuitry that just blows activity into the visual system to make sure it stays active during the night. Every ninety minutes, you have this wave of active, random activity that just gets blown in there. And because we're visual creatures, we see we have full, rich visual experience even though our eyes are closed and it's dark out, and it's because we are just making sure the brain is making sure that it's keeping this competition going so the visual system doesn't get taken over. Interestingly, dream sleep is something we find across the animal kingdom, but what we were able to demonstrate is that it correlates with how plastic the animal species is. So some animals drop out of the womb and they figure out in thirty minutes how to run, how to walk. Very quickly, they reach adolescence, they can reproduce, so all kinds, you know, they're just they're obviously very pre programmed, let's just put it that way. But other creatures like humans, are extremely plastic. We take forever to learn how to walk, to wean to reach reproductive age, things like that, precisely because we're extremely plastic, and so we have lots of dreaming because we have to protect our visual cortex at night. But other animals that are, you know, these pre program types, they have just a tiny bit of visual dreaming, but not a lot. And by the way, I'll just mention that the amount of visual dreaming we have goes down with age. So it's an infant, you're dreaming all the time, and as you get older and older, you dream less and less is a fraction of your sleep. And you know that's just a correlation. But in theory, what that suggests is, you know, as an infant, your visual system is very highly at risk of getting taken over, and as you get older and things get more cemented into place, it's less at risk of getting taken over, so you don't need as much screensaver time and only.
This kind of reminds me of studies I've read on a related subject, which is a prolonged blindfolding of normally cited people who apparently it's very common for people under those circumstances to experience a lot of visual hallucinations. Does that have any relationship to what you're talking about here?
It does, Thank you for asking. That's perfect because this is all part of the defensive activation theory, which is to say, if a system is used to having data coming in and suddenly it's not getting that data anymore, it fights back from the inside it starts producing that data itself. So one example of this is let's say blindfolding, or you also see this for example in you know, when people get thrown in solitary confinement in the dark, they start having hallucinations both auditory and visual because they're not getting that data and they're used to it they're supposed to get. There's also something called Bonet syndrome Charles Bone syndrome, which is people start losing their vision, but they don't realize that they're losing their vision because they start having hallucinations that essentially fill in for them. This is all the same issue, though, which is that the brain is used to getting certain inputs, suddenly it's not getting it anymore, and so it starts generating in itself. One more example is tonightis which is ringing in the ears. This typically comes about because somebody loses hearing in some frequency or some band of frequencies and the brain says, wait a minute, I'm not hearing anything at twelve thousand hurts anymore, so I'm going to start making myself and it starts making this sound by itself. So this all falls under the defensive activation theory.
One of the interesting things I recall about the studies on prolonged blindfolding was that the hallucinations that were reported were not entirely random. So it wasn't just you know, people seeing strange scenes play out in front of them. That they would often hallucinate stuff that you would expect to see in that place in the room based on other senses. So like if they heard someone come to the door of the room, they would hallucinate the image of that person in the door.
Yeah, that's perfect. And by the way, I think this also has a lot to tell us about dream content because the thing about dreams, I love the way you put this, because you could, in theory, dream about anything at all. You could dream that you are in Cambodia and that you are in the fourteen hundreds and you're a magician who's doing something. But you know, you tend to dream about you know, your work and your spouse and your drive and whatever, you know, things that are more local to you. And it's precisely because when you slam random activity into the visual system, the synapse is the connections that are essentially hot from the day's work, you know, those those are the things that tend to get activated, and the association is very loose in a sleeping dream state, and so what happens is, you know, things can go off on weird tangents, but physics still works fine in a dream. You know, rocks don't float upwards and stuff like that, and so you know, essentially you're just rebooting things that were there during the day. And and this is closely related to what you're saying about. You know, all the associations that your brain builds up over a lifetime. So you hear the voice and you're expecting to see that person, and that's exactly what happens. Actually, I just want to mention one other thing about the dreams, which is people will often ask me, well, what about a blind person, how do they dream? And the answer is blind people also dream because you have this very ancient circuitry in your head that's blasting activity into the back of the brain the occipital cortex, which is normally the visual cortex. And people but if you're born blind, it's you know, long taken over by hearing in touch, and so a blind person's dream is all about hearing in touch. They don't see anything, but they say, oh, I was, you know, moving through the living room and I felt the furniture was rearranged, and then there was a big dog in the corner and I ran from it and I was scared. And so, you know, they've got full, rich dream experience. It's just that it is not visual because that part of their brain is no longer visual.
And would you well, that makes me wonder then if if your hypothesis about the defensive activity of dreaming is correct, does that mean that that dreaming is now to protect still what would normally be used for visual processing that part of the brain, but its role in processing auditory and other stimuli.
A great question. No, that it's that these circuits that underlie dreaming are extremely ancient, and so they are assuming that you've got perfectly fine vision. And if you don't have vision for some reason, then the circuits aren't going to change. They're just doing a basic architectural job of saying, hey, guys, every ninety minutes, just last some activity into the back of the brain.
There.
That's all they're doing. And they don't know if you're blind or not.
Now, speaking about dreams, I guess it's not too much of a leap to start talking about consciousness. I was wondering, where do you think we are in terms of coraling, testing, and even eliminating various theories concerning the nature of human consciousness. Yeah?
Boy, this still remains to my mind the central unsolved mystery of neuroscience. What's interesting, by the way, I wrote an article, the cover article is Discover magazine back in something like two thousand and six, called ten Unsolved Questions of Neuroscience. And what's fascinating to me is it's now twenty twenty three and they are equally as unsolved. I mean, it's funny because we're making so much progress in the field in some ways, and yet in other ways we're just facing some really tough problems. So the consciousness, you know, what is consciousness is really I think the central one. And you know, for any listeners who are wondering what is the question, the question is how do you take eighty six billion cells and stick them together and hook them up in such a way that you have private, subjective internal experience. So you know, the smell of apple pie and the taste of feta cheese, and the pain of pain, and the redness of red and so on how does that happen? Because you know, my laptop computer has lots of signals running around, zeros and ones running around, and it's transistors, but presumably it's not experiencing anything. It can play a YouTube video for me, but presumably it doesn't find it funny the way I do. And so this is really the question of consciousness. We don't know the answer to it. I can just tell you my general feeling on this, which is when you look at the history of science, what you find is that in every era there were big pieces of information missing, and yet the scientists were in a position of having to try to explain everything not knowing some other thing. Here's an example. You know, when the pump was invented, people suddenly said, oh, I see the heart is like a pump, and then it was obvious, oh, click falls into place. But before that, everyone's trying to figure out what the heck the heart was doing, but no one had the concept of a pump. Or you know, before the magnetosphere of the Earth was discovered, you'd have no way to explain the northern lights. You'd have to make up some crazy story about the northern lights and so on. Anyway, I feel like we're in that situation now with consciousness. There's something right at the edges. We're all listening for its whispers. We can sort of feel that there's something there, but we don't know exactly what it is that we're missing that will allow us to explain how you take a bunch of physical stuff and have it experience.
Now, a topic that's being discussed a lot right now is, of course, as always artificial intelligence, but specifically generative artificial intelligence, especially with so many of these text and image creative tools that are available just to the average person to experiment with and share the results of. And I was wondering, what's your take on generative artificial intelligence and how it relates or doesn't relate to human creativity.
Yeah, so actually this is my next episode because I'm fascinated by this. Yeah, I'm just so Okay. So, you guys may know I'm a neuroscientist, but I'm also a writer, including of fiction. And so suddenly, when when generatively I started blowing up really at the end of last year, I of course, like many artists, thought, oh my gosh, what does this mean for me? What's the what's the future for writers? But actually, in my next episode, I make a four part argument why I think it'll be an important part of the symbiosis between humans and machines that eventually comes about.
But it's not going to.
Replace writers and artists. There are many reasons. You know, One thing is it can it can only do short form stuff, and it does it very nicely. But you know, if you want to write a little blog post or a little jingle or poem or whatever, like, it's great for that, but to actually write a novel is a completely different sort of thing because what the author is doing there is planting clues and having let's say, a cliffhanger that doesn't come back for two or three chapters, and you know, there's a continuity through time where what the author knows is what the end of the story is and then writes towards that. But AI can't even do things like make up a joke, because to make up a joke you have to know the punchline first and then construct the joke to meet it. But it's doing everything in the forward direction, so there are there are reasons like that. There's also make the argument that we as readers, I think, actually really care about the heartbeat behind the page, which is to say, if you offered me two books, and one was written by AI and one was written by you, Rob, and you know, I would absolutely want the one that's written by a real human, because I know that you're a human with all the you know, limitations and anxieties and joys and ecstasies of a real human. And and that's what I care about as a fellow human. And you know, part of my evidence for this is a colleague of mine here in Silicon Valley announced recently that he'd written a book that was half by him and half by chat gpt And and I actually read most of the book and it's it's actually a good book, but I was not inspired when I heard that I read it for other reasons. I thought that sounds terrible, and I was trying to figure out why why did I feel that way? Why did I feel that it was interesting to me? And it has to do with this heartbeat behind behind the page that that matters. Here's the analogy that I'm thinking about nowadays, is it was when cameras first came on this scene, visual painters all panicked and thought we're done for because why would anyone want me to sit here and paint something for weeks and weeks when you can just get a perfect representation of it in a fraction of a second with a camera. And the answer is, cameras did not kill visual painting. They just ended up filling a different neighboring niche and became their own art form. But visual painting still exists because you could do other things with it, and I can you know, at least right the moment, all these text generation programs are extraordinarily boring in what they come up with, because they get pushed through reinforcement learning with humans so that humans say, oh, don't say that, don't say that, that might defend someone, and so on, which is fine. I mean, I'm not opposed to that. But the thing is that good literature is stuff that really challenges us. Any good piece of literature that you find is something that's full of stuff wethink. Oh yikes, that sounds like a terrible thing that just happened. And none of these large language models are even willing to go near that or touch that. So I think they're going to be quite a distance from real literature for the foreseeable future.
I would tend to think also with literary craft. A lot of what we really like about literary style is being surprised. But I wonder if a you know, surprised by like a strange word choice or a strange metaphor or something. Those are the things that feel really good. But can can a generative AI tell the difference between a comparison or a word choice that is strange and a pleasing and exciting way versus one that will be essentially interpreted as a hallucination or an error by the AI.
That's interesting, I would say, I mean, say something positive about these ais. I think probably it would be able to do that, because remember, all us doing is a statistical game of saying, Okay, what's the most probable thing to come next, and you can turn up the temperature on it so that it does things that are increasingly less probable but somehow makes sense. I had not thought about that, But I think these things might be great at making really good metaphors that are surprising, because one of the things that authors have to deal with all the time is that they recycle metaphors and it's totally you know, a soporific to the reader. It puts them to sleep. But a good author I was just reading the other day. It was name Frank Herbert who in Dune he said something about the waves throwing white robes over the rocks. That's how he was describing the foam hitting the rocks, which is beautiful because it wakes you up in that moment you think, oh, what a nice way of describing that. But if one of these large language models simply says, hey, I want to make something not the most probable thing, but less probable, less probable, I'll bet it could come up with really good stuff like that that no human author has yet tried. Let me just give it one example, which is when Alpha Go beat le so Dole, the Go champion back and so I think twenty seventeen. You know, here's the best human in the world of playing the game of Go, and the AI program beats him, and everybody sort of watched that and thought, wow, wow, that's the end of that. But the most interesting part of the story was what happened next, which is le Sodole ended up then playing against his his human opponents and took on different sorts of moves that he had seen Alpha Go play that no human had played before, like it was just doing these weird things that were totally in the rules. They were legal, but no one had thought of doing it before. So now he started doing this and started beating his human opponents at a much higher rate. So the point is we can learn from AI, and I think there's going to be this really interesting collaboration that happens into the future where we see new things happening and in this case, new metaphors that come out in literature and we think, wow, I would have never thought of that one, and then we can use them.
Another element of literary style, though, I think about with Generative AI is the role of insight in writing, and it makes me wonder what insight actually is. This is obviously something we prize, you know, when we read a novel that we really like and we say that it is true, you know there's something true in it. Obviously the story is literally fictional, it didn't happen, but it observes something about life that we perceive as like deeply correct and do I don't know, I would have an intuition that says I would come across insights like that, or things that feel like insights like that. Less in generat in something generated by AI. I can't prove that, but it does raise this question of what insight is.
Yeah, you know, I tell you, I think I'm signing with the A on this one. Because what these large language models are essentially is every human all put together. So whatever insights people have had previously, this is all available to the language model, and so there's no reason that it can't put something together that's very insightful. And it's not that it's having the insight, it's that it gets to say, Okay, well, here's a billion people who have written stuff down, and I've noticed that, you know a number of these maybe two hundred of these people have all said the same thing over here. And maybe Joe's never read that sentence, you know, that paragraph, but but I there's something going on over here, and it puts it together and then you say, oh my gosh, that was really insight because it's not a machine telling you the story, it's a billion people telling you the story.
Now, Joe and I are actually currently doing some episodes of our own podcast on the subject of infantile amnesia. You know, why we don't remember our earliest childhood or you know, infancy and birth and so forth. And and we've heard from some listeners, as we inevitably knew we would, who say that they do remember their birth, so they do remember very early childhood. And we were just wondering what your take is on people who who have that experience or seem to have that memory. What may be going on there?
Yeah, I mean, here's here's what we think in there. Science generally is that, you know, memory is a is something that unpacks slowly with time. It's a cognitive development in some sense. And you know, as you guys know, it's about three years old for girls and three and a half years old for boys that they start laying down their first memories. Here's the interesting thing. Memory is a myth making machine, and we're constantly reinventing our past. And so one of the difficult things to assess when someone says, hey, I remember whatever being born or being one years old, is it's really difficult to know the degree to which they think that's true. But it's not true because we're all told stories by our parents of oh, and you were an infant, you did this hilarious thing and blah blah blah, and you hear the story once or twice, and eventually it becomes a false memory. So I think it's very difficult to know to be able to tell this sort of thing. And of course for someone who has a memory, it's very difficult to tell them, Hey, that might be false and you just think you remember that. That makes people angry. But you know, the truth is, this kind of stuff comes up all the time in courts of law, in the realm of eyewitness testimony, because people think that they're memories are like a video recorder, and they're simply not. There's a giant psychology literature on this showing all kinds of ways that things get false, memories get introduced, and so on. You know, a colleague of mine did a really great study right after September eleventh, two thousand and one. She was in New York, and she went and interviewed a bunch of people in downtown in Midtown, New York about what they had just seen on September eleventh, and then she was clever enough to also ask them to describe a memory from September tenth, the day before, like lunch here, and I did this, and I did that, And then she went and tracked all these people down a year later and asked them to tell their memories again about September eleventh, September tenth, of the year before, and it turns out that in both cases the memories drifted. So this comes back to the beginning of our conversation. Even Amigdala memories, even the scariest memories that you have, it doesn't mean they're accurate. And so I mean, especially it doesn't surprise me about September eleventh, because especially the more you tell a story, the more you start laying down these ruts in the road, and that becomes the story that becomes the truth. And you know, we've all run into these things in our life where someone suddenly shows us a photograph or something that says, wait, that's not my memory. Look here's the thing here, and you go, oh, gosh, I had actually misremembered that that thing that happened, or where I was standing or what I was doing. Anyway, So this is the concern when people say, oh, I remember whatever being born or this event when I was really young, is that we know how easy it is to believe memories that are not true.
Now correct me if I'm wrong, But I think I recall reading that. In some of these cases with the like where there's a big public event and people remember you, people are like asked to write down their experiences that day, and then the researchers contact them again later and have them try it again. You say, what do you remember about that day? Not only do they often get details wrong, but don't they often insist that the way they remember it now is correct and what they wrote at the time was wrong.
Exactly. That's exactly right, Yeah, because it's so hard to disbelieve our own memories about things. You know, this is obviously at the heart of lots of spousal arguments too. You know, you have two brains, you have two different ways of remembering what precisely happened. Yes, that's exactly right.
All right, Well, you already mentioned that you have the episode coming up about AI creativity. I'm definitely excited to check that one out. Is there anything else you want to tease out for listeners what else they can expect from future episodes of Inner Cosmos? Yeah?
Well, okay, so my next one after that is going to be is a I sentient Because you know, this is a big question now as these models get larger and larger, and things are moving at an extraordinary pace. Now, what does sentients mean? And this is related to the question you asked me Rob about consciousness and so on. So I think this actually gives an interesting tool into studying consciousness that we haven't had before. But I have other episodes about my One after that is about counterfeiting money and what it is that we notice about counterfeits or we do not. I have an episode on will you perceive the event that kills you? And I find this is just a topic I've been thinking about for a long time and have put together a lot of work on this about you know, if suddenly something, let's say that the brick from the pedestrian bridge over the highway fell on your head when you were in a convertible, The question is, would you perceive dying or would you be dead before you knew anything happen? And what does that look like? Does it look like you know, suddenly the footage just ends but there's no pain, stuff like that. So I have lots and lots of episodes. Can we create new senses for humans? Which is a big part of what I've been doing over the last eight years with company that I run called Neosensory. Yeah, and I have forty six episodes this year, all of which I've outlined, and then it's just a matter of spending the twelve hours per week of writing the hour long monologue.
Awesome, it sounds exciting. I'm excited to check out more episodes.
Great. Thank you guys so much for having me. It's been a pleasure to see all.
Yeah, thanks for coming on the show.
All right, well that was our conversation with David Eagleman. Once again, much appreciation to David for taking the time to chat with us today. If you want to check out his new show, and we do recommend it once again, it is called Inner Cosmos with David Eagleman. You can find it on the iHeart app or wherever you get your podcasts.
Just a reminder that's Stuff to Blow Your Mind is a science podcast with core episodes on Tuesdays and Thursdays in the Stuff to Blow your Mind podcast feed. On Mondays we do listener mail episodes. On Wednesdays we do a short form artifact or monster fack episode, and on Fridays we set aside most serious concerns to just talk about a weird film on Weird House Cinema.
Huge thanks to our audio producer JJ Posway. If you would like to get in touch with us with feedback on this episode or any other, to suggest a topic for the future, or just to say hello, you can email us at contact at stuff to Blow your Mind dot com.
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