The Visionary
The future, and what is barely possible, reads round the next corner.
David Eagleman reads as The Visionary because his work sits where neuroscience meets the imagination, asking not just how the brain functions but what its workings imply about who we might become.
“Yeah, this, by the way, is why I wrote my book Incognito some years ago, which is about everything that's running under the hood that we don't have access to. I mean, the amount that your conscious mind has access to is the broom closet in the mansion of the brain, the part where you say, oh, yeah, I'm aware of this.”
“Evolutionary times. What this means is you can still hear and smell and taste and touch in the dark, but you can't see in the dark. And that puts the visual system at a disadvantage. It's like you have been blindfolded in a sense. And so what we realized is the visual system has to fight back to keep its territory all during the night.”
“Okay, well, it's just that if you are a blind person, you still have dreams at night, and that's because these circuits that drive dreaming are very ancient. You find these across the entire animal kingdom, actually. So every 90 minutes, they get this random activity blasted into their occipital lobe.”
“We know it involves these spikes, but we haven't cracked the neural code yet. So in the same way that Francis Crick and James Watson cracked the genetic code, oh, it's ACTG, and the whole thing is just about keeping the order of the base pairs and all the rest is just housekeeping. We haven't figured it out with the neural code as yet.”
The Diary of a CEO: “Stanford Neuroscientist: Can’t Remember Your Dreams? Your Brain May Be Warning You!”
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