I love podcast guests who changed the way I think about some important aspect of the world.

A great example is my guest today, David Eagleman. He's a Stanford neuroscientist whose work on brain plasticity has completely transformed my understanding of the human brain in its possibilities.

The key thing about the human brain is it's about three pounds. It's locked in silence and darkness.

It has no idea where the information is coming from because everything is just electrical spikes and also chemical releases as a result of those spikes. And so what you have in

there is this giant symphony of electrical activity going on. And its job is to create a model

of the outside world. Welcome to people I mostly admire with Steve Levitt.

According to Eagleman, the brain is constantly trying to predict the world around it.

But, of course, the world is unpredictable and surprising,

so the brain is constantly updating its model.

The capacity of our brains to be ever-changing is usually referred to as plasticity, but

Eagleman offers another term, live wire.

That's where conversation begins.

Plasticity is the term used in the field because the great neuroscientist or psychologist actually, William James,

coined the term because he was impressed with the way that plastic gets manufactured,

where you mold it into a shape and it holds onto that shape. And he thought, that's kind of like what the brain does.

The great trick that Mother Nature figured out was to drop us into the world half-baked.

If you look at the way an alligator drops into the world, it essentially is pre-programmed. It eats,

mates, sleeps, does whatever it's doing. But we spent our first several years absorbing the world

around us, based on our neighborhood, in our moment and time, and our neighborhood and our moment in time and our culture

and our friends and our universities. We absorb all of that such that we can then springboard

off of that and create our own things. There are many things that are essentially pre-programmed in

us, but we are incredibly flexible. And that is the key about live wiring.

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