4.8 • 4.4K Ratings
🗓️ 9 November 2020
⏱️ 77 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Imagine you were locked in a sealed room, with no way to access the outside world but a few screens showing a view of what’s outside. Seems scary and limited, but that’s essentially the situation that our brains find themselves in — locked in our skulls, with only the limited information from a few unreliable sensory modalities to tell them what’s going on inside. Neuroscientist David Eagleman has long been interested in how the brain processes that sensory input, and also how we might train it to learn completely new ways of accessing the outside world, with important ramifications for virtual reality and novel brain/computer interface techniques.
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David Eagleman received his Ph.D. in neuroscience from the Baylor College of Medicine. He is currently the CEO of Neosensory, a company that builds sensory-augmentation devices, as well as an adjunct professor at Stanford. His research has involved time perception, synesthesia, and sensory substitution. He is the founder and director of the Center for Science and Law. He is a bestselling author of both fiction and nonfiction. He was the writer and host of the TV show The Brain with David Eagleman, and writer of the Netflix documentary The Creative Brain. His most recent book is Livewired: The Inside Story of the Ever-Changing Brain.
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0:00.0 | Hello everyone, welcome to the Mindscape Podcast. |
0:02.4 | I'm your host Sean Carroll. |
0:04.1 | Surely you've read these stories in the news media about how one or another thing you |
0:08.0 | could do will change your brain, right? |
0:11.6 | Playing Angry Birds changes your brain. |
0:14.0 | Reading Twitter changes your brain. |
0:15.8 | Eating Captain Crunch changes your brain. |
0:18.2 | It's very scary like your brain is very precious to you. |
0:20.6 | All this stuff keeps changing your brain. |
0:22.4 | Well, it's all true, of course, but here's the thing. |
0:26.4 | Every time you open your eyes, it changes your brain. |
0:29.6 | In fact, forget about opening your eyes. |
0:31.6 | Every bit of sensory input you get changes your brain and probably even without sensory |
0:36.5 | input your brain would be changing because we call it looking and listening and getting |
0:41.0 | memories imprinted, right? |
0:43.0 | The connections between our neurons are slightly being shuffled by the imprints that we get |
0:47.3 | from the world around us. |
0:48.9 | The brain is something that changes. |
0:51.6 | It's not a static thing. |
0:53.5 | Today's guest is David Eaglement, who's a neuroscientist, author and entrepreneur. |
0:58.2 | David and I have been friends for a long time, done a lot of things together. |
1:01.3 | He has a new book out called LiveWired, the Inside Story of the Ever Changing Brain. |
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