Dr. David Eagleman: After many many decades of people debating this, you might have figured out the reason why we dream. Yes. And it's a simple answer. So if you go blind, the visual cortex in the back of the brain gets taken over by hearing and by touch and by other things. In fact, our colleagues at Harvard did an experiment where they blindfolded normally cighted people. And you could start seeing that takeover happening after 60 minutes. And that's when we realized, wow, the purpose of dreaming is to defend the visual territory from takeover from the other senses. But what fascinates me about brain plasticity and what I've devoted my career to is figuring out the way that we can be the sculptors of our own brains and how it gives us an opportunity to become the kind of person we would like to be.

Host: And can we do that?

Dr. David Eagleman: Yes. Here's the thing. Your brain peaked at the age of two. Okay. So at the beginning you've got fluid intelligence, meaning you could learn anything. But now that you have grown up in this world, you've got crystallized intelligence, meaning you know how to drive a car. You know how to operate a cell phone. You know how to run a business. And so your brain doesn't require as much change which means that the structure of the brain is always degenerating.

Host: So what are the set of actions that will fundamentally change my brain and make me that type of person who's motivated and disciplines and who has high agency and attacks the world.

Dr. David Eagleman: So this is something I've studied in my lab for decades now. And the key is that

Host: and what about AI and the social media debate as it relates to brain development?

Dr. David Eagleman: Well, I happen to be a cyber optimist for young people. I think it's going to make them much smarter than the generation that came before. And here's why.

Host: Interesting.

Dr. David Eagleman: Dr. David Eagleman, what made you so fascinated about the brain? And why should everybody listening be fascinated about the brain as well? Here's what I think it is. When I was 8 years old, I fell off of the roof of a house that was under construction and I fell 12 feet and broke my nose on the floor below. But the whole thing seemed to take a long time. I did the calculation and figured out that it only took 6 of a second to get from the top to the bottom. And I couldn't figure out why it seemed to have taken so long. So I think that got me really interested in perception and the machinery by which we view the world and taken in and what is actually real versus what's a construction of the brain. And that's how what I've devoted my career to is figuring out how the brain which is locked inside the skull. It's about three pounds. How it constructs this model of the world and which things we can take as reality and which things we shouldn't.

Host: I think most people don't even know they have a there's a brain there almost. It sounds like a strange thing to say, but we've never really most of us haven't really seen our own brains at all. We've never been able to touch our own brains at all. So, it's it's easy to fall into the trap of thinking that everything I experience is true and is reality. So, I'm wondering how a deeper understanding of all this stuff can help me live a better life.

Dr. David Eagleman: Yeah. One of the things that I started writing about years ago is that I think we're not I think we often think of ourselves as individuals, meaning not divisible into other things. But really, you are a team of rivals. So, you've got all these neural networks that have different drives making different suggestions to you.

Host: What's a neural network?

Dr. David Eagleman: Um, so in the brain, you've got 86 billion cells called neurons. And these are communicating with each other at a blindingly fast rate. Many of these cells are hooked up in networks. So, they're, you know, this guy's talking to this guy and this guy, and they're all in particular networks. The thing is, you can actually get competing networks. So, for example, Stephen, if I drop some chocolate chip cookies in front of you, part of your brain wants to eat it. It's a good energy source. Part of your brain says, "Don't eat it. I'll gain weight." Part of you says, "Okay, I'll eat one, but I'll go to the gym tonight." The point is you are arguing with yourself. You are conflicted. This is what makes humans so interesting is that we have all these voices trying to drive us to different conclusions about our behavior.

The way that your ship of state moves depends on the vote of the neural parliament at any time. So understanding this I think is really critical to navigating our own lives because all of us do things where retrospectively we regret it. We say I shouldn't have eaten that whole bag of chips or done the you know the alcohol or the drugs or what like everybody has regrets all the time with things and it's because you have different voices in charge at different times. Okay.

Dr. David Eagleman: Part of what this leads to is what we call the Ulisses contract. So a Ulisses contract is where you do something now to prevent yourself from behaving badly in the near future. Just as an example, you know, when people go to Alcoholics Anonymous, the first thing they're told is clear all the alcohol out of the house. Because even if you feel like, look, I'm in a moment of sober reflection. I don't want to ever drink again. If you have alcohol in the house, you're going to bust into that cabinet at some point on a festive Saturday night or a lonely Sunday night or whatever. So, what you do is you constrain your future behavior by setting things up in the right way so your future uh the future you can't behave badly. We naively think, okay, well, I know who I am. I'm just one person. But but you're not. And under different circumstances, you're tempted by different things and you'll do different kinds of behavior. So having a sense of what's going on under the hood gives us an opportunity to be more closely aligned with the kind of person we would like to be

Host: because it feels like there's just one well I do argue with myself in my head sometimes but it feels like there is just one me and so when I hear that voice say Steve you should have that cookie and it's 1:00 a.m. And then the other voice says, "No, you shouldn't." I think it's kind of the same person just tussling with himself,

Dr. David Eagleman: right? Well, but that tustling with himself implies different political parties that are all battling it out. You know, when you look at a parliament, you've got all these political parties that all love their country. They just have different ideas of how to steer it. And this is what's going on uh in in the brain all the time.

Host: So, what does one do about that? How do I make do I do I have to make a list contract?

Dr. David Eagleman: I think it's very useful to make that sort of thing. But also just understanding oneself. I mean part of the you know there was this Greek admonition to know thyself. This was a sign they had in various places, various temples and stuff. But I think that becomes know thyelves. And the better we know ourselves, the more we can get rid of the illusion that we are one person. Because all any of us need to do is look back on our behavior to say, "Oh yeah, in some circumstances I would do that. and other circumstances I think is a terrible idea. So this is all to the goal of understanding who you are.

Host: What are the big misconceptions about the brain that people have gone through their life believing?

Dr. David Eagleman: I mean that's one of them. Something that is true that kind of could fall in place of that is just this fundamental idea that our brains are plastic or sort of adaptable because when I found out that I could change my brain by what I do, I found that to be really really inspiring.

Host: Yes, that that's exactly right. So brain plasticity, if someone hasn't heard that term before, it sounds like a weird term, but the reason it came about 100 years ago is because the great psychologist William James pointed out that, you know, if you take a piece of plastic, what we like about that material that we call plastic is that you can mold it into a shape and it'll hold that shape. And that's what your brain does. So if I ask you the name of your third grade teacher, you can remember that name even though it's been a long time because your neural networks changed and held on to that piece of information. Okay? Well, our whole lives our brains are changing every moment.

Dr. David Eagleman: So now we have certain doors that close at different times. So just as an example, um you need to learn language in the first several years of your life. If you don't learn language, you can never get the concept of language. Your brain will never figure that out.

Host: You're not saying you can't learn a new language as an adult. You're saying the concept of

Dr. David Eagleman: the concept of language, the concept that I can name things and I can ask for things and so on. Just that never clicks in the brain. For example, in Romania at the fall of Chuchescu, there were tens of thousands of kids in the orphanages because their parents had been killed. It was too many kids. And so the staff there said, "Look, the kids will get, you know, clingy if you pay too much attention to them. So here's what we're going to do. We're going to feed the kids, but we're not going to hold them and we're not going to talk to them." And all these children grew up with real cognitive deficits as a result.

Dr. David Eagleman: Here's the thing about brain plasticity. Human beings have a a similar brain to all our neighbors in the animal kingdom. If you compare our brain to a horse brain, a dog brain, anything like that, it's the same general structures and stuff. But what we have is much more of the wrinkly outer bit called the cortex. It's the outer 3 mm. And maybe we'll come back to why that matters so much. But the other thing that mother nature tweaked with us, it's small genetic tweaks. But we have much more plasticity, adaptability such that when a horse drops into the world, it's doing the same thing that horses did 100,000 years ago. It's just, you know, eat mate. But when a human drops in the world, we learn everything that's happened before us. And then we springboard off the top of that. So we living in the 21st century, we say, "Oh great, you know, physics, math, this, that, art, blah, blah, great. We got everything that's happened before us. Now let's do our own thing." And that's what's so special about the plasticity of the human brain, the adaptability of it. The downside, the gamble is that mother nature drops human brains into the world kind of halfbaked and we then get to absorb everything. But in the rare circumstance where you're not getting the right input, then then that ends up really in trouble because it's only halfbaked. So when it comes to language, we can learn multiple languages when we're young. That's very easy, but it gets harder and harder as that goes along. And various other things become harder. And here's why. It's because I I mentioned this earlier, but the job of the brain is to make a model of the world so it can operate within it.

Host: You went from having a brain that had high fluid intelligence to now having a brain that has high crystallized intelligence. What that means is at the beginning you can learn anything. You could learn any language. You could have dropped into any area. You could have dropped into 13th century Japan when I was young.

Dr. David Eagleman: When you were young, when you were a baby, if you had dropped out of the womb in, you know, 10th century Mongolia, you would have said like, "Okay, cool. Learn lang." You would you would be a 10th century Mongolian. But as it happens, you dropped into this era, you know, a certain place and time and neighborhood and culture and family. And so you learn that that's who you become is that person. We often think that plasticity diminishes as you age. But it's not simply that it's diminishing. It's that you are getting the right answers about how to operate in the world. And so you don't have to change as much. Your brain doesn't require as much change.

Host: What if I want to change?

Dr. David Eagleman: Yes. So it turns out you still can change. That's the key is that the reason brains change less and less is because they don't have to. But when things get upside down, just as one example, everything about the pandemic really stunk, except for one thing, I think the tiny silver lining is that all of us had to reassess. Oh my gosh, wait, how is the world working? I thought I knew how the world worked, but now I don't know if there's going to be toilet paper at the store. I don't know if the bank's going to be open. I don't know if I can get coffee at the coffee shop. Like, everything was different. As awful as it was, it's really useful to challenge your internal model of the world and get to do that as an adult. We don't usually get to.

Host: So, if I want to change, what would you recommend that I do? If I want to if I want to change who I am, say I'm stubborn, I'm not motivated, um, and I want to be a different person.

Dr. David Eagleman: The key is challenge. The key is seeking challenge. So, it turns out that where we always want to be is in between the levels of frustrating but achievable. and you want to take on new tasks. You want to seek novelty to find yourself in that zone and push yourself to do things that you just haven't done before. And one of the things that's so wonderful about the modern world, you know, everyone's got complaints about the internet and social media and stuff like that, but the good news is it deep it exposes you to so much more than you ever even knew was out there. The key is to actively seek those challenges and seek new things and seek to become expert in various sorts of fields. And and I think the key is that once you become good at something, you you have to drop that and take on something you're not good at. This is the best thing that you can do for your brain. The reason is because what you're doing is you're constantly building new roadways and pathways in the brain.

Dr. David Eagleman: There's a study that's been going on for for decades now called the religious orders study where a bunch of Catholic nuns agreed to donate their brains for autopsy when they passed away. What the researchers discovered when they look at the brain carefully is that some fraction of these nuns had Alzheimer's disease. Their brains were physically degenerating with the ravages of of this dementia, but they didn't show any of the cognitive deficits that one normally has. They didn't seem to be having memory problems and so on. It turns out it's because all these nuns lived in these convents till the day they died. They had social challenges and they had fights with their fellow sisters and they played games with their fellow sisters and they were they had chores and responsibilities and they were doing stuff. What that means is even as the tissue the brain tissue was physically degenerating, they were making new roadways and bridges all the time.

Host: And so that's what kept them cognitively healthy. We call that cognitive reserve. Contrast this with with people who retire at 65 and they go home and they watch television and their social circles shrink and so on. That's when you've really got concerns because you're not building the new pathways. Is there data to support that that when you retire, if you retire early or if you retire say in your 60s, it increases your probability of an earlier death or cognitive decline?

Dr. David Eagleman: Almost certainly with cognitive decline because you're just not getting the challenge at that point. You're just coasting on your internal model. this. It's tragic, but what happens often is that people's hearing gets worse. And so by the time they retire, let's say in their mid-60s, it's not really that fun for them to go out to parties and restaurants anymore because they can't quite hear. And so there there all these converging reasons why their social lives shrink. But it turns out social life is one of the most important things that we can do for our brains because there's an expression we sometimes use in neuroscience, which is that nothing is as hard for the brain as other people. because you never know what the other person's going to say and do and how they'll react emotionally and so on. So, you're constantly on your toes with other people. And if you're not doing that anymore, that ends up being a problem.

Host: What about the you there's been a couple of studies that have come out that say things like your brain's going to atrophy if you don't continue to write or um if you just defer all of your learning to things like chatgbt or other AI models. But one of the things I've wondered is if I'm going through my business life and I'm encountering hard problems and every time I encounter a hard problem, I drop it into an AI. The AI spits out a textbased answer. I copy and paste that and send it as my response. presumably there's some kind of important part of the learning cycle or the you know neurological development that I'm like foregoing there I'm missing that I probably should you know you said earlier about doing hard things what I'm doing there is I'm avoiding the hard thing which is like thinking about it and trying to understand it

Dr. David Eagleman: yeah here's I think the really important distinction there's vicious friction in our lives and there's virtuous friction so vicious friction is all the stupid stuff that you have to do like hey Stephen for your business I need you to cop copy this spreadsheet over here and fill in all these cells and and do your taxes and whatever. Okay, that if we can push that off to AI is massively important for for improving human lives. There's really not benefit in vicious friction. But virtuous friction is, hey Stephen, I really want you to think about what is the optimal way to do this business. What is the best structure for this? How do we actually go DT to C? How do we go B2B on this? What's the what's the approach here that we're going to take that you haven't done before that would be amazing? That's virtuous friction because you're really using your brain to learn stuff that way. So that's the first distinction that matters is get rid of all the busy work. There's no honor in that. I mean I'll just mention in the 1990s there was this big debate about whether we should have kids use desk calculators or not. And thank god that finally got resolved and we let kids use calculators so that we can learn, you know, couple we can spend a couple days learning long division, but you don't have to spend six months on it because who cares? With the virtuous friction, there's real opportunity to surf the wave of AI so that you are figuring out these tough problems with the aid of somebody who cares about your problem and is willing to talk with you 247 and never gets tired of talking to you about it. And so you are not just copying and pasting, but you're working with the AI to come up with ideas that were beyond what you would have come up with. Because I mentioned earlier about internal models, we have pretty narrow fence lines and you can think of all these things, but you don't even know what you don't know. So, if you can have somebody who's willing to talk with you, an expert in all of humankind's knowledge, willing to talk with you about it as much as you want, there's a real opportunity there to have a synergy where collectively you both come up with a better idea than either of you could have alone.

Host: But is there a way for that relationship to take place so that I actually benefit? Because, you know, in the example I gave, I'm just I take the question I was asked, I put it into an AI, it gives me an answer, I copy and paste it back to the person that asked me the question.

Dr. David Eagleman: that would happen if you really didn't care about the person asking you the question or the question.

Host: I mean this is what a lot of people are doing like I get so many email because you know we interview a lot of candidates who join the business and so I see tens of thousands of emails sometimes a week that I mean I don't see all of them but the ones that I see I often know that you know because we've sent them five questions or a task and I look at it and go this is I can almost predict the exact model that sent it to me because they all have a different personality so I go oh this one the person put into Gemini or this one the person put it into chatbt.

Dr. David Eagleman: Yeah, exactly. And it's full of contrastive constru construction like it's not this, it's that. Yeah, exactly. And then the M dashes. Exactly.

Host: I'm really asking like is the person that did that benefiting from from it?

Dr. David Eagleman: No.

Dr. David Eagleman: Well, no, but for a couple reasons. One is that, you know, you and it it triggers your red flag and so that does not do anyone any good. see so many of my colleagues posting on LinkedIn these very obvious AI things and it irritates me because I feel like I'm not going to spend my time reading that because of I call this this the effort phenomenon which is um in in psychology we care a lot about things that seemed like they took a lot of effort and there's something about seeing an an AI post that's just irritating because it's so obviously AI

Host: that's a really interesting idea the effort phenomenon

Dr. David Eagleman: yeah I've been I've been writing about this for a while because um it turns out there are psychology ology studies where if I offer you two pieces of art and one of them looks like, you know, let's say it's a a red dot in the middle of a white canvas and the other one is, you know, bottle caps stacked up and glued in this great shape or whatever, you'll pay you'll pay much more for the thing that looks like it took a lot of effort. People will pay more for a real diamond than a synthetic lab grown diamond, which is exactly the same thing. It's just carbon in the matrix. But they feel like, oh well, mother nature took hundreds of millions of years of effort on this one, but not over here. It just took a few days in the lab. So, there's a million ways where we care about that a lot. When it comes to this AI thing, um, yes, anybody who's just popping back something to you, it just feels like, all right, they took the the path of least resistance, and I'm not so interested.

Host: I want to know from a neuroscience perspective whether they benefit.

Dr. David Eagleman: Presumably, they don't benefit too much either. I mean, it's hard to know exactly how many times they went back and forth with it. They could have said, "Hey, Chad GPT, thank you for this, but I'm kind of this more of this person. When I really think about it, this is the thing that inspires me." Not not what you suggested. So, so somebody could put effort into it. It's just that we can't know that when we get the AI response.

Host: One of the things I've learned from doing this podcast and all these episodes is everything is a trade-off. And and if you don't know what the trade you're making, then you're often at great risk. And so like some of my friends will say, "Oh, I take this pill and it's amazing. It does all these things for me. It's the most amazing thing ever. I can just focus for 24 hours a day and I'm so productive now. And I go, "What's the what's the downside?" And they go, "Oh, there's no downside." And I go, "Hm." Like, so that's what I mean. It's even worse when you don't you don't know the trade you're making. And so with AI, I go, "Okay, if it's making me wildly more efficient or productive, what trade am I making?" I think understanding this it's probably not two categories but a spectrum from vicious friction to virtuous friction but really paying attention to what is virtuous friction what would make me a better person if I actually put the effort into this that matters a lot.

Dr. David Eagleman: and I will say for us as professors for you looking for job candidates we need to change how we're asking the questions if we just say hey write answer these five questions of course everyone's going to use it for example in my classes is at Stanford. I I don't have people turn in a final paper anymore. That was from previous life before AI. Now I have them do projects as their final thing where they're uh you know running an experiment on something. And of course they use AI to help them generate some of the issues, but they have to deal with other people and look at the data and figure out what's wrong and that kind of stuff.

Host: I worry that it's getting into the age of, you know, the whole calculator thing you said where maybe actually it is now you need to assess them on their ability to use the AI, not to succeed without it.

Dr. David Eagleman: Yeah, agreed. This is the whole game for all of us, I think, is figuring out how to surf this wave of AI where it can make us super human. We can just be better, so much better than anything we ever were doing before because we have immediate access to knowledge and facts that either we had forgotten or we never knew existed. And so we should be surfing that wave. So I I I totally agree with you on that point. If you can figure out how to change your interview questions so that you're seeing, hey, can this person really get the speed?

Host: With everything you know about learning and neuroplasticity and expanding one's brain, is there a anything else you can say to the audience about how they should use AI so that they become a superhum?

Dr. David Eagleman: Interesting. I you know, look, I I have been talking to my friends about this issue a lot lately and I I mentioned how I've become so much better at home improvement stuff. I just know so much more. Each one of my friends has something like that where like, hey, you know what? I've actually gotten so much better at this super random thing that I never even thought I, you know, I never thought about it explicitly, but because I'm always asking AI questions about that and it's giving me the answers. It's not simply that it gives me the answers and I forget it. It gives me the answers and I remember it. I become better and better because it's like the way that Alexander the Great had Aristotle as his tutor and could ask him anything and learn great stuff from him. We've all got Aristotle in our pocket now and we can become better at the things that we want to do, the things that resonate with us for whatever reason.

Host: If everyone's got Aristotle in their pocket, how does one create an edge?

Dr. David Eagleman: I think it has to do with we're all just going to be running faster. In the same way that when Steve Jobs introduced Apple computers, he said this is like a bicycle for the mind. What he meant by that was that for millions of years we've been walking bipedily and and then just in the last nancond of evolution we invented the bicycle and suddenly humans can move faster because of the bicycle and he said having a personal computer is like a bicycle for the mind and I think of AI now as like a motorcycle for the mind it's it allows us to move so much faster so now it's a motorcycle race and there will be people who are much faster than other people because they're really using that optimally.

Host: What might I I install as a practice every week when I'm speaking to my AI? to expand my brain and give me a big cognitive reserve.

Dr. David Eagleman: Oh, ask it questions that you're curious about about anything. Just asking questions. Here's one thing I do all the time. I'll say, "Hey, I've been thinking about this. You know, I on my podcast, I do a lot of monologues and so I'll start talking to it and I'll say, "Hey, I've got this idea that I'm thinking about. What if blah blah blah blah." And then I'll say, "Here's my idea. Give me pros and cons." You know, tell me why this is wrong. And I do that pretty much with everything that I ask it if I'm proposing some, you know, stupid seed of an idea and it really gives me the counter arguments and I really engage with it. That is the important part, I think. And by the way, I just want to say I think for the next generation that we're teaching this, there really only two things we can teach because all the details of, you know, hey, let's teach computer programming or something, that's probably already gone as a useful thing. So what we can teach is critical thinking and creativity. That's it.

Host: I think that's such an important point, this point about asking your AI why you might be wrong. I I think I've had most of my paradigm shifting moments when I've come to an an AI model that I was using with a very with very high conviction. And the prompt that always I think is most sort of expansive in terms of my intellectual knowledge is when I say to it, be brutally honest about your opinion. Think for yourself and be objective and tell me where my blind spots are. There's something innate with within us all where we don't actually want to be wrong. We often I think as a natural reflex and this is why people get really sort of trapped in echo chambers of political opinion and you know Leon Fesser talked about this idea of cognitive dissonance when something you believe contrasts with new information and how it makes you feel uncomfortable there's something when I type that out when I when I love the idea or the thing I've written or the memo I've written this new idea and I go on tell me why I'm completely completely wrong and it eviscerates me it is both uncomfortable but it feels incredibly important because then then it's like I've I've grown. But these AIs, they're they're programmed almost to like kiss my ass.

Dr. David Eagleman: Yes. Although, you know, Chatupati released a very sickopantic version, I don't know, maybe a year ago. Meaning it compliments you. You give some idea and it says, "Oh, Stephen, that's the best idea I've ever heard. You're a genius and blah blah." And that didn't last very long, that model, because nobody actually liked it. So, you're exactly right. And and I'm sure most listeners know this, but you can tell your AI to be brutally honest with you all the time. You can tell them to do that all the time and it'll do that. So you can you can establish the kind of person that you're talking to. Here's the thing. You're right. Of course, people don't like to be wrong. It can be socially embarrassing. It can be uncomfortable. And yet, there's something very different when you're talking to your AI. It's a very private thing. And you say, "Hey, tell me why I'm brutally wrong." And when it tells you, you think, "Oh, thank God it's telling me that instead of like a real human." So I I think a lot of that is alleviated with AI. We we don't feel as bad about being wrong there.

Host: I often hear the claim that AI could never be creative.

Dr. David Eagleman: It's massively creative. Here's why. Creativity in the brain, all creativity is is you absorb your world. the whole world around you, every experience you've ever had. And then you're bending and breaking and blending those cognitive concepts into new remixes. That's all creativity is. And you're doing that all the time. Whether you're just trying to think of what to say next or what recipe to make next or what patent to do or what company to start, you're just remixing the stuff that you already know. And that's why, you know, I don't know, take Beethoven, he could have written any kind of music that was being done anywhere in the world. But of course, he didn't. like that's what he grew up with was the music and his local culture and so on. What we have now is a much broader diet as I mentioned before where we can get everything going in. But the point I want to make here is that AI that's what it does. It remixes stuff that's come in. So AI is massively creative. The part of creativity that AI can't do right now is selection. Meaning it can generate a 100 pictures but it doesn't know which one to pick. It doesn't know which one is going to be the most appealing to you. But it can remix beautifully.

Host: But neither do humans, right? So if I asked an intern to make me 100 pictures, I mean, I could get my AI to pick one, but it wouldn't know what the intern or the AI wouldn't know which one I loved.

Dr. David Eagleman: The intern would have a much better shot at it. And as the intern is there for a while, he or she becomes quite good at getting, oh, okay, I get Steven's taste. It would be this one.

Host: And the AI can't learn that what my taste is.

Dr. David Eagleman: I don't think the AI could learn that about visual images because when it generates the pixels, it's doing this, you know, this magical stuff under the hood where it's deciding which pixels and how they diffuse together and, you know, mix the image, but it doesn't know how to read that image like, oh yeah, the way this is and blah blah that'll really appeal to Steve. It does it it's not seeing the image except as a bunch of pixels. Hm. Hm.

Host: You need to be a human for that

Dr. David Eagleman: Quite possibly. But here's the interesting thing. Human art constantly evolves and all AI is trained on is what has been done before and what has worked. And so if I asked it, let's say we composed five different songs and said, "Hey AI, which song is going to be better?" It's going to say something that's right in the middle of the distribution of popular songs. But that's not what actually makes it next year and the year after. It's new things. It's new twists that that nobody has seen before. That's what we love. That's what we seek as consumers. And so because AI can only be trained up on what already exists, it's never going to get the new thing at the edge.

Dr. David Eagleman: right? But here's the thing and you know that we all know this which is that the code never lasts. So humans have this pull where they're always seeking things between novelty and familiarity. So we like things where we recognize the brand and we recognize what the singer has done before. But there has to be novelty or else we're not going to go for it. We're not going to listen to that boy band for the next 10 years doing the same song over and over. So you're of course right that we, you know, we want a bit of familiarity. We want to be anchored, but we definitely seek the new. This is what humans always do. This is why car companies always release the next model even though the current model is perfectly fine. This is why haircuts evolve. This is why fashion evolves through the years. Um because we always care about novelty.

Host: So the way that the record industry and the radio industry make something familiar is they blast the same song at you on every radio station for a long period of time until it breaks past being just novel, just new and it becomes familiar. And like I saw this graph which shows that the a song that you'll love is right there in the middle of like it's new enough that you're still into it but it's um familiar now because you've heard it so many times that you love it and you'll if anyone listening the first time you hear a song you might not love it as much as once you've heard it like 20 times

Dr. David Eagleman: and then at some point you've heard it too much. Yeah. And it comes back down the other side of the cover where it's now too familiar.

Host: Yeah. That's exactly right. And so we're always seeking that tension in the middle. And yeah, companies run into this all the time. Like sometimes they try things that are too novel that just completely fail. You know, Coca-Cola tried this a long time ago with introducing new Coke and no one liked it, whatever. Um, and other companies like what was that company? Blackberry with the the little thumb things that you can press the physical keyboard on the phone. They failed because they wouldn't change fast enough. But anyway, companies that make it are always staying in that uh sweet spot.

Dr. David Eagleman: I completely agree with you. I think I think it's so funny. I did a post on LinkedIn the other day saying that maybe the like interesting paradox or interesting outcome of AI is that every other iteration of technology made us less human. And maybe the intelligence now has gotten to a point where it's now forcing us to be more human because that is all that kind of remains in a way that maybe the the technology has gotten so good like social media didn't make us more human in any capacity. But maybe this is the moment where it goes we've got this now go do what only you as a human can do which is like go out there Taylor Swift and sing in front of people IRL.

Host: Go and do something in the real world. Even for like nurses um and doctors, maybe they shouldn't be filling out admin and paperwork anymore. Maybe they should be holding your hand and giving you, you know, in real life care that only a human could do.

Dr. David Eagleman: I totally agree.

Host: And so maybe that's the like the the positive upside to all of this is um finally, you know, we've been on this journey with technology and finally it's delivered upon its promise.

Dr. David Eagleman: I totally agree. And by the way, you know, AI relationships, by one estimate, there's a billion people having relationships with AI, like a girlfriend or boyfriend kind of thing. Okay? And so for people like us who grew up before that existed, we think, "Oh my gosh, that's weird." But in fact, I think it might become helpful because it can be a sandbox as long as we have the proper feedback. In the end, we have millions of years of evolution driving us towards being with the person you love, touching another human being, watching the stars, taking her out to dinner with your parents, like all you know, we care about that. And so this worry that people sometimes talk about about oh people are just going to be on their phone with their AI relationship I don't think is realistic for almost everybody because it gives us the chance to you know hopefully sandbox some things about relationships and get over some dumb things with relationships and then we can actually be with our fellow humans.

Host: as it relates to things like dementia, which I know is a fear that a lot of people have. A lot of people are suffering with dementia, I think increasingly. In fact, if I was trying to save off dementia, what advice would you give me, David?

Dr. David Eagleman: Yeah, keep your brain active. Keep it active till the day you die. Take on new challenges. And as soon as you get good at something like, you know, sudoku, drop it and pick up some that you're not good at.

Host: And in simple terms, why?

Dr. David Eagleman: It's because you're forcing your brain to make changes. Otherwise, your brain says, "Okay, I got this. I got the world. I understand what's going on. There's no real particular need for me to change." And the fact is that the structure of the brain is always degenerating. And when you get something like a disease like Alzheimer's disease, it degenerates much faster. And what you want to always be doing is building new roadways and fashioning new paths that had not been walked before.

Host: So that there's more to degenerate, which gives me more left over once that degeneration begins.

Dr. David Eagleman: Yeah, I that's Yeah, I think that's a good way to look at it. your pathways are falling apart and if you can build new pathways which requires effort you have to actually care and pursue and do the thing even as parts of the thing have fallen apart you still have ways of getting from A to B

Host: what do I need to stay away from in terms of chemicals or supplement I don't know or food I don't know

Dr. David Eagleman: yeah obviously there's just been a lot more emphasis on getting good sleep and good diet and this stuff really matters I think that's really useful for the brain I mean it's fascinating to watch what's happened in the latest generation in terms of alcohol ol consumption. I live up in in Silicon Valley and there's a lot of people who have wineries just north of me and they're like selling half their acorage. It's absolutely fascinating to see what's happening there. I will say I have a friend who's who's in her 20s who said that she's in favor of bringing drinking back. Why? Because she said we go to parties and everything's so awkward and no one knows how to talk to one another. And so they're missing something else. they're missing the the dumb mistakes category that we all got to enjoy growing up. So, it it is a really interesting balance of of how abstious one wants to become.

Host: David, we have a closing tradition where the last guest leaves a question, the next guest, not knowing who they're leaving it for. Question left for you is, what do you wish most for our planet over the next 10 years?

Dr. David Eagleman: You know, I think I would come back to this piece about the complexification of relationships, which is to say, if we could just get a little bit smarter about understanding people out groups as being humans with lives with their own thing going on. doesn't mean we have to love them or agree with them, but if we can just get to that point, I don't think we'll ever hit world peace, but at least we'd have slightly less polarization. So, I'm I'm definitely in favor of that and I do think it's possible and I do think AI can help us get there by challenging us on these points and saying, "Hey, that group that you've already dismissed as an out group, what if I told you this story about this person? What if I introduced you to this person?" That kind of stuff. and you know having there's all kinds of social movements that have sprung up that allow people of different political opinions to come together in a room and talk with one another again it's not that anyone has to change their mind but they can say hey you know what I really like that person I thought that was a cool person a sweet person nice person and and now I understand that somebody who I have seen with my own eyes has a different opinion on this than idea

Host: is that wishful thinking to some degree

Dr. David Eagleman: I don't think so because these things are happening all over the place and and

Host: the macro is is division isn't it It's polarization echo chambers. There's now I think there's now 20 social networks or some crazy number that have more than 20 million people on them which means that social networks are splintering off into niches and interests and you know there's like Rumble and Bumble and then there's like threads and X and Facebook snap Instagram and and what we're seeing is more and more interest group.

Dr. David Eagleman: Yeah. Here's what I would say. There's absolutely nothing new about echo chambers because it was always the case that your neighbors and your community and whatever, that's what you thought was reality. I'm actually quite optimistic about the existent the mere existence of the internet because at least we are exposed to the fact that there are lots of different points of view. It used to be in places like the USSR, they controlled the media tightly so that everything you saw was a news um approved story, but now you see all the points of view. Now, many of them might drive you crazy and whatever, but at least you know that there are people out there that believe in that. And I think that's really useful. If I had to decide between state control where there's a single story or seeing the whole messy spectrum of opinions, I'd rather see the latter.