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.

Thank you. 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 simple demonstrations

that can quickly disabuse you of this notion. For example, imagine that I show you two pictures.

I flash one, then it goes off, then the second one comes on,

then it goes off, then the first one comes back on and so on. So it alternates between pictures A and B,

and it looks like it's the same picture. But let's say I let you know that there is a difference

between the pictures and your job is simply to spot the

difference. Well, if you've ever played these sorts of games before, you know how surprisingly

difficult it can be to tell the difference between them. It turns out that we are really blind

to changes in the scene. And these can be quite large changes. So you might

have a big statue that's present in the background of one photo and not the other, or a Jeep,

...