You know, you can't tear half the circuitry out of my cell phone and expect it to still work, but you can do that with the brain.

Hey, everyone, it's Rosie here. Welcome back to Radio Headspace.

So, like many of you, after I had COVID, I didn't feel like myself.

I felt foggy, my memory was bad, and I was just off. But a friend of mine reassured me

that my brain is elastic and that everything would be fine. And of course, everything is back to

normal now. But that left a big question. What exactly is brain elasticity? And to answer that,

I called up Stanford neuroscientist Dr. David Eagleman.

Much like me, David is obsessed with understanding how the brain works. And the conclusion he's come to

is that our brain is basically the most advanced piece of software in the world.

I always find it so fascinated to hear people's stories of why they decided to study

the brain because it is such a complex structure. So I'm curious for you and you don't have to

take long to respond, but I'm just curious. Yeah. Well, for me, I was in college and I was taking a lot of

philosophy classes and I really enjoyed these philosophical

conundrums that you spin yourself down into and so on. But in the end, many of them,

you just, that's where it ends. There's never an answer. And I thought, I thought, gosh,

if we could understand the perceptual machinery by which we're viewing the world, maybe there

would be an answer here. Maybe we

don't have to leave it with question marks. So I started studying neuroscience. As it turns out, my father

was a psychiatrist and my mother was a biology teacher. So it was sort of natural. I ended up there,

but I certainly did not think that until I was maybe 20 years old. I never thought I'd be going down

that path. And once you were there, you were just fascinated. I was hooked, yeah. I actually

majored in British and American literature as an undergraduate because that was actually my first love.

...