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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“Oh, he was a decathlete. He was a decathlete and just unbelievably good at every sport he ever tried. He was a big sprinter and a big muscular guy. And somehow, look, here's the thing. As an undergraduate, I majored in British and American literature because that was my first love. And so when I decided in my last semester of my senior year that I loved neuroscience, I applied to neuroscience graduate school and I miraculously got in, but I wasn't sure if I wanted to do a PhD in neuroscience. I didn't know what that would entail and I figured I'd end up with big Coke bottle glasses and my hair sticking up everywhere. I didn't really know what it meant to be a scientist. And so I met this guy and he was so...”
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 say the ones that come to mind are, first of all, my father, who is a forensic psychiatrist and just a super smart guy. That was a big influence on my life. Then I went to graduate school and my advisor was a guy named Reed Montague, who was such a terrific thinker and a great athlete. He was a major influence on me. And the other one, I guess, was Carl Sagan, you know, who I only know through television, but that was all I saw as a kid. We never watched much TV, but I saw Cosmos on PBS and it totally influenced the trajectory of my life. I mean, I just, first of all, so turn on by all the stuff he was saying. And yeah, it's interesting actually because my parents never said, oh, you could be the next president of the United States. They always would say, oh, you could be the next Carl Sagan.”
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 I just want to point out it's not necessarily visual, it's spatial. So, you know, he's got this amazing spatial sense, it sounds like, about what's where and how to turn things and how to move things and get things into his pocket or whatever. But it's spatial.”
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, 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. But now that part of the brain is no longer visual. So a blind person has dreams that involves touch and hearing and so on. Like, oh, I was feeling my way around the living room. And there was a big dog in the corner and I got scared and I ran, but, you know, the furniture was all rearranged and whatever. But it's all touch and hearing. It's not visual.”
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
“What's funny about dreams is, you know, you wake up and you try to explain it to your spouse or whoever you're talking to, and we layer on all this extra stuff and this narrative to make it make sense. But actually dreams are just these weird visuals that happen. Actually, let me just mention one thing because I always get asked about, okay, what about blind people? What happens their dreams? Do you know the answer to 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
“Exactly when you're blasting random activity in, because we're visual animals, we have dreams, you know, when you get activity back there, you think, oh, I'm seeing them riding through a meadow, I'm talking to a silver leprechaun, whatever's going on.”
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
“Now, I don't know any counterexamples where they have a lot of REM sleep, but I did come across one which I thought was a real problem for the hypothesis, which is elephants. Elephants have almost no REM sleep. They do have a little bit of REM once in a while, but otherwise they don't. And of course, elephants have big brains and so on. But it turns out elephants only sleep one to two hours a night, and they have excellent night vision. So they don't need to keep their visual cortex protected against takeover in the same way that we do. So that actually falls right into line in the theory.”
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. So if you are a creature like, by the way, if you're a baby human, you dream all the time. They have about 50% of their sleep is REM sleep, is dream sleep. And as you get older, your brain is less plastic. And by the way, you have less percentage of REM sleep. But anyway, for an animal that's not particularly plastic, it has very little dream sleep.”
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 why it takes us so long to develop. But some of the other monkeys and apes and whatever, they drop out their good to go. And if you look at something like an alligator, you know, it's just like eat, run, mate. That's all it's doing. There's nothing other than the pre-programming that it needs. Rapid eye movement sleep is what correlates with dreaming. So if you look at the amount of REM sleep that these different animals get, you find that it correlates perfectly, like a perfect machine gun correlation.”
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
“You got it. That's exactly it. And so Homo sapiens, it's unbelievable. I mean, we're so useless for so long. And that's because we've got these extraordinary plastic brands. We drop into the world half-baked and we absorb the world around us. We absorb the language and the culture and all the knowledge that has come before us.”
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 that makes quantitative predictions across species. So, what we did is we found 25 different species of primates and we looked at how plastic their brains are. Some primates come out very plastic like Homo sapiens, others like the gray mouse lemur it's called is very not plastic. It drops out. It reaches puberty rapidly. It knows how to walk rapidly. It's sort of pre-programmed, if you want to think about it 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
“Exactly. You got it. You got it. It's a screensaver. And so what's very interesting is a lot of people have asked me when I present this. I'm presenting this at a big talk at Stanford tomorrow, by the way. And, you know, a lot of people say like, wait, don't we already know why we dream? And the answer is no, we don't know why we dream. There are various hypotheses, but that doesn't mean you stop making hypotheses. And the reason this one matters, I think, is because it is the first ever.”
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
“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. And so that's what dreaming is about. Every 90 minutes, you've got these very specialized circuits that blast activity just into the visual cortex. That's all that happens in dreaming is it's going just to primary visual cortex, all this random activity, and it's just to keep it defended against takeover from its neighbors.”
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
“2007 did this experiment where they put people in FMRI, the brain scanner, and they blindfolded them tightly and they were doing things like, you know, when you're exposed to sound or touch, what is that, you know, what's happening in the brain? And what they found is that in 60 minutes, the visual system started responding to touch and to sound. And that was really unexpected because we know that if you go blind, your visual system will get taken over. especially if you're really young, but no one would have ever dreamt that you'd start seeing the first signs of takeover in 60 minutes. And so that got my student and I to start thinking about something right away. And we realized that dreaming has to do with the rotation of the planet. And this is because the planet rotates into darkness. So we spend half our time in the dark. Obviously, I'm not talking about electricity blessed times, but historical.”
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
“Which is, it has to do with brain plasticity. So the brain is always reconfiguring itself. It's a very dynamic system and every one of these neurons in your head where they look like branching trees and they make 10,000 connections to other neurons. These are constantly moving. So imagine like moving trees that are plugging and unplugging and seeking and connecting with others and so on. So anyway, that's called brain plasticity, this constant reconfiguration. And it turns out the surprise in neuroscience is how rapidly things can start moving and changing. And so some colleagues of mine at Harvard back in...”
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
“Let me give a slightly different answer to the question because actually when I thought you were going to, I thought you might be about to ask, are there any of the 10 that we have sort of made some progress on? And actually there is one. There's one, and that has to do with why we dream. One of the questions was why do brains sleep and dream? Sleep is still a little complicated, but the bunch of hypotheses. And I can tell you if you're interested in that, of course. No, thanks. Yeah, we're in a rush here. Yeah, please, please.”
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
“A program and worked on that until he passed away, but there are many other people who are pursuing that in various ways. And so, again, that's the easy problem of consciousness is just figuring out the correlates.”
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
“Well, let me say two things. So, Crick had a chalkboard in his office and he had lots of things written on it, but right in the middle, he had the word meaning written on it because that was his central question is why does any of this mean anything to us? If I look at my garage door opener or my cell phone or whatever, it's just pushing zeros and ones around and transistors and presumably nothing means anything to it. But we have all this feeling and meaning. So that was the central question. And what he was trying to figure out was what he called the NCC, the neural correlates of consciousness, so working with our mutual colleague Christoph Koch. He was working on the NCC and trying to figure out, okay, look, there's the hard problem of consciousness, which is why does any of this equal subjective experience, but the maybe easier problem is to figure out what parts of the brain are involved and absolutely have to be there for you to be consciously aware of something. And so that's what he, you know, he sort of defined that as...”
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
“You get self awareness and sentience. We don't really know. And all the data we have is consistent with either. So the data we have on unconsciousness, of course, is that, you know, if you hurt your brain, let's say with a stroke or a tumor or traumatic brain injury or whatever, or you put molecules in like drugs, your consciousness can change in any of these circumstances. But all that tells us is that the physical integrity of the system is necessary for the conscious experience, but it certainly could be either.”
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 don't think there's any way to know. So just to define that for the audience. So, the second view is sometimes called panpsychism, which is that maybe consciousness is a fundamental quality of the cosmos. And like gravity or mass or whatever, it's already there and you're putting things together in just the right way. And the first version is that, you know, if you put a bunch of cells together in just the right structure,”
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, lots of them. I mean, I think most of my career has been defined by trying to understand how the brain constructs reality. You know, you've got all these spikes running around, and the question is, how does that make this subjective reality we have with all its colors and sounds and tastes and smells and so on? Why does this biological activity in a whole bunch of cells feel like something? That feels to me like the biggest central question in neuroscience. I actually wrote an article, I think in 2004, 2006. I wrote a cover article for Discover magazine and I called it 10 unsolved questions of neuroscience. And I defined 10 questions. And these are still equally as unsolved now as they were way back then. And so I feel like there's so much really rich stuff to answer. But anyway, consciousness really sits at the middle. And by the way, for Francis Crick, this was one of his central questions also. Maybe the central question that he devoted the end of his life to, you know, how do you put together 86 billion?”
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, exactly. So when Crick said that, and by the way, any good scientist is doing this anyway, you have lots of hypotheses, each one of which you think, wow, that's going to crack open something big. And then you realize, oh, that's totally wrong. You run an experiment or whatever. So you got to have a lot of them.”
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
“Let me think of one second tangent here, which is the worst piece of advice I ever had was when I was in college there was a professor in electrical engineering professor of mine and I really liked the guy and he said to me one day he said look eagleman life is like you're a lumberjack and you go into the forest with your axe you got to pick one tree and you just hit that tree if you take a whack at all the trees you're not going to get anywhere and it sounded so wise and so reasonable and so on but it's just not who I am i'm just not the you know pick one tree guy and so i think it already”
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 just looking. He was an amazing guy precisely because he was so high IQ, so high octane, and had no other constraints on him. I've never known anyone who happened to be in that position 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
“Of all the journals there, you know, science and nature and journal of neuroscience. He was flipping through it. And one day I asked him, I said, you know, what is here looking for? Because it looks like he was looking for something. He said, I don't 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
“I did my postdoctoral fellowship at a place called the Salk Institute, and that's where Francis Crick was. And for anyone who doesn't know, he was the co-discoverer of the structure of DNA and just figured out all these massively important things in molecular biology. He was essentially the Titan of the 20th century in biology. And I, like many people, I think, had assumed he had already passed away or something. I didn't realize he was still trucking along, but the thing that was so special about that guy was that he didn't have any of the constraints that other scientists did. So other scientists all have to, whatever we write grants, we write papers, we have to do mentoring grad students, whatever, reading applications. But because he won his Nobel Prize when he was young, he just didn't have any of that. And as a result, he was able to just spend 100% of his time doing deep thinking. And that was it. I walked into his office. He had a”
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, that's a particularly. Challenging one. You know, one of the things that people do test, which is slightly different than what you're asking, but it's about the way that memory, even though we believe the part that we do remember is accurate, it's the way that that drifts. And just as an example, my colleague Liz Phelps at NYU, right after September 11th, 2001, she went interviewed a bunch of people and said, you know, what exactly did you see on September 11th? And she was also clever enough to ask them, tell me your memories from September 10th the day before. They said, okay, well, I ate lunch here. I did this, whatever. Okay. Then she found these same people a year later and asked them. And it turns out both the highly emotional charge memories and the boring memories had both drifted. It turns out that everything drifts, even things that you think you could never get wrong. People get wrong all the time. So memory is a myth-making machine. We're constantly...”
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, a memory needs to be reconsolidated. It needs to be taken from activity back into the structure of the system. And so it's vulnerable to erasure. Super weird, but I'll just, as a side note Scary memories, very emotionally charged memories, are not erasable, those are unerasable, which sucks actually because those are the ones that trauma victims often want to erase. You have what amounts to a secondary memory system that says Hold on to that because that's the really important stuff.”
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
“Talk about how memory actually has to get moved around in the brain and moved into different states. And there's all kinds of weird stuff. I'll flag one or two, which is one of them is that memory actually has to be reconsolidated after you take it out of long-term storage. So maybe you knew this, but let's say to a listener, if I ask you, what's the name of your fifth grade teacher? You haven't thought about that presumably in a very long time, so you bring that out of cold storage, let's call it, and you're thinking about it now. Now it's an active memory represented by spikes running around in the brain. If you get hit in the head right now, that'll be gone. It'll be gone. Or if I give you a protein synthesis inhibitor”
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
“Because if that is verifiable, that's amazing and cool. And what it illustrates is something that we do know, which is that that stuff is in there. And we know this for several reasons. I mean, a big one is if somebody says a German word, let's say that you haven't heard in years, but you say, oh, yeah, that's right. I remember that word. All that stuff's in there. The other thing is there's a psychological effect called savings, which is, let's say you've studied German for a long time, then you don't study it for years, but then you pick it up again and you say, okay, I'm going to get really serious and study this. You'll be much faster at learning it because all that data is in there in some form. It's in there. And so it's much, much faster the second time around. Just as an example, when astrology.”
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
“First of all, I'd love to actually test with you on this. Like, what I mean is For example, we could just pull up online some basic German test where you're doing something and see whether when in Deep Ketosis if you have a better score than you do otherwise to verify.”
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, 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. I mean, look, I'm raising this cup of water to my mouth. I have no idea how I'm doing the thing with my arm and my elbow and my getting it into my mouth. All I am aware of is whether I spilled it on myself or not. And, you know, it's like that with everything in your life, getting a joke, falling in love, driving a car, all this stuff is happening totally unconsciously.”
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
“Because that's all vision and hearing and all this stuff is. We just experience lots of data when you're a kid, when you're a baby, you don't know how the heck to use your eyes or ears or whatever. You're just getting all this data going into the darkness there and you figure stuff out. You figure out correlations.”
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
“You know, one that we proposed a long time ago, and we sort of did a tiny bit of work on is about stock market data, summarizing what's happening in the stock market. And moment to moment, you can feel it on your skin. There are many ways to do it with whole patterns or just like, hey, I want to follow Google and Meta and whatever. And you can feel what's going on. And what I'm interested in is if we train someone for the long term on this, can they get to the point where they say, I just have this feeling, this gut feeling that oil is crashing right now or something without even being perceptually aware of what all these signals are and what they mean, can they just develop a direct perceptual experience of the economic movements of the planet?”
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 of them is that I think we can really use AI and machine learning for a lot of very useful stuff. I'll give you one example of actually a company that spun off from our company, which is it's these three college students who are doing this awesome thing to help people with autism understand the social context that they're in. So kids with autism usually can't tell if the person they're talking to is angry or happy or sad or whatever. So the wristband just uses machine learning to listen and say, oh, that person is angry or happy or sad or whatever, and then just buzzes to tell you the right answer. And this kind of thing is so useful. Obviously, we are in the middle of this explosion of what's going on in AI. And to be able to use that and do some very sophisticated thing and then just feed the data back into the user and just tell the user the simple answer to the very complicated thing going on out there. I think we're just going to see so much of that happening.”
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
“Discovered quite accidentally is that if you look at water in the microwave range, you can tell if it's drinkable or not. You can tell what water is drinkable and what's not. And nobody knew that before. It's just one of these things where you have to look and say, oh, hey, did you notice this? And so that's what I think we are set up for is so many discoveries of just being in the world in different having different types of vision on the world.”
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 it turns out that all these other things, x-rays, microwaves, and gamma rays and all these things are passing through your body totally invisible to you because you don't have the proper receptors to pick up on it. But I suspect there are a whole bunch of Nobel Prizes hidden out there in different parts of the spectrum. If we could just pick up on those and detect them in our daily lives and be aware of things. And by the way, I should clarify one thing on that. We have all kinds of ways of detecting things in the spectrum in those different parts, but only in the laboratory. We're not walking around and experiencing the world that way. And I think that's what makes all the difference. I'll just give you one example just to clarify what I'm saying. Some colleagues of mine have this company where they look in the microwave range at the oceans to see where the ships are going and they can make estimates of commerce that way and so on. But what they did”
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
“Oh, because several of them are clinical. They have to do it. Let's do, for example, for prosthetic legs or peripheral neuropathies or whatever. You know, we're just feeding data in, but because I don't have any of those problems, not yet, knock on wood. It turns out that I'm into the idea of century expansion. Can I tap into other things? And one of the things, as maybe you remember from my TED Talk, one of the things I've always been fascinated by is how little we see of the world. Always wanted to be tapped into a lot more, just as an example. You may remember this from the TED Talk, you know, the amount, what we call visible light, the Roy G Biv, that's less than a 10 trillionth of the light that's out there, of the electromagnetic spectrum.”
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. I have really no idea if this is a useful thing for marriages, but it is totally cool to be able to know when someone else is feeling stressed out. I mean, the reason we did this over the internet is you can be on the other side of the globe and you could suddenly call your wife and say, you know, hey, maybe you're stressed out. You know, you feeling okay? Anyway, it's just a really interesting thing. So we're exploring lots of things. None of them have clear market paths, but they're the thing that feed me scientifically.”
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 of the cool things that we did is we took one of these smartwatches that can pick up on your skin response and heart rate and heart rate variability and that stuff. And then we using the API we fed that data out and over the internet and then to the wristband. So you can feel all that. But the interesting part is when you take the wristband off and put it on someone else. So let's say your spouse is tapped into your physiology. Your spouse can feel the things that you're.”
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
“A lot of heat coming from the engine block. I can just feel that, or I happen to go in the library the first time I was wearing this, and I could tell there were two empty chairs. I could tell which one was sat in at some point in the last half hour because there's still a heat signature there. And even the books on the display where people have recently picked up a book, they still leave the heat signature there. So it's really amazing. It's like slicing up time in a different way when you're tapped into the infrared range. But we have all kinds of projects where you can feed in data from the internet. stock market data Twitter data”
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 really interesting thing is we've got 70 projects, 70 different projects about sensory addition and sensory expansion. And so some of my favorites are things like for a long time I've been wearing infrared just so I can pick up on what's going on in the infrared range. You can actually do this in the near infrared or the midwave infrared, but in the near infrared, the first time I put it on, I happened to be walking at nighttime in between a couple houses. And I suddenly felt all this infrared radiation, but I couldn't figure out where it was coming from. So I just followed my wrist. And there was a security camera with infrared LEDs, which normally is totally invisible to you. You can't see that. But it was so obvious to me that the security camera was there because I could feel it. But in the mid range, that's when it's really interesting because that's the temperature. That's where it's picking up heat signatures. And so I can like walk through the parking lot and know immediately which cars have been parked there a while and which ones have just pulled up in the last half hour.”
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, exactly, exactly. But the stuff on the inside isn't real, and it doesn't get verification or confirmation on the wrist. And so your brain figures out, oh, okay, I don't need to pay as much attention to that. So that's how that works, which is cool. So we're doing all these things in the hearing space. And that's actually what my company, Neosensory, is on the market with, because that's all a very direct path.”
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 drives down the tinnitus as much as any solution that exists. The reason it works, there are very complicated arguments, but I think the simple thing is that you're teaching the brain what is a real external sound because the skin is giving you verification that the sound actually is real Yeah, exactly, as opposed to the beep on the inside, which is fake news.”
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
“Terrific. Okay, so first thing, by the way, is that everyone calls it tinnitus, and audiologists call it tinnitus, and either one is correct. So, okay, great. Good. Second thing is the way it works is something that is so simple. It's called bimodal stimulation, but all it is is we're playing tones, boop, boop, boop, boop, boop, boop, around your tinnitus frequency, and you're feeling the corresponding buzzes on your skin. So you're hearing the sound in your ears and you're feeling the buzz on your skin.”
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, exactly. And as I change the amplitude of those two motors, I can move that virtual point around. So we're actually stimulating 128 virtual points on the wrist is what we're doing.”
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. So you have higher on the wrist, but your intuition is right that there's just less room on the wrist to stick motors. So we have fewer motors than we had on the vest. It turns out we use an illusion, which is if I stimulate two neighboring motors, you will feel one virtual point in between those two motors.”
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, because your mind is getting the information now through your wrist, through the skin of your wrist, which is essentially acting like a perfect inner ear. We're just transferring the inner ear to the skin, essentially, and that just passes the information into the brain. The brain says, oh, I got it. That was sheep versus sheet versus chic. It gets the information from the wrist and puts it all together”
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
“Wrists all over the world. And that's not only for deafness, but also for tinnitus ringing in the ears. I can explain how that works, if interesting, but also for age-related hearing loss. So as people get older, they lose their high frequencies. So we just use machine learning on this wristband that listens in real time for the high frequency parts of speech, like a TH or an S or a V or a B. And it buzzes your wrist in different ways to let you know, hey, I just heard a TH. I heard a B, a V. And so what happens is your ear is doing all the work at the medium and low frequencies and the wrist band is just clarifying what just God said at the high frequency. And it turns out that works like gangbusters. Your brain can learn to fuse those signals quite easily. And after a few weeks, people, they don't need hearing aids. It replaces a hearing aid.”
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
“Capture sound and turn the sound into patterns of vibration on the skin from high to low frequency, which is exactly what the inner ear does. And we put it on deaf people and trained them and it turns out that works great. You can learn to hear through your skin. And it's because essentially the brain doesn't care how the information gets there as long as it gets there somehow. The brain will figure out what to do with it. And the way it does is by making correlations with other senses. So, you know, you see the dog's mouth move and you feel the barking on your skin and your brain figures out, oh, that's the sound that goes with that. And so I gave the TED talk on it where I showed the vest. And then in the interim, what I did from that time is I shrunk it down to a wristband. I actually spun a company off. So I should say we shrunk it down because the whole company was involved in this very hard work, shrunk it down to a wristband and we're on.”
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