# Unlocking the mysteries of our brain | David Eagleman

Segment00:05:00 – 00:10:00

Full episode transcript, trimmed to training segment.

==================================================

[0005:10] Chris Anderson: So what, we'll come onto that part a bit more, but let's start, first of all, thinking about someone with all five senses. If it is five, uh, basically working, kind of, quote as “normal”. Um, talk a bit about this miracle of how this, this brain in the dark of, of a baby sort of developing you, you've got this blizzard of it incoming, just electrical signals, and yet somehow after a year or two, they are interpreted as “There is a face that I love and light up to. And if I say, ‘Mama’, something smiles. And if I say ‘wah’ what water comes or milk comes.” Or, so like how, how are those pieces possibly put together?

[0005:54] David Eagleman: Yeah. Well, okay. So as far as you know, this debate about nature and nurture? Totally dead question nowadays because it's always both.So baby drops into the world knowing a lot of things already. Like how to mimic a facial expression. You know, you can stick out your tongue at a baby and the baby will do the same stuff like that. So, which is actually very complex visual-motor task to do. So there's some amount of pre-programming, but the interesting part is all the stuff that we absorb from there.

And so the trick that Mother Nature discovered is to drop us into the world with a half-baked brain and then we, you know, absorb the world around us such that, you know, an alligator born today is just the same as an alligator born a hundred thousand years ago.

But we drop into the world, by the time we're, you know, five, six years old, we’ve absorbed essentially everything humans have done before us. Our language, our culture, our family tradition, our nation's traditions, and so on. And we get to springboard off the top of that, and that just made us such a runaway species, we’ve taken over every corner of the planet as a result of not having to learn, you know, not having to play the role of a human over and over again, but constantly ratcheting up in what we're doing.

[0007:02] Chris Anderson: So this, this process of understanding, it seems to be built, I mean, at some point, right? Right. At the base level, it starts presumably because there are real things out there in the world. So, so say there's a puppy in the house, somehow the baby learns that, the same thing that sends at the same time that you get certain visual sensations you might hear “Yap, yap, yap.” And, um, and you might have the sort of the lick of puppy tongue on your face or something like that. And so the brain says, “These must be associated.” And then from that, a further understanding comes up. Is that about what happens?

[0007:36] David Eagleman: That’s exactly right. And, and the interesting part is that fundamentally the brain is multisensory, which means it's trying to make links across the senses. So you just got these little windows on the world, right? I'm just picking up a little slice of electromagnetic radiation here and some air compression waves here and other. And so what my brain's trying to do is put together, “Ah, there's an object that is a collection of these things altogether.”

Um, now the interesting part is when you're born, you don't know how to use your eyes or your ears, anything like that. And so it, it is a learned thing, but somehow when you learn it enough, it just becomes a qualia. You have a direct subjective experience of it.

[0008:13] Chris Anderson: So you, qualia is the subjective feeling of something.

[0008:16] David Eagleman: Exactly. So when you see the puppy, you don't think, “Hey, there's a bunch of photons that happen to be in the shape that I've seen before. And there's, you know, some medium frequencies hitting my eardrum that's probably a bark, and so on.” You just feel like, “Oh, there's the puppy making noise,” and such. Now the weird part is how do, how do qualia come about? How is it that information—which, you know, we can build a, uh, you can build a computer to recognize a puppy, but presumably it doesn't experience the puppiness and the love about the puppy and so on.

[0008:45] Chris Anderson: Yeah. Well, you're talking here about consciousness, so that's what I—we might come back to that. That's, that's a very, very hard one. But to go back to the Mr. Potato Head thing, so some of where this has come from is that you've observed that people who are lacking one sense, so say they, they are deaf or blind, their brain is, is able to repurpose the area that would have been used for, say the missing visual field and do something else with it. Talk a bit more about that.

[0009:14] David Eagleman: Exactly. You know, it's funny because I feel like that's something that neuroscience knows, but it's always considered sort of a side, uh, property of the brain. But to my mind, that's the most important thing or examples like that, because what it demonstrates is that although we have this textbook model of the brain—like here's visual system and here's hearing and touch and so on—that’s just how it usually turns out. But, exactly as you said, if somebody goes deaf, that part of the brain is taken over. Someone goes blind, that part of the brain is taken over. It's a very fluid system.

[0009:44] Chris Anderson: So one of the things you've observed and seen is that if someone is born deaf, for example, um, if you give them alternative access to audio information, not through their ears, but for example, on that wristband you're wearing, right, right there. Um, that they can actually start hearing through their wrist.