Why do you still feel the waves after you get off a boat?

And when you get off the treadmill at the gym, why does everything seem to be flowing past you

faster? What does heartbreak have in common with drug withdrawal? And why, after you stare at a

waterfall for a while, do the rocks on the

side seem to be crawling upward? Why did people in the 1980s think their book pages had some

color red in them? But no one thought that before or after the 80s. And what does any of this have to do

with the great philosopher Aristotle

watching a horse stuck in the river?

Welcome to Inner Cosmos with me, David Eagleman.

I'm a neuroscientist and author at Stanford.

And in these episodes, we sail deeply

into our three-pound universe

to understand why and how our lives look the way they do.

Today's episode is about the way the brain readjusts its circuitry on really fast timescales

and why your brain is constantly doing this.

In the 1980s, tens of thousands of people began to notice something really weird.

When they looked at a floppy disk envelope with the black and white IBM logo on the front,

the letters IBM seemed to have a red tint.

And the same thing happened when people looked at pages in a book.

The text seemed like it was shaded red. Now, if that's not weird enough,

check this out. This only happened in the 1980s. People didn't perceive a red tint before or after

this decade. So what was changing about brains during that window? I'll tell you the answer, but to understand this, we're first

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