Could you learn to fly a helicopter, not by practicing, but instead by uploading the information directly into your brain?

What would society do if kids no longer had to go to school?

And what does any of this have to do with suntan booths or nano-robots or twerking over a presidential address?

Or what a cowboy on a hill is simply not able to see?

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, Today's episode is about the possibility of really coming to understand the tangled forest of 86 billion neurons in your head and the trillions of connections between them. And if we could do that,

could we upload information directly into your brain? Could we speed up education this way?

Now, at the moment, this is all pure fantasy because we simply don't have the technology

to allow us to do that. But the question we're

going to ask today is whether this is theoretically possible and something we can look forward

to around the corner of the next century. And what are the caveats the things to watch out for

and the unexpected complexities here.

So let's get started.

Some hundreds of years ago and still in many impoverished places in the world,

children of the species Homo sapiens

reproduced by the time they are young teens.

But this situation is totally different in modern times and modern societies now.

Young people go to school for their first 18 years or 21 years.

And increasingly 25 or 26 years for an advanced degree.

And in fields like medicine, they take another several years of

internship and residency. And in a field like neuroscience research, people do a postdoctoral

...