Why can't you tickle yourself? Why don't hippopotamuses tell stories around the campfire?

What would I advise the president if we find ourselves at war with extraterrestrials? And what does any of this have to do with Wayne Gretzky,

or the Greek goddess of memory and her children,

or poking your finger into the side of your eyeball,

or hitting a bottle to get ketchup onto your French fries?

And why do we get so anxious about the world changing around us?

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 one of the most important things that brains do, which is the simulation of possible futures.

The way we teach about brains in the classroom usually has to do with the brain figuring out

where it is and what is happening around it. Like it detects touch on its skin and it detects photons from the environment

out there and it picks up on sound waves that are happening.

And it stitches all of these together in the massive hurricane of electrical spikes that

race around in the silence and darkness of your skull.

And all of this neural information allows you to put together a picture of what is happening

in the world out there.

And that is what allows you to operate in the world.

And to catch that fish and put it in your mouth and to run from the predator, or more

prosaically to find the right empty parking space,

or tell the cashier what you want from the fast food menu,

or apply the brakes on your bicycle when there's a pothole in the road.

So the brain gathers data from the world around it so that it can operate inside of that world.

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