Dr. David Eagleman is a neuroscientist who writes New York Times bestsellers, confronts the darkest and brightest aspects of human nature, and fights for wiser social policy. He is also the host of a new PBS series that premieres October 14. He will speak at McKendree University at 7:30 this evening.
Eagleman, who directs both the Laboratory for Perception and Action and the Initiative on Neuroscience and Law at Baylor College of Medicine, has put together a funny, smart, surprisingly comprehensible six-part series titled The Brain. Airing at 9 p.m. Central every Wednesday from October 14 until November 18, the series paints a warmly human, intelligent picture of the brain’s inner workings.
We spoke with Eagleman about his lab work—designing a vest, for example, that shows our brain can use our skin to detect the subtlest of patterns—and his thoughts on violence, empathy, technology, common sense, and what human beings will look like in the year 3000.
You point out that “in one cubic centimeter of brain tissue, there are as many connections as stars in the Milky Way Galaxy.” How can we even begin to fathom the crazy interconnectedness of our brain, all those millions of signals passing back and forth without our conscious awareness?
We wouldn’t want to be aware of it all. What’s actually happening under the hood is a level of operations our poor little conscious brains would never be able to understand. What you want to do as the CEO is kick your feet up on the desk and take the long view, making the big decisions and only getting alerted when something is going wrong.
It makes me a bit nervous, though, realizing that so much of who I am is taking shape outside my awareness.
For me, the big takeaway is that you are not one thing. You are made up of competing neural networks that are all battling to be in control. It’s a bunch of different drives, and how you act is the outcome of all these battles. That’s why people end up arguing with themselves and cussing at themselves. Who’s talking to whom here?
So that’s why people say, "Well, part of me feels like…” Then how do we develop better judgment?
First, we have got to get rid of this illusion that we are single-minded and everything is a cost-benefit decision. Once that’s understood, there are all kinds of ways you can structure things cleverly to act more along the lines of the person you want to be. I call it making a Ulysses contract with yourself.
To avoid running aground when the Sirens sing?
Exactly. So when you’re in a tempting situation—he knew he’d crash into the rocks and die, so he lashed himself to the mast, because he knew the future Ulysses would be behaving badly. In a moment of sober reflection, you make sure you get rid of all the ice cream. You are doing something now to shape the behavior of your future self.
So all that trendy neuro-economic stuff analyzing our decision-making processes was too simple, right?
No, neuro-economics was actually a reaction against oversimplifying. Classical economics was the one that was too simple. You have this notion of homo economicus, the ideal actor, who is rational and not swayed by emotion or confused by risk. Psychology and neuroscience get the credit for saying, “You know what? People are really complicated. We are confused by risk and influenced by branding.”
Describe our likely descendant in the year 3000. What forces are changing us most radically?
The marriage of our technology and our biology. And I don’t mean things like people using cell phones. I mean ways of being able to feed new information sources directly into the brain. Currently, our brain is locked into our skull and our only access to it is with words, which is very low bandwidth. We are finding ways to get more direct access to what’s going on. In my lab, I’ve build this vest covered in 40 vibrating motors, and through the cellphone I can stream real-time information. In modern times, we don’t use our skin for much of anything. But what we found—I predicted this a while ago—is that the brain can unlock patterns that feel as arbitrary as these vibrations. In Episode 6, I explore a prosthetic arm developed by DARFA. You plug the electrodes directly into the motor cortex of a patient who is paralyzed, and the brain can eavesdrop on the signals. If I’m extrapolating forward, what this means is currently we are totally dependent on these fragile little bodies that we have, but there’s no reason we can’t make all this out of stronger stuff. And that opens up possibilities for interstellar travel…
Yikes. I worry that our brains and emotions haven’t even caught up with our current technology yet.
And I agree with you. I think it’s always going to require the next generation to be born into it. The pace at which technology is changing is hard for adult brains to keep up with at a certain comfort level. My wife’s grandmother is barely keeping up with CD players, but I have a 3-year-old son who was born into a world of iPads.
What single change in our brains would most dramatically decrease violence?
Empathy. Humans are exquisitely social creatures, and a lot of the circuitry of the human brain is about other people. This is called social neuroscience. It’s why we are such a social species, why we group together, and how we have been able to build civilizations. But the downside is that for every group, there are also out-groups. When you are thinking about someone who is a member of your out-group, the regions of your brain that are involved in understanding them as a person get dialed down. Neurally, you are less empathetic.
So do our brains get dialed down even before we’re carefully taught to hate?
No, they go hand in hand. Propaganda is a perfect tool for dialing down your empathy. It’s a universal tool: For every culture, the out-group "are like animals." For Episode 5, I flew into Srebenica in Bosnia, the most recent location of genocide in Europe. I went to a village where 8,000 Bosnian Muslims were slaughtered in one event. I show that, measurably, parts of your brain that are responsive to that person as another person show less activity with an out-group. Genocide is usually studied in the framework of politics or economics, but for a real understanding of why it keeps happening, one more lens is needed, and that’s neuroscience.
So now we’ve got that lens. How do we dial the empathy back up?
Through education. If we can successfully teach our children about how the brain responds to in-groups and out-groups through propaganda, they won’t fall for it.
Doesn’t temperament play a role too, though? How comfortable people are with something new or different, how rigid they are about what’s right and good…
Along any axis we measure, we find that people are really different from one another. Brains are as unique as snowflakes. That’s a combination of the genetics and every experience they have had in their lives. And that’s part of the challenge. Politicians always assume that making social policy will be really easy. But you are the single inhabitant of your brain.
What if I’m out in the desert and I see a blue person. I’ve heard no propaganda about blue people. Will I instinctively classify them in an out-group and feel less empathy for them?
I think it would depend on a lot of things. Brains are good at—no, we’re not good at it at all. Brains are very eager to make an assessment: friend or foe? If the blue person is sending some signal that tells you this could be an ally, you could still feel empathy. You can see this with children—they love everybody equally.
You describe a brain with a great deal going on beneath our awareness, yet it seems very different from Freud’s notion of the subconscious.
Well, actually, Freud was the first guy to really nail it, to say most of our beliefs and actions are coming from this subterranean depth that we have no access to. What I don’t know is why it took so many thousands of years for humans to even come to that idea!
Because we like to think we’re in control?
Yeah, I guess.
What do we still not understand about the brain?
The problem of consciousness. Why does it feel like something when your brain’s running in a particular way? In deep sleep, it doesn’t feel like anything. As soon as you wake up, your consciousness flickers to life and you think oh, here I am. How you build consciousness out of physical pieces and parts is an unsolved mystery. Now we know these are related because if you change the physical part—put in alcohol, get brain damage—you change the consciousness. So somehow your consciousness depends on the physical, but what we don’t know is how that world arises from the physical.
Maybe in the year 3000…
What to expect from The Brain’s six episodes:
- October 14: "What Is Reality?" Dr. David Eagleman takes viewers on an extraordinary journey, exploring how the brain, locked in silence and darkness without direct access to the world, conjures the rich and beautiful world that we all take for granted.
- October 21: "What Makes Me?" Explore how we are our brains, how our personality, emotions, and memories are encoded as neural activity. The process of becoming continues through our lives. We change our brain, and our brain changes us.
- October 28: "Who Is in Control?" Eagleman explores the unconscious brain and reveals that everything from our movements to our decisions to our behavior is largely controlled and orchestrated by an invisible world of unconscious neural activity.
- November 4: "How Do I Decide?" Learn how the brain navigates the tens of thousands of conscious decisions that we make every day and the many more unconscious decisions that we make about everything from whom we find attractive to what we perceive.
- November 11: "Why Do I Need You?" See how the brain relies on other brains to thrive and survive. This neural interdependence underpins our need to group together—and our capacity to do the best and the worst of things to each other.
- November 18: "Who Will We Be?" Join Eagleman as he journeys into the future and asks what’s next for the human brain and for our species. He speculates that our descendants may be so different from us, we’ll be strangers to them.
