You're listening to the Impact Theory podcast, your source of empowering ideas and actionable techniques from the world's highest achievers. Join host Tom Billio, serial entrepreneur and co-founder of the billion dollar brand Quest Nutrition, on a journey to unlock your potential and realize your vision of success. Welcome to Impact.
everybody welcome to impact theory you were here my friends because you believe that human potential is nearly limitless but you know that having potential is not the same as actually doing something with it so our goal with this show and company is to introduce you to the people and ideas that are going to help you actually execute on your dreams
All right, today's guest is one of the most widely recognized names in modern neuroscience and his unique approach to his work and life continued to bankrupt my ability to explain him. But let me try. He's the writer and presenter of the amazing international PBS series The Brain and he's published multiple best-selling books and over 100 academic articles for prestigious journals such as Science and Nature. His work is
utterly captivating because his infectious enthusiasm makes it really clear that he's filled with wonder by the things that he doesn't understand. He's not a guy that uses science to blind people who delight in life's mysteries. Instead, he uses science to become fluent in the language of nature.
His mother said that he was a bit of a weird child, which doesn't surprise me. He wrote his first words by the age of two, was explaining Einstein's tour by the age of 12, and he used to memorize 400 item lists for kicks, and then repeat them backwards to test his memory.
His prodigious curiosity, ambition, and intellect have made him an adjunct professor at Stanford, helped him create next generation companies, and have earned him numerous accolades and honors, including being made a Guggenheim fellow, being named vice chair of the World Economic Forum in the area of behavior and neuroscience, and being invited to join the board of the Long Now Foundation.
Beyond the awards, however, lies a mind that is able to synthesize the vast and uncharted dual universes of the macro and micro and distill them into something profound and accessible to the human mind.
Nowhere is that more visible than in his best-selling, stunning work a literary fiction called Sum, 40 Tales from the Afterlives. It's been translated into 28 languages and turned into two different, you guessed it, operas. The ideas he explores in the book make apparent a truly beautiful mind, so please help me in welcoming the man whose work has been said to have the unaccountable jaw-dropping quality of genius.
The internationally best-selling author of incognito, the secret lives of the brain and the brain, the story of you, Dr. David Eagleman.
Thank you for having me. Thank you for being on the show. I have been a longtime stalker, as you know, since we bumped into each other one fateful evening during the X Prize, which was awesome. And since then, I have been utterly obsessed with getting you on the show. So do you know that I have a book list of like the 25 essential books everybody has to read? I didn't know this. All right, so I do. And Incognito has been on there from day one, literally when it was only a 10 book list, Incognito was on that list. I think it's just super foundational.
to people understanding the brain. And I think we have to take the time, in fact, right to my eight camera, I will tell you, I must acknowledge every time you guys have ever heard me say that the thing that makes the brain so profound is that it is encased in total darkness and yet paints this beautiful world for you. I got it from this man here, so the theft finally fully acknowledged. So thank you for that. All right, I want to start.
with a question that normally I don't, but I think that this is something that people really need to understand. So for a minute you were almost a stand-up comic, then you were briefly at Oxford, and then ultimately got into neuroscience. Why the brain?
I majored in British and American literature as an undergraduate, but my last semester I took a course on neuro-linguistics. And I think it's because I think a lot of philosophy courses, which I loved, but I understood that we really need to understand the perceptual machinery by which reviewing the world.
to answer a lot of these questions. In fact, a lot of these questions would sort of go away or change character if we understood how we were actually constructing reality. So that's what got me interested in the brain. And what began that fascination? And I asked that with the context of having read some.
And until I read some, I don't think I understood you, or at least I understand you in a completely different way after reading it. It was really surprising. Briefly just what was some, what sparked it, and wasn't it the first book that you wrote? Yeah, some was the first book I wrote. It's a book of literary fiction. It's 40 short stories, all of which are mutually exclusive.
I was already well into my science career when I wrote that, and I feel like it's just a way of using literature to get at the same sorts of questions that science is trying to get at. It's just a way of exploring the world. What's interesting is that they use slightly different techniques. So science, we've got reproducibility and double blind studies and so on. But literature, you get to ask all the questions where
Science runs up against his borders where it sort of runs out of its capacity to ask the question then you can ask those in writing So that's what that's what some was about and give a couple examples of the types of stories that you tell in that because they are utterly fascinating
Thank you. I'm just asking questions like what if the universe expands and then when it contracts the arrow of time reverses? What would it be like to live our lives in reverse? What would happen if your life was chunked up so that you lived all of your experiences that shared equality grouped together so you spend
21 days driving the street in front of your house and 30 hours of pain and 56 days sitting on the toilet, flipping through magazines. What if you had to do all these experiences grouped together like that? These are all just ways of exploring our life.
as we know it, by just changing the angle on it a little bit. So it's 40 stories, and I think the experience, you tell me, but the experience that I intended for the readers is to stretch out mentally in directions that maybe they never considered before. It's interesting. I did get some of that, but the real juice for that book for me was to, by taking an oblique angle, or maybe even an absurd angle on my life, in that comparison,
that it revealed absurdities that I'm living with today. And the one that you were just talking about where you said, okay, what if you lived your life in this sequential order? That was the one I think that really, and it's like, if not the first story, it's one of the first stories. And it cuts right to the heart of how much time am I doing
driving, sitting in traffic, waiting in a grocery store. And I don't know how long you labored over which ones you featured and how many minutes you assigned to each one, but it really felt like a commentary. It certainly became my own commentary on my own life to think about how much time I spend. So I have this real aversion to email. And the reason I have the aversion is because of that flash insight like that about how much time you spend doing things like this. So it was really, really interesting.
Yeah. One thing I have to deal with, which I didn't expect to, but there's some misinterpretation about the title. Sometimes someone sees the title, they see 40 tales from the afterlives, and they think, oh, he's become religious or something, but it's not that at all. What they are are, in some sense, deconstructions of religious myths. And to me, this seems like one of the most powerful
ideas or stories to tell is about what it would be like to have created the earth and the places where it's gone that you don't have any control over anymore. So that's, I guess that's one of the themes I was obsessed with. Was that even realizing that? Is it intentional for you that the more you learn that the more expansive your, you become more open-minded or so it would seem from the outside? Is that intentional?
I don't know if it's intentional, but it is definitely what happens. This has always been my opinion about science, at least since I've been in it for decades now, is this issue of how science is really an understanding of the vastness of our ignorance. And so as we move forward, we figure out lots of little things, which is terrific.
But essentially, it opens up new folds in the possibility space where we realize all the things that we don't know. And every answer leads to so many more questions. And so it seemed, I don't know, when you're a kid and you're flipping through science books, it seems like everything's already known.
But when you're in it as a career, it has the opposite feel like, geez, it's all uncharted waters out here. And obviously we write science textbooks and so on, sort of summarizing what we know and unfortunately giving the message to the next generation that it's all known.
You know, part of my goal has been really expressing the vastness of our ignorance. I mean, very basic things like, how does consciousness arise? Why does it feel like something to be alive when the brain is, as far as we can tell, put together out of physical pieces and parts?
You have an enormous number of neurons, like 86 billion of them. But it's still physical stuff. It's only three pounds. We've got the problem cornered. And so the question is, if I make a very fancy computer program,
I can make it super fancy, but it's not going to feel like something. It's not going to feel the pain of pain or experience the redness of red. It can detect wavelengths and say, oh, that is 560 nanometer wavelength, but it's not going to experience red or the smell of cinnamon or the taste of feta cheese or something like that. So that's the heart of the most fundamental question sitting right in the middle of neurosciences.
Why does it feel like something as opposed to just being a robotic system of cells that are moving around? We don't know the answer to that. We don't even know what a theory would look like. That's the position we're in. And of course, it's like this is all physics. What is going on with dark matter and dark energy and so on? We were faced with such massive questions, and this is why it is exciting to be in science as opposed to the idea of, well, we've pretty much got it all figured out.
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Yeah, I love that about your approach, and that's why I was simultaneously surprised and not at all surprised to see that you'd written a work of literary fiction, which by the way, I tracked down because you made an obscure comment in one of your interviews about how fiction was your first love. So then just through climbing around that world, saw that, read it, and I literally just paused my research and read the book straight through.
and was like, wow. So the line in the intro about you synthesizing the macro and the micro. So you talk really, really cool about that. And you talk about it in some, you also talk about it in some of your scientific lectures, that it's so hard to conceive of things so grand as the universe. And it's so hard to conceive of things so microscopic is existing at the molecular atomic level because we're not on that same scale. So how do we grapple with that stuff and bring it down? And the reason I wanted to really belabor the point of sum was just that
In all of that exploration and the thing that I think has really set you apart from the rest of the world of science is it seems to be expanding your oomvelds. It's expanding your vision of what the world is and what it could be. The more you know, obviously links to a realization that there's something even bigger that you don't know. But if you would, share the story of what's going on with the Hubble, the deep space exploration that they're doing and how it frames things for you.
Oh, yeah, that was some years ago. The Hubble telescope did what's called the Deep Field observation, where they took a little patch of sky, about a thumbnail size of sky. That looked completely blank, right? Yeah, exactly. They picked a dark spot in the sky.
And they trained the Hubble Space Telescope on that spot, and they collected photons coming in for, I'm forgetting how long now, but for some period of time, maybe it was 20 days or something, they collected a bunch of photons. And when they developed the shot that they had, what they discovered were there were thousands of galaxies in that little spot there. And of course, this is true of any spot, any direction that you take anywhere,
You know, Galaxy has like 100 billion stars. Any number of which might have planets rotating around it, any number of those might have, you know, be in the Goldilocks zone, so it's not too hot, not too cold, and have some form of life on it. And just the fact, to me, that was so revelatory, it was so...
mind blowing to think that in any spot, there's that much action going on. And of course, that's just that the limits of what we can see now. But at every moment in time, there's sort of a limit to how far we can see and there's stuff even beyond that. I mean, physically, just in terms of looking at galaxies. So anyway, what we're facing is
this weird moment in time when we as a society are smart enough to think about the size of the cosmos and the probability that there exist other life forms, who the heck knows what the, like we're DNA based, but is that the only way to go? Might there be completely different ways to construct life?
to construct language, to construct societies. So we're in this weird place where we know that there must exist life elsewhere, and yet we've had no contact with anybody right now. So we're still sitting here all alone, just waiting for something to happen. It's an amazing time. Yeah, very fascinating. And to bring it all back together for people from a contextual standpoint,
I saw an interview that you did with, um, he's a guru of some kind, mystic. And he- Saguru. Saguru? Saguru. So that was what I love about that. And this will tie everything up in a bow, why I've started with some and why I want to know why you want to do this and the notion of being lost in the wonder of what we don't understand.
So we're living in a world today for me where people are trying to, whether it's business, they're trying to become an expert, whether it's in science, they're trying to nail everything down and know exactly what is true and what is false, there's a narrowing of scope. And as somebody who won, and I will debate this later, I want to live forever.
Do you ever read Einstein's dreams? I did, yeah. Okay, so we'll talk about that in a minute. I want to live forever, and so the thing that scares me is my beliefs calcifying into dogma, that my world will begin to collapse into myself as I believe that I'm an expert, I know something, and we'll get lost in that and won't be open to new ideas.
You've talked about how Crick, one of your mentors, would that be fair to say? Even up until the day that he died was always looking for things that disproved the things that he knew rather than confirmatory evidence, which I think is really brilliant. But when I saw you in that interview with Sadhguru,
who's a mystic by the way you have to imagine this guy he's like covered in robes head to toe like the big beard jiggy looks like he stepped off the pages of a cartoon right i mean he looks like a character right and you approached him with such authentic interest in like his position and i was like
Okay, I know you as a scientist, a guy deep logic, really trying to understand where the brain is going and actually trying to push the limits of our sensory perception. We'll get to that, but that you were able to approach him actually interested in hearing his answer. You weren't combative. Where does that come from? It just comes from a position of feeling like, I really don't know anything. I'm just trying to figure it out. I mean, this is the weird part where
You're born. You don't remember where you were before you were born. I mean, you just have this sense of you've always been here. In other words, you don't have a sense of like, oh yeah, this is when I started. You've just sort of always been here. And then you're gonna die someday, or maybe you won't, but we might die someday. And then presumably, then that's just over. But everything about our existence is so weird. I find it amazing and cool.
Yeah, that's where that comes from is not pretending that that we've got the answer. You know, it's funny because I see that there are two fronts in science that are going on in terms of public communication of science and one of them is
One of them is sort of this front that the neo-atheists have taken, which is trying to tell people the ways in which they're wrong in the way they're thinking. And there's some importance to that because there are lots of ideas that we can address scientifically and actually rule things out of the possibility space. So that's really important.
I'm sort of on the other front though, which is I'm not, to me, I'm just not that interested in telling people all the ways they're wrong. I'm just interested in figuring out the new structure of the possibility space. So where new folds are opening up, and this is all, to my mind, this is all predicated on science. This is the scientific mindset is saying, all right, we've got a wide table. We can fit a lot of hypotheses on here. Let's try to figure out the next step and the next step instead of imagining that we've got it all figured out.
So that's the part that attracts me, the gravitational pull for me of doing science.
Yeah, and so my last thing on sort of the wonderment of all this, and then we'll move on to the highly tactical, but it, to me, the thing that draws me to science, the thing that makes me so fascinated with the brain, the thing that compels me to pursue success more doggedly than the next person, is the sense of it all being a spiritual pursuit, that I want to see how far I can push it. I wanna see how far I can take the limits of being a human, and where are the edges, and how far can we push that out? And when you get recursive enough,
the alternate version of this interview, which is me being like a two-year-old and asking you, why, why, why, why, why, until you either have a meltdown and walk off, or like, we get to some sort of basic fundamental truth. But I think the reality, and for me, that is the why the humanities and the science, right, which you have both in spades. But I'd be asking you only to get to a confirmatory answer that I already believe, which is, it's just beautiful. Like, it's just interesting, right? And I don't have anything more than that, but it is,
makes me feel alive, right? And so I think that's where, and like I promised, we will go into the tactical, but that's where this all gets interesting for me, and that's where I hope people pick up a study of you. That's where I hope people pick up a study of the brain is
is the wonderment and all the things that we don't know and to be so thrilled with the things that we do and then what that means and how we can push it. So as an example that tell us what you're doing with neo-sensory like what that is, how it was born, where it goes and you know what we can do. Yeah so I've been interested for a while in this issue of
how the brain gets its information. So as you flagged at the beginning there, you know, the brain is locked in silence and darkness in the skull. And yet you have this experience, all the colors and the sounds and the touch and the, you know, the touch from your toe and all the stuff that smells the taste. And that's very weird because all this is happening inside and that you think, I think I'm seeing you over there, even though in fact I'm seeing you in here and so on. You just freaking out with that. Yeah, I never quite made that leap.
Yeah, okay. Yeah, it's totally freaky the whole thing is now it's like really fucking with me Yeah, okay. Yeah, I know but this is exactly it This is exactly the thing about the study of neuroscience is that the more you start reaching your arms down into it Just the weird weird and the whole thing is and this is our existence. So somehow this is this is the thing to figure out But what I got interested in was
How does the brain get information in there? So you've got all these senses like your eyes and ears and nose and fingertips and so on. And I'll just speed up to say the conclusion that I came to after looking at the problem for years is I think that these are all just peripheral plug and play detectors. And they're useful. So for example, the range of light that we see with our eyes
That has everything to do with the big ball of fire in the sky. And the way that electromagnetic radiation bounces off things and whatever, it turns out that this little strip of visible light is the most useful, the most information relevant for us to see. So we've developed eyes to see in that range. Hearing.
touch, smell, these things are useful for our survival. So we've got these things. The theory that I developed around this, I call the PH theory, which stands for potato head. And the idea is that you just plug in these detectors and you're good to go. And that mother nature
developed the principles of brain operation, which took a long time. And once she's done the hard work of that, then she can plug in any kind of, you know, potato head thing, and it doesn't matter. And when I look across the animal kingdom, I just, I never cease to be amazed at the variety of things that are plugged into different animals that pick up on very different information than we do. So, give a couple examples.
Snakes have heat pits, or the black ghost knife fish has electro receptors, so it can pick up on electrical signals. A lot of birds and animals and insects have magnetite, so they can pick up on the magnetic field of the earth and so on. And these are all just different input things where they can take in information that we're not taking in, and they can do something useful with that.
I got interested in this question of, well, if the brain is just a general purpose computing device and you can stick in any kind of information you want, could you feed a different kind of information stream to our brain? So what if you fed real-time data from the internet, for example? Could it develop a perception about that? So one way to stick new information into the brain is to do a neurosurgery and stick electrodes in, but that's a really lousy way to do it that it'll never catch on.
And so what I did is I ended up building a vest that's covered with vibratory motors. And so imagine that you're wearing this vest underneath your clothing. So no one even knows you're wearing it. But it's got all these motors on it. And I can turn any kind of data stream into patterns of vibration on the torso. And then the question is, can the brain come to understand those patterns of vibration and have a new kind of
what philosophers call a qualia, which is that the feeling of seeing or hearing or touch, or can you develop a new kind of perception of the world? So I'll give you one example of where we've already done this.
So we've done this with deaf people. We put the vest on them. We train them up with these little games on the phone, and they can come to understand the world through these patterns of vibration on their torso. It's actually doing exactly what your inner ear is doing, which is busting sound up into frequencies and sending that to the brain. We're just doing that through the torso. And it works, and people can come to understand it. And that sounds completely wacky, but it's no more wacky than like a blind person reading braille.
It's the same sort of idea, which is to say you can get information in the brain any way that you can get it in there. And what kind of vocabulary do they have, like how big? Oh, infinite. In the sense that what I'm doing, because I'm capturing the frequencies and putting that on the torso.
They hear everything. They hear the car. They hear the door slamming. They hear the coffee pot brewing, as well as language, as well as multiple conversations. So they're hearing everything exactly as you do with your ear. Even though we feel like sound just somehow pipes right into our heads, in fact, all our ear is doing is taking it a sound wave,
breaking it up into different frequencies and then sending that via different lines to the brain, to the sort of central operating mission control center. So that's all I'm doing here. I'm just breaking things up into different frequencies and that goes to the spinal cord and up to the brain. It's exactly the same thing. How normal is their ability to conversate through the device?
Totally normal, but let me say we're constantly changing up algorithms, trying these things. We're still in the middle of lots of studies on that. But the way that it works, let me just tell you, the way it works is we present the phone presents a word to the best. So you feel, and then you have two words that are shown. Was it, you know, knee or shop? And then you, you know, you have to figure any, you make a guess and you're right or you're wrong. This is for a deaf person to train up.
So then they get the next word, and they have to guess, because this word to that word. And so they keep guessing. And so they're starting off at chance performance, 50%. But what happens over the course of days is that they get better and better and better. And it's all unconscious learning because the patterns are too fast to sort of say, oh, I know exactly what's going on. The signature of conscious learning is where you have a Eureka moment. But that never happens. They just get better and better and better.
And also, they can watch your lips while they're feeling that, and also they can vocalize, so they say something and they feel it. Which is by the way how a baby trains up with babbling, you're doing motor output and you're hearing it, and that feedback loop, we're just replacing with this feedback loop.
So, yeah, so people can learn everything. You know, they can learn what this sounds like and the glass and whatever. We'll get back to the show in a moment. But first, I want to talk to you about our sponsor Factor. Time is your most valuable asset by a country mile, whether you're building a business, climbing the corporate ladder or hustling on your side project. It doesn't matter. You need nutrition that works as hard as you do. That's exactly where Factor comes in.
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And what's their subjective opinion on it? Do they love it? Is this like, oh my God, it's like a cacophony of madness? Like, where do they fall on that story? Yeah, no, they come to understand what's being said in the world. So they love it. The interesting thing that I've learned, by the way, is that
the deaf community, which is 53 million. There's a fraction of the deaf community that does not want a solution. And so they hate it. But for the people who are deaf and want a solution, this is to them something that is a completely new dimension because
It's a wearable so they don't so you know a cochlear implant which is the only other solution you have to get an invasive surgery for it it costs about a hundred thousand bucks this we can make for you know a thousand bucks and and it's just a wearable that you put on so people people really Appreciate the solution and what I love about this is that I can spread it around the world very easily at that price point most inventions reach the wealthy people first and then have to trickle down over a long course of time But this is something that go all over
And so what's the timeline on that? Like when do we get, when we start seeing it? We're about seven months from rolling off the assembly line. Wow. So I didn't actually realize how, what an enormous process it is to build something, start a company and get the thing to the point where it's a product, but that's, we're making great progress. That is a huge undertaking. And you've done another company, Brain Check. Yeah. What are you guys looking for? So I mean, I know what you're looking for early signs of say, dementia or damage or whatever, but what do you do when you find it?
Ah, so with brain chicken in particular, so it's a tablet game essentially where in five minutes you take these little games and we figure out 14 different measures of what's happening under the hood.
reaction time, perception, cognition, decision making, we can understand a lot about what's happening. We can get a cognitive snapshot in this short time. And it turns out that's so simple an idea, but that's something that hasn't existed. So in the medical landscape, you know, we go, we get our blood pressure tested, we get all kinds of things tested. But what's happening under the hood? We never get tested. Like, how are you doing cognitively? And
You know, people can do this at home. So what we're doing now is we're setting things up with hospital systems and providers so that they give the app to all their patients so that at home, you know, every two months you get dinged that it's time to take your brain check. The hospital doesn't have to do any extra work. And for the patient, they're getting this continuance of care where they're getting to see how they're doing cognitively. So you can track
through time what's going on with somebody, and that way we can see when somebody's turning the corner into, for example, mild cognitive impairment, which is the stage before dementia. And the reason that matters is because when people are cognitively impaired a bit, that's when all the pharmaceutical treatments can actually do something. Once they're fully demented, there's no helper hope.
And the problem, I mean, I've seen this a hundred times, people start getting dementia, but they don't visit a neurologist until it's far too late because they have a hundred ways of denying it. They say, you know, it's been a tough year, whatever, I'm not getting enough sleep and so on, they deny it until it's too late. So that's the idea there. So as far as what can be done about it, the answer is this is what navigates your medical care so that you know which way to go. You know whether something is wrong or not cognitively.
And are there any things that somebody with normal cognitive function can do to elevate? Like, how do we start pushing the mind a bit? Yeah, I wanna do some cool stuff. Yeah, the general story, yeah, the general story about that is that it's about seeking novelty because with the brain
It very quickly gets into when you're repeating something, the brain puts less and less effort into it. And you're not forming new connections and so on. But when people push themselves and do novel things all the time, that forces new connectivity. And so the best thing that people can do, I mean, we don't really have to worry about it at our age. But once we get to a certain point, when you get to 200,
The thing you have to worry about at some point is the issue of your world shrinking and doing the same little things and not sort of expanding and seeking new things. So... Isn't there a name for this, like the default when you go into autopilot?
Oh, I mean, I talk about this as the unconscious brain, which is essentially almost everything that you do. So everything about the way we shift on the seed as our blood needs it and talking and so on, this is all generated unconsciously. But when you enter into a complete novel situation where you really don't know what you're doing, that's when the conscious mind has to sort of be a part of what's going on.
And that's when you form new connections and make new pathways. So that, it turns out, I mean, this is a very general statement, but that is the most important thing for people as they get older, is to seek new experiences. And that's the thing that often doesn't happen, especially when somebody has retired.
So my whole belief about the meaning of life, it's not the exact right word, but is to find out how many skills I can acquire that have utility, then put that utility to the test in service of something bigger than myself. So that's like my mission in life, right?
So what are things that I should understand about the brain that would allow me to acquire more skills, acquire them faster, put them to use more effectively? Like what are either realizations about the brain or training techniques that I should know about?
Yeah, I mean a big part of this has to do with the fact that we live our lives mostly on autopilot unless we put a lot of effort into not doing that and so So just by getting off autopilot I'm but wouldn't that so that's ultimately just sort of making new connections So examples that you give oftentimes drive home a new way brush your teeth with your left hand
Um, and I certainly do feel the impact of that. Like from a stave off neuro generative decline, that seems to make a lot of sense. And you've talked about the nuns who donated their brains to science, why I don't know, but that's incredible. And all of them, right, had like early stage dementia, but they showed no signs.
Not all of them, but a much bigger percentage than anyone thought. About a third of them had Alzheimer's, but it wasn't clear when they were alive because they were so cognitively active, because they were doing stuff. First of all, they were embedded in a social network, because they were living in the condense. And so they had responsibilities and conversations and so on. And that made it so that even though the brain was falling apart with Alzheimer's, nobody knew it. They didn't have the cognitive effects there. And is this at the center of your upcoming book Live Wired?
Yeah, the theme of that book is that you can't really think about the brain as hardware, and you can't think about it as software. It's this weird other thing that I call liveware, which is that it's constantly reconfiguring its own circuitry. So everything that you...
Learn every little thing changes the pattern of circuitry in your brain. So when you first learned that my name was David, that's underpinned by a physical change in the structure of your brain, which is wild.
another question, which is, do you have, so Joseph Campbell said, you want to change the world, change the metaphor. And I've long had a suspicion that the metaphor of the computer as like, metaphor for the mind is missing something. Maybe it's just this notion of it being alive and it can change itself. But do you have a metaphor that you use to explain the brain to people? Essentially, that's what my book Live Wire is about, is trying to understand how we can rethink about the metaphor of the brain because
We've understood for a while now that a computer is a really terrible metaphor for the brain. And unfortunately, it's pretty embedded in the way that the culture thinks about the brain. And even among neuroscientists, they'll talk about, OK, well, how do you store a memory? And how do you retrieve a memory? And they're thinking about it the way a computer does. But of course, that's nothing the way that we store memories.
What's special about our brain is that it takes in lots of information and then there's lots of stuff happening under the hood where we're bending and breaking and blending the information that we've taken in and we're using that to constantly generate new things. And so this would make a terrible computer in the sense that, you know, when I put something in my computer, I want exactly those zeros and ones back out.
And that's not what the human brain is doing. So this is actually my next book. It's called The Runaway Species. About how we manipulate our own memories. Exactly right. It's about this question of what is unique about the human species in that, you know, why have we taken over the world? Why haven't
Squirrels launched ships to the moon or camels invented the internet or things like that And this has a little bit to do with with the fact that we have opposable thumbs and larynx and bubble But that's not the important part the important part is the algorithms that we're running under the hood which are just slightly different I mean they're not much different than the rest of the animal kingdom But they're just different enough that as a species we've now taken over every niche on the planet and we've moved to the moon or about to move to Mars and like we've really rocked this place and and the question is given that our
brains are so similar. Given that our brains are so similar to all our nearest neighbors in the animal kingdom, the question is why? What is going on differently? And so I'll tell you what I think it is. So first of all, we have more of a part of the brain called the prefrontal cortex. We just have more of that than our nearest neighbors. And that allows us to
to come up with possibilities, to simulate what ifs, to generate possible futures and evaluate them. And so between that and the fact that our memories are constantly trying things out, and they're imperfect in a very interesting and useful way, that allows us to say, well, wait, what would that be like? Oh, what if I said this to this person? And what happens is the whole civilization ratchets up such that
You know, when you go to, you know, bonobo chimps in the middle of the forest and you look at what they're doing and then you come to a city, you come to LA or San Francisco or something and you look at what's going on, it's a completely different ball game what we're up to. And it's because of this thing of saying, well, would this work? Would this work? And most of our ideas suck and occasionally one sticks and it ratchets things forward a little bit as a civilization.
So what is that you said our memories are imperfect in kind of a weird and wonderful way? What is that? Imperfect in the sense that they're not all like a digital computer. They're constantly manipulating the inputs. And this, by the way, goes back to the question you asked about
You know, what are the things to do to keep an active brain and so on? It's getting more inputs. It's because every new thing, every new idea, every new situation that you see goes into that pot and can be stirred up. And you say, oh, that new thing I saw, that's kind of like this thing. And if I put that together with that thing, here's this new idea. Here's this new thing I can do. Didn't you say once that the brain is built on association? Yeah, that's right. And how's that useful?
So just to explain it, the idea is that instead of things being stored like in a computer, instead I associate everything with other things that I've input or learned before. So for example, when I smell coffee, that triggers the association of what coffee will feel like on my hands, and the name of the barista at Starbucks, and the sound of a grinder, and what it'll make me feel like. All these things are in this big network of association.
That's the secret of how the brain is storing everything. I think it's that everything that sits in this giant network and that's what allows us to manipulate ideas and think about, okay, well, wait, I know this is associated with it and that's associated with that. So how do I put these all together to build something? And now let's get to the nice sticky one. Free will. So in one of the episodes of the brain on PBS, such a cool one, I know this one really got my wife's attention, where you show the puppets playing
and one puppet's like trying to open the box, and the other puppet's like trying to help it, and then there's a third puppet, and he comes and like crushes the box down and ke- and like is mean to the other puppet. Then you give kids babies, young babies, the opportunity to play with either the nice puppet or the mean puppet, and they choose.
They choose the nice puppet. This was an experiment done by Paul Bloom at Yale, and then I recreated this experiment for the show. And yeah, what this demonstrates is that we come to the table with a lot of intuitions and instincts about things, including, because we're extremely social animals, we are very good at judging right away whether, for example, this person is helpful to that person is mean, and we associate ourselves with the helpful people instead of the bullies.
debate for many decades about nature versus nurture, but the answer, that question is dead because it's not either of those. It's both of those together. Yeah, for sure. So really fast, bring it back to some. One of the stories that was my favorite was there's heaven and there's hell, and in heaven they use the same information to reward and excite that hell uses to punish and condemn, which is the knowledge that free will is nonexistent.
Walk people through like, how was that great for some people and so heartbreaking for others? Well, it's just a matter of whether you believe in, whether you feel like
It's too strange to imagine that we are these giant vast creatures. I mean, think of the fact that you're made up of 30 trillion cells and you're this huge giant creature that's driven around by this three pound mission control center that's sort of controlling all this and through these cables that come out, you know, moves it all around and so on. It's very
Weird to think about maybe that's it about what's going on just like just like you said you were freaked out when I mentioned the thing about vision before It's really freaky to think about not having any free will and that fundamentally were these very complex robots. It's interesting for me free will Because I feel like I'm in control it doesn't seem to matter right so
where it might get weird is if you actually could break down exactly what algorithm is firing that. So let's pretend you can identify the algorithm. Here's the algorithm that makes you feel that way or do this thing. And then here's the algorithm that makes you, Tom, not care. That would get a little weird, but then it's so recursive back to, well, there's something that's feeding into how I feel about that exact moment. So since I feel like I'm in control,
It doesn't really check. Yeah, and this, by the way, is related to that same story from some where it's this issue of, if I were to get out a whiteboard, we can't do this yet in neuroscience, but imagine that I were to say, like, here's exactly why strawberry ice cream tastes the way it does to you and why it's so delicious to you and blah, blah, blah.
I could explain that and show the pathways and the genes. And it wouldn't affect your enjoyment of it at all. It wouldn't change anything about your experience of it. And so there's this funny disconnect between what we're able to do in science and what it is like to be a human. And there's this gap there in the explanatory framework. What would you consider success for you at the end of your career?
I tell you what is really on my mind now, so I mentioned about neo-sensory in this vest. What I'm really interested in is this question of can we create new senses for humans? So as a question, think about this question of why does vision feel so different than hearing?
which feels so different than touch, which feels so different than smell and taste. Given that, it's all the same stuff on the inside. If I were to stick an electrode into your brain somewhere and listen to a neuron going, pop, pop, pop, pop, pop, pop. I wouldn't be able to tell you whether it's a visual neuron or an auditory neuron or a somatosensory neuron. It's all the same stuff going on in there. So the question is, how the heck does your qualia, a vision,
feels such that you would never confuse it with a sound. If I did a sound, you wouldn't think, oh, yeah, that looks like something. So I have a hypothesis on this. It's just an hypothesis at the stage. But I think it has to do with the structure of the data coming in. So your eyes are two two-dimensional sheets. Audition is a one-dimensional signal hitting your eardrums, touches
a high multidimensional signal of stuff, you've got all this very different structure of these different pathways. And I think that's what makes things feel different. I think that somehow the feeling of vision or the feeling of hearing or touch or smell, these have to do with the data that's coming in. So, if I now feed something completely different in through the vest, the question is, are you going to have
a completely new experience. It's not vision, it's not touch, it's not hearing, it's not smell. It's this other thing that's like that, but you can't put it in those other terms. And I suspect that this is where things are going. Anyway, this is the thing that's really interesting to me is, can we create completely new senses for humans by feeding in new structures of data?
That's intriguing. I can't wait to see the results of that. Do you think that your research and your deep interest in science and the brain is affecting the way that you raise your kids?
You know, I thought it would. My wife's also a neuroscientist. I'm going to talk about doubling down. I know, we totally thought that it was going to, but what's interesting is that as a parent, you know, you're just trying to get through every day, you know, love your kids and have them love you. And so, yeah, it's funny. We had originally thought about doing some cool experiments, but we...
I so wish you had the thing about smart kids is that they are pushing on their boundaries straight away They're trying to figure out their own world and and what they can do To separate themselves from their parents and go out and experience the world and that's why that's why it's tough because I know my older boy if I told him do x he's gonna definitely do why so Yeah, but with what you know about priming don't you think there's things?
that you could do to make him want to do it? Yeah, the key with being a parent actually is loving something in your child's presence. So I show that I love chess, then eventually he'll come over and see that. All right, so real fast, we're running out of time, but I couldn't not ask. Walk us through what you think the brain is telling us needs to change about the legal system.
Yeah, this is an area where I devote about a quarter of my time. It's called neuro law. It's about understanding the variety in people's brains and how brains are really different. And what we do is a legal system, as we sort of imagine that all brains are equal. And so when people come up front of the judge's bench and they've committed crime X, then they get sentenced Y. And that seems to be something that people like in terms of fairness. But in fact, it's not all that useful
for running a legal system, and what we have in America is the highest incarceration rate in the world, of any country. We put more of our population in jail than anybody. So, my goal is to build a forward-looking legal system instead of backwards-looking that says, you committed this crime, there's your punishment, forward-looking that says, okay, look.
You know, this person's got schizophrenia. This person has this sociopathy. This person is tweaked out on drugs and so on and so on and so on. And here's the way that we can root people through the system that's maximally effective for getting done what we, you know, for helping society. This doesn't let anybody off the hook. It's not like we say, oh, you
You know, it's not your fault that you did this. It's not even about that. It's just saying, here's the things that we know in neuroscience. Just as an example, I recently wrote a paper on all of the rehabilitation methods for drug use that we have and that we're developing as a field. There's so much that the legal system could do in that space rather than just say, oh, you were caught with two ounces of marijuana, we're going to incarcerate you.
So what would you say is the goal of your system? You said it's most effective. What is effective defined as? The most effective thing is instead of treating jail as a one size fits all solution.
We actually attend to what would be best for people who commit crimes so that they can become part of society again. And again, this doesn't mean that we're exculpating anybody, but it does mean if you take somebody with schizophrenia and you lock them up for 10 years, that's not actually helping anything. You don't cure schizophrenia that way by breaking rocks in the sun all summer.
Yeah, this is seeking to understand the differences in people's brains and how we can help people. All right, so I have one final question, but first, where can these guys find you online? Eagleman.com is my main website, and for neuroscience and law, it's cylaw.org. How do you spell that? SCI, like science and law. Got it. Very cool.
All right, last question. What is the impact that you want to have on the world? There are some big picture things I could say, but I'm actually going to be in this narrow space for the moment about figuring out whether we can build new senses for humans, just because I think that's going to be the thing that opens up so much, not only in terms of our ability to experience the world,
to get out of the narrow viewpoint that we're in and be able to open up to other things. But it also teaches a lot about how the brain constructs qualia and how we have our experiences in the world. So that's my next goal.
David, thank you so much for being on the show, man. Awesome. Great to see you. Guys, I'm telling you this, I have had an obsession with him and the things that he's bringing to the world for a very long time because he is the most unique gateway into what it means to be a human, somebody who is actually looking at the wet works between your brain and trying to figure out how it's doing what it's doing, why it's doing what it's doing, how we can harness it, how we can expand it, but he also understands the fundamental beauty
of the human condition. And everything that he does is painted with that. And you get this, watch his talks. You get the sense that he's amped up. And it's like he was saying about when your kids see you love something, I literally wanted to say that's exactly how I've fallen in love with it is watching you fall in love with it. So guys, it is a world that I assure you you're going to want to get into and learn from. He is at the absolute cutting edge of what is happening in the world of science.
And he does it in such a beautiful, warm, inviting way. He's not trying to shut people down. He's trying to show people just how much we don't know and how exciting that is. All right, guys. You know it's a weekly show, so be sure to subscribe if you haven't already. And until next time, my friends, be legendary. Take care, David, man. Thank you so much. Oh, thanks, Amelia. It's awesome, dude. All right. We really enjoyed that.
Hey everybody, thanks so much for joining us for another episode of Impact Theory. If this content is adding value to your life, our one ask is that you go to iTunes and Stitcher and Rate and Review. Not only does that help us build this community, which at the end of the day is all we care about, but it also helps us get even more amazing guests on here to show their knowledge with all of us. Thank you guys so much for being a part of this community. And until next time, be legendary my friends.
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