Hi, this is David Eagleman.

I want to wish you a very happy holidays.

We're going to take a break for a couple of weeks,

and then we're back in January with new episodes on emotion,

intelligence, time perception,

smell and taste, brain computer interfaces,

and much more.

In the meantime,

we're going to replay one of our favorite episodes from the past year,

and I'll look forward to seeing you in January.

What do counterfeit bills have to do with brains? And why is it so hard for you to recognize a real penny?

And what does this have to do with the building on the 50

euro bill recently getting replaced with the face of the goddess Europa? And what did I have to do

with that? And why did I campaign to the European Central Bank that all bills should be blank

with a single hologram in the middle.

Welcome to Inner Cosmos with me, David Eagleman.

I'm a neuroscientist, and you might wonder how a neuroscientist got involved in studying

counterfeit money.

Well, hang tight because in this episode, we're going to see how all these issues intersect.

One of the most pervasive mistakes that we make is believing that our visual systems give us a faithful representation

of what's out there. We think of our vision the way we think of a movie camera,

like it's just capturing the information from the world. But there are a whole bunch of

...