TechStuffConversation on the Brain with Guest David Eagleman
Neuroscientist David Eagleman joins the show to talk about lighthearted topics ranging from the nature of consciousness to the intersection of technology and the grey matter that lives in our skulls.
Welcome to Tech Stuff, a production from iHeartRadio. Hey there, and welcome to tech Stuff. I'm your host, Jonathan Strickland. I'm an executive producer with iHeartRadio and how the tech are you listeners? We have a treat today. We've got a guest on the show. He's a neuroscientist, he's a technologist. Most importantly, he's a fellow podcaster, David Eagleman, host of Inner Cosmos with David Eagleman.
Welcome to the.
Show, Thanks Jonathan. Great to be here.
David.
It's a pleasure to have you on. I think you may only be the first or second person I've ever had on the show who has done a ted talk. I've had film directors on the show. I've had production designers for things like Stranger Things on the show. But it's rare that I get a chance to sit down with a neuroscientist. So this is going to be a real pleasure, great pleasure for me too. Well, let's start off by talking a bit about Inner Cosmos, because you know, this show has launched, it's got thirty episodes out as of the time we're recording this episode, thirty I think published the day before we're recording this. That's right, And first I want to applaud you for your restraint that it took seventeen episodes before you gave us the definitive answer on what is consciousness?
Yeah, well, you know the show as you well though, it's about you know, the intersection of the brain with our lives, our daily lives, and right, so it took a little while to work up consciousness. Unfortunately, we still do not have a definitive answer to that, and it's you know, this is really at the center of the mystery of neuroscience is how do you put together eighty six billion neurons and have all this you know, three pound glob of wet biological stuff that is you? But why does it feel like anything to be you? Why aren't you just you know, my Mac laptop here has a whole bunch of transistors, but presumably it doesn't find things funny or interesting or painful or curious. Yeah.
Yeah.
I often talk about in the sense of the ability to have an experience versus the ability of just being able to process information, and a lot of what you talk about has obvious crossover into the world of technology, but beyond that, like when we start talking about things like artificial intelligence or artificial neuron networks. Like that's where we start really having this interesting cross talk, because I get the sense that often the technologist side has maybe a superficial understanding or sometimes a complete misunderstanding of the neuroscience. But they're trying to use neuroscience to describe their technologies, and meanwhile you have neuroscientists who are often trying to straighten out the concepts, and it can become a complicated conversation where people are talking on two different levels. So one of the things I wanted to ask you actually relates to this, which is, as a neuroscientist and as a technologist, how do you actually define artificial intelligence? Because it's such an enormous discipline, and I feel like a lot of the reporting around it gets very reductive.
Yeah, all great questions. Here's the thing, you know, we don't even know exactly how to define natural intelligence. What I mean is people have known, for example, since the nineteen twenties that the IQ test measures something useful and it correlates with one's success in life along various metrics career and so on. But there's a big debate about what intelligence is in humans. Is it the ability to better simulate possible futures and evaluate them. Is it the ability to squelch distractors and so on? There's lots of there's lots of different diferent ideas about what intelligence might be, but we don't know. It's probably a word that has too much semantic weight on it, meaning that it's not just one thing anyway, So when you ask the question of what is artificial intelligence, it can mean a lot of things, and people mean different things by it. And so the way we're building AI is the way we build any sort of machine where you're trying to get the machine to do something for you that you don't want to do. So, for example, you know, Google Maps knows every street, every place I should go, how a best way to get there? That is artificial intelligence in the sense that it's way better than I would be at memorizing an entire atlas, And so that's a very useful machine for me. You know, Chat, GPT compiling the world's data and being able to tell it to you in the structure of a human speaking. It's sort of like what we appreciated about Google, which is this compilation of all the world's data. But now it can just spit it out to you in various ways. Lots of ways to think about what artificial intelligence is. But I will I do want to say something, which is that you know, AI butted off from neuroscience because neuroscientists figured out a while ago, Look, you know, you've got neurons. These neurals are connected to one another. Now, as it turns out, neurons are really complicated. Each neuron is about as complicated as a city. It's got the entire human genome inute. It's trafficking millions of proteins around very complicated cascades, and it's constantly plugging and unplugging and seeking and plugging into other neurons and so on, and so people a while ago came up with this idea of an artificial neural network where they said, look, what if we just have units that are connected to each other and those those connections have particular strengths that can change. And so, as it turns out, that has been the trick that has led to this renaissance in AI that's been incredible, but it also it's departed from the biology. I would say they're now sort of oft in different directions. It's very cartoonish version of the biology. In some ways it is much better than the biology, and in other ways it's much worse. Just as an example, AI, even given the absolutely mind blowing things it's doing right now, it's not as good as let's say, a five year old is at navigating a complex room and socially manipulating adults to get what she wants, and you know, all these things that you know, getting food to her mouth when she's hungry and so on. There's a lot of things that humans can. You know, I should say that ais to there's still gonna be work ahead of it to get there.
Yeah, yeah, I remember.
One of my favorite stories was from a few years back when I was at south By Southwest and a roboticist was talking about a project in which they had a robot that was capable of moving through human environments and they were attempting to have the robot figure out how to open a door, and they said the process of that had the robots standing in a corridor for like three days just analyzing door and getting in the way of people who needed to go place.
Like everyone hated the robot.
By the end of this, but they were explaining like, this is something where as a human, once you have the experience with a door, you can start to reason out how to interact with other doors, even if the mechanism is different. Right, you can start to interpret how to interact with this barrier, and it may mean that you have to try a couple of different things before you successfully open the door, but you have an idea. But in artificial intelligence, that's something that we're only starting to approach right now. Another great example was when DHARPA did the General Challenge where they had the humanoid robots that needed to complete a series of tasks like driving a vehicle, getting out of it, walking through a door, picking up a tool, using it, and they found that one of the toughest challenges was walking through the door. There's so many videos. Don't look it up, people, it will break your heart, but so many videos are very expensive. Robots face plan think while trying to walk through a doorway, and it just shows that these these things that can come very easily to humans do not necessarily come easily to machines. Whether we're talking about an AI software running in the background or a robot.
That's true, but let me jump in with one question about what we mean by come easily to humans, because what's interesting is we've had millions of years of evolution building this incredibly complex structure, the most complex thing we've ever found on the planet, the human brain, And so what seems easy to us is actually not easy at all, of course from other nature to have built. But yes, I totally agree with you. Anything physical is something that AI still has a long way to go to get.
Yeah, and to your point, yes, the human brain is a phenomenon of evolution where it's what makes this comparatively easy for us when you combine, you know, compare that against a machine. I had mentioned earlier about your TED talk. I loved it because it was all about using technology to expand human senses. And also you very well, you put it extremely well about how our understanding of the world around us, our understanding of the universes, obviously funneled through our senses, which means when you look at what our senses are capable of, you realize we're experiencing the tiniest fraction of what's actually going on out there. That there are entire frequencies of the electromagnetic spectrum that we cannot observe directly, and that's just part of the limitations we have on ourselves. And that when we think about that, and we think about technology having the capacity to expand that, that's really a fascinating thing. And I thought it was great because I had also done stories about biohacking and grinders, people who are kind of taking the underground auto mechanic garage approach to this sort of thing where you might be talking about implanting magnets on your fingertips so you could sense electromagnetic fields. Usually it means directing stimuli in a way that you would pick up with one of your traditional senses, not creating a new one necessarily, sort of the same way that you would say, like infrared goggles translates information into the visual spectrum so we can see it. But I'm curious, since that talk, since you've given that talk where you were looking into different ways to bring stimuli in and have the brain interpret it and perhaps even augment or create new senses, have you done any more work along those lines since you get that talk, and I would love to hear about it.
Yeah, great, great, So maybe I should back up just for one second, if for those listeners who haven't heard the toss, it was just about this issue of how the brain is locked in silence and darkness inside your skull. It doesn't see any of the world, doesn't hear any of the world. All it ever has or these little electrical spikes zipping around among neurons and then release of neurotransmitters. But that say, it's just this electrochemical world buzzing around in the dark, and yet it constructs this whole cosmos for you, you know, the colors and the lights and the joy and the smells and the tastes and the touch and all that. So this is you know, we actually mentioned this at the beginning about the mystery of consciousness. But this is what brains are good at doing, is extracting patterns and assigning meaning to those and figuring out how to navigate itself in the world. So what I got interested in is, you know, if I were to show you a little piece of you know, of the brain. Let's say I could do this in real life with you know, like drilling a little hole in there and you get to see all the action the activity inside that little piece of brain. And I said to you, hey, what part of the brain is this Is this visual information or auditory or touch or smell? You wouldn't be able to tell me. I wouldn't be able to tell you because it looks the same everywhere the cortex. The wrinklely bent on the outside of the brain is actually the same structure all across the brain, even though we tend to call this part, oh, that's your visual center, and here's your auditory system, and here's your amount of sensory system for touch and so on. In fact, it's all exactly the same structure. It's just a matter of which data cables are getting plugged into there. So that's the background. Whatever data you send in there, it figures out what to do with it and how to make it relevant. So I got interested in this question of sensory substitution, which is can we feed in completely new kinds of senses into the brain. And so what I presented at that talk, as you know, of course, Jonathan, is a vest with vibratory motors on it, and we were able to show, for example, that we could that deaf people, people who could not hear, who are profoundly or severely deaf, they could come to understand the auditory world just by patterns vibration on their skin. This is what your inner ear does. You know, when you capture air compression waves on your ear drum, that goes through a few stages, then it gets broken up from high to low frequency, then shipped off to your brain as patterns of spikes. All we're doing is capturing sound on microphones and breaking it up from high low frequency and putting that into different parts of the skin as vibrations. And it turns out that people who are deaf could come to hear this way. And so what we have done, and answer your question, what we've done since then, is we have shrunk the VEST down to a wristband and I spun this company off from my labs called Neosensory, and the wrist band does exactly the same thing as the VEST. It's capturing sound in here. It's got full computational capacity, and it has these vibratory motors along the inside of the wrist, multiple motors, and it's turning that sound into patterns of vibration on the skin of your wrist, and people who are deaf can come to hear this way. The really wild part is that after about six months when I ask them, hey, when you hear a sound, what is it? You know? Do you hear a dog mark and you feel a buzz on your wrist and you think, oh, what was that? Must be a dog where And they say, no, I just hear the dog. And I say, well, what do you mean by that? They say, I just I hear the dog out there, which is wild, right, except that's all that your ears are doing too. I mean, we've long stopped appreciating that because you've been using your ear since you were a baby. But for goodness sakes, all you have are spikes running around. And yet you think, oh, I'm hearing Eagleman's voice here from out there, whereas in fact, all of the sound is just happening in your head. It's the interpretation of an auditory signal that's happening in your consciousness. So turns out it doesn't matter how you push the information in there, you get the same thing happening there. And we also, we've done a whole We have several products on the market now and we're on risks all over the world. One of them is the you know, to replace hearing aids. So most people, as they get older they lose their high frequencies because yes, high frequencies. Yeah, you know, that has the most energy, and it kills the little cells inside your in your ear eventually, so they stop hearing high frequencies. And that's why often as people get older, they have a harder time understanding women and children because their voices tend to be a slight higher register. And so what we're doing is using exactly the same risk band. It's using cutting at ji to listen in real time for different high frequency parts of speech called phonemes. And when it detects, oh, there was an S, there was a K, there was a V, there was a T, and so on, it buzzes in different ways to tell you. And so what's happening is that somebody's ears doing fine at the medium and low frequency, and the risk band is simply clarifying what is happening at the high frequency. And so that turns out to be a really great solution. It It takes about a week or two for people to get used to it, to understand how to use it. It's all unconscious learning, but they just get better and better at understanding what's being said, and they'll just mention one other thing which was sort of as it's fascinating that it worked, which is that for which is ringing in the ears. What we do is we have people wear the wristband and we play just for ten minutes to day. We play a series of tones boom boo, boo boo, boom boom, boom boom, and as you're hearing the tones, you're feeling the buzz on the wristband. And it turns out this drives down tenatus as well as any solution that exists. And the reason is there are complicated arguments for us. But I think the simple reason this works is because you're teaching the brain what is a real sound boom boom boom boom, because you're getting verification on the wristband, but the internal ring in the ears, the bea doesn't get any confirmation and so the brain says, Okay, that's fake news and drives it down.
I'm going to need to get one of these wristbands. I spent a lot of my youth going to the University of Georgia and all the little rock clubs in the surrounding area, and I have paid for my decisions. Kids use earbuds or not earbuds, ear plugs. Use earplugs when you go to the shows, because trust me, yes, trust me, we're gonna have to take a quick break, but when we come back we have more. With my conversation with David Eagleman, the other thing I wanted to point out for folks who may not have picked up on it, is that this solution where you're using this tactile feedback, where it's taking in sound and creating this not only is it unconscious learning, it obviously does not require invasive surgery. It can be orders of magnitude less expensive and thus far more accessible, which means that it's a technology that can help the heart of hearing, or beyond heart of hearing, to experience the world on a greater scale than they otherwise could, which is always a wonderful story to tell when you're talking about tech, because often we're talking about tech solutions that are not really solutions. They are convenient is for a select.
Few, Yeah, thank you. I mean this is this is why we're on risks all over the world now, and lots of deaf schools in really impoverished countries as well, precisely because you know, the only other option for somebody who is deaf is a cochlear implant, which is one hundred thousand dollars and an invasive surgery. So yeah, this makes a big difference, and it works so well just to push the information into the brain via an unusual channel.
It's fascinating to me.
The more you think about it, the more the more you start to come to the conclusion of well, of course it works when you start to break it down, as the brain is creating everything we're experiencing. It's just it's bringing in information from various sensors, and the nature of the sensor doesn't matter as much as how the brain can synthesize that data and turn it into something that we can experience as something meaningful exactly.
I mean, those two spheres on the front of your head, those are just capturing photons and turning them into spikes. In your ear, your very sophisticated ear, is just capturing air compression waves and turning into spikes. And your nose in your mouth are capturing mixtures of molecules turning those into spikes. But it's all it's all ending up in the same common currency.
Well, David, one of the other things I wanted to mention to you. I recently was doing some episodes about the Ignobel Prizes, which you know, obviously a series of joke prizes that came out of a satirical science magazine. It's meant to either celebrate or sometimes raz people who have done various things in science. One of the things I thought was really interesting was they gave an Ignobel Prize to a group of people Craig Bennett, Abigail Baird, Michael Miller, and George Wolford who wrote a fascinating paper. The paper is titled Neural Correlates of Interspecies Perspective taking in the post mortem Atlantic Salmon An argument for proper multiple comparisons correction. So this study was all about how using very very sensitive equipment, mostly fMRI I actually and through misuse of statistics, it could be very easy to get false positives with things of this nature. And thus what it means is that we need to be very very careful when designing controls when we're using things like fMRI I to draw conclusions. And I'm curious as your work as a neuroscientist, as your work as a technologist, have you encountered this sort of thing where there's always this emphasis on moving fast, you know, move fast and break things and to get to the end product as quickly as possible. But in the process you have to make sure that the science is right or else the conclusions you draw, the solutions you make aren't really addressing anything. Have you encountered things of that nature?
Sure, I mean spending a career in science when deals with this all the time, which is to say, you know, science constantly tries to drive forward, but it's always two steps forward, one step back in the sense I mean this fMRI paper with the salmon for anyone who does know, it's you know, they put a dead salmon in the scanner, and we're able to demonstrate that if you do this the math in a certain way, that it looks like there's activity in the salmon's brain even though there can't possibly be so. So this is actually not an indictment of functional metic residence imaging, the brain imaging technology that we use. Instead, it's just an indictment of how you do the statistics and so on. This is an incredibly complicated device fMRI, and the you know, the way you analyze the data requires, you know, a long time to get to get up to speed on it. But what it allows us to do is see what's happening in the brain, in the live brain of a human when they're doing a task or thinking about something. It's been absolutely incredible the amount of data that's come out of this. But what their paper shows is that, hey, you just have to make sure you're doing the statistics right and so on. And you know, like every field and sence, you find lots and lots of papers that are publishing right at the P equals point zero five, you know, statistical significant value, meaning that there you know, people are saying, oh, we've just spent a year during the study, and maybe it's not quite statistically significant, so there's a there's some little amount of fraud that happens. Look, let's do it this way. My mentors was Francis Crick, the guy who discovered the structure of DNA with Watson, and he, you know, he would read the journals every single week when they came out, and he said to me that he just assumes that twenty five percent of what he reads is wrong, whether by fraud or accident or whatever, doesn't matter. But this is the thing science is the only human endeavor we have that is constantly knocking down its own walls and being self correcting, So you know, think, of course there's mistakes and fraud and terrible stuff happens all the time, size but at least that gets ironed out and straightened out, whereas in every other field of human endeavor it doesn't.
Yeah, I thought the paper was incredibly invaluable. It was one of those where, like I get the idea of the Ignobel Prize going to it because the whole idea of it makes you laugh and then it makes you think. But my argument was, now, this is, this is a statement to other researchers saying, just make sure that you're absolutely positive you're doing everything you know correctly with scientific rigor, that it's replicable, that it's replicable by other scientists who are not directly working on whatever it is you're working on, so that you ultimately are getting to the right conclusion, because otherwise you're going to feel that you're you're sort of wandering off the path, and perhaps worst case scenario, you could say you're wasting time, or truly, worst case scenario, you could be misleading people.
You know you.
Combine that with the world of like startups and Silicon Valley and the general philosophy that they have, and you can see that there's not parody between the two. And so I imagine it requires a lot of balancing to make certain that the science is there before the real big moves in technology. Otherwise you would run the danger of running into something like a Therah noose, which obviously a poster child for bad science.
Yeah, exactly. I mean, again, the good news about science or startups is that if somebody is doing something that doesn't work, the truth outs. Yes, And you know, unfortunately in science all the in science and startups all the time, this stuff happens again, you know, sometimes by fraud and often by mistake or accident. But you can't keep that ship running for very long. I mean, look, you know, the big thing that happened more recently is this issue about Alzheimer's disease. And you've got these plaques and tangles and so on. It turns out that it was discovered that about thirteen years ago, this guy who published the papers that actually fraudulently doctored the photographs to make it look like something was going on there. Cut to thirteen years of research and countless millions of dollars going into researching this thing that was all predicated on a fraud, and that sucks. But you know, in thirteen years is a long time, but yeah, it gets figured out. At some point, nothing's gonna last.
Yeah, yeah, it's which is that is something of a comfort to know that in the long run it all gets hashed out. I mean, obviously, if you are someone who's caught up in it, in the middle of it, it can be it can be life changing in a really negative way. But but there is there is comfort to know that the very nature of the process of science is one that will weed this stuff out. And I also argue all the time and like, you know that science works because if science didn't work, none of your technology would work. Your technology is proof science works. It is the actual manifestation, physical manifestation of science. And it's also why I get very let's say, passionate when I encounter people who are in some ways science deniers. It's it's it's unthinkable to me because I think how much of your life revolves around your interaction with things that literally would not work if science, that the scientific process didn't work.
I agree with you, But let me play devil's advocate here for just a second, which is, you know, given that science is wrong some of the time, and you know, thank goodness, it's self correcting and we'll get it straightened out. I always have a little bit of I give a little wiggle room to people who say, well, how do we know that's true? You know, maybe these scientists are influenced by politics or something. And that's true too, that happens all the time. And in fact, the grant money goes towards things that any society and any moment in time finds politically interesting or expedient to do. And you know, science money doesn't go to those things that society doesn't care about.
And so on.
Anyway, I whenever I hear somebody saying, hey, I don't think this is true, or that, how do we know climate change? How do we know the vaccines, whatever, I always feel like, good man, keep asking the questions, and you know, and the truth will out as a result of that, and one side or the other will find out who's wrong. Right.
Yeah, I'm certainly in favor of asking questions. I think I get frustrated with people who when faced with an answer that they don't like. Are They're not interested in the process that arrived to that answer. They're interested in the answer changing. Right, Yeah, yeah, fair enough, fair enough.
There's lots of there's lots of wrong reasons to criticize science.
But I mean, but to your point, the whole, the whole of science is all about, like, I discovered this thing. I think it's a thing. Can you look at this thing and tell me if you also think it's a thing? And if enough people think it's a thing, then we have a scientific consensus about it being a thing. And then that we can we can say we're fairly comfortable this is a thing. Maybe sometime in the future we'll discover, oh, we were totally wrong, that wasn't a thing at all, But for now we're comfortable in calling it a thing, which is a crazy genderic way of describing it.
No, I like the way you describe it, but it is it is important to look. I'm totally on your side on this, but just just to fill out the other side for a moment, all we ever have in science is the weight of evidence, So we never can conclude this is the truth or this is the thing, and so all we say is, look, all the data seems to indicate, seems to point in this. For example, we all believe in quantum mechanics because it's the best theory we have. It predicts experiments correctly to fourteen decimal places. We don't know it's true. We don't know it's true. I mean, you know, there may be something in one hundred years from now. We just cover. Oh that's way better. By the way, it predicts experiments to thirty decimal places, and it's it's a totally different thing. And I mean in the same way that let's take Newtonian physics. You know, you drop a ball or what do you shoot a cannon ball or something, and it works pretty well, but it doesn't it doesn't expand to deal with things that at the very big or very small. Sure, and so we say, okay, well it's good enough for here. It's fine. But yeah, yeah, I don't know. I always there's a little piece in my heart that always is fine with people questioning anything, because really, the whole history of science is that in every generation people have thought, okay, we've got all the puzzle pieces here, we sort of know the answer, and it's never been true once ever, And just imagine trying to explain, you know, how the heart works before the discovery of electricity, or how the northern lights work before the discovery of the discovery of you know, photons and the magnetosphere around the planet and stuff like like you could you'd be making up theories, but you would be doomed to be incorrect. And so whoever was the naysayers in those days, good good on them for saying, I don't know, you know, just because all the sciences agree on this doesn't necessitate it's correct.
Well, and I do think that curiosity is probably one of the most important human qualities to have, right. You need to have curiosity, You need to have that desire to learn. And like I remember, I was chatting with my niece who was asking very deep questions for an eight year old, and I was explaining things like I was explaining in big terms things like Newtonian physics and then quantum physics. And then she said, at what stage do you swap from describing something in Newtonian physics to quantum physics. I said, you have hit upon a question that no one has an answer to, and I know that's not satisfying to you. But this is where you have to know that adults don't know everything God exactly.
But you know what the funny part is, it's not that your niece was asking deep questions, that she's just asking good questions. Yes, as someone looking at through the whole thing with fresh eyes, like wait, why do you guys believe in this and that? Yeah?
Yeah, it's like the simpler way.
I mean when I was a kid, I was asking, well, what makes that a hill and that a mountain if they're both the same height, which just gets into semantics right right, But it's great, like I'm glad that she's thinking of things in her way and that she's gonna totally leave me in the dust, which is fantastic, that's what I want to say. But exactly, you know, it's that the question seems deep to us only because we have forgotten to ask it anymore.
That's the frustrating part. Is we get older because look, the job in the brain is to make an internal model of the outside world to say, okay, this is how this works, is how that works. And as we get older and older, we say, okay, I've kind of got this figured out. I know how the world works. I know how people respondated this. I know how to ride a bicycle, I know where my door is. But as a result of this, we, you know, we stop asking questions. We lose the curiosity that a child has because we kind of think we know the answers to things. And what makes good science or I say, you know, like a good scientist is anyone who just retains the natiety, the youthful, you know, acting like a child their entire lives and saying, wait a minute, how do we know that?
Yeah?
So I like that. I like that a lot. And those moments where it hits me, which are well, I'll say they're rare, like it does hit me occasionally, but it's always wonderful when it does. And I ask a question that I just I didn't even think to ask before, and then going down that rabbit hole can be really informative and entertaining. Even if you don't arrive at an answer that you can fully apply to whatever the question was, it's the journey along the way that can be really fascinating. It's great because, like, I have discussions with different kinds of people. So I've had discussions with scientists and I've had discussions with engineers, and it can be fun to see the different approaches people take, because engineers tend to see the world as a series of problems and they're always thinking about solutions, and scientists tend to look at the world and just ask questions about the very nature of it and how they can have a better understanding of it, and how does that fit within our current understanding? Does it fit or does it mean that we have to actually adjust our current understanding. And I learned so much by talking to these two different groups of people, and it's always a joy.
Yeah, And you know, one of the things with neuroscience in particular is it's fundamentally the question of how we perceive reality at all. So, just as an example, you may know this, but I've spent a big chunk of my career studying the perception of time. And you know, this is one of those things that just seems obvious, like, oh, yeah, five minutes past, no problem, you know, or this happened before that, or you know, this is blinking at a particular rate or whatever, like you don't even think to question it. But you know, I've spent whatever twenty five years studying this really hard, and just the deeper you reach down to this system, the more it sometimes feels like, oh my gosh, it's so weird, you know, or you know, we mentioned conscious before, like the colors. Colors don't exist in the outside world, you know, there's just electromagnetic radiation of different wavelengths, and your brain assigns what we call equaliya to it, so we say, oh, that's red, that's blue, that's green. But those the colors don't exist. It's all in your head, you know. And sound doesn't exist as such. It's just air compression waves. So the world outside your head you can't even really picture it. I mean, it's just electromaic magnetic radiation and air compression waves and whatever. But but we experienced it as this colorful cacophonousts, you know place. So anyway, the more you reach down into this stuff, sometimes it feels like, oh my gosh, it's it's not even clear what's true or not true. And then, of course, with the AI having had this explosion the way it has recently, you know, in Silicon Valley, there's been this real shift from people saying they're atheists to being creationists. Creationists meaning like you know, we're an AI simulation by who the heck knows, And you know suddenly that that idea, you know, we've all talked about as our whole career is about, Hey, how do we know if we're in a simulation? And so on? But all of a sudden, it seems like, whoa, that's not as crazy as it once seemed.
Yeah, David and I got a little more to talk about. But before we can get to that, let's take another quick break. If it is possible to build a system that is capable of creating a synthetic reality where the inhabitants of that synthetic reality would assume it is real. If that is in fact possible, then the chances are that some civilization at some point has done that, and that the chances that we are the civilization that will eventually get to that point. Is incredibly egotistical to suggest that if there are all these things, the more you look at it, as you're taking all these things to consideration, the odds are diminishingly likely that we're in a real reality in a simulated one.
Exactly, the odds are that we're in a simulated reality. Yeah, this is Nick Bostrom's argument. So the whole notion of what is reality and why do you experience? Why do you experience things the way we are? I feel like it's that that has complexified even from the time I was whatever, from the time I was a student till now, just trying to understand what reality even is basic question. So it's interesting because the engineers have a simpler job in a sense, which is, okay, if I launch this cannonball doesn't land there, great, I can you know, refine and change the angle and terrific. But the scientists are facing really, really tough questions.
Yeah, I would urge my listeners not to think about it for too long or too hard, or you'll find yourself in a spiral.
I've always founded interesting by the way the bounce back, which is to say, you know, no matter how deeply you study something about reality or colors or whatever, you know, you stand up from your desk where you're reading this book or whatever, and you go out and then suddenly think, oh, that honeysuckle smells awesome. It's been such a good mood. And oh, this guy is so blue it's beautiful. Oh, and here's my beautiful wife and I feel so happy to see her, and here's my children. I'm so happy to you know, all the stuff that you just can pcluded was all illusory. You know, you can't help but experience that.
Yeah.
In other words, if I explained to you, if I had a way of diagramming and showing with equations so on the whole reason why you like, you know, chocolate ice cream, it would actually have no difference in your life to your enjoyment of chocolate ice cream. You would you would say, wow, I can't believe it's all mechanical and here's dopamine serotonin in this. But then you eat, You're like, wow, that sure is delicious.
Yeah.
Yeah, Yeah, the knowing does not diminish the experience.
Yeah.
I get very pragmatic about it. I think if it's a synthetic reality, if what we're in is a simulation, it makes no difference to my day to day existence. Like I still want to make sure, like my motto is, I want to leave things better than they were when I got here. If I can do that, then that at any level I can, whether the people are simulated or perhaps there's some outer reality where people are looking at it and.
Saying like I did his best. He didn't know his get it right, but he tried really hard. Well, I'm going to consider that a win in the long run.
Excellent. Excellent.
Yeah, and I wish I could keep you here to talk about all of the different topics you've covered on Inner Cosmos, but obviously there's a whole podcast that exists for that very purpose, and would be rather ridiculous of me to have you repeat it all. I mean, there are topics that you talk about that I used to discuss on a show I did called Forward Thinking, about things like the concept that some people have bandied about, about the idea of uploading yourself into some sort of of computer system in order to maintain some semblance of digital immortality. I don't know how you specifically feel about that. I've always felt that this kind of is in the realm of techno billionaires who are absolutely terrified at the thought of ceasing to exist. But I'm curious about your own take.
It's not just techno billionaires. They can do something about it, but some fractions of the population really cares about dying. They're really horrified by that. I just happened to be at the other end of the spectrum where I really don't care. It's just I mean, I just understand mortality, and you know, I know that I'll die at some point and that's that. But some people really care about figuring out. Look, could I, for example, freeze my whole body or just freeze my head? And I'm actually doing another episode on this coming up. Okay, here's a question for you. The first guy to freeze himself for the hope of getting rebooted in the future, you know, cut to five hundred years from now when people know, ah, here's how we can revivify a frozen body. What year was that guy born in the first person who's frozen like that?
Gosh, oh, that's a great question. Okay, so I'm gonna just give a shot in the dark. I'm gonna say nineteen twenty.
Okay, eighteen ninety eight is the first guy, and he froze himself in the late sixties. Yeah, and I didn't remember any people have been thinking about this guy thing for a long time. Or Hey, could I freeze myself and do a Hail Mary pass into the future and just hope that people then will know a lot more and we know now and they'll fig because you know, you can revivify a body of someone who's let's say, frozen in a lake. You know, they've fallen through the ice, they freeze, their heart stopped, their vitals have all stopped, and you know you can warm them up slowly and get them going again. And so we know this is possible, and yeah, so a lot of people are really interested in this. There's two ways to do it. One is you freeze the body. The other one is this issue of could you somehow extract all the interesting structure of what's going on in somebody's brain, you know, the whole reconfiguration of their network that represents their life. Could you reconstruct that digitally? It would save a lot of space and so on, And then you're and then you know, essentially run the person in a simulation. So that's that's where we might already be. But in any case, we're trying to do a simulation inside a simulation of saying, you know, could we could we reboot you in some other world? And and the thing is about the computationalacity of the planet. It's still the estimate is that to capture all the information and a brain, all the connections and exactly the three D structure would be about a zetabyte of information, which is about four times more than the computational capacity of the entire planet right now. So it's an enormous thing. But boy, and you know, in fifty years we won't even care. You'll be wearing a zetabyte on your wrist or something.
So well, we know, we know in the short term who the people will be who would go for that, because it would be the people who could afford to set aside.
Is that a bite of.
Of processing power and computer data storage.
But what's interesting is if you're the tech billionaire who gets yourself uploaded some stimulation, you are now at the be you know, you're now slave to the programmers. Yes, right, And so the programmers might say, look, we're gonna do something terrible to you here or whatever we're gonna you know, you need to send some money to us, so that because we're now controlling your entire world. Yeah, I don't know, it would be such a great pause.
No, I think it ends up being myopic, which is sort of how I felt at the very start of this conversation too about that whole concept. Like, I do think it's an intense fear of mortality that ends up driving this. I think, actually, if I'm being honest, I think a lot of futurists kind of fall into that category two, specifically the ones who have talked about the concepts like the singularity and transhumanism and things, elements of which we're seeing play out to some extent, but certainly not in the form or scope that has been talked about for a couple of decades. And it's not to say that we're not going to get to a point where remarkable change isn't happening at a scale where we can't even talk about the present. Maybe that does happen, but it just seems to me that there's this underlying theme under a lot of those writings of that seems to suggest a fear of mortality. This could just be armchair psychology bypart, and maybe it's just a theory I have which I totally will own, but just it keeps coming back to me because I spent five years doing a show kind of exploring futurists and futurism thinking and that sort of things, and those were the the things that's sort of they weren't they weren't even subtext, but it seemed to be kind of an underlying motivating factor.
You know, I'm not sure I see that only because I happen to not care about the mortality issue. Yeah, and yet I'm very interested in the future. I know, I spent a lot of my time thinking about futurism and so on. So they don't I don't think they necessarily go together. Being thoughtful and creative about what's happening next and where things are going feels to me like, you know, this is the best part about human brains, is our capacity to do this, to say, Wow, look, I'm gonna I'm going to simulate forward. Given all the stuff that I know, the future is probably not going to be just like the past. Instead, you're gonna have these things come together and then this other technology merge with that, and then wow, look at all these things. It leads to I mean, we're always wrong, of course, right, sure, terribly wrong. But if you look at the world's fares through the decades, like the nineteen sixty Worldfare had displays on like underwater hotels or using lasers to cut down trees or things like that, they had all kinds of amazing stuff, but nobody even thought of the Internet. I mean really one of the most is the biggest change is no one thought of that, And you get the most creative thinkers together, and yet they just they miss what are the really big changes, like cell phones or something.
Yeah, yeah, I mean.
Well, it's like before the transistor, no one could think about an era of maniaturization. Right, Like, if you were before the transistor, you would never have thought that a computer would be something that someone could own in their home, let alone carry in their pocket. And there'd be no way, like, you would have no frame of reference to say, because in your experience, the way coulduter's got more powerful was that they were larger, Right, So like if your computer held up, held up an entire floor over underneath Stanford, that was a really good computer. There's no way you could have one of those in your home. And I'm very much the same way. I'll think back occasionally and I'll go, wow, those knuckleheads get it all wrong, and I thought, yeah, but if I were back then, I would have gotten it wrong too, because I didn't have the knowledge that the transistor was right around the corner exactly.
By the way, you know, when you said that that just suddenly a thought crossed my mind, which is it's funny that we still call this a PC a personal computer to distinguish it from you know, like I can wow, I can take it one home myself.
Well, I also grew up in the seventies and eighties, so for me, like it's cemented in my head because that's how I was exposed to it. And and as I'm sure you're aware, sometimes we have a tendency to kind of arrest definitions in our head based upon when we encountered the thing for the first time. Absolutely, well, David, before we go, can you tell us a little bit more about inner cosmos for those who I mean, obviously you cover tons of different topics related to the brain, but give our listeners a little insight into what the show's all about, because I want text of listeners to definitely go and check it out.
Thank you.
You know.
Part of what's really hard about doing the podcast but so rewarding is each week is a monologue. I just you know, for forty five minutes or an hour, I talk about some topic. But it's like I'm doing storytelling. What I'm doing is I'm plenty of other threads of history and culture and science and extrapolation in the future to address questions of various sorts, like this question of you know, could we ever upload our brains? Or will we ever do mind reading? There's all kinds of stuff in the media about you know, reading minds. Or sometimes I address mysteries like you know, why do some people think the northern lights make noise? And quick hint on that is it has to do with synesthesia, which is where someone has a blending of the senses. Or I talk about various issues about our perception of time, like does time actually run in slow motion when you're in fear for your life? This is something that happened to me when I was a kid and almost died. I fell off of a a house under construction, and then I ended up studying this as an neuroscientist known and ever studied this question before about this time slow down? And so it's all about things like this. And actually in the episode that's coming out next week, I'm talking about the dress. You remember the dress? Was it you know blue or black or white or gold? Yeah, Like I'm really unpacking that and other other memes that you may remember, Like you know, this thing, does it sound like brainstorm or green Needle. It's the same audio file but can sound like either one. Anyway, I'm putting a whole bunch of things together. What I realized, I think, is that to my knowledge, no one's ever sort of put all these together and served it up in a way where it's where you really get something deeper out of it, like, oh, yeah, I saw that meme, I saw that. Mean But what does this all mean to us? What does this mean for our brains the way we see the world. What does it mean for who we are in terms of our neural networks. One theme that if you've listened to several of the episodes, you might have already been picking up on this theme. I'm very interested in the fact that we are essentially like a team of rivals underneath the hood, meaning you're not just one thing. You've got all these different networks running and they're often in conflict. And so this is why humans are nuanced and subtle and interesting, Because you know, if I put some chocolate chip cookies in front of you, part of your brain says, hey, that's a good energy source, let's eat it, and party brain says, no, don't eat it, you'll get fat, and Party of Brains says, Okay, I'll eat it, but I'll go to the gym tonight. And you know, you can start contracting yourself and cussing with yourself and like who's talking to whom? Here? It's all you, but it's different parts of you and anyway, So all this stuff is of great interest to me, and I think is the material for storytelling and really diving into this stuff. So I just love that people care about this stuff.
Yeah.
To me, David, it's like, like it reminds me of conversations for some reason, I associate when I was a teenager, but because I was the nerdy teenager, I didn't you know, drink or anything. I would hang out with my friends and we just start asking questions we did not know the answers to, and like you get into all the like the stereotypical ones, like when I see red and I experienced the color red, how do I know that when you're looking at something that's red it looks the same to you as it does to me, Or maybe your red looks like blue to me, but we've both agreed that this thing is red. Therefore that's what red is to me. It's what red is to you, but our experiences are and you just gone into this deep conversation.
Yeah, exactly. And by the way, this is just like with your niece who when you said she's eight years old. I mean, this is the same thing. It's that as we age, we forget to ask those questions. We just somehow stopped asking. Think, oh, I don't know the answer, and that's the end of it. And so you know, it's funny that you had mentioned that because I often think, for example, you know a few of my episodes have been about visual illusions, and this one about the dress and so includes some issues about that. But I often think that visual illusions are really interesting to ten year olds and then to neuroscientists when they grow up. But that's it, Like everyone else sort of forgets about visual illusions unless they're you know, taking three seconds to appreciate a meme on the internet. But like, why does that happen? It's an incredibly powerful inroad into what is happening in the brain to understand what's happening with an illusion anyway, So what I'm trying to do with Inner Cosmos is bring all these threads together so we can really understand ourselves, understand who we are and what our reality is.
I love it.
I mean it's a tall ask for a podcast, but I think you're up to the challenge.
Thank you.
Yeah.
I highly recommend that y'all check it out. That's Inner Cosmos with David Eagleman. It's one of those things that I listened to just as a fan. Thank you terrific, well, David, Thank you for coming on the show.
I really appreciate it.
Thank you for having me. It's such a pleasure to be here and talk with you.
Jonathan fantastic guys. That's it.
Go check out the show and I'll talk to you again really soon. Tech Stuff is an iHeartRadio production. For more podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
