David Eagleman, Neuroscientist and Author, on the Brain as a Neural Parliament, AI Hallucinations, and Rethinking Democracy with AI

00:31:39 · David Eagleman, Dan TurchinPlay from here

Every ninety minutes, if you look up the circuitry of dreaming, it's this very ancient circuit that just blasts random activity into the visual cortex and only the visual cortex every 90 minutes. So every 90 minutes, you just slam some random activity in there. And so it's essentially a screensaver dreaming. And and this... So we did, you know, quantitative studies on this. We compared 25 different species of primates, looked at how plastic their brains are, in other words, how how flexible their brains are, and how much dream sleep they get, and it turns out it correlates perfectly, which is to say, like humans, we have very flexible brains, and we do lots of dreaming to defend against this takeover. But other, you know, monkeys like lemurs, they don't... They they have very not plastic brains. Their visual cortex has no danger of getting taken over. They have very little dream sleep. So, anyway, that's... That seems to be why we dream at night. It's to defend the territory from takeover from the other senses. [00:32:39] S2: I didn't realize that the parts of the brain that are being unused, like, by a sense that's disabled, it can be used by another sense. Yeah. So so the whole... We have full capacity of brainpower even if it's not consumed by all the senses, say say equally. It denies

00:32:39 · Dan Turchin, David EaglemanPlay from here

[00:32:39] S2: I didn't realize that the parts of the brain that are being unused, like, by a sense that's disabled, it can be used by another sense. Yeah. So so the whole... We have full capacity of brainpower even if it's not consumed by all the senses, say say equally. It denies [00:33:00] S0: that. Exactly right. Yeah. The cortex, which is the wrinkly outer bit, that's essentially one trick pony. It's the same circuit repeated over and over and over and over the whole way across. And so even though we look at it, we say, oh, that's visual cortex. That's auditory cortex. That's, you know, sensory cortex for for, you know, your body. It just happens to be that based on the wiring that comes in. But if something breaks about that wiring, then it says, oh, that's cool. [00:33:25] S2: I'll use this territory for something else. I've read about studies that you've conducted where people who are deaf, maybe they have like a heightened sense of touch, and so they can learn to quote hear through like haptic feedback. That's exactly right. So what we did is

00:33:25 · Dan Turchin, David EaglemanPlay from here

[00:33:25] S2: I'll use this territory for something else. I've read about studies that you've conducted where people who are deaf, maybe they have like a heightened sense of touch, and so they can learn to quote hear through like haptic feedback. That's exactly right. So what we did is [00:33:40] S0: we made a vest with vibratory motors on it that captures sound, and so for a deaf person, we're capturing sound, breaking it up into frequencies from low to high, and deaf people can learn how to understand the language of that and come to hear the world. We shrunk that down to a wristband. I actually ran a company on this for the last ten years. A wristband with vibratory motors on it, it does the same thing. It's capturing sound, turning into patterns of vibration on the wrist, and deaf people can understand the world that way. Because it doesn't matter how the information gets into the cortex, as long as it gets there, the brain will figure out what to do with it.

00:33:40 · David Eagleman, Dan TurchinPlay from here

[00:33:40] S0: we made a vest with vibratory motors on it that captures sound, and so for a deaf person, we're capturing sound, breaking it up into frequencies from low to high, and deaf people can learn how to understand the language of that and come to hear the world. We shrunk that down to a wristband. I actually ran a company on this for the last ten years. A wristband with vibratory motors on it, it does the same thing. It's capturing sound, turning into patterns of vibration on the wrist, and deaf people can understand the world that way. Because it doesn't matter how the information gets into the cortex, as long as it gets there, the brain will figure out what to do with it. [00:34:14] S2: One of the things that's fascinating to me about brain research, this applies to a lot of areas of technology, but specifically to the brain, is that no matter how much we think we know, as a community, it seems like we're well aware of how much we don't know. So maybe just as a as a thought experiment, I know I gotta get you off the hot seat, and I'm gonna restrict your time, but you gotta answer this one last important question for me. Gladly. When David and Dan are back here and it's 2036 and not 2026, what is something that will be just foundational about our understanding of the brain that today just would seem like science

00:34:51 · David EaglemanPlay from here

[00:34:51] S0: fiction? Yeah. I mean, you want the whole list of the top 10. Here's what I think. We're at the foot of the mountain in terms of understanding the brain. What's funny is we have this book in the field called Principles of Neuroscience, which is this big, thick textbook, about eight eighty pages, and it's not... I look at that, and I think that's not principles. If it were principles of neuroscience, it would be like a pamphlet. Right? But what we clearly are doing is just cord dumping all this data that we are getting, but we're not seeing the big picture yet. What I love so much about scientific revolutions is when suddenly there's a collapse of a bunch of data and we say, Oh, that's a thing. For example, imagine that you had a magical microscope that would allow you to peer into a cell, all the complexity in a cell, and then you'd say, There's no way I'm ever going to figure this out. But then Crick and Watson come along and say, Look, the important part is to keep the sequence of the base pairs, and all the rest is housekeeping. And you'd say, oh, got it. That's what we're waiting for in the brain. I don't mean we're waiting for it passively. We're actively trying to figure out such principles, and we've we've discovered a number of things, but, boy, there is so much more to be discovered. So what kind of foundational things? I mean, the big central question is consciousness. Why does it feel like something to be alive? You know, what's the difference when you are asleep and your brain is running along and doing all kinds of stuff, but then you're awake and it's running a slightly different algorithm and you're you're consciously aware? You have a impression that you are here and you see colors and you feel pain and, you know, all this stuff of being awake.

00:36:35 · Dan Turchin, David EaglemanPlay from here

[00:36:35] S2: Can science answer [00:36:36] S0: that? No. We don't know the answer to consciousness. We're totally... Not only do we not have an answer to consciousness, we don't even know really what such an answer would look like in scientific language because how do you say, look, do a, you know, a double integral on this and carry the two and do this, and that equals the beauty of a sunset or the redness of red or the feeling of a pain in your knee? Like, how do you even translate those languages into one another? So it's very difficult, this problem. You know, myself and lots of colleagues are working on this, and I've been working on this for decades, but nobody's got an answer yet.: [00:37:11] S2: Might we someday decode consciousness, like we could decode DNA? Oh, I