YouSaid · the spoken record

David Eagleman

lines on the record: 105
first: 2023-05-26
most recent: 2023-05-26
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

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“Two years since I saw this other person, that kind of thing. So, anyway, this was a whole bunch of research in my lab over the course of a decade that came together, but the point is if you're laying down richer memories, you won't necessarily live longer, but you will make it seem as though you've lived longer because when you're asking what just happened or how long has it been, you've got more data, more footage to draw on. And of course, we all know this feeling when you go on some super exciting trip on the weekend and you come back and you're back on a Monday, you think, oh my gosh, it's been forever since it was Friday. There's so many things that happened. But if you just have a normal weekend, you think, oh my gosh, it's Monday. I was just Friday. There's nothing to write down. And so you don't feel that there was much duration that happened there.”
2023-05-26 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #674: Neuroscientist David Eagleman — Exploring Consciousness, Sensory Augmentation, The Lazy Susan Method of Extraordinary Productivity, Dreaming, Improving Hearing with a Wristband, Synesthesia, Stretching Time with Novelty, Lessons from Titans of Science, and Much More · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“They've got much more memory than they would in normal circumstances. So they say, you know, I watched the hood crumple in the rear view mirror fall off and the expression on the other guy's face and then, okay, so anyway, that got me thinking about this issue about how we lay down memory. And it turns out that we touched on memory a while ago, but most things in your life you do not remember the number of cracks in the sidewalk and who was wearing what and what was on the menu, on the wall. We just don't remember almost everything because the job of memory is to write down stuff that matters, that's emotionally salient or informationally relevant. And so you're just writing this tiny fraction. But anyway, when you're estimating how long it's been since some event, the way you estimate that is by drawing on the footage that you have. Saying, oh, well, see, this happens, this happened, okay, so that must have been two months since I saw my friend.”
2023-05-26 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #674: Neuroscientist David Eagleman — Exploring Consciousness, Sensory Augmentation, The Lazy Susan Method of Extraordinary Productivity, Dreaming, Improving Hearing with a Wristband, Synesthesia, Stretching Time with Novelty, Lessons from Titans of Science, and Much More · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So, when I was a kid, I fell off of this house under construction, and I fell 12 feet, and it seemed to take a long time, and I got really interested in this issue of does time run in slow motion when you're in fear for your life. I mean, I got interested in that question once I became a neuroscientist and grown up. And so I did this experiment. I think you know about this, where I dropped people from 150 foot tall tower in free falling backwards and they're caught in a net below. And I measured the speed of their perception as they're falling because everybody has this experience or knows someone with this experience where they get in a car accident and things seem to run in slow motion and they can report all these details of what happened. Anyway, long story short, it turns out that the whole thing is a trick of memory. People don't actually perceive faster during a scary event. It's just that they laid down more memory. So when they read this back out, they say, what just happened? What just happened? It seems like...”
2023-05-26 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #674: Neuroscientist David Eagleman — Exploring Consciousness, Sensory Augmentation, The Lazy Susan Method of Extraordinary Productivity, Dreaming, Improving Hearing with a Wristband, Synesthesia, Stretching Time with Novelty, Lessons from Titans of Science, and Much More · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Remember, it's not all seeing and all knowing in terms of knowing the truth. All it is is it's read everything and it's giving you a summary of everything. So totally. If there are people with different interpretations of what you talked about, that's what it'll know.”
2023-05-26 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #674: Neuroscientist David Eagleman — Exploring Consciousness, Sensory Augmentation, The Lazy Susan Method of Extraordinary Productivity, Dreaming, Improving Hearing with a Wristband, Synesthesia, Stretching Time with Novelty, Lessons from Titans of Science, and Much More · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Love it. I'm not sure I see how though because we're still stuck in our internal models. So even if I'm talking to ChatGPT and it tells me all kinds of things I didn't know, now I know those. Each time I add something new to my internal model, I think, okay, now I'm complete. I didn't know that. Now I know it. Great. I got it now.”
2023-05-26 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #674: Neuroscientist David Eagleman — Exploring Consciousness, Sensory Augmentation, The Lazy Susan Method of Extraordinary Productivity, Dreaming, Improving Hearing with a Wristband, Synesthesia, Stretching Time with Novelty, Lessons from Titans of Science, and Much More · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“She started scratching the surface on things. Most people are like, oh, I thought I kind of knew, but maybe I don't really know. So that's what it's about and how we can expand our perception by asking questions all the time, by not taking our truths so seriously, by understanding there's more out there. That's what it's about. And I'm really jazzed about this book. Right now, it's already 120,000 words. And so I've got it as I'm finishing. I've got to really crunch it down so that any human will read it”
2023-05-26 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #674: Neuroscientist David Eagleman — Exploring Consciousness, Sensory Augmentation, The Lazy Susan Method of Extraordinary Productivity, Dreaming, Improving Hearing with a Wristband, Synesthesia, Stretching Time with Novelty, Lessons from Titans of Science, and Much More · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Thank you. It's all about this issue of all the stuff we don't see and don't understand. So I start off with some examples like we talked about with the electromagnetic spectrum, all the light you don't see, but forget it. It's all about the stuff that you think your model is complete and you know everything out there to know. But fundamentally, your perception is like a Potemkin village where you just see the facades of things. And if I scratch the surface on anything, like if I were to ask you, hey, do you know how the electoral college works, you'd say, yeah? And I say, okay, can you explain it to me?”
2023-05-26 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #674: Neuroscientist David Eagleman — Exploring Consciousness, Sensory Augmentation, The Lazy Susan Method of Extraordinary Productivity, Dreaming, Improving Hearing with a Wristband, Synesthesia, Stretching Time with Novelty, Lessons from Titans of Science, and Much More · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“One for kids is done, and that's off to the publisher, but the one that I'm working on the big one I'm working on is called Empire of the Invisible, and it's going to take me another few years to finish this, but it is.”
2023-05-26 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #674: Neuroscientist David Eagleman — Exploring Consciousness, Sensory Augmentation, The Lazy Susan Method of Extraordinary Productivity, Dreaming, Improving Hearing with a Wristband, Synesthesia, Stretching Time with Novelty, Lessons from Titans of Science, and Much More · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Okay, I don't know if this is going to answer the question directly, but one way to get people there is to, for example, if you admire Sherlock Holmes or, you know, if a kid watches the Benedict Cumber match version or whatever, you think, wow, that guy is really noticing things. And that's when you start realizing the limits of your own internal model. You think, wow, you know, I would have never noticed that. Why? Because I didn't pay attention to that. I didn't care about that. But if you admire people who can do things and solve things that I think it's in your self-interest to say, I want to expand my internal model. I'm not satisfied to say, okay, I've got it. I know the truth. I'm not going to do any more work. Something along those lines of inspiring people that way.”
2023-05-26 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #674: Neuroscientist David Eagleman — Exploring Consciousness, Sensory Augmentation, The Lazy Susan Method of Extraordinary Productivity, Dreaming, Improving Hearing with a Wristband, Synesthesia, Stretching Time with Novelty, Lessons from Titans of Science, and Much More · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I think I would put a billboard next to an elementary school or maybe junior higher high school. I don't know. I'd have to think about this. But something like question your truth, because this is the issue that we're always in, is I've been fascinated by this issue. So, you know, the brain locked in and silenced the darkness comes up with an internal model of the world with all of its truths, its political truths, all that stuff. And the funny part is that when you look at someone else, let's say on the opposite side of the political spectrum from wherever you are, you think, oh, the person's misinformed, they're a troll, if I just talk to them long enough, they'd come to agree with me and so on. It's weird. Everybody believes this and everyone on all sides of the spectrum thinks, okay, I clearly see the truth and I don't know why those other people don't. And so I've just been fascinated by this issue about how completely we believe our internal models. So that's what I would try to do with young people anyway is just get them to”
2023-05-26 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #674: Neuroscientist David Eagleman — Exploring Consciousness, Sensory Augmentation, The Lazy Susan Method of Extraordinary Productivity, Dreaming, Improving Hearing with a Wristband, Synesthesia, Stretching Time with Novelty, Lessons from Titans of Science, and Much More · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“We don't have enough to know, certainly religion, we have enough data to know that all those biblical stories are completely made up and wrong in a thousand ways, but we certainly don't have enough evidence to say, oh, therefore there's nothing interesting in the cosmos besides us. I mean, who knows?”
2023-05-26 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #674: Neuroscientist David Eagleman — Exploring Consciousness, Sensory Augmentation, The Lazy Susan Method of Extraordinary Productivity, Dreaming, Improving Hearing with a Wristband, Synesthesia, Stretching Time with Novelty, Lessons from Titans of Science, and Much More · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Avoiding committing to something with certainty if you don't need to. And really, this is just an expression of the scientific temperament. Science is always going to say, look, what we can have is the weight of evidence at any given time. We can say, oh, that supports this more and this. Okay, great. So we'll sort of provisionally believe this to be true, but it's not about pretending certainty when we don't have enough data. And when it comes to some fundamental questions like our existence here, what, I mean, we don't have any data on that.”
2023-05-26 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #674: Neuroscientist David Eagleman — Exploring Consciousness, Sensory Augmentation, The Lazy Susan Method of Extraordinary Productivity, Dreaming, Improving Hearing with a Wristband, Synesthesia, Stretching Time with Novelty, Lessons from Titans of Science, and Much More · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Was set up as like you know this battle between these. But as you know from reading some, it's all about shining a flashlight around the possibility space. It's all about saying, God, who knows what's going on here? Let's just make up a bunch of stories. Let's make up forty stories. And we can make up 400 more. And so that idea, you may know this, but years ago I proposed this new movement called possibilianism, which really caught on and actually is still moving around the planet. Well, but the idea with possibilianism is”
2023-05-26 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #674: Neuroscientist David Eagleman — Exploring Consciousness, Sensory Augmentation, The Lazy Susan Method of Extraordinary Productivity, Dreaming, Improving Hearing with a Wristband, Synesthesia, Stretching Time with Novelty, Lessons from Titans of Science, and Much More · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“This is the beauty of science that it's always willing to knock down its own walls. And so this is what the scientific method is about, and it's the most special thing that humans have ever done. Because everything else is about how do I sort of establish my throne and I set this up and no one can question this, but there's nothing in science that isn't vulnerable to getting knocked off its pedestal. And so, in fact, much earlier in the podcast, when you asked me about maybe of consciousness whether it's an emergent property or whether consciousness is a fundament, who the heck knows? And I think as you get older and more mature as a scientist, you feel like, okay, I don't know. I don't know. We'll see. We'll do experiments. We'll figure it out. But there's no need to pretend certainty on things. And in fact, that's always driven me crazy. And one thing, I walked into a bookstore. This was many years ago, about the time that some came out, actually. I walked into a bookstore and there was a table of books on the front. And one was by religious fundamentalists, one pile, and the other pile was by the neo-atheists. And the table.”
2023-05-26 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #674: Neuroscientist David Eagleman — Exploring Consciousness, Sensory Augmentation, The Lazy Susan Method of Extraordinary Productivity, Dreaming, Improving Hearing with a Wristband, Synesthesia, Stretching Time with Novelty, Lessons from Titans of Science, and Much More · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“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. So what we're facing, I don't know if it'll be 10 years, hopefully, maybe it'll be 20 or 100, but what we're facing is a giant leap in understanding that we know is coming, but we just don't have the trick cracked yet. So that's one thing. Was your question about any kind of invention or neuroscience in particular?”
2023-05-26 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #674: Neuroscientist David Eagleman — Exploring Consciousness, Sensory Augmentation, The Lazy Susan Method of Extraordinary Productivity, Dreaming, Improving Hearing with a Wristband, Synesthesia, Stretching Time with Novelty, Lessons from Titans of Science, and Much More · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I think the main thing has to do with technology as opposed to theoretical ideas. So what I mean is we've got plenty of theoretical hypotheses all about how the brain might be working and so on. But we actually don't have any good technology for measuring what's going on inside the brain. So we've got brain imaging where you see these fancy images of brains with false color images on it and so on. It's really crude. That's fMRI. That's just measuring where the blood flow goes and you're measuring cubes of millions and millions of neurons at once. And all you can say is, oh, there was some activity there somewhere in that cube. So what we really need is a technology that allows us to measure the spiking activity of every neuron in the brain, let's say 86 billion neurons all at once in real time, ideally, and then do massive computational analysis of that to understand what is the language of the brain.”
2023-05-26 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #674: Neuroscientist David Eagleman — Exploring Consciousness, Sensory Augmentation, The Lazy Susan Method of Extraordinary Productivity, Dreaming, Improving Hearing with a Wristband, Synesthesia, Stretching Time with Novelty, Lessons from Titans of Science, and Much More · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And that's what actually shapes the human being. I actually started off the book with a quotation from Heidegger who says, every man begins life as ten thousand men and dies as a single one. And what that means is, you know, you've got all this potential, all these directions you could go in your life, but as you move through life and you make choices and stuff happens to you, you end up as exactly who you are.”
2023-05-26 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #674: Neuroscientist David Eagleman — Exploring Consciousness, Sensory Augmentation, The Lazy Susan Method of Extraordinary Productivity, Dreaming, Improving Hearing with a Wristband, Synesthesia, Stretching Time with Novelty, Lessons from Titans of Science, and Much More · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I think the notion of how plastic the brain actually is is something that's totally underappreciated. There's sort of an idea that I think many people have, which is, oh, you're just born with a brain, the brain kind of unpacks, and then you're who you are. But really, we are totally functions of our culture and our society. And one of the things that's amazing to me is like, imagine, Tim, that you and I were born 10,000 years ago exactly the same DNA. we wouldn't be anything like what we are now. Even though with the same DNA, we might look vaguely like we do now, but my God, the culture, everything we're pulling in would be so different”
2023-05-26 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #674: Neuroscientist David Eagleman — Exploring Consciousness, Sensory Augmentation, The Lazy Susan Method of Extraordinary Productivity, Dreaming, Improving Hearing with a Wristband, Synesthesia, Stretching Time with Novelty, Lessons from Titans of Science, and Much More · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“After a moment until you take them off again. Anyway, so this is a general thing that the brain's always trying to do is say, how can I pull the most useful information out of the world by recalibrating everything else around me”
2023-05-26 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #674: Neuroscientist David Eagleman — Exploring Consciousness, Sensory Augmentation, The Lazy Susan Method of Extraordinary Productivity, Dreaming, Improving Hearing with a Wristband, Synesthesia, Stretching Time with Novelty, Lessons from Titans of Science, and Much More · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“The rocks and trees at the side, and it looks like everything's moving up. This is called the motion after effect, where you see motion moving in the opposite direction. I make a long argument, but I'll just say in a sentence here that what the brain is trying to do is say, okay, I'm going to reset my zero. I'm going to recalibrate so that I can see if there's more information here. Essentially what it would be trying to do is cancel out the downward motion because it says, okay, there's lots of that, but there's no new information there. So I'm trying to cancel it out and it does it by, you know, having this upward motion. There's more sophisticate arguments about how it does this early. But it's doing that to maximize the information. Same if I change the color of the lights in the room. Let's say I make it all red. Your brain will quickly stop seeing the red and it will adjust itself so that it's seeing other things so it can maximize what it's pulling out at all times. Of course, you know this if you put on, let's say, yellow sunglasses or something, everything looks normal.”
2023-05-26 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #674: Neuroscientist David Eagleman — Exploring Consciousness, Sensory Augmentation, The Lazy Susan Method of Extraordinary Productivity, Dreaming, Improving Hearing with a Wristband, Synesthesia, Stretching Time with Novelty, Lessons from Titans of Science, and Much More · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Okay, so LiveWired in general is about this issue of how you can't really think about the brain like hardware or software, but instead it's what I call liveware, where it's reconfiguring itself all the time. This thing I mentioned earlier, brain plasticity. So, you know, there's something like 30,000 papers a year coming out on brain plasticity now, but I wrote this book to sort of synthesize and build the framework for understanding what it is for the brain to absorb the world around it and do that. But what I surfaced that way were some principles that were interesting to me. And one of them is about, yeah, infotropism is a term that I coined about what the brain is trying to do it all times. It's reconfiguring its circuitry so that it can maximize the information that it brings in from the world. So just as an example, if you're watching a waterfall, you know, we've probably all had the experience you're staring at a waterfall for a while, and then you look over the...”
2023-05-26 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #674: Neuroscientist David Eagleman — Exploring Consciousness, Sensory Augmentation, The Lazy Susan Method of Extraordinary Productivity, Dreaming, Improving Hearing with a Wristband, Synesthesia, Stretching Time with Novelty, Lessons from Titans of Science, and Much More · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Every time I come up with a new idea for a screenplay or book or whatever, I'm like, that's the greatest idea. And I jump in on it.”
2023-05-26 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #674: Neuroscientist David Eagleman — Exploring Consciousness, Sensory Augmentation, The Lazy Susan Method of Extraordinary Productivity, Dreaming, Improving Hearing with a Wristband, Synesthesia, Stretching Time with Novelty, Lessons from Titans of Science, and Much More · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I'm having a good time, and it's my own fault. And my wife accuses me of I choose it, obviously. The thing is, I can't resist new shiny objects. Every time some student says, Hey, I want to start a company, will you help me and be an advisor? I'm like, heck yeah, that sounds amazing. And I do that.”
2023-05-26 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #674: Neuroscientist David Eagleman — Exploring Consciousness, Sensory Augmentation, The Lazy Susan Method of Extraordinary Productivity, Dreaming, Improving Hearing with a Wristband, Synesthesia, Stretching Time with Novelty, Lessons from Titans of Science, and Much More · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yes, I do think about that all the time. And I really admire Tim, your four-hour work week as an example. I'm working on the 400-hour work week and it sucks because I'm totally”
2023-05-26 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #674: Neuroscientist David Eagleman — Exploring Consciousness, Sensory Augmentation, The Lazy Susan Method of Extraordinary Productivity, Dreaming, Improving Hearing with a Wristband, Synesthesia, Stretching Time with Novelty, Lessons from Titans of Science, and Much More · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It's bottomless coffee, and it's quiet. It's not like a Starbucks where attractive people are walking in and out all the time, whatever. It's just like quiet and boring. You can just drink coffee and write. But that's where I spin it because what happens, I'll work on something and then I'll say, oh yeah, you know, I really want to get to this other thing and so I'll spin it and do the other thing.”
2023-05-26 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #674: Neuroscientist David Eagleman — Exploring Consciousness, Sensory Augmentation, The Lazy Susan Method of Extraordinary Productivity, Dreaming, Improving Hearing with a Wristband, Synesthesia, Stretching Time with Novelty, Lessons from Titans of Science, and Much More · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“But the lazy Susan comes in when I say, Wow, I've got a four hour chunk and I'm going to sit down at iHop. By the way, I've written all my books at iHops. I don't know why, but I love...”
2023-05-26 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #674: Neuroscientist David Eagleman — Exploring Consciousness, Sensory Augmentation, The Lazy Susan Method of Extraordinary Productivity, Dreaming, Improving Hearing with a Wristband, Synesthesia, Stretching Time with Novelty, Lessons from Titans of Science, and Much More · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Unfortunately, the lazy Susan can only get spun on the weekends or something when there's opportunity to think this week happens to be a pretty tough one, so I'm constrained in every moment and I just have to perform.”
2023-05-26 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #674: Neuroscientist David Eagleman — Exploring Consciousness, Sensory Augmentation, The Lazy Susan Method of Extraordinary Productivity, Dreaming, Improving Hearing with a Wristband, Synesthesia, Stretching Time with Novelty, Lessons from Titans of Science, and Much More · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“That sucks. Then I teach neurolaw at Stanford on Thursday. Then I'm having dinner with a startup that I'm advising. Then I'm doing my podcast actually twice this week on Tuesday and on Friday I'm doing like a three-hour recording session.”
2023-05-26 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #674: Neuroscientist David Eagleman — Exploring Consciousness, Sensory Augmentation, The Lazy Susan Method of Extraordinary Productivity, Dreaming, Improving Hearing with a Wristband, Synesthesia, Stretching Time with Novelty, Lessons from Titans of Science, and Much More · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Thank you. Unfortunately, I'm looking at my calendar. It turns out I have zero time on my calendar to do anything that would resemble birthday-ness.”
2023-05-26 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #674: Neuroscientist David Eagleman — Exploring Consciousness, Sensory Augmentation, The Lazy Susan Method of Extraordinary Productivity, Dreaming, Improving Hearing with a Wristband, Synesthesia, Stretching Time with Novelty, Lessons from Titans of Science, and Much More · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Encyclopedia Brown, but all the mysteries have to do with the brain. So it's really, I think, educational and lovely. So I'm having a meeting about that. And then it happens that tomorrow is my birthday. So unfortunately.”
2023-05-26 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #674: Neuroscientist David Eagleman — Exploring Consciousness, Sensory Augmentation, The Lazy Susan Method of Extraordinary Productivity, Dreaming, Improving Hearing with a Wristband, Synesthesia, Stretching Time with Novelty, Lessons from Titans of Science, and Much More · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Okay, so a lot of it is work meetings with my company Neosensry. Some of it is meetings with VCs about that. Then I have various lectures I'm giving. It happens that this week several of them are virtual lectures, so that's a lot easier for me than working on how to do B2B stuff, business-to-business stuff, because we're now selling the wristband not only to customers, but directly to big businesses with big warehouses for their deaf employees. But then let's see, I'm giving a talk to a bunch of Stanford students. Then I run the Center for Science and Law, which is where neuroscience and the legal system intersect. So I'm having some meetings about that. I also just finished a book about this is a little embarrassing because it's so unusual. It's so different than anything else I've written, but it's a young adult book. It's, or middle grade, but it's about a brother and sister team who solve mysteries like hardy boys or.”
2023-05-26 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #674: Neuroscientist David Eagleman — Exploring Consciousness, Sensory Augmentation, The Lazy Susan Method of Extraordinary Productivity, Dreaming, Improving Hearing with a Wristband, Synesthesia, Stretching Time with Novelty, Lessons from Titans of Science, and Much More · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Exactly, exactly. So it turns out I learned a long time ago that Walt Whitman would do this with his writing projects. Each segment in the lazy season, he'd have a different writing project. And he would work on something until he was slowing down. And then he'd spin it and randomly pick a different project and work on that. And that is precisely what I do. I loved seeing that story about him because that's my life. I work on whatever I am maximally resonating with at that moment. As soon as I start slowing down or get stuck, I just jump to a different project. And when I come back to the thing I had been working on, I'm sort of, you know, more refreshed in a sense or I've thought of a new idea about it, that kind of thing.”
2023-05-26 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #674: Neuroscientist David Eagleman — Exploring Consciousness, Sensory Augmentation, The Lazy Susan Method of Extraordinary Productivity, Dreaming, Improving Hearing with a Wristband, Synesthesia, Stretching Time with Novelty, Lessons from Titans of Science, and Much More · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I would only be able to give what I do, and that is the lazy Susan method. So do you know what Lazy Susan is? You know, it's the circular thing that sits in the middle of the table. Okay, not everyone knows what this is.”
2023-05-26 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #674: Neuroscientist David Eagleman — Exploring Consciousness, Sensory Augmentation, The Lazy Susan Method of Extraordinary Productivity, Dreaming, Improving Hearing with a Wristband, Synesthesia, Stretching Time with Novelty, Lessons from Titans of Science, and Much More · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It's anytime he says, like, hey, Dad, how does this work? And I've got a daughter now, too. And so you'll say, hey, how does this work? I say, well, how do you think it works? They come up with an idea and I say, okay, cool. Can you come up with another idea? They come up with another. Okay, great. Now, how do we test that? How would you distinguish those two ideas? So that's what it is to come up with something on your own and figure out how to test it. Because whether or not they become scientists, I mean, they probably won't, for all I know, but definitely want them to be good thinkers. And be able to figure things out so they're not dependent on dogma or what their neighbor tells them is the answer, that sort of thing.”
2023-05-26 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #674: Neuroscientist David Eagleman — Exploring Consciousness, Sensory Augmentation, The Lazy Susan Method of Extraordinary Productivity, Dreaming, Improving Hearing with a Wristband, Synesthesia, Stretching Time with Novelty, Lessons from Titans of Science, and Much More · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Italo Calvino's Invisible Cities is an extraordinary book about Marco Polo talking to the great Khan, Kubla Khan, about different cities in the Khan's Empire. And its magical realism, and by the way, all five of those authors that you named, that I guess I named back in that article in 2011, all five of them, they're all magical realism, which means it's not just writing about the day-to-day stuff, but just feeling freedom. About things that shouldn't be possible, and you just make it possible. So I've always loved that style of writing. All five of those are really still my favorites all these years later. A hundred years of solitude, if someone hasn't read that, Borges' Labyrinths, Tony Morrison's Beloved, essentially anything by Faulkner. The bear is a great one.”
2023-05-26 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #674: Neuroscientist David Eagleman — Exploring Consciousness, Sensory Augmentation, The Lazy Susan Method of Extraordinary Productivity, Dreaming, Improving Hearing with a Wristband, Synesthesia, Stretching Time with Novelty, Lessons from Titans of Science, and Much More · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And I call this the Don Vaughn method of just hitting someone over and over from different angles to make sure that they don't forget. So I was so impressed by this because, you know, I was busy and I couldn't remember to call him back and whatever. And so I was really impressed with this. And so when I was trying to get some published at the end there, I thought, explicitly, I'm going to do the Dawn Vaughn method and I'm going to hit this agent from every angle that I can.”
2023-05-26 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #674: Neuroscientist David Eagleman — Exploring Consciousness, Sensory Augmentation, The Lazy Susan Method of Extraordinary Productivity, Dreaming, Improving Hearing with a Wristband, Synesthesia, Stretching Time with Novelty, Lessons from Titans of Science, and Much More · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And then I forgot. And then I get a letter from his high school teacher saying, hey, this is just a letter to recommend the kid. Then I get called from again. Then I get an email. And I thought, wait a minute, I don't want to miss this kid. This kid's amazing. And so he ended up working in my lab. And for the last 16 years has been my closest collaborator. His name is Don Vaughn.”
2023-05-26 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #674: Neuroscientist David Eagleman — Exploring Consciousness, Sensory Augmentation, The Lazy Susan Method of Extraordinary Productivity, Dreaming, Improving Hearing with a Wristband, Synesthesia, Stretching Time with Novelty, Lessons from Titans of Science, and Much More · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And so that was actually the seed of the book, and that's the why, you know, and then again, as a lover of literature and a writer, I just found this concept of the afterlife such a great backdrop upon which to ask all kinds of questions. And as you know from the book, it's, you know, it's funny and it's there's pathos. And anyway, I do know exactly why I kept going. And that was because of a 16-year-old kid that I met when I was at the Salkin School with Francis Crick actually. What happened is there was a high school science day and these kids came over and I talked to them about what I was doing. And one of the kids came up to me afterwards and said, can I work with you? This is what I want to do. Can I work with you? And I said, sure, write down your phone number on the dry rice board here. And he did. And the next day, the dry erase board got erased. And so I forgot about the kid. Okay. So then I get a voicemail from him saying, hey, I'm the kid, blah, blah, blah, blah. And then I thought, oh, I got to call this guy back.”
2023-05-26 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #674: Neuroscientist David Eagleman — Exploring Consciousness, Sensory Augmentation, The Lazy Susan Method of Extraordinary Productivity, Dreaming, Improving Hearing with a Wristband, Synesthesia, Stretching Time with Novelty, Lessons from Titans of Science, and Much More · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Why the book actually started when I was, I think it was like 11 years old, and I ended up talking to a rabbi and I said, hey, you know, I've never understood what is the Jewish view of the afterlife. And he said, well, yes, three Jews, you'll get four opinions. And I thought that was so amazing because I'd never heard someone say something like that before”
2023-05-26 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #674: Neuroscientist David Eagleman — Exploring Consciousness, Sensory Augmentation, The Lazy Susan Method of Extraordinary Productivity, Dreaming, Improving Hearing with a Wristband, Synesthesia, Stretching Time with Novelty, Lessons from Titans of Science, and Much More · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“That's amazing, yes. So Eno turn his job. And then around the same time, Max Richter turned it into an opera at the Royal Opera House of London. And it keeps, you know, finds itself back in the top 100 books on Amazon over the years. And so it's just been such a special part of my life. But the point is that it was such a long extended failure. And I'm so thankful that I just kept banging on that door until it finally creaked open accidentally.”
2023-05-26 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #674: Neuroscientist David Eagleman — Exploring Consciousness, Sensory Augmentation, The Lazy Susan Method of Extraordinary Productivity, Dreaming, Improving Hearing with a Wristband, Synesthesia, Stretching Time with Novelty, Lessons from Titans of Science, and Much More · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Exactly. Look, it took me a while to learn that this is what literary agents are about. They're sort of the first filter. And if an agent says, I'll take something on, then a publisher will actually take a look at it. But I had been trying to write to publishers directly. Tim, I know you know the book, and the book became an international bestseller and pretty immediately got published in 33 languages. It got turned into two operas, Brian Eno turned into an opera at the Sydney Opera House. Didn't that happen?”
2023-05-26 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #674: Neuroscientist David Eagleman — Exploring Consciousness, Sensory Augmentation, The Lazy Susan Method of Extraordinary Productivity, Dreaming, Improving Hearing with a Wristband, Synesthesia, Stretching Time with Novelty, Lessons from Titans of Science, and Much More · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“This is in the bookshelf, or where you're like, I don't even understand what this thing is, and so that was a failure that just kept dragging on for a very long time. And I had written it over seven years. And I was pretty much certain that it was never actually going to see the light of day. And then finally, you know, I just kept trying to crush it from different angles. And I finally came up with an idea of there was a particular literary agent that I wanted to hit. And so I managed to figure out three different ways to hit her so that within 48 hours she was hearing from three different people. And so finally she said, I will take you on as a hip pocket client, which just means you're not really a client of mine, but I'll keep you in my pocket just in case I see an opportunity. And then she called me two days later and she was sort of incredulous. And she said, wow, some just got bought. And so that was the start of a big thing. And Tim, I know you've read all that.”
2023-05-26 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #674: Neuroscientist David Eagleman — Exploring Consciousness, Sensory Augmentation, The Lazy Susan Method of Extraordinary Productivity, Dreaming, Improving Hearing with a Wristband, Synesthesia, Stretching Time with Novelty, Lessons from Titans of Science, and Much More · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Thank you very much. And I submitted for publication and I got rejected. So I submitted again, I got rejected. I ended up collecting a stack of rejection letters as high as the book. Nobody wanted to publish it. And some people, you know, most of the reform rejections, but some people hand wrote stuff saying, hey, I really liked this book, but I just have no idea where I would.”
2023-05-26 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #674: Neuroscientist David Eagleman — Exploring Consciousness, Sensory Augmentation, The Lazy Susan Method of Extraordinary Productivity, Dreaming, Improving Hearing with a Wristband, Synesthesia, Stretching Time with Novelty, Lessons from Titans of Science, and Much More · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Only because now the competition is so high. And so if you haven't rotated in labs the whole time you're an undergrad and been doing neuroscience since you were two years old and so on, then it's hard to get in. That's a bummer.”
2023-05-26 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #674: Neuroscientist David Eagleman — Exploring Consciousness, Sensory Augmentation, The Lazy Susan Method of Extraordinary Productivity, Dreaming, Improving Hearing with a Wristband, Synesthesia, Stretching Time with Novelty, Lessons from Titans of Science, and Much More · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Actually, in one of my philosophy classes, we'd been assigned to write a final project. And I don't know, like 12 page assignment or something. I ended up writing 108 pages on the brain. And the reason I was writing so much on is because I went to the library and I, over the course of that last semester, read every book that the library had on the brain, which, by the way, was not that many at the time because there just weren't that many. But I read everything. So when I showed up for the graduate school interview, I said, look, I know I don't have much biology on my transcript, but ask me what I know and I'll tell you because I've read X, Y, Z and it worked. The problem is I don't think a kid could get into graduate school now with that trajectory. I think that's a shame.”
2023-05-26 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #674: Neuroscientist David Eagleman — Exploring Consciousness, Sensory Augmentation, The Lazy Susan Method of Extraordinary Productivity, Dreaming, Improving Hearing with a Wristband, Synesthesia, Stretching Time with Novelty, Lessons from Titans of Science, and Much More · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So, what happened is, I went to college and I studied electrical engineering, I took lots of physics, I took lots of, you know, all kinds of things, and I couldn't quite find what was resonating. I couldn't find the thing that I loved. And so I ended up majoring in literature, but I was taking these classes. And it was my last semester that I took a neuroscience class. And by the way, the class I took was taught by a very old professor who was using literature from, let's say, the 1960s. It was a terrible neuroscience class, but it didn't matter at all. I was totally hooked.”
2023-05-26 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #674: Neuroscientist David Eagleman — Exploring Consciousness, Sensory Augmentation, The Lazy Susan Method of Extraordinary Productivity, Dreaming, Improving Hearing with a Wristband, Synesthesia, Stretching Time with Novelty, Lessons from Titans of Science, and Much More · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“The truth is that I was always studying science, and so I had tons of science on my transcript. It's just that I didn't have neuroscience in particular. And so what had happened is I was good at science growing up. And so everyone told me, I feel like everyone gave me bad advice. They said, oh, you should become an actuary and do the stuff with math because I could do math or you should become a waste engineer because there's a lot of money in waste engineering. People had all these proposals that were so boring and nothing to do with Carl Sagan and real questions”
2023-05-26 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #674: Neuroscientist David Eagleman — Exploring Consciousness, Sensory Augmentation, The Lazy Susan Method of Extraordinary Productivity, Dreaming, Improving Hearing with a Wristband, Synesthesia, Stretching Time with Novelty, Lessons from Titans of Science, and Much More · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, I suspect this is different for each person, but for me, it worked really well. And I had a coach, a track coach in high school, it was the same way. He was so mean to me and it brought out my best behaviors that way.”
2023-05-26 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #674: Neuroscientist David Eagleman — Exploring Consciousness, Sensory Augmentation, The Lazy Susan Method of Extraordinary Productivity, Dreaming, Improving Hearing with a Wristband, Synesthesia, Stretching Time with Novelty, Lessons from Titans of Science, and Much More · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, it was proof of concept. And, of course, you know, the ideas and the challenges and whatever that it opened up my world, it opened up my mind so enormously. And he was very hard on me. I was a grad student for five years and he was a total jerk all the time, but I love the guy so much, but he was really hard on me.”
2023-05-26 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #674: Neuroscientist David Eagleman — Exploring Consciousness, Sensory Augmentation, The Lazy Susan Method of Extraordinary Productivity, Dreaming, Improving Hearing with a Wristband, Synesthesia, Stretching Time with Novelty, Lessons from Titans of Science, and Much More · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Admirable in all the ways that I wanted to be, you know, just as a killer in every way and so smart. He was 20 IQ points ahead of everybody and also could bench press and do chin-ups better than everybody.”
2023-05-26 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #674: Neuroscientist David Eagleman — Exploring Consciousness, Sensory Augmentation, The Lazy Susan Method of Extraordinary Productivity, Dreaming, Improving Hearing with a Wristband, Synesthesia, Stretching Time with Novelty, Lessons from Titans of Science, and Much More · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT