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Success Story with Scott D. Clary
David Eagleman - Brain Expert & Entrepreneur | The Science Behind Peak Mental Performance
01:30:13
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- [00:00]
Scott Clary
Hey everyone, Scott here. I just want to take a second and say thanks for listening to the podcast over the past couple years. Obviously this wouldn't be possible without each and every one of you. I have a favor to ask so I would love to get some more information about you and why you listen to the podcast and why you listen to the show and why you tune in every week. And I have put together a short survey and we are using this to help us sort of inform what type of content we want to create and the direction of the podcast going forward. This information is not shared with anyone else, so this is just for us internally and I put together a link so scottdclary.com survey where you can go and you can fill in some information so we can know what kind of content you love. Also, for the first 100 people that respond to the survey, you will be entered into a draw for a hundred dollar Amazon gift card. So we'll be giving out one of those to the first people that respond. It should not take more than two minutes of your time to fill out the whole survey. It's really not that long and it will help shape the future of the podcast. So I really appreciate each and every one of you and thank you for listening. A huge shout out to bamboohr for supporting today's episode. Let me share something I've learned from building multiple businesses. Your time has a dollar value and if you're spending hours on HR tasks, you're literally burning money. That's why I'm fired up about bamboohr. This isn't just another software tool. This is Strategic business optimization. Over 34,000 companies are already using them because it transforms those time consuming HR tasks into streamlined processes. Here's what makes it different. It's actually built for entrepreneurs like us. Simple to use, easy to implement, and it scales as you grow. No complicated onboarding, no HR degree required, just pure efficiency. Listen, if you want to operate like a true CEO, reclaim your time. Do what I did. Check out the free demo@bamboohr.com freedemo see for yourself all that bamboohr can do and how truly affordable it can be too. That's bamboohr.com/free demo bamboohr.com free demo this isn't just about HR, it's about strategic growth.
- [02:14]
David Eagleman
The brain is a very fluid device. It's constantly reconfiguring itself. Every moment of your life, from cradle to grave, it is changing its circuitry.
- [02:24]
Scott Clary
What if your brain wasn't fixed but live wired? What if time could stretch, bend and distort depending on how you live. And what if technology could give you senses you were never born with? This isn't science fiction. This is the world of David Eagleman.
- [02:37]
David Eagleman
You're born with all the neurons that you're going to have and they're all making connections. And this goes more and more until by the age of two years old, you actually have more connections than you're going to have for the rest of your life. Memories beautify life, but only forgetting makes it bearable. Take a moment to think about why it is you are doing this thing. Whatever your reason is, really take it on and think about that. Because mattering really matters.
- [03:01]
Scott Clary
A neuroscientist, best selling author and founder of two breakthrough companies, Neurosensory and Braincheck, David is redefining what it means to be human in the age of science and technology.
- [03:10]
David Eagleman
If we think about ourselves as creatures through time who are not the same person at all moments, I think this is a very powerful hack to help our future behavior. Keeping yourself always between the levels of frustrating and achievable, that's where you're really living life. And by the way, it's the best thing you can do for your brain.
- [03:27]
Scott Clary
From decoding how we perceive reality to inventing devices that let the deaf feel sound, David's work isn't just about understanding the brain. It's about expanding it. In this episode, we explore a mind that's helping millions unlock their own. Welcome to Success Story. I'm your host, Scott Clary. The Success Story podcast is part of the HubSpot podcast network. Now, HubSpot doesn't just have great podcasts. They also have great tools for entrepreneurs. Let me tell you a story. I'm sure you've all heard of the Angel City Football Club. Well, you don't just become the world's most valuable women's sports franchise by accident. Angel City Football Club did it. The little help from HubSpot. When they started, data was housed across Multiple Systems and HubSpot unified their website, their email marketing and fan experience in one platform. This allowed their small team of three to build an entire website in just three days. The results were nearly 350 new fan signups a week and a 300 database growth in just two years. Sure, you can be a great team in the arena, but if you truly want to build a legacy, a franchise, and a dynasty, you have to build a community outside of the arena. And HubSpot helped Angel City Football Club do just that. If you want to learn about how HubSpot can help your business, visit HubSpot.com there's some other great case studies and you'll learn how HubSpot can help your business grow better. And one quick ask before we dive into today's episode, I need your help with something important. I've just launched a quick survey to better understand what you guys want from the show. And your feedback is going to directly shape our upcoming content. It's only going to take a few minutes of your time and I made it super easy to find. Just head over to Scott declary.com survey and as a thank you for helping me out, I'm giving away a free gift card to one lucky respondent chosen at random once we hit 100 responses. So not only will your feedback help make this show even better, you might score something cool just for sharing your thought. I really appreciate your help with this one. So, David, you study how the brain constantly rewires itself. From your decades of research, what is the single most fascinating thing that you've discovered about how brains work?
- [05:52]
David Eagleman
Oh, boy. You want the whole list of the top 10? Here's what I'd say. Well, okay, so on the, on the topic of fascinating, I would say the issue is that the brain is a very fluid device. It's constantly reconfiguring itself. Every moment of your life, from cradle to grave, it is changing its circuitry. So this is very different from the way we build computers or cell phones or anything like that, where it's static. Instead, you've got 86 billion neurons and they're each like little creatures that are moving and feeling around. And if you can imagine 86 billion little things sort of squirming around in your skull, that's what's actually going on. And so what that means is, for example, the cortex, which is the wrinkly outer bit of the brain. That's where really the magic happens for our species. We have more cortex than any of our neighbors in the animal kingdom. That's what makes us so good at what we're doing. And that's really the thing that's, that's constantly changing. And it turns out that it's a one trick pony. So the cortex doesn't care if it's, you know, like this little patch is encoding for vision or hearing or touch or memory or anything. It's just doing what it does. And the way we know that is if somebody, for example, goes blind, then that part of cortex gets taken over by hearing, by touch, by vocabulary, by anything. It gets taken over and any part of it can Run any job. So it's essentially like a little unit of circuitry that's repeated over and over. So this is what I find the most fascinating is the absolute fluidity of the system, which I think has gone underappreciated until very recently.
- [07:47]
Scott Clary
So any part of the brain can do any job. So I think that this and help me understand sort of what we believe to be true about the brain, even, you know, 20, 30, 40, 50 years ago. This seems to be, I mean, your research has sort of spanned, you know, decades, but still it's relatively new, and it's still, it's relatively cutting edge. So for the longest time, what did we believe to be true about the brain?
- [08:15]
David Eagleman
Well, I think the main thing is that we thought it was sort of static and, and set into place. And the degree to which it's not is the part that's surprising. I'll just give you an example which is, I guess it was about 12 years ago, some colleagues of mine at Harvard did a study where they blindfolded people and they put them into the brain scanner and they measured what was happening in their visual cortex at the back of the head when they, let's say, played a sound in your ear or gave you a touch on your hand. And the answer, of course, is that your visual cortex isn't responding with stuff like that. But within an hour, they started seeing activity in the visual cortex in response to a. A touch or a sound. And that kind of speed of change is something that is a real surprise. No one expected it to go that, to go that fast. And so that led me and my student to realize something very important, which is if the reconfiguration can start moving that rapidly. What we realized is that, wow, you know, we live on a planet that rotates, and that means we spend half the time in the dark. And that's a really big deal here, because in the dark you can still hear and touch and smell and taste, but you can't see. Obviously, I'm talking about evolutionary timescales before electricity, you can't see. And that puts the visual system at a disadvantage. And what, what we realized from this Harvard study is that if the visual cortex can get taken over so rapidly, the brain needs to do thing to defend that territory at nighttime. And we realized that's what dreaming is. Dreaming is simply a way for the brain to shoot random activity into the visual cortex and defend it from takeover. Essentially, it is a screensaver to make sure that the visual part of the brain doesn't get taken over. So the speed of this led to this completely new theory about why we dream. And at this point, we've studied 25 different species of primates, and we now understand that this hypothesis can make quantitative predictions. In other words, we can tell how much a species will dream at nighttime depending on how fluid their brain is, how plastic their brain is.
- [10:45]
Scott Clary
That's so interesting. Now, I guess the obvious question, excuse me, is why, why would our brain almost. Or why are we set up so that we almost like self sabotage? So if we're not dreaming and then all of our other senses start taking over our visual component, the part of our brain that lets us see, that seems like an evolutionary flaw to, I guess the evolutionary fix is dreaming. But why are we self sabotaging?
- [11:14]
David Eagleman
So it's not self sabotage? Look at it this way, vision is massively important. Vision, by the way, did not exist until the Cambrian explosion when lots of species suddenly came about onto the scene. But what happened is suddenly eyeballs started appearing. And not just one type of eyeball, but all these different types. In other words, the idea of saying, hey, maybe I can capture photons at a distance to understand where the prey or predator is, that suddenly took off as an idea, as an evolutionary pressure, and everyone started developing vision. And so there are huge advantages to be able to capture photons and understand stuff at a distance, but you have to do this extra thing. You have to make sure that because you end up in the darkness, you take care of it that way.
- [12:08]
Scott Clary
When you think about all of these different, you know, things in your brain always moving around and, and, and, and, and almost, I don't know, it's not learning, but it's like adapting. I mean, you called your book, you called your book Livewired versus Brain Plasticity or Neuroplasticity for a reason, because it's always moving around and things are always adapting and changing. What does this mean for how we learn skills or how we adapt to new situations? Because to your point, when you conducted that experiment, the response was very quick. The adapt, the adaptation was very, very quick. But when we try and learn new things, it doesn't seem that quick.
- [12:51]
David Eagleman
Ah, well, it actually is so quick. Do you have kids, Scott?
- [12:55]
Scott Clary
Not yet. What's next?
- [12:57]
David Eagleman
So I have two kids. And you know, the thing is, it appears that infants are sort of going slowly and they're, you know, just flopping around and, you know, biting their fist and slapping things. But, but in fact, their brains are so active, what happens is, so you're born with all the, all the neurons that you're going to have, but it's the connections between them that develop. And so what happens is you've got these 86 billion units, these neurons, and they're all making connections, what are called synapses. And this goes more and more and faster and faster until by the age of two years old, you actually have more connections than you're going to have for the rest of your life. And from there, it's a game of pruning. You're actually taking this overgrown garden and you're getting rid of a lot of the branches. But the key is kids are learning so much so fast. And this continues into our adulthood. We are an incredibly plastic species. So if I show you a new movie and I say, hey, this, this movie star's name is such and such, and it takes place in this location and it's this, you know, fantasy about these creatures or whatever, you'll remember all that stuff, you'll remember the details of that. But all of that learning is represented by changes in the configuration of your network. That's all learning is. Learning in memory is just changing where the synapses are, are plugging in, or how strong they are. And so your entire life you're learning stuff. And this is really what makes our species so special, is that we have much more of this plasticity than anyone else. And so, you know, if you're an alligator, you're doing the same thing that alligators did 100 million years ago. You, you know, you eat, mate, swim, do whatever. But a human baby drops into the world and absorbs its culture and its language and everything that's come before it, and then is able to springboard from there and say, okay, cool, I got this. And this is now going to be stored in the configuration of my network. Now, great, give me the next problem. Where do I go from here? And that's why we've taken over the planet and gotten off the planet. And we'll continue to do amazing stuff as a species.
- [15:15]
Scott Clary
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So I hear a lot about when it comes to brains, about sort of the reptilian brain or like the sort of the, the, the thing that we have. I guess it's most similar to animals. That was sort of like the first part of our brain and I'm oversimplifying because it's not my area of expertise. But help me understand. We have, we have the sort of the evolved part of our brain that makes us very different from animals. But there's still a primal component to some degree that I'm assuming impacts how we go through life, how we navigate situations subconsciously. How much of that, how much of that is similar to the crocodile or to, you know, I don't know, a bear or a monkey?
- [20:10]
David Eagleman
Yeah, great question. Okay, so here's the, the general story is that our brain is very similar to, let's say a chimpanzee's brain or a pig's brain or a monkey or a bear, and even in many ways to an alligator brain. So brains are doing all the same stuff. They've got, you know, eyeballs and visual systems. They have ways of detecting sound and hearing and they have ways of doing decision making. And so it's, it's really the same stuff and balance and all that. The brain doesn't get reinvented now let me just make a caveat on that, which is, you know, our evolutionary history goes way, way, way back. So if you look at different branches, let's say the mollusk branch like an octopus, octopus brains are, are quite different from ours, which is a fascinating example of convergent evolution, which is to say we both landed on intelligence, even though their brains are somewhat different. But let's go back to our branch, let's say mammals. All mammal brains are really, really similar. What we have is just much more of the cortex, which I mentioned before, the outer 3 millimeters. We just have a lot more of that than anyone else. We have about four times as much as our nearest neighbors, chimpanzees. And so this is the stuff that's really allowed us the flexibility to learn whatever we need to learn. But in answer to your question, all of the changes that happen in the brain are incremental. They're all building on what has been before. And that's of course all mother nature ever does. You know, our body plan is so similar to our neighbor the chimps because we come from a common ancestor. And even though their, you know, their legs are more outward, their feet are more outward and, and they have longer toes and they have, you know, all these different things. It's because we're all building on the same foundation and just going off in slightly different directions with, with whatever. But coming back to this issue about the reptilian brain, that was a hypothesis that we've got sort of these three layers where the, the first one is the reptilian brain. It's not actually accepted anymore that the details are right, but the spirit of it is exactly right. The spirit is that we're building and building upon older structures.
- [22:36]
Scott Clary
So then if how we react to situations that we haven't previously encountered before, what part of our brain is that? Because I think that that's what people always, I think that people can wrap their mind, you know, pardon the pun, around learning new, learning new things and, and upskilling themselves and neuroplasticity and practice and you know, Malcolm Gladwell's 10,000 hours and all these, all these ideas of how do we learn new tasks, right? And you probably have some ideas about how we can learn more efficiently, that would be interesting. But the, the automatic response to stimuli for situations that we, you know, the fight or flight, how we react to, you know, if we're going to see a, a really attractive person in public or if we feel fear or anxiety because there's a life threatening situation. It almost seems like Everything like that is pre programmed and we kind of just react and we don't really know how to improve or optimize our reaction until we just expose ourselves to the situation repeatedly enough. And I'll give you a very real example for me, I mean public speaking, which is the, the number one fear I think of. I think it's one of the top fears for sure. You know, when I first started speaking, cold sweats, felt like I was going to pass out. Like there's no real reason why I feel that nothing's ever happened to me that's bad when I'm speaking. But there's something there that I, I was, I, I'd assume born with to a degree, but through repeat exposure of speaking, you know, a hundred times now I don't feel that way anymore. But it would have been great if I had some sort of hack to tap into that automatic response the first time I did it. So I didn't feel like, you know, garbage in front of a whole bunch of people. So what's, that's a lot of ideas, but what's happening there and how can we sort of optimize. I called it the reptilian brain. I didn't know that concept didn't exist or wasn't accurate anymore. But that the automatic reaction to things that we haven't learned ourselves or experienced ourselves.
- [24:42]
David Eagleman
Yeah. So first your intuition is exactly right. Most of what is operating under the hood is all very basic stuff that's keeping you alive. And, and what we have are all these layers of circuitry that get laid on top. I'll just you an example. Babies have all kinds of reflexes that eventually get overwritten. Just as one example, one's called the Moro reflex, which is if, if a baby suddenly feels unstable, like if it feels like it's going to drop or something, it'll put out its arms. And this is thought to be evolutionarily very old in terms of, for example, maybe even going back to arboreal, you know, to tree dwelling ancestors of ours where you know, suddenly you're, you're dropping or something. So you reach out to, to grab. Okay. The point is the Moro reflex goes away after, after a little bit. But you might. And the reason is because it gets overwritten with other things. All kinds of other circuitry sort of gets pasted onto this. I think of it like a, like these Renaissance paintings which often had to reuse canvases or walls and so you get all this layering going on. But anyway, here's the point. I want to make if somebody gets dementia much later in life, where there's a degradation of the circuitry, then their moro reflex can come back out. So the point is, it was always there, but it was simply rewritten. That is what essentially all of our learning in the world is about, is overwriting the basic stuff. So when you get lots of practice at public speaking, you're overriding these very basic circuits that are scared about being looked at by hundreds of other primates and you're the center of attention. Or if you go skydiving, you learn to overwrite these circuits that are scared about jumping from a large height. Now, what causes us to learn new things that can overwrite the basic stuff? One of the things that I talk about in my book Livewired is the issue of relevance is massively important, which is to say your brain has to care about it for whatever reason. So what I mean is, if you didn't have any reason to want to do public speaking, then you simply wouldn't build new circuits to overwrite that. But you had some motivation, you know, whatever set of things that caused you to go out on that stage that causes you to, to, to learn new circuitry and overwrite that. And this is true for everything that we learn is you have to care about it. And so there are lots of studies on this showing that if you put, let's say, two animals through exactly the same training, but you, you block this particular neurotransmitter release in one of the animals and not in the other, the, the, the animal with this blocked neurotransmitter release won't learn anything. And this happens to map onto relevance, onto what, what matters.
- [27:59]
Scott Clary
Wow. So it's, so that's. So the, the cliches about, you know, your, your, your want or your need or your whatever, your, your goal has to be stronger than your fear is actually very true from a biological perspective, you have to overwrite that fear.
- [28:16]
David Eagleman
That's exactly right. And by the way, the 10,000 hour rule, you know, 10,000 hours is made up, but it's approximately, you know, it's, it's right in spirit. And, but, but you have to care about what you're doing. In other words, if I said, hey, Scott, I'm going to train you for 10,000 hours to play, you know, table tennis, and you just didn't care about table tennis, then you wouldn't, your brain wouldn't get particularly better at that.
- [28:37]
Scott Clary
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- [31:56]
David Eagleman
What I always tell my students is just take a moment to think about why it is you are doing this thing. And by the way, it doesn't have to be a good reason. It can be, you know, I'm trying to impress that girl over there by doing it. It doesn't matter. Whatever it is, leverage that. Like really think about that. As in, okay, if I do well on this exam, if I really study and do well on this exam, then that girl will want to go on a date with me because I'll be, you know, the smart guy in the class. Great. Whatever your reason is, really take it on and think about that. Because that's the thing that's causing the neurotransmitter release, that's causing changes in your brain. It's causing you to, to succeed at, at the thing. So, you know, I want to impress my parents, I want to make money at this thing. It doesn't matter if it's like a great, you know, high quality reason or not, as long as it's meaningful to you. Just make sure you're concentrating on, on that and putting things in context. Because otherwise, for example, I tell this to my students because, you know, at finals time they have this slog of studying for all this stuff.
- [33:00]
Scott Clary
Of course.
- [33:00]
David Eagleman
So it's important to think about, okay, why am I here at Stanford? Why am I in college? Why am I taking these dumb classes? It's just, that's the important way to get yourself to do well in the thing is to think through some reason why it matters to you. Because mattering really matters.
- [33:18]
Scott Clary
Mattering really matters. Is there any argument for, I don't know, you know, you're trying to learn something new and you read a book while listening to the audio version as well. Like little tricks like that that imprint quicker or reconfigure your brain quicker or even. I've heard things when I. I mean, it's been a while since I've been in school, but, you know, the stuff that you learn right before you go to sleep is, is like codified and imprinted on your brain as opposed to, I don't know, doing it in the morning. I have no idea. Are any of these little hacks or things relevant? True. Completely made up.
- [33:59]
David Eagleman
You know, the fact is, there's so much difference from brain to brain. Everybody's living on their own planet internally, and we can talk about some examples of that. But what I want to say is when it comes to something like, hey, should I do the audiobook or should I read the book on the page? It totally depends on the person. And so one of the really important things in life is just self knowledge, as in what kind of person am I? Have I noticed that audiobooks I'm getting a lot more out of than physical? Or is it the other way around? Because the physical books, I can kind of remember the geography. Like, oh, yeah, that was a third of the way through up on the upper left part of the page. You know, people have different ways that they take in information and succeed at things, so it's important to figure out where you are on that. Unfortunately, I would say there aren't too many little hacks. I wish there were some hack that just like, would, you know, make you super great at studying something. But I think self knowledge is a big part of it. And coming back to this issue, I think the issue of relevance and making sure you know why you are doing any task, even if you're lying to yourself. I mean, even if your boss asks you to do something and you don't want to do it, figuring out, okay, look, I'm gonna think of a, I'm gonna think of a motivating reason, even if it's not totally true. And then doing that, that's really helpful.
- [35:18]
Scott Clary
Have you looked at, have you ever done research on what some of these nootropics do to the brain and, and their effect on learning?
- [35:27]
David Eagleman
Yeah, I would say we don't have anything yet in the field. Every few years there's a buzz about, hey, here's some nootropic that is. And the idea is this, is this will actually nail down memory in a, in a better way. And, you know, we've got things like caffeine which allow us to, you know, stay focused and do our thing. And I, I drink plenty of caffeine, but otherwise I think there's always this. This, the latest fad, but I. I don't think we have anything great on that. What's interesting is that if you had something that nailed down memory, if you had some drug that did that, I'm not even positive that would be a great thing, because it might get you through the exam. But the fact is that our brains are optimized for a certain amount of remembering, a certain amount of forgetting, and you certainly wouldn't want to run the maze and remember, oh, they took this right turn, this left turn, and then you remember that five years later when it's not useful information anymore anymore.
- [36:32]
Scott Clary
That's interesting.
- [36:33]
David Eagleman
Yeah. Henri de Balzac, the. The writer once said, memories beautify life, but only forgetting makes it bearable.
- [36:43]
Scott Clary
Very powerful. What happens if you can't forget? What happens if some things are stuck with you forever?
- [36:48]
David Eagleman
Yeah, that would be awful.
- [36:49]
Scott Clary
One more. One more thought and question on memory and sort of brain health and brain optimization. I've spoken to Steven Kotler, who does a lot of work on flow state, and he's written several books, I don't know how many. And he was speaking about activities that ward off Alzheimer's and dementia, and I don't know about the science behind it. He has a lot of conviction that certain kinds of activities can ward off Alzheimer's dementia. Is there anything that is studied or proven to ward off Alzheimer's dementia if that's something that's in your family? He was mentioning, if I remember correctly, he mentioned that tennis was one of the most beneficial activities because it's cognitive and physical at the same time, which apparently is something that is not prevalent in many other sports. I don't know where I think he's done research on this. But regardless, in your studies, have you found anything like that to be the case where any sort of activity prevents cognitive decline? Maybe. Any foods, anything at all, really?
- [37:59]
David Eagleman
I'll tell you, the whole thing comes down to challenging your brain with novelty. So the key is, and you can fit anything you want in here, including tennis. But the key is, if you are an expert tennis player, then playing tennis in your 60s or something is not going to benefit you. The thing that'll benefit you is to not play tennis, but to start something else that you've never done before, that you're terrible at, that you need to learn how to do. That's the thing. And this is true across whatever it is. Whether it's. I don't know, people always ask me about Sudoku or, you know, sailing or Whatever the thing is, it's got to be something that's challenging. What you always want to do, but especially if your brain is getting closer to cognitive impairment, is put yourself between the levels of frustrating but achievable. So you're taking on a new task. Let's say you've never done Sudoku before. Then that's cool. You start Sudoku, you don't know what you're doing. You're putting a lot of effort into it. The point is, what that's doing in the brain is building new roadways. You're. You're making new things happening with your synapses that you haven't done before. As soon as you get good at Sudoku, then you have to drop that and pick up something else, like tennis, like whatever the new thing is that you haven't done. But the key is the challenge, and that's where you always want to be. And weirdly, that's actually our best thing that we know about for, you know, for dementia is. Is challenging the brain. Obviously, there's lots of pharmaceutical work going on and other things like that. As far as foods go, I don't think there's anything that's particularly convincing about that. If one already has a balanced diet, I don't think there's some magical new food that one can do there. But the key is to constantly build new roadways and bridges in the brain. There was a study that's been going on for, I think, 30 years now called the Religious Order Study. And this is on nuns who live in convents in the Chicago area who all agreed that they would donate their brains upon their death. And so over the years, different nuns have. Have passed away and donated their brains, and the brains have been autopsied. And the. The stunning result from the study is that a number of these nuns actually had Alzheimer's disease. Their brains were ravaged, you know, molecularly. You can see this in the tissue. The tissue is degraded, their brain tissue. But even though they had Alzheimer's disease, they didn't show the cognitive deficits that one would expect. And this came as a giant surprise. But the reason is because these women live in these convents till the day they die. And in these convents, they have chores and responsibilities. They have this very active social life. And when you have an active social life, you're arguing with people and fighting with people and getting along with people, and whatever we sometimes say in the field, that there's nothing as hard for the brain as other people. And so it's a constant challenge they're constantly keeping their brains active. And as a result, even though their brains are degenerating, they're building these new roadways. Compare this to people who retire and don't have that kind of challenge and sit at home alone and watch television on the couch. That's a very different thing that's happening as they're brain tissue degenerates. There's no new roadways being built, and that's why you can see the cognitive correlates of the degeneration.
- [41:49]
Scott Clary
That's fascinating. So retiring, Very retiring. With no activity. No. No learning new skills, no socializing. Very bad for your brain. I would even. It's interesting, but I guess by virtue of what you just said, flow state is, is great for productivity and for work, but it's actually useless for preventing cognitive decline. Which is ironic because everybody keeps trying to. How do I get the flow state? How do I, you know, how do I optimize my four hours in the morning where nothing distracts me and I'm completely in the zone?
- [42:19]
David Eagleman
That. That's exactly right. You got it. That. What, what's funny is brains are always in this middle state where they're trying to balance novelty and familiarity. So if you're doing too much novelty, it's tough. And the brain really wants to just be. For example, I just returned from an eight day hike in Spain, a pilgrimage along Camino de Santiago. And you know, each night you're sleeping in a different little inn and then you walk 15 miles to the next place and so on. And when I came home just a couple days ago, I really just wanted to be in my bed because I thought, oh, it's familiar. And I want to be in this bed for several nights instead of a different one each night. So it's tough when you've got too much novelty. But the key thing that you just want to make sure you're always avoiding is too much familiarity. And you're exactly right in the flow state. You're saying, okay, this is something I've trained my brain on. It knows exactly what to do and I don't have to challenge it and think about something new here. So you don't want too much of that.
- [43:21]
Scott Clary
What would you say that are some, some common habits that are really damaging to either our brain's health or just brain's potential?
- [43:30]
David Eagleman
Yeah, I mean, so many things that, that we all do. Obviously, you know, diet is one. Unless people think about it. What's cool, what, what I think is neat is that just over the course of my Lifetime so far. I, I feel like I've seen a real change in the way that society thinks about diet now. But maybe I'm wrong. Maybe people just talk about this on social media about eating clean and then they don't actually do it. Who knows?
- [43:58]
Scott Clary
But I think some people try. But maybe, probably that's true too, to be honest.
- [44:03]
David Eagleman
You know what I find interesting? I, I see these, these weightlifting videos on, on YouTube and I, I watch these things and I try to implement some new techniques or whatever. These things all have, you know, millions or tens of millions of views. And I think that's awesome that so many people are watching this thing about like, you know, the five best, you know, back exercises or five best bicep exercises. I think, hey, that's so great that so many people are watching this. But what I don't know is how that translates. In other words, do people, are there millions of people watching it, that not doing it? I'm not certain anyway, as far as things that we do, obviously it feels to me anyway that there's been a lot more emphasis about sleep and this is massively important. One thing that I feel like I've seen a change on as well is alcohol consumption, which is related to the sleep issue. You, it's become more socially cool to not drink alcohol, which is a great idea, right? Because alcohol, among other things, disrupts your sleep. And so at least in the circles that we spin in, a lot of people are not drinking in a way that, let's say our parents generation, everybody drank. So I think that's a really cool hack that's been happening socially. You know, and obviously one generation ago, everyone would smoke cigarettes and there were these ads. You know, nine out of ten physicians recommend Camel brand of cigarettes or something. It's crazy to look back at those sorts of ads. But anyway, so there are all sorts of bad habits that people are, are working on. To my mind, one of the main bad interesting challenges in life is that we all have temptations that we in our long term thinking self would rather not give into. Whether that's drugs or alcohol, or some people have gambling or some people have sex addictions or whatever. The issue is that people have, when they're, when they're really in a moment of sober thinking about who do I want to be in the world? They're on a hike, they think, okay, I don't want to do that anymore. The question is, how do you get yourself to actually not do it? Because we are very different people at different times. And when you're faced with the temptation, you're probably going to do it. And so one of my deep interests, and this is actually my next book, is on something called the Ulysses Contract, which is how we make deals with ourselves through time. The listeners may remember the story of Odysseus, also known as Ulysses, who is coming home from the Trojan War and realized he was going to pass the island of the Sirens, and. And he really wanted to hear their songs. But of course, he knew that like any mortal man, their. Their song would seduce the. The whole ship to. To come crash into the rocks, and everyone would drown. So what he did is he filled his sailor. His, you know, sailor's ears with beeswax, and he had them lash him to the mast so that he could hear the siren song. But he couldn't do anything about it because he instructed them, I want you to go straight and just ignore me if I'm screaming and yelling. The point is, the Ulysses of sound mind, who is, you know, tens of miles from the island, knew that the future Ulysses, who would be right next to the island, would behave badly. What he was doing is making sure that when faced with temptation, the future Ulysses wouldn't behave badly. So what I find very interesting is how we can make Ulysses contracts in our own lives to make sure that, you know, for example, we show up at the gym. One way to do that is to tell your friend you'll meet him there at 9am and if you tell your friend you'll meet him there, then you wake up, you maybe feel a little lazy, you feel like skipping, Well, I can't, because he's going to be there. So then you show up. So that's a very simple way of making Ulysses contracts. For people who are trying to, you know, battle drug or alcohol addictions, there are all these things you can do, like make sure you never carry more than $20 in your pocket, because if somebody offers you drugs on the street, you'll say, oh, shoot, I don't have the money. Or for an alcoholic, the important thing is to clear all the alcohol out of the house. Because even if you think, okay, look, I know what to do, I'm not going to drink this thing. If it's there, you'll drink it at some point. So. So there are all kinds of things. If we think about ourselves as creatures through time who are not the same person at all moments, I think this is a very powerful hack to help our future behavior. Why do.
- [48:52]
Scott Clary
From a neuroscience perspective, why does our present self, our sort of our hedonistic in the moment self betray the intentions of our future self. Why? What hijacks our thinking in the moment?
- [49:05]
David Eagleman
Yeah, I mean, this is. The fascinating thing is you are not one thing. And we have this illusion that, you know, I am David, you are Scott. We know exactly who we are and so on, but in fact, you. The way I wrote about this in my book Incognito is that the brain is a team of rivals. So you've got all these neural networks that want different things at different times. And actually, this goes back to the beginning of our conversation. You have all these very primitive circuits, too, that want, you know, food and sex and drugs and whatever. And so, you know, even Friedrich Nietzsche had realized this. And he said something. I'm not quite getting this right, but he said something like, each drive philosophizes in its own spirit. By which he meant when you're under the control of any particular drive, like, hey, I really want that chocolate cake. You can end up making rationalizations for it. You can philosophize because it's controlling you. Now, this circuit you say, you know, actually, chocolate cake.
- [50:14]
Scott Clary
Yeah.
- [50:14]
David Eagleman
I think it's good for you. And whatever. You know, whatever. You have your whole story that you can cook up, but you cook up different stories when you're under the influence of different circuits in your brain.
- [50:24]
Scott Clary
I just, I just looked. I looked up the quote. It's basically the argument is, every driver instinct seeks mastery and attempts to philosophize in the spirit of that drive.
- [50:34]
David Eagleman
Perfect.
- [50:34]
Scott Clary
That's. That's. Yes. So that's. But exactly what you said. You. You captured it perfectly.
- [50:39]
David Eagleman
Yeah.
- [50:39]
Scott Clary
That's interesting how we're always at war with. With ourselves.
- [50:42]
David Eagleman
That. That's exactly right. And so this idea that we think of ourselves as individuals, meaning we are not divisible into multiple things, is actually totally incorrect. We are. We're. We're. We're a neural parliament, is how I think about it. And you've got all these different political parties that, by the way, just like in any country, all the different love their country and they all want the best for their country. They just have very different ways of going about it. And that's what it's like all the time. And whichever way the parliament votes determines your behavior. That's the way. That's what steers the ship of state for you. So sometimes you'll eat the chocolate cake and sometimes you'll skip the chocolate cake, depending on how the vote tips.
- [51:26]
Scott Clary
A big thank you to indeed for supporting success story because hiring people is one of the hardest things you're ever gonna have to do as an entrepreneur, as a founder, as somebody who's trying to build a It's important to hire well and find the right person. But it takes so much time and it's so labor intensive because like most entrepreneurs, you have a thousand things going on and there's a good chance that you just realized your business needed to hire somebody yesterday. So how can you find that great, amazing right fit candidate fast? It's easy. Just use Indeed because you don't have to waste time struggling to get your job posts seen on all these other job sites. If you're using Indeed, you can just use their Sponsored Jobs to help you stand out and hire fast. Your post jumps right to the top of the page for relevant candidates so you can reach out to exactly who you're looking for faster. And the results really speak for themselves. According to Indeed data, Sponsored jobs posted directly on indeed have 45% more applications than non sponsored jobs. And you know what I love most about Indeed? It really just makes hiring so fast because everything is streamlined in one place. No more juggling multiple platforms or waiting weeks for the right candidate. And how fast is Indeed in the minute I've been Talking to you, 23 hires were made on Indeed according to Indeed Data Worldwide. There's no need to wait any longer. Speed up your hiring right now with Indeed and listeners of Success Story will get a $75 sponsored job credit. To get your jobs More visibility@ Indeed.com Clarie terms and conditions do apply. Just go to Indeed.com Clary A huge thank you to NetSuite for supporting today's episode. Now, what does the future hold for business? If you ask nine experts, you're going to get 10 answers. Bull market Bear Market Inflation up Inflation down Honestly, at this point you just need a crystal ball. But. But until we get one, over 41,000 businesses have found the next best thing. They future proofed their businesses their operations with NetSuite by Oracle, which is the number one cloud ERP. Imagine having your accounting, your financial management, your inventory, your HR all flowing together in one fluid platform. And here's what makes NetSuite different. It gives you one source of truth for your business. You get the visibility and control to make quick, confident decisions while others are guessing. You're working with real time data, insights, forecasting. You're basically looking into the future of your business with actionable data. Whether your company earns a couple million or even hundreds of millions, NetSuite helps you respond to immediate challenges and helps you grab your biggest opportunities. And speaking of opportunities, they put together the CFO's guide to AI and machine learning at netsuite.com ScottClary. This is the playbook for understanding how to use AI for your business. The guide is free. That is NetSuite. I just want to take a quick second to thank HubSpot for supporting today's episode. Now. Success Story is one of the many podcasts in the HubSpot podcast network, which is the audio destination for business professionals. If you like Success Story, you're also going to like Billion Dollar Moves, another incredible podcast hosted by Sarah Chen Spelling. Sarah is an incredible interviewer. She asks the hard questions on her show. You're going to learn about the triumph, the failures of all her guests, the hard lessons of the best and brightest in business so that you too can make billion dollar moves in venture, in investing, in business and in life. I want you to go listen to Billion Dollar Moves wherever you get your podcast. It is one of my favorites. Sarah is one of my favorite hosts. If you like Success Story, you're going to love this show. And a quick pause if you haven't had a chance yet, I'd love your input on our Listener survey@scottdclary.com survey. It takes just a few minutes and one lucky respondent won a gift card once we hit 100 responses. Your feedback directly impacts what we cover on this show. I really appreciate it. Now you talk about some very physical strategies to sort of enforce these contracts, your present day contracts with your future self. Because you're talking about only carrying $20 if you're a drug addict. This is something that is very, is very tangible, is very real. It's gonna, it's, it's gonna make it impossible to do the, the undesired behavior. Where does willpower come into all this? Is willpower just, you know, it sounds good on a, on a, you know, when, when Tony Robbins is talking about motivation. But realistically, when it, when push comes to shove, we're kind of doing ourselves a disservice by just relying on willpower alone. Or does willpower actually have a place? Place? And I'll tell you the context. So when I think about, when I think about what I do in my day, I try and structure my day and make commitments so that it makes it impossible for me to get out of those commitments. It's very easy. I mean like if I'm going to the gym, I'm, I'm waking up, I, I block some time so I don't have calls. So I Have no excuse. I've already blocked time for the work that I have to do later on, so I can't even say, oh, you know, I could do this now. No, I've purposely blocked off time later for the work that I want to get done in that day. So I have no excuse. What am I going to do? Sit around for. For an hour and a half on my ass? No, I'm going to feel like a loser. I'm going to get up, I'm going to go to the gym. So I've. I've architected my day so that I will actually hate myself if I don't execute on the thing that I want to execute on. I don't know if that's willpower. Maybe it's willpower in the planning, but I don't think it's willpower.
- [56:46]
David Eagleman
Right. What you're talking about is essentially Ulysses contract, which is how do you. In a moment where you feel totally clear on the kind of person you want to be, how do you structure your day and say, I'm making certain that I don't have any appointments during that time and I set my alarm and so on. This is. I mean, it's fascinating because we don't usually talk about this sort of thing, but we are very complicated creatures through time. So we're constantly planning, you know, the Scott of tomorrow and the Scott of next week and so on. You're making all these plans for this person that yet exist and might feel differently than you do. In other words, you might wake up and feel, wow, I'm kind of tired this morning, but yesterday I structured my whole day so that I'd have this opportunity to go to the gym. Damn it. I guess I better just go. So, yeah, we're constantly making these things. Now, as far as willpower goes, I think a different way of looking at that is just to think about. About our long term planning self. As in, okay, this is the kind of person I want to be. And you make plans around that. We might call that willpower. But let me just give an example. There was this experiment years ago. You've probably heard of this. It was the marshmallow test, where you bring a kid into a room, like a six year old kid, and you say, look, here's this marshmallow on the plate, but I'm going to leave the room and I want you to not eat the marshmallow. And I'll be back in five minutes. And when I get back, if you haven't eaten the marshmallow, I will Give you two marshmallows to eat. And the question is, when you leave there are these hidden cameras set up. Do the kids eat the marshmallow? And it turns out, you know, let's say half the kids do and half the kids don't. They follow these kids out for many, many years. I think it was decades. They follow these kids out. And it turns out that if you don't eat the marshmallow, this correlates with better success in all kinds of metrics in life. And so this gets called willpower. But I think there's a different way that we can look at this. I mean, the way that a lot of the kids did it is with a physical sort of method. As in some kids who are really trying to not eat the marshmallow would clap their hand over their eyes so they're not looking at the marshmallow. Or other kids did this strategy where they turn their chair around so their back is to the marshmallow. Stuff like this. But what they're doing is saying, look, I want my, you know, I want to privilege my future self here and really think about that. So I'm going to do whatever I need to do right now so that he wins as opposed to the short term temptation self. So there's probably, you know, a way that we can think about willpower as the, as the act of practicing the long term self and really saying, okay, what do I need to do so that this guy wins as opposed to this one.
- [59:50]
Scott Clary
I've also thought about this from the context of, I mean, a lot of entrepreneurs listen to this show and they're. And I hate the concept of motivation. I don't like the concept of motivation because I think motivation dies out very quickly. Very similar to this marshmallow test. I like, like when you structure your life in your environment, mentally, physically, financially, so that it's almost impossible for you to have to give up. It's almost so you. It's like, it's almost like when you start a company, don't quit your job and only have three months of Runway. And then, and then all of a sudden your company doesn't work out in three months. You have to go back to work, maybe find a way to work on it fractionally after you're done your job. You know, you work your 9 to 5 W2, then 5 to 9, you can work on your company and then also set expectations with your spouse and your kids. And how much time is this going to take? And then what you're doing is you're Structuring your brain or you're at least telling yourself a story that. I'm not going to rely on motivation. I'm going to structure my life so that I can pursue this regardless of what happens. Because I'm setting expectations and I'm architecting everything to sort of be in pursuit of this goal. So I don't care about motivation, I don't care about any of these quick, you know, flash in the pan contributing factors to my success. I'm just structuring my life so I can stick with it long enough which will dramatically increase the likelihood of success. I love that idea that has served me in everything that I do. But there's, but that's, that's not will, that's not motivation. That is pure structure. That's architecting life so that it's almost inevitable that the thing that you take on will eventually become successful.
- [61:37]
David Eagleman
That's perfect. That's exactly right. And so what this requires is the long term thinking parts of your brain. Who do I want to be? What do I need to do to get there for myself? I always recommend doing this on a hike because that's what I like to do. Be out in the sun and think about on a long term thing when you're not faced with the temptations. Because the second you've got the temptations in front of you, then that, then those drives take over the spirit of your philosophizing and then you can't think clearly anymore. So you really need to set aside the time and think, great. What do I need to do to structure this so that I don't have those other things getting in my way?
- [62:19]
Scott Clary
Here's another idea that I'm sure you'll, you'll have fun figuring out or unpacking. Again, more philosophizing. But, but we have all of these competing selves, right? As you mentioned, we have all these, we have this parliament of various parties that all have these competing interests. Goal setting is important and figuring out what your North Star is. But I'm also a big fan of the concept of. I wrote a newsletter about it a while ago about dying every day. Not literally, obviously, but every night when you go to bed and when you wake up, you can choose the goals that you're pursuing actively as opposed to just doing them because they're, there's sunk costs and there's already time invested in those goals. I think it's very important. What are your thoughts about goal setting? Long term goal setting when you have all of these conflicting priorities? How do you Navigate that so that every day you can wake up and choose the goals that you actively want to pursue as opposed to the goals that you committed to 10 years ago. This is business, this is relationship, this is everything. This is the job. I think this is something that a lot of people have trouble with. What are the signals that you should look for in how you think through problems? And what are those signals that should eventually inform, you know, is a path that I'm on the correct path.
- [63:39]
David Eagleman
Oh, that's great. Part of what's so important there is the, is scheduling the reassessment of that. So in your dying every night, it sounds like the idea is, you know, reassess it every, every morning that might be too fast because, you know, some mornings you wake up and you had a bad sleep and you think, I just want to quit this job or whatever. So. But it's, I don't know, I haven't thought about this issue, but maybe, you know, the first of every month or certainly on your birthday or New Year's Eve or whatever you really think about. Okay, I'm going to sit down with a piece of paper now. And, and again, the thing that we started talking about with brain plasticity has to do with relevance. You know, what is relevant to me because that, by the way, is the thing that's going to, to change my brain the most. That's where stuff is going to stick. And so if I'm grinding through some job that I've been doing for 10 years and I don't love it, it's really hard to get any brain plasticity happening. And then referring to the second thing we talked about, brain plasticity, especially as an adult, is massively important to fend off dementia. You have to keep challenging your brain. So what you said is so important, which is, okay, what can I do that maximally revs my circuits and gets me interested? And that's not going to be the same answer that it was a year ago or 10 years ago. So I think that's great. Maybe we can agree on this, that every birthday and every, whatever, half birthday, you go on a hike with a little pencil and journal and you really chew on what is my new direction? Action.
- [65:19]
Scott Clary
I think that's so important because there, yes, there's, there's the science behind what drives you. But I think that also I, I think that in modern society, our brains are so hijacked that we don't even take time for ourselves. I, I, these are all very interesting ideas. I mean, they're not core to Your research, but the fact that we're always being plagued by anxiety and stress and trauma, like, you know, we were not meant to be exposed to the problems of the world 24 7. And now we get them on Twitter, and now we get access to all the most horrific things that are happening globally. And I think that. That being always on at work, being always, you know, attached and connected to the Internet, I can't imagine this is healthy for us from. From a pure, like, you know, cortisol inducing perspective, but outside of that, that we don't have the capacity to actually take a second, or we don't create the capacity or the time for us to take a second, sit down, be alone with our thoughts, figure out what our brain is actually telling us. And I'm curious if you've ever done research on what happens to somebody's brain when they're constantly being stimulated by all these thoughts that aren't their own. I can't imagine that's a peak performance situation.
- [66:42]
David Eagleman
Hmm, that's really interesting. Okay, so let me just play devil's advocate, because I think this is interesting. First of all, historically, I have to imagine that there was much more trauma than there is now, which is to say we scroll through Twitter, we say, oh, this terrible thing's happening in the world, but it doesn't. For better or worse, it doesn't really mean much to us. It's like, oh, in this country, somewhere else, there's this thing that happened between.
- [67:06]
Scott Clary
Are we able to contextualize that, though? Are we able to contextualize that that trauma isn't in our village or is it isn't beside us?
- [67:13]
David Eagleman
Well, okay, so let's. Good question. But let's compare it to somebody living a thousand years ago in Europe and you're, you know, trying to farm your little crop, and the crops die, and then bearded horsemen ride in and slaughter half the people that you know and love, and then you have, you know, seven kids and five of them die in childhood. And I. So I. I'm not actually sure that, you know, life used to be so rosy. I almost wonder if scrolling through Twitter and seeing little things and then they're just little, you know, 256 character tweets, and then we forget about them might actually be better. But in both cases, the point that you're making, and I agree with, is that it is absolutely important. With the number of distractions, everybody has to say, okay, who do I want to be? Because the world is not going to ask that of you if you don't ask it of yourself. In other words, to your point, the world is constantly saying, hey, pay attention to me, pay attention to this shiny thing, and so on. You have to figure out, okay, I'm, how am I going to remove myself and go for that hike and really think that through?
- [68:25]
Scott Clary
Yeah, I think that's, I think it's very wise. If you think about sort of all the things that you have learned about, about the brain, about neuroscience, about, you know, making contracts with yourself, what has been the one thing that's had the biggest impact on your life? That sort of you practice every single day?
- [68:43]
David Eagleman
Yeah, I think understanding myself as not the same person at every moment, but I'm sort of a collection of people through time. That is what allows me to then navigate this parliament and think, okay, how, you know, as we said, who do I want to be? And then how am I going to get there? And it's not always obvious because look, just look at New Year's resolutions for almost everybody. Almost all of these fail by January 30th because people think, oh, I'm going to do this, I'm going to do that. And then they forget and they get lazy and they get distracted or whatever the issues are and they don't do it. So really concentrating on what is the collection of me's that I have to deal with here and how do I navigate this, I would say that's the most impactful thing for navigating myself.
- [69:39]
Scott Clary
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- [73:11]
David Eagleman
Yeah, I actually do not put as much weight on gut experience as, as it sounds like naval does and many others do for exactly the reason that you said, which is that it can incorporate all kinds of stuff that has to do with your history and your childhood and you were bullied on the playground and you were whatever, but it has nothing to do with what the optimal decision is now. So, so look, by the way, even ancient Greeks had noticed this. They said, life is as though you are a charioteer and you're holding two horses that are pulling you down the road. But one horse is always pulling you off to the right and one to the left. It's the horse of reason and of passion. And your job as the charioteer is to keep these horses in check and hold them both so you can keep going down the middle of the road. So it's probably important to listen to what your gut is saying. But I would not, not privilege it and say it's somehow better than what my cognition is telling me. Instead, I would figure out how to balance the two and how to hold both forces.
- [74:20]
Scott Clary
It's a tough balance. Yeah. I think that two things can be true at once. But I think that that's, I think that leaning, again, extremes are usually an issue in every, in every part of life. And I think that leaning too much into gut experience or leaning too much into not listening to your gut, both of that, both of those outcomes are not ideal. I think that it's probably a combination of both. The last thing that you do a lot of research and you teach about, which I think is interesting, is time perception. So time perception, I mean, I don't really know too many people that, that understand why a couple events. So one, you, you've spoken about how time slows down during accidents. I would also ask why does it feel like time speeds up as we get older as well? It seems like it seems like days are flying and our perception of time is warped there as well. So what, what is our brain doing in those two situations?
- [75:25]
David Eagleman
So it's actually the exact same answer to both of these. So I did a series of studies where, you know, I Dropped People from 150 Foot Tall Tower in free fall going backwards, they're caught in a net below. And what I discovered is by putting people in these really scary situations like that time does not actually run in slow motion. Instead it's the trick of memory, which is to say when you are in a scary situation, your brain is writing everything down because that's all memory is for. Memory Is to say, say, here's a relevant, important situation. What is going on here? What just happened? What just happened? So your brain writes down absolutely everything. So when you read that back out, you have much denser memory than you normally do. And you think, oh, that must have taken a long time. I remember every detail of that car accident and the hood crumpling and the rear view mirror falling off and what the other guy looked like and the wall approaching and so on. So. So you think, wow, that must have taken five seconds, even though it only took two. Okay, so it has to do with the density of memory. That's why time seems retrospectively to have slowed down when you're in a scary event. But it's also why time seems to speed up as you grow older. It's because your brain's job is to figure out the rules of the world, the patterns of the world. And when you're a kid, everything is new. You've never seen any of this stuff. Stuff. And so a childhood summer lasts forever because you did this new thing and you went to this new camp and you met this new kind of person who you'd never met before, and you see this new device that you've never seen, and everything's new. So by the time you go back to school in the fall, it feels like forever. This summer, by the time you're older, you've kind of seen all the patterns. You've met these kinds of personalities. You've been around the world. You've seen all the little restaurants and hotels and whatever, you know, a little different here, here and there. Okay, so as a result, when you're, you know, some older age and you look back at the summer, you think, oh, my God, where did that summer go? It just was spring. Now it's fall. And it's because your brain hasn't written down that much new stuff. There just hasn't been that much to write. Okay? So that's the reason why as you get older and older, time seems to speed up. This. The solution to this is what we have been talking about, which is seeking novel. Because even when you're older, if you go and do something really novel, it seems like, wow, that lasted a long time. So I mentioned I just got back from these eight days in Spain doing this pilgrimage, and wow, those eight days seem much longer than a typical eight days when I'm just grinding through the same stuff that I'm doing here at home. It felt like, wow, I've been gone for a long time. So some people have proposed this argument where they say, no, the reason I'm speeds up is because, because, you know, the summertime represents a smaller fraction of your life. But that has very little to do with it. It's a memory issue. And if you're in a situation where you're writing new memories that retrospectively seems to have lasted a much longer time, so again, comes down to seek novelty.
- [78:37]
Scott Clary
So everything comes down to seek novelty. When it comes to optimal brain health, everything comes down to seek novelty. Humans are meant to learn new things and experience new things. Things when you think about that. And then I guess just one last question on that. If our perception of time is tied back to memory, and I don't know how to describe it outside of the fact that it's not 100% accurate, it's our perception of what happened during that time, it's not exactly how it went down. How much can we trust our memory? If they can be, if they can even warp our perception of time? How much of the other things that we think happened actually happened the way they did?
- [79:22]
David Eagleman
Yeah, that's a great question. It turns out, not surprisingly, our memories are totally fallible. Memory is a myth making machine and we are constantly reinventing our past to keep it consistent with who we think we are. And so, yeah, everything that we believe we remember is it's memory is about usefulness, not necessarily about accuracy. So, you know, and by the way, every time you call up a memory of, let's say, you know, a breakup that you had years ago or something that, that keeps getting changed each time you pull it up and it's influenced by who you now are and what you now know. It's essentially the way I think about this is it's like an operator game with yourself. You know, the operator game where you whisper something to someone and he whispers to the next person, the next person. It's like an operating game with yourself where every time you pull up the memory it changes a bit and then the next time you pull it up, what you're remembering is what you thought from last time. So yes, memory is not particularly reliable. Where this becomes a problem socially, of course, is for example, with eyewitness testimony in courtrooms. And this is totally understood, by the way, as the worst technology that we allow in courtrooms. This actually went all the way to the Supreme Court about what if it's totally clear that some eyewitness testimony is unreliable? Can you rule that testimony out? But the fact, but, but the Supreme Court argued you can't. They concluded that you can't And. And the interpretation of that is most cases rely on eyewitness testimony. If we rule that out, the whole system would fall apart, because often we don't have anything other than eyewitness testimony in a. In a criminal case. So the court said, look, you just got to accept it and try to educate the jurors about the fallibility of this. But what's interesting is that doesn't work either. You can. You can train jurors about how terrible memory is, and at the end, they'll still say, okay, I get that, but my memory is like a. You know, like a video recording. Not true. No.
- [81:30]
Scott Clary
I mean, you know, the reason I ask, because it was. I don't second guess my memory often, but just last week, and it was not a traumatic event like a. Like a murder or something like that where there has to be eyewitness assessment. I was on a zoom call, and I was negotiating a contract, and the zoom call was recorded, and it wasn't a. A big delta, but I for sure thought that person said one number number. And then I. And then they sent me the contract, and I'm like, we just spoke about this like. Like, with full conviction. We just spoke about this, like, you know, like, three days ago. What are you talking about? This is not the number we just spoke about. They pulled the zoom call, and they totally said the number that was in the contract. I'm like, it was very. It was like, what the.
- [82:11]
David Eagleman
Wow.
- [82:13]
Scott Clary
Yeah, it was really weird. It was really weird. So for some reason, it was a really weird experience because, again, I don't usually, in my opinion, I hope I don't incorrectly remember things like that often, but I was so clear. I was so clear on this one number they said, and it was not that number. And I must have just been going into that call thinking that that was going to be the number. And then I heard them, but it didn't register. There was some brain trick going on, and I didn't clock it, and I had full conviction that I was right and I was not.
- [82:48]
David Eagleman
Yeah, this happens all the time with everything. What's interesting is this is all going to change with, you know, with deep fakes. One possibility is that someone can then say, oh, Scott, I'm going to show you our zoom call. And then they're actually manipulating with AI that's not happening yet, but probably in two years that'll happen more. But. But what I find. What I find interesting about this is, you know, when I grew up, we had, you know, like, cameras, like a Polaroid Camera that you take a picture with. And we had very few photographs from, like, my whole childhood. I probably have, I don't know, a collection of, you know, whatever, 20 photographs that are little moments in time that I can kind of remember now. Point one is that I often misremember the scene or the photograph. And when I see it, when I pull it out of a box, I haven't seen it in 20 years. I think, oh, my gosh, I totally misremembered that. Just like your zoom call. But point two, I've been thinking about this a lot. We now have an Alexa in our kitchen that is constantly cycling all these photographs of my children, of their lives. So they're seeing photographs from a month ago, a year ago, five years ago. And as a result, they are pinned much more closely to what actually happened than I ever was, than my generation ever was. They're seeing evidence of their childhood that holds them closer to the truth. Truth. I don't know what the consequence of that is, but it does mean that they'll have a more accurate representation. They don't get to drift as far away as we all did.
- [84:21]
Scott Clary
Well, I think it could be positive or negative, depending on the childhood. So if it's a good experience, then that's great. Those are great memories. If it's trauma, then you're closer to the trauma.
- [84:33]
David Eagleman
I agree. Although we only take photographs for good things. I mean, like most parents, you know, it's the good.
- [84:38]
Scott Clary
Of course. Of course. Yeah, yeah, yeah. No, yeah. I don't know what the implications of that are. That's interesting. Yeah, I think that, that's, that's just in general, though, like, now, even, even, like the, the, the ridiculous, you know, nights where you have a little bit too much to drink, someone's taken a photo of it. So that's remembered for forever.
- [84:55]
David Eagleman
Yeah, that's right. That's right.
- [84:58]
Scott Clary
That's. You know, you mentioned something before that I fully agree with, which I didn't have a chance to mention or, or, or weigh in on. But drinking in particular, I found with the work that I do, and I'm sure that you do as well. Well, I, I can, you know, you can't measure it explicitly, but I can immediately feel a significant cognitive decline if I have a drink versus if I don't. And I will not like, I mean, I, I'm not like, alcohol free, but if I'm doing a podcast, I will never have a drink the night before. I notice that I, I, My, my thoughts are not as clear. I can't Pull my words as quickly when I listen back to the recording. It's all these likes and uhs and ums that I'm not even conscious, just that I'm saying in the moment. So I. I'm sure there's a lot of things that are not great that we do, like you mentioned, but alcohol, I think is probably one of the worst for. For not. Not in the moment, the day after. And sometimes if. If it's too much, it's like two days after. So I can't imagine it's good for you at all.
- [85:59]
David Eagleman
That's right.
- [86:00]
Scott Clary
At all.
- [86:00]
David Eagleman
And, you know, and it's hard to even separate that from the, you know, just from the disruption of the sleep. It fragments your sleep, and that might be enough to really screw you up the next day.
- [86:10]
Scott Clary
You are always doing research. So what is some research that you're working on now? Research about the brain, about anything that's sort of keeping you up at night that you're still curious about that you want to find out?
- [86:23]
David Eagleman
Oh, God, there's so many. You know, I'm really into these issues of memory and time. And what I'm thinking about now is this issue that I mentioned before about the way that our circuitry keeps writing on top of older circuitry. And when people get dementia, the stuff comes back out. I don't know if you've ever known somebody who's experienced a dementia, but they start doing things like stealing stuff, like stealing the pepper shaker from the table at the restaurant. Just like stuff that seems so weird for a person who's had a successful life and so on, but. But they revert back to this. This more primitive stuff going on. Like, I want this thing now. These are all things that I'm researching. I'm also kicking off a new company now that has to do with companion robotics, but specifically for people who. Who live alone, who are elderly, who live alone. They just. They don't have a social life necessarily, or certainly not one as rich as a younger person who's right in the middle of things. So this is a companion robot that keeps some company, is constantly talking to them and so on. That's what's happening on the surface, underneath the surface. What the companion robot is doing that we're building is doing all kinds of cognitive testing on them and doing vocal biomarker analysis and doing conversation analysis and so on to tell when somebody is entering mild cognitive impairment. Because, you know, people generally just don't know when they are getting cognitively impaired. And clinical visits are so infrequent that it's rarely caught. So this is something that's living with you every day, talking with you every day, and can tell, hey, you know what, you should go to the doctor now and check this out.
- [88:17]
Scott Clary
If you had unlimited money and technology, what would be an experiment that you'd want to conduct?
- [88:25]
David Eagleman
I mean, one of my long term interests is in creating new senses for humans. So I gave a TED talk on this a decade ago about using, for example, you know, vibrations on the skin to pass in new kinds of data to people. And we kicked off this company called Neosensory a decade ago, which is about all kinds of ways that you can pass new information in. We built a wristband with vibratory motor on it. We came up with 70 different experiments of things to do. Like, you know, what if it's detecting infrared light and you're feeling infrared light and you know, in all this detailed patterning on your skin. The interesting problem, and I don't know quite how to capture this yet, but it's hard to get people to do this for the amount of time that's needed. Like you really need to wear it for a month or maybe several months sense to really develop a new sense. And somehow it's really hard to get people to do so. If I had infinite money, I would pay people to just do this and take on new senses and become, you know, it's this way of broadening what our species can do because we come to the table with, you know, eyes and ears and nose and mouth and so on. We've got these various sensory plug and play devices. But here's a new kind of device. You just have to be sufficiently motivated to take it on.
- [89:56]
Scott Clary
What would be the benefit of, of this new sense? Like describe what the outcome could be?
- [90:01]
David Eagleman
Oh, just, I mean, look, I, I wore the infrared thing for a while and it's so extraordinary. Just as an example, you know, I'm walking through the parking lot and as I'm passing by the cars there, I can tell which cars have, you know, been parked in the last half hour versus which one's been sitting there for a while because the heat off the engine block block is different. As I'm walking by, I can tell, I go, that engine block's hot and that one's not and so on. And then I come into the. We live close to a library here. And I walked in the library and I could tell there were two chairs there. I could tell which chair had been sat in in the last half hour. It's you know, just empty chairs. But there's, I could even tell which books had been picked up off the shelf recently because there's a heat signature on them still from the person's hands and, and it slices up time in this different way that's quite extraordinary. And there's, by the way, there's different ranges of infrared. So in a different range of infrared, I was walking in the dark and I suddenly felt all this infrared. I thought, what is that? And so I followed it and somebody had a security camera, a night vision security camera, so it's got these infrared LEDs so that it can see in the dark. But of course, normally you can't see it, but it was just obvious to me, like, oh, there's, there's an infrared camera over there. So just being able to see the world in a totally different way is quite extraordinary. And in answer to your question, I don't even know the consequences of this. I Suspect there are 12 Nobel prizes to be discovered in other parts of the electromagnetic spectrum. I'll just give you an example. There's a colleague of mine who makes a satellite company that looks in the microwave range, so just in a different wavelength range, looks at oceans to see where there are ships and, you know, you can see ships and that. Whatever. Anyway, what he discovered accidentally is that if you look at water, any water in this particular range, you can tell if it's drinkable or not. You can tell if it's clean and can be drunk or not. And that was an accidental discovery. But that's the kind of thing where there's just so much to be discovered. And the way we're going to get there is by having people with extra senses just walking around in the world, just experiencing the world, and they'll notice things. It's very hard to sort of set up lab experiments where you, you know, where you go and test each little thing. The way to do it is just have, have people experiencing the world and we'll discover things that way.
- [92:35]
Scott Clary
Do you think that items like Neuralink are going to unlock opportunities like that as well?
- [92:40]
David Eagleman
Here's what I think. So Neuralink is doing very cool stuff with putting electrodes into the brain. This has actually been happening since the 1960s. So Neuralink is just the latest of many companies that do this sort of thing. The problem is you still have to go in for an open head surgery and, you know, drill a hole in your skull and stick stuff in your brain. So it's not the kind of thing. Despite the mystique about it, it's not the kind of thing people, I think are ever going to do because there's always risk of infection or death on the operating table. So I think this is just an intermediate stage as we get towards better technologies like nano robots that you can swallow a billion of and then they go and inject themselves into your neurons and can send signals that way. So I think in 30 years, we'll be seeing very different kinds of things. But I have a suspicion that our distant descendant are going to be unrecognizable to us. So if you compare us to our ancestors of, let's say, a thousand years ago, we'll have more in common with them than we have with our descendants 100 years from now. I think the whole idea of a human as we think of a human now is going to change entirely.
- [93:56]
Scott Clary
I think that's fascinating. I've had conversations on this podcast about just optimizing humanity through technology, and it's interesting. It's very interesting. I, I mean, the goal is to live longer and not just live longer. And I mean, like, you're talking about optimizing sensory and optimizing brain and brain health. But also I also think we're in this period, strange period in history where we've extended lifespan significantly, but people are not living well until they die. I think that there, I think that, you know, if somebody, I mean, I'll use my own family. I mean, there's dementia and Alzheimer's in my family. And yes, for sure, until like 85, the, you know, the person is living very well. But after that, it's significant decline cognitive health. Otherwise, it's not like the last 10 years are great. They're. They're not, they're not. So I think that, you know, some of these items, hopefully cognitively and otherwise, you can be healthy and, and to whatever degree, whatever that means, you can live a much healthier life up until the day that you actually die, versus, you know, 90 of the way there, which I think that that's the reality for most people.
- [95:18]
David Eagleman
That is the hope. And what's really, you know, what's really lovely is that education has spread around the globe. And what that means is we just have more and more biologists and scientists and people doing things. And that means the hope is there that we can actually figure out some of these problems. The, the fact is there are hundreds of things converging on you by the time you're 85. If it's not dementia, it's heart attack. If it's not that it's, you know, your liver is going to go, whatever. And so the key is it's sort of a whack, a mole problem where you have to keep hitting all these things, but we'll get there. I mean, it just. It keeps getting better every year.
- [95:58]
Scott Clary
Okay. So if people want to connect with you, first of all, tell them where to go, but also, what can they look forward to in the future with your work, with what you're working on. You're writing a new book, all that.
- [96:10]
David Eagleman
Yeah, well, I'm actually writing several new books right now, and one of them. One of them has to do essentially with how we all construct our truths and why we all believe our own truths. I'm just fascinated by this. You know, let's take the political spectrum. You look anywhere on the political spectrum and everyone feels like, look, I know the truth, and I. Those people on the other side, they're trolls or they're stubborn or they're misinformed. If only I could just shout loud enough in all capital letters on X, then everyone would come to understand my truth. Truth. But I. I'm fascinated that everyone thinks this. And so, yeah, so I'm writing about why, you know, why we all have these very limited internal models and believe that we know the answer. So, anyway, that. That's. That that'll come out. That's called Empire of the Invisible, and that hopefully will be out in a year or two. My website is eagleman.com and one of the things you can get there, some, aside from the science and stuff, is. Is my podcast Inner Cosmos, which I just finished my 100th episode on, which I know is many fewer than what you've done, Scott, but.
- [97:25]
Scott Clary
No, that's amazing.
- [97:26]
David Eagleman
But. But I. But I did find out that I looked up the statistics on this. It's only a very tiny fraction of podcasts that ever make it to 100 episodes. So you're on what, like 800 or something?
- [97:36]
Scott Clary
What are you on? Yeah, yeah, it's about 850.
- [97:39]
David Eagleman
Yes. Now you're in a much smaller world.
- [97:40]
Scott Clary
Actually, I would look at the stat, too. I think that to be a top 1% podcaster, you have to make it past 10 episodes.
- [97:47]
David Eagleman
Yeah, yeah, at least that. That's right. Yeah.
- [97:52]
Scott Clary
No, that's amazing. And then we're socials. You just. Everything's on the website. Everything's on the website.
- [97:57]
David Eagleman
That's right. That's right. I'm on all the. On all social media.
- [97:59]
Scott Clary
Yeah. Perfect. Okay. So the last thing I'd like to ask, you know, You've. You've taught so much today, so thank you. If you had the ability to only pass on one piece of wisdom or lesson to your kids for whatever reason, that's the most important lesson that you've ever learned. It could be about, I don't know, usually it's about how to live life, things to keep top of mind, things that have really changed your life, ideas or whatnot. What would that lesson be and why is that so important?
- [98:30]
David Eagleman
I'd want to think on that more. But I think given the context of what we've talked about today, what I would really emphasize to them is this issue about keeping yourself always between the levels of frustrating and achievable. Keep finding ways with everything in life so that you don't take some job and settle in and feel like, okay, I know exactly what I'm doing on this assembly line, and I can just do this for years because that's how you waste life. But if you keep yourself in that challenge zone, then that's where you're really living life. And by the way, it's the best thing you can do for your brain.