Hey there, I'm Jason Gautz, and you're listening to Think Again, a Big Think podcast.

It's 150,000 years ago. You're a homo sapiens, hanging out in really cozy clearing protected from behind by a cliff wall.

It's a great spot. Temperate, isolated, pretty safe. Lots of good fruits and

tubers nearby. Should you just hang out here forever, maybe? Well, you could, but something's

nagging at that medial frontal cortex of yours. There's a hill in the distance. What's beyond it?

Something different, maybe? Something new and shiny? Maybe today you'll just take a quick

peek. My guest today is neuroscientist David Eagleman. In the runaway species, how human

creativity remakes the world, David and his co-author Anthony Brandt explore that ancient

tension between mastery and curiosity, the known and the unknown, and how the human imagination

exploits it to make new things.

Welcome to think again, David. Great, great to be here. You talk in the book about creativity as

being just a very ancient thing that is unique to humans. Can you talk a little bit about why

we need creativity, why we've been creative for so long?

Yeah, the thing that I was very interested in is that if you fly over a forest, let's say,

and you're looking down on the forest, it looks essentially the same as it did a million years ago.

There are a bunch of animal species living there and they're living through the same kind of days that they've always lived. But then you get to the city that you're arriving in, like London or New York or something, and it looks like a motherboard has risen out of the earth. And there's only one species on the planet that's doing this kind of thing, and that's us. And the question is why.

And so it has a little bit to do with opposable thumbs and larynx, but it's much more fundamentally

to do with the structure of the human brain, which is very similar to other animal brains,

but there's just these little tweaks, these little algorithmic differences that have made

all the difference. So just in a sentence, it's that the human cortex, which is the wrinkly part on

the outside of the brain, that has expanded enormously in our recent evolution. And there's essentially two results of that.

One is that we've got a lot more space between input and output.

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