Diary Of A CEO: w/ Stanford Neuroscientist Dr. David Eagleman on Brain Plasticity (Transcript)

When you look at a parliament, you’ve got all these political parties that all love their country. They just have different ideas of how to steer it. And this is what’s going on in the brain all the time.

STEVEN BARTLETT: So what does one do about that? How do I make — do I have to make a Ulysses Contract?

DR. DAVID EAGLEMAN: I think it’s very useful to make that sort of thing, but also just understanding what’s — I mean, there was this Greek admonition to “know thyself.” This was a sign they had in various places, various temples and stuff. But I think that becomes know thyself. And the better we know ourselves, the more we can get rid of the illusion that we are one person, because all any of us need to do is look back on our behavior to say, oh yeah, in some circumstances I would do that, other circumstances I think it’s a terrible idea. So this is all to the goal of understanding who you are.

Brain Plasticity: You Can Change Your Brain

STEVEN BARTLETT: What are the big misconceptions about the brain that people have gone through their life believing? Something that is true that kind of could fall in place of that is just this fundamental idea that our brains are plastic or sort of adaptable, because when I found out that I could change my brain by what I do, I found that to be really, really inspiring.

DR. DAVID EAGLEMAN: Yes, that’s exactly right. So brain plasticity — if someone hasn’t heard that term before, it sounds like a weird term, but the reason it came about 100 years ago is because the great psychologist William James pointed out that if you take a piece of plastic, what we like about that material that we call plastic is that you can mold it into a shape and it’ll hold that shape. And that’s what your brain does.

So if I ask you the name of your third grade teacher, you can remember that name even though it’s been a long time, because your neural networks changed and held on to that piece of information. Our whole lives, our brains are changing every moment. So now we have certain doors that close at different times. Just as an example, you need to learn language in the first several years of your life. If you don’t learn language, you can never get the concept of language. Your brain will never figure that out.

STEVEN BARTLETT: You’re not saying you can’t learn a new language as an adult. You’re saying the concept of —

DR. DAVID EAGLEMAN: The concept of language — the concept that I can name things and I can ask for things and so on — just that never clicks in the brain.

For example, in Romania at the fall of Ceaușescu, there were tens of thousands of kids in the orphanages because their parents had been killed. It was too many kids, and so the staff there said, look, the kids will get clingy if you pay too much attention to them. So here’s what we’re going to do: we’re going to feed the kids, but we’re not going to hold them, we’re not going to talk to them. And all these children grew up with real cognitive deficits as a result.

The Human Brain: Half-Baked by Design

DR. DAVID EAGLEMAN: Here’s the thing about brain plasticity. Human beings have a similar brain to all our neighbors in the animal kingdom. If you compare our brain to a horse brain, a dog brain, anything like that, it’s the same general structures and stuff. But what we have is much more of the wrinkly outer bit called the cortex. It’s the outer 3 millimeters. But the other thing that Mother Nature tweaked with us — it’s small genetic tweaks — but we have much more plasticity, adaptability, such that when a horse drops into the world, it’s doing the same thing that horses did 100,000 years ago. It’s just eat, mate.

But when a human drops into the world, we learn everything that’s happened before us, and then we springboard off the top of that. So we living in the 21st century, we say, oh great, physics, math, this, that, art — great, we got everything that’s happened before us, now let’s do our own thing. And that’s what’s so special about the plasticity of the human brain, the adaptability of it.

The downside, the gamble, is that Mother Nature drops human brains into the world kind of half-baked, and we then get to absorb everything. But in the rare circumstance where you’re not getting the right input, then that ends up really in trouble because it’s only half-baked.

So when it comes to language, we can learn multiple languages when we’re young. That’s very easy, but it gets harder and harder as that goes along. And various other things become harder. And here’s why: the job of the brain is to make a model of the world so it can operate within it.

So for example, you’re an entrepreneur and you love doing business, so you get it. You get, okay, here’s how you structure business. Here’s how you hire well. Here’s how you set up a board well. You’re doing everything because you’ve got a really rich internal model of how to structure a business. That’s what the brain wants to do, is get that stuff right.

As a result, if you suddenly ended up taking a trip to Mars and there’s a whole very different society there that does businesses very differently, you would have to relearn stuff really quickly. So here’s the thing: you went from having a brain that had high fluid intelligence to now having a brain that has high crystallized intelligence.

What that means is at the beginning, you can learn anything. You could learn any language, you could be dropped into any era. You could have dropped into 13th century Japan when you were young, when you were a baby. If you had dropped out of the womb in 10th century Mongolia, you would have said, okay, cool, learn language — you would be a 10th century Mongolian.

But as it happens, you dropped into this era, a certain place and time and neighborhood and culture and family. And so you learn that — that’s who you become, is that person. We often think that plasticity diminishes as you age, but it’s not simply that it’s diminishing. It’s that you are getting the right answers about how to operate in the world, and so you don’t have to change as much. Your brain doesn’t require as much change.

Can Adults Still Change?

STEVEN BARTLETT: What if I want to change?

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

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

The Power of Challenge and Cognitive Reserve

DR. DAVID EAGLEMAN: The key is challenge. The key is seeking challenge. So it turns out that where we always want to be is in between the levels of frustrating but achievable. And you want to take on new tasks. You want to seek novelty to find yourself in that zone. And push yourself to do things that you just haven’t done before.

And one of the things that’s so wonderful about the modern world, everyone’s got complaints about the internet and social media and stuff like that. But the good news is it exposes you to so much more than you ever even knew was out there. The key is to actively seek those challenges and seek new things and seek to become expert in various sorts of fields.

And I think the key is that once you become good at something, you have to drop that and take on something you’re not good at. This is the best thing you can do for your brain. The reason is because what you’re doing is you’re constantly building new roadways and pathways in the brain.

There’s a study that’s been going on for decades now called the Religious Orders Study, where a bunch of Catholic nuns agreed to donate their brains for autopsy when they passed away. What the researchers discovered when they look at the brain carefully is that some fraction of these nuns had Alzheimer’s disease. Their brains were physically degenerating with the ravages of this dementia, but they didn’t show any of the cognitive deficits that one normally has. They didn’t seem to be having memory problems and so on.

It turns out it’s because all these nuns lived in these convents till the day they died. They had social challenges and they had fights with their fellow sisters and they played games with their fellow sisters and they had chores and responsibilities and they were doing stuff. What that means is even as the brain tissue was physically degenerating, they were making new roadways and bridges all the time. And so that’s what kept them cognitively healthy. We call that cognitive reserve.

Contrast this with people who retire at 65 and they go home and they watch television and their social circle shrink and so on. That’s when you’ve really got concerns because you’re not building the new pathways.

STEVEN BARTLETT: Is there data to support that, that when you retire, if you retire early, or if you retire, say, in your 60s, it increases your probability of an earlier death or cognitive decline?

DR. DAVID EAGLEMAN: Almost certainly with cognitive decline, because you’re just not getting the challenge at that point. You’re just coasting on your internal model.

It’s tragic, but what happens often is that people’s hearing gets worse. And so by the time they retire, let’s say in their mid-60s, it’s not really that fun for them to go out to parties and restaurants anymore because they can’t quite hear. And so there are all these converging reasons why their social lives shrink.

But it turns out social life is one of the most important things that we can do for our brains, because there’s an expression we sometimes use in neuroscience, which is that “nothing is as hard for the brain as other people,” because you never know what the other person’s going to say and do and how they’ll react emotionally and so on. So you’re constantly on your toes with other people, and if you’re not doing that anymore, that ends up being a problem.

Building Brain Pathways Early

STEVEN BARTLETT: Interesting. And as a— I’m 33 years old, so if you were to plot where my brain is on like a graph of decline, is it the case that I should be doing as much as I can now to build as many pathways I can so that when I’m 80, my decline sort of levels out in a better place?

DR. DAVID EAGLEMAN: Oh yeah, for sure. But this is true for many reasons actually. The truth is your brain peaked at the age of 2, because that’s when you get most connections between neurons, between these cells in the brain. You get this— at first you’re born with these 86 billion neurons, and they connect and connect and connect, and it finally becomes like an overgrown garden at the age of 2. And from there you’re pruning, from there you’re taking connections away.

Now it happens that that’s not a bad thing, that’s a good thing, because that’s how you’re resonating with the world that you are in— 21st century London and LA versus 10th century Mongolia— because you’re just strengthening those pathways that resonate and you’re getting rid of everything else.

But over time, your brain cells die. Every time you hit your head on something or whatever, your brain cells are going down. So in that sense, you’ve peaked. But your crystallized intelligence that you’ve been building your whole life, that keeps going and you’ll have decades ahead of you where you can start doing stuff.

But yes, the reason to learn everything you can is because all that stuff cashes out at various points in your life. When you’re starting your next business or you’re wanting to do the next great thing where you’re surfing the web of AI, you’ll say, “Oh, I learned this thing when I was 16, I learned this thing when I was 22, and these are paying off now.”

The Anterior Midcingulate Cortex and the Challenge Response

STEVEN BARTLETT: I think I heard Andrew Huberman say that one of the most fascinating discoveries of the last century is a particular part of the brain called the anterior midcingulate cortex, and it links to what you were saying a second ago about challenge. And doing things that are difficult.

DR. DAVID EAGLEMAN: Yeah, it turns out that area of the brain is involved, and other networks as well, because when you’re doing something new and challenging and difficult, you have stress and anxiety. Your whole brain is active. Let’s say I measured your brain even with something like EEG, electroencephalography. That’s where I stick electrodes on the outside.

Let’s say I measure your brain and my brain. We’re doing something that, let’s say, you’re an expert at. What’s something you’re really good at? Juggling, I don’t know, some physics.

STEVEN BARTLETT: Let’s go for juggling.

DR. DAVID EAGLEMAN: Okay, let’s say you’re an expert juggler, say I’ve never juggled. If we’re both juggling, you’re going to be much better than I am, but your brain will be less active. You won’t have as much activity in your brain. My brain is on fire with activity because why? I’m trying to figure out, okay, where do I put my hand? How do I throw this?

So when I’m a novice at something, my brain is using much more activity, not just the anterior cingulate, tons of activity all over because I’m trying to figure out the rules. I’m trying to figure out what’s going on. You as an expert, you got it. You don’t need to burn much activity. This is what the brain’s goal is, is to say, “Hey, once I’ve practiced something a lot, once I get something about the world, I’m going to burn it deeper and deeper into the circuitry so I don’t have to burn a lot of energy on it.”

STEVEN BARTLETT: On this part of the brain, the anterior cingulate cortex, Andrew Huberman was saying it’s larger in people that do things that they basically don’t want to do, hard things. If you spend your life doing things you don’t want to do, then it happens to be bigger. And so people have now thought of this part of the brain almost like the willpower muscle, because for some reason those that are doing hard things have bigger ones and those that are not have smaller ones.

Brain Plasticity and Real Estate

DR. DAVID EAGLEMAN: It wouldn’t be so much the willpower muscle, it would be some indication retrospectively of how hard you have worked. Look, the fact is you can see changes in brain size with lots of things. I’ll give you an example. If you are a pianist, if you play piano, then we can actually see physical changes in your motor cortex. This is the part of the brain essentially underneath where you would wear headphones. You actually get a bigger loop of tissue here than you do in a normal brain. Why? Because you’re doing so much fine motor activity with your fingers, with both hands.

In contrast, if you’re a violinist, you’re only really doing that kind of detailed activity with one hand and the other hand’s just bowing. And so you only get that activity in one half of the brain for violinists. So I can look at a brain and tell, “Hey, is the person a pianist or a violinist or neither?” I can tell just by looking at the visual cortex because you see changes in the brain based on what you do. For example, jugglers, people who play music— even you can tell this with medical students who study for final exams. You actually see changes in the distribution of their cortex.

STEVEN BARTLETT: Why would it be getting bigger?

DR. DAVID EAGLEMAN: The reason is the brain’s devoting more real estate to that. In this case, let’s say we’re talking about fingers on a piano or violin, the brain is devoting more— there’s more relevance to that, and so it devotes more real estate.

STEVEN BARTLETT: So that you can do it better in the future?

DR. DAVID EAGLEMAN: Exactly. The key about the cortex, this wrinkly outer part, is that it is a one-trick pony. This is often overlooked because even this brain that I’m holding here is color-coded so that we think, “Oh, okay, that’s clearly labeled this. That’s clearly labeled that,” and so on. But in fact, it’s all the same stuff, and it can change.

So for instance, if you are born blind, then this area that we normally call the visual cortex gets taken over by the rest of the brain. If you’re born deaf, then this part that we call the auditory cortex gets taken over, it gets devoted to other tasks. And so this whole system is very, very fluid, and this is what fascinates me about brain plasticity— the way that we can be the sculptors of our own brains because we can devote ourselves to particular things and have the brain’s real estate get involved in that.

Can You Rewire Your Brain for Discipline?

STEVEN BARTLETT: So if I was currently someone that couldn’t get out of bed, I didn’t have a lot of discipline or motivation, and I wasn’t very good at committing myself to hard things— with everything you know about the brain, is it possible to take a set of actions that will fundamentally change my brain and make me that type of person who runs marathons, who does hard things, who’s motivated and disciplined, and who has high agency and attacks the world?

DR. DAVID EAGLEMAN: Yes. But it’s much more than simply resolve because, I mean, just look at New Year’s resolutions. By February, most people have dropped most of them. So it’s really a psychology problem about figuring out, okay, what are the things that motivate me?

So let’s say you want to become a marathon runner. You’ve got that distant dream. You figure out like, what actually motivates me in the short term? Who am I trying to impress? What am I trying to accomplish in my life? How can I structure things like this Ulysses contract that I talked about earlier, where I’m actually locking myself into a contract? Like, I call Bob and I say, “I will meet you every morning at 7 and we’re going to run until we drop.” Once I’ve committed to those sorts of things, that’s how you set things up so that you do the right thing.

STEVEN BARTLETT: It’s a bit of a cycle, right? Because then my brain will adapt, and then presumably that’ll make it easier for me to run.

DR. DAVID EAGLEMAN: Yeah.

STEVEN BARTLETT: And then I’ll run more and then my brain will adapt.

DR. DAVID EAGLEMAN: That’s right.

STEVEN BARTLETT: And the cycle continues.

DR. DAVID EAGLEMAN: And it’s not just your brain, of course. In this case, it’s your body. You’re getting better, you’re getting stronger, you don’t get as out of breath. And so all these things help. But in order to keep the cycle going, you need to figure out what is spinning this flywheel and what are all the other things in your life, whether good motivations or bad, it doesn’t matter. You just figure out what it is that you can do to get there.

Exercise and the Brain

STEVEN BARTLETT: Are there some physical exercises that are particularly good for the brain, from what you’ve understood?

DR. DAVID EAGLEMAN: The general story is exercise is really important for the brain. I’ll give you just one example of that, which is there’s still this debate going on about whether we get new neurons in the brain. The general story has always been you’re born with 86 billion neurons and those slowly die with time. But in rats, for example, there is a little trickle of new cells, new brain cells, and there’s been a debate for a long time about whether that little trickle happens in humans or not.

Still unresolved, but in rats what you can see is that exercise causes the trickle to increase. If you stick the rat on the wheel and it’s doing physical exercise, you get more new brain cells. Now we don’t know for sure that this happens in humans, but lots of things about physical fitness and exercise matter a lot to the brain. This is nothing new. Exercise, sleep, diet— these are really important things for keeping the health of this organ.

Social Media, Brain Development, and the Digital Age

STEVEN BARTLETT: Is there anything else that’s important to know for someone that is trying to change and improve and keep their brain in a healthy state as they age that we haven’t touched on?

DR. DAVID EAGLEMAN: There is something that all of us are thinking about, which is about social media and the internet in general. I do think one of the interesting things about the internet and social media is that if we were growing up in a village 500 years ago, you just know the people in the village and what they can do and so on. But let’s say no one in the village was an entrepreneur or a neuroscientist. And so we can’t even picture that as a thing. We don’t know anything about that.

One thing that the internet has done for kids growing up in the digital age is that you get a lot more exposure to things. You have so much more exposure. And I actually think this is one of the positive things that I would say about social media is that you not only get exposure — wow, that kind of thing is possible and that kind of thing is possible — but you also have people teaching you how to get there. They say, hey, I’m a fitness influencer and I’m going to show you exactly how to do the thing. Or you say, hey, here’s exactly how you start a business, or I say, hey, here’s the route that you go through undergrad and grad school to become a neuroscientist.

And that’s great. There’s just so much more of a talent window now that everyone gets exposed to. So I think that makes a better brain.

What Are We Doing to Children’s Brains?

STEVEN BARTLETT: What are we doing to our children that you think we probably shouldn’t be doing as it relates to brain development?

DR. DAVID EAGLEMAN: Here’s the thing that’s really important about this debate is that nobody really knows, and I’ll tell you why. It’s because to do anything in science, when you’re saying something about a group, you need to have a control group that you’re comparing against. And when it comes to asking the question of, hey, kids growing up now with social media or the internet, how do they compare to other brains of kids who don’t grow up with that? Well, we don’t have a control group unless you look at kids who are incredibly impoverished, or let’s say Quakers who don’t believe in technology. And with both those groups, there’s 100 other important differences.

So you can’t just say, oh look, I’m comparing to this kid who grew up without food, and I’m going to say there’s this difference. Who the heck knows why. There’s so many differences there. Even a generation ago, there’s so many differences in terms of diet and pollution and politics and blah, blah, blah, everything that you can’t do it. So I only mention this because I think it’s very important. A lot of people pipe off with things about, oh, the younger generation, their brain, this, that, but we don’t actually know.

And I will tell you that I happen to be a cyber optimist on this point about what growing up with the internet does for young people. I think it’s going to make them much smarter than the generation that came before. And here’s why. The size of the intellectual diet that they can bring in.

So when I was a kid, I grew up pre-internet. I wanted to know stuff. So my mom would drive me to the library, which was 25 minutes away, and I would pick up the Encyclopedia Britannica and I would flip through it and hope they had an article about the thing that I wanted to know about. And that’s how I was able to get my little straw of knowledge. But now kids are growing up with access to anything they’re interested in. And this is so good for the brain.

And from a plasticity point of view, the reason this matters is because change happens in the brain when you are curious about something. So when a kid asks a question to Alexa or Siri or whatever, and they get the answer, that sticks because they have the right cocktail of chemicals going on in their head. In contrast, when I grew up, I learned tons of just-in-case knowledge. I mean, that’s all that the teachers could teach us is just in case you ever need to know this fact, here it is.

But kids are in a really great situation now. So there are pros and cons to all this stuff, but I think I’m very optimistic about what this means for the warehouse of knowledge that kids can build up now.

And by the way, I saw an interview with Isaac Asimov in 1988. He was the great science fiction writer who wrote Foundation and so many other books. And he was saying on the show in 1988, he said, “Look, I envision a day when there will be one central supercomputer and every house will have a cable running to that supercomputer. And you can ask any question you want and it knows the entirety of humankind’s knowledge on that computer.” You know, what he was foreseeing here was the internet. He got the details wrong, but it doesn’t matter. But the idea is he saw how this would be so incredible for education because he pointed out, “Look, in any classroom, it’s going too fast for half the kids, too slow for the other half of the kids. And if you could just pursue the sphere of humankind’s knowledge, if you could enter in whatever door you wanted to, that’s the way to do it, because you’ll be motivated.”

Now, he wasn’t talking about brain plasticity or anything, but this is exactly what I’m saying from a brain plasticity point of view. It really matters.

I’ll just mention something, which is a lot of people are concerned that with AI, we’re going to get lazy. We won’t know how to do anything anymore because we can outsource. It just so happens that I love doing home improvement. I’m always fixing my house. I have 3x’d myself in the last half year because of AI. Because I take a picture of something, I say, hey, I’ve never seen this kind of thing before. How does this work? Whatever. And ChatGPT says, oh, you do this and you take this out and here’s the bolt and blah, blah. It’s not me outsourcing it, it’s me being curious about something. And so I remember how to do everything now. I know how to do much more than I used to because I like it.

AI, Learning, and the Brain: Vicious vs. Virtuous Friction

STEVEN BARTLETT: What about the — you know, there’s been a couple of studies that have come out that say things like your brain’s going to atrophy if you don’t continue to write, or if you just defer all of your learning to things like ChatGPT or other AI models. One of the areas that I think — in one of the studies, was it a Stanford study that everyone was talking about where the participants used Google and AI and then they’d learned something themselves?

But one of the things I’ve wondered is, if I’m going through my business life and I’m encountering hard problems, and every time I encounter a hard problem, I drop it into an AI, the AI spits out a text-based answer, I copy and paste that and send it as my response — presumably there’s some kind of important part of the learning cycle or the neurological development that I’m foregoing there and missing that I probably should. You said earlier about doing hard things. What I’m doing there is I’m avoiding the hard, which is like thinking about it and trying to understand it.

DR. DAVID EAGLEMAN: Yeah. Here’s, I think, the really important distinction. There’s vicious friction in our lives and there’s virtuous friction. So vicious friction is all the stupid stuff that you have to do, like, hey, Steven, for your business, I need you to copy this spreadsheet over here and fill in all these cells and do your taxes and whatever. Okay. That, if we can push that off to AI, is massively important for improving human lives. There’s really no benefit in vicious friction.

But virtuous friction is, hey, Steven, I really want you to think about what is the optimal way to do this business? What is the best structure for this? How do we actually go D2C? How do we go B2B on this? What’s the approach here that we’re going to take that you haven’t done before? That would be amazing. That’s virtuous friction because you’re really using your brain to learn stuff that way.

Okay, so that’s the first distinction that matters — get rid of all the busywork. There’s no honor in that. I’ll just mention in the 1990s there was this big debate about whether we should have kids use desk calculators or not. And thank God that finally got resolved and we let kids use calculators so that we can learn a couple of things — we can spend a couple days learning long division, but you don’t have to spend 6 months on it because who cares?

With the virtuous friction, there’s real opportunity to surf the wave of AI so that you are figuring out these tough problems with the aid of somebody who cares about your problem and is willing to talk with you 24/7 and never gets tired of talking to you about it. And so you are not just copying and pasting, but you’re working with the AI to come up with ideas that were beyond what you would’ve come up with. Because I mentioned earlier about internal models, we have pretty narrow fence lines and you can think of all these things, but you don’t even know what you don’t know. So if you can have somebody who’s willing to talk with you, an expert in all of humankind’s knowledge, willing to talk with you about it as much as you want — there’s a real opportunity there to have a synergy where collectively you both come up with a better idea than either of you could have alone.

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

DR. DAVID EAGLEMAN: That would happen if you really didn’t care about the person asking you the question or the question.

STEVEN BARTLETT: I mean, this is what a lot of people are doing. I get so many emails because we interview a lot of candidates who join the business. And so I see tens of thousands of emails sometimes a week — I mean, I don’t see all of them, but the ones that I see, I often know that, because we’ve sent them 5 questions or a task and I look at it and go, this is — I can almost predict the exact model that sent it to me because they all have a different personality. So I go, oh, this one, the person put into Gemini, or this one, the person put it into ChatGPT.

DR. DAVID EAGLEMAN: Yeah, exactly. And it’s full of contrastive construction, like, and it’s not this, it’s that. And then the em dashes. Exactly.

STEVEN BARTLETT: I’m really asking, like, is the person that did that benefiting from it? No.

The Effort Phenomenon

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

STEVEN BARTLETT: That’s a really interesting idea, the effort phenomenon.

DR. DAVID EAGLEMAN: Yeah, I mean, I’ve been writing about this for a while because it turns out there are psychology studies where if I offer you two pieces of art and one of them looks like, you know, let’s say it’s a red dot in the middle of a white canvas, and the other one is, you know, bottle caps stacked up and glued in this great shape or whatever, you’ll pay much more for the thing that looks like it took a lot of effort.

People will pay more for a real diamond than a synthetic lab-grown diamond, which is exactly the same thing. It’s just carbon in the matrix. But they feel like, oh, well, Mother Nature took hundreds of millions of years of effort on this one, but not over here. It just took a few days in the lab. So there’s a million ways where we care about that a lot.

When it comes to this AI thing, yes, anybody who’s just popping back something to you, it just feels like, all right, they took the path of least resistance, and I’m not so interested.

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

DR. DAVID EAGLEMAN: Presumably they don’t benefit too much either. I mean, it’s hard to know exactly how many times they went back and forth with it. They could have said, “Hey, ChatGPT, thank you for this, but I’m kind of more of this person. What I really think about is this. This is the thing that inspires me, not what you suggested.” So somebody could put effort into it. It’s just that we can’t know that when we get the AI response.

AI, Learning, and the Motorcycle for the Mind

STEVEN BARTLETT: It seems to be a pretty consistent principle of life generally that when you do something hard or when you put in effort, as you say, you tend to get back an equal and opposite return, relatively. So I would think that if I fought through, maybe even using AI as a companion, but I fought then to write it out myself instead of just copying and pasting.

DR. DAVID EAGLEMAN: Yeah.

STEVEN BARTLETT: One of the things I’ve learned from doing this podcast, all these episodes, is everything is a trade-off.

DR. DAVID EAGLEMAN: Yeah.

STEVEN BARTLETT: And if you don’t know what the trade you’re making, then you’re often at great risk. Some of my friends will say, “Oh, I take this pill and it’s amazing, it does all these things for me, it’s the most amazing thing ever, I can just focus for 24 hours a day and I’m so productive now.” And I go, “What’s the downside?” And they go, “There’s no downside.” I go, hmm. That’s what I mean. It’s even worse when you don’t know the trade you’re making. And so with AI, I go, okay, if it’s making me wildly more efficient or productive, what trade am I making?

DR. DAVID EAGLEMAN: I think understanding this, it’s probably not two categories, but a spectrum from vicious friction to virtuous friction. But really paying attention to what is virtuous friction, what would make me a better person if I actually put the effort into this, that matters a lot.

And I will say, for us as professors, for you looking for job candidates, we need to change how we’re asking the questions. If we just say, “Hey, write, answer these 5 questions,” of course everyone’s going to use it. For example, in my classes at Stanford, I don’t have people turn in a final paper anymore. That was from a previous life before AI. Now I have them do projects as their final thing where they’re running an experiment on something. And of course they use AI to help them generate some of the issues, but they have to deal with other people and look at the data and figure out what’s wrong and that kind of stuff.

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

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

Using AI to Become Superhuman

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

DR. DAVID EAGLEMAN: Interesting. I have been talking to my friends about this issue a lot lately, and I mentioned how I’ve become so much better at home improvement stuff. I just know so much more. Each one of my friends has something like that. We’re like, “Hey, you know what? I’ve actually gotten so much better at this super random thing that I never even thought about explicitly.” But because I’m always asking AI questions about that and it’s giving me the answers, it’s not simply that it gives me the answers and I forget it. It gives me the answers and I remember it.

I become better and better because it’s like the way that Alexander the Great had Aristotle as his tutor and could ask him anything and learn great stuff from him. We’ve all got Aristotle in our pocket now, and we can become better at the things that we want to do, the things that resonate with us for whatever reason.

STEVEN BARTLETT: If everyone’s got Aristotle in their pocket, how does one create an edge?

DR. DAVID EAGLEMAN: I think it has to do with us all just going to be running faster, in the same way that when Steve Jobs introduced Apple computers, he said, “This is like a bicycle for the mind.” What he meant by that was that for millions of years we’ve been walking bipedally, and then just in the last nanosecond of evolution, we invented the bicycle, and suddenly humans can move faster because of the bicycle. And he said having a personal computer is like a bicycle for the mind. And I think of AI now as like a motorcycle for the mind.

STEVEN BARTLETT: It’s—

DR. DAVID EAGLEMAN: It allows us to move so much faster. So now it’s a motorcycle race, and there will be people who are much faster than other people because they’re really using that optimally.

STEVEN BARTLETT: And that’s what I mean. How do I create an edge versus whoever I’m competing with in whatever industry I’m in?

DR. DAVID EAGLEMAN: Well, for sure, the people who are just copying and pasting the AI slop, that’ll be easy to beat that crowd. But otherwise, I think it’s just a matter of, hey, these are the newest things. It’s like in history when the new sword gets invented or the new gun or the new cannon. You have to keep improving and using that. And that’s what’s going on now with AI.

Critical Thinking, Creativity, and the AI Edge

STEVEN BARTLETT: And from a neuroscience perspective, if I wanted to use AI — based on all these things you’ve told me about novelty and all these other points that expand the connections across my brain and give me a big cognitive reserve — what might I install as a practice every week when I’m speaking to my AI?

DR. DAVID EAGLEMAN: Ask it questions that you’re curious about, about anything. Just asking questions. Here’s one thing I do all the time. I’ll say, “Hey, I’ve been thinking about this.” On my podcast, I do a lot of monologues. And so I’ll start talking to it and I’ll say, “Hey, I’ve got this idea that I’m thinking about. What if blah, blah, blah, blah, blah?” And then I’ll say, “Here’s my idea. Give me pros and cons. Tell me why this is wrong.” And I do that pretty much with everything that I ask it if I’m proposing some stupid seed of an idea. And it really gives me the counterarguments and I really engage with that. That is the important part, I think.

And by the way, I just want to say, I think for the next generation that we’re teaching, there are really only two things we can teach, because all the details of, hey, let’s teach computer programming or something, that’s probably already gone as a useful thing. So what we can teach is critical thinking and creativity. That’s it.

STEVEN BARTLETT: I think that’s such an important point, this point about asking your AI why you might be wrong. I think I’ve had most of my paradigm-shifting moments when I’ve come to an AI model with very high conviction. And the prompt that I think is most expansive in terms of my intellectual knowledge is when I say to it, “Be brutally honest about your opinion, think for yourself and be objective, and tell me where my blind spots are.”

There’s something innate within us all where we don’t actually want to be wrong. We often, I think, as a natural reflex — and this is why people get really trapped in echo chambers of political opinion — Leon Festinger talked about this idea of cognitive dissonance, when something you believe contrasts with new information and how it makes you feel uncomfortable. When I type that out, when I love the idea or the thing I’ve written or the memo I’ve written, this new idea, and I go, “Go on, tell me why I’m completely, completely wrong,” and it eviscerates me. It is both uncomfortable but feels incredibly important because then it’s like I’ve grown. But these AIs, they’re programmed almost to kiss my ass.

DR. DAVID EAGLEMAN: Yes. Although ChatGPT released a very sycophantic version, maybe a year ago, meaning it compliments you. You give some idea and it says, “Oh, Steven, that’s the best idea I’ve ever heard. You’re a genius.” And that didn’t last very long because nobody actually liked it.

So you’re exactly right. And I’m sure most listeners know this, but you can tell your AI to be brutally honest with you all the time. You can establish the kind of person that you’re talking to. Here’s the thing — you’re right, of course, people don’t like to be wrong. It can be socially embarrassing, it can be uncomfortable. And yet there’s something very different when you’re talking to your AI. It’s a very private thing. And you say, “Hey, tell me where I’m brutally wrong.” And when it tells you, you think, “Oh, thank God it’s telling me that instead of a real human.” So I think a lot of that is alleviated with AI. We don’t feel as bad about being wrong there.

Can AI Be Funny or Creative?

STEVEN BARTLETT: As you were saying that, I just went on ChatGPT and I typed this in. “Is my joke funny?” And the joke I typed in is: Knock knock. Who’s there? A lettuce. Lettuce who? Lettuce in and I’ll tell you. Okay, you didn’t laugh. I didn’t laugh. ChatGPT said yes, it works as a joke. Solid structure. Uses the classic pun payoff, which is exactly how most knock-knock jokes land. And then it’s done a laughing emoji. I then said, “Be brutally honest and completely objective. Was that funny?” It said, “It’s not very funny.” Interesting.

DR. DAVID EAGLEMAN: That’s interesting because it depends, right? A little child actually finds that joke funny. And for a little child, they then get to repeat that to their classmate and they’re learning how to do a joke and so on. So I’m not sure I think there’s a single answer to whether that can be funny or not.

STEVEN BARTLETT: But the interesting thing is it just reinforcing what I already believed. And therefore, when we think about growth or having a growth mindset, if someone’s just always reinforcing what you already believe and know, I don’t know if it’s ever going to be a growth mindset. I mean, I just asked it again. I said, “Be really honest.” And it said, “It’s absolutely not funny.”

DR. DAVID EAGLEMAN: Yeah, but remember, all it’s doing is it’s just a statistical parrot. And so when you say, “Be really honest,” it thinks that’s what it should answer.

STEVEN BARTLETT: I said, “Be even more honest.” It says it’s basically not funny at all and you shouldn’t say that to people. Okay. And it says comedic originality, 1 out of 10, likelihood of real laughter, 1 out of 10.

DR. DAVID EAGLEMAN: Well, that’s quite good. That’s quite accurate. Here’s the thing. I’ve been thinking about this issue a lot about whether AI can be funny. And at the moment it can’t be. It’s great at repeating jokes, but it doesn’t understand humor on its own. What it knows — if you ask it to make up a new joke — is it’ll have the first guy walk into a bar, then the second guy walks in the bar and does X, and that establishes the pattern. But then the third guy, it’ll have break that pattern, which is the structure of a joke, but it doesn’t know how to break the pattern in a way that’s funny. It’s just the third guy does some random thing. So AI, as it stands now, the way it’s structured with what’s called a transformer model, doesn’t know how to think of the punchline and then go back and make the joke lead to that punchline.

STEVEN BARTLETT: A lot of people don’t either. I say that not in an offensive way, but just to say that I often hear the claim that AI could never be creative.

DR. DAVID EAGLEMAN: It’s massively creative. Here’s why. Creativity in the brain — all creativity is — you absorb your world, the whole world around you, every experience you’ve ever had, and then you’re bending and breaking and blending those cognitive concepts into new remixes. That’s all creativity is. And you’re doing that all the time, whether you’re just trying to think of what to say next or what recipe to make next or what patent to do or what company to start. You’re just remixing the stuff that you already know.

And that’s why, take Beethoven. He could have written any kind of music that was being done anywhere in the world, but of course he didn’t. That’s what he grew up with, was the music in his local culture and so on. What we have now is a much broader diet, as I mentioned before, where we can get everything going in.

But the point I want to make here is that AI, that’s what it does. It remixes stuff that’s come in. So AI is massively creative. The part of creativity that AI can’t do right now is selection, meaning it can generate 100 pictures, but it doesn’t know which one to pick. It doesn’t know which one is going to be the most appealing to you, but it can remix beautifully.

AI Creativity, Human Selection, and the Limits of Artificial Taste

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

DR. DAVID EAGLEMAN: The intern would have a much better shot at it. And as the intern is there for a while, he or she becomes quite good at getting, “Oh, okay, I get Steven’s taste. It would be this one.”

STEVEN BARTLETT: And AI can’t learn that, what my taste is?

DR. DAVID EAGLEMAN: I don’t think the AI could learn that about visual images because when it generates the pixels, it’s doing this magical stuff under the hood where it’s deciding which pixels and how they diffuse together and makes the image. But it doesn’t know how to read that image like, “Oh yeah, the way this is and blah blah, that’ll really appeal to Steven.” It’s not seeing the image except as a bunch of pixels.

STEVEN BARTLETT: Pixels. Hmm.

DR. DAVID EAGLEMAN: You need to be a human for that because I feed them.

AI Predicting Human Behavior: Steven’s Experiments

STEVEN BARTLETT: So I was doing an experiment recently where I took my behind-the-scenes channel, which is a 30-minute-long video, I dropped it into Gemini, and I’d say things to it like, predict where people would drop off on the video. And then we upload the video to YouTube, we get the retention data back, and Gemini, in the last 2 times that I’ve done it, has 100% record of knowing that at minute 7, where insert person talked for too long and might have been a bit more sell-y, might have tried to sell a hoodie, for example, in that part, it would say, you’re going to lose people here. And it would very accurately say why. It would say, because you talked for 74 seconds and it was jarring versus the moment that came before it.

And when I feed the AI thumbnails and say, which thumbnail is going to perform the best? We did a test recently where we put 4 thumbnail test results that we knew the answer to into Gemini and said, which one’s going to win on YouTube A/B testing, and it got 100% accuracy of predicting on data we already had which one would win. And so now I keep having these paradigm-shifting moments where I’m going to— only humans could do that. But increasingly, the AIs that we’re experimenting with are making better creative decisions than I can make myself, as if the outcome of that creative decision is which one people are going to prefer. I’d say a year ago that wasn’t the case.

DR. DAVID EAGLEMAN: Okay, so I totally agree with you, but let me just mention one thing which is fascinating, which is that often the way it’s doing it is not at all the way that a human would do it, which might be fine for our purposes, but the data and the way that it’s picking up on it, it might be something about— I’m making this up— how much green was in the YouTube thumbnail image, or how much red, or whatever the thing is, or just noticing that there’s big font versus smaller font or whatever.

The next time you try it, it says, “Oh yeah, this thumbnail is going to be great.” And it’s some ridiculous thumbnail that doesn’t make any sense to you as a human, nor to your fellow humans. But it might say, “Oh yeah, this would be great,” because it’s judging things on very weird dimensions that we can’t always see.

STEVEN BARTLETT: In the example you gave about maybe it’s because the text is bigger or the color red, but those are the same factors we think about as a human. We think if we know that if the font is bigger, it performs better. We know that red performs better than green.

AI and the Limits of Predicting Novelty

DR. DAVID EAGLEMAN: Quite possibly. But here’s the interesting thing: human art constantly evolves, and all AI is trained on is what has been done before and what has worked. And so if I asked it— let’s say we composed 5 different songs and said, “Hey, AI, which song is going to be better?” It’s going to say something that’s right in the middle of the distribution of popular songs. But that’s not what actually makes it next year and the year after. It’s new things, it’s new twists that nobody has seen before. That’s what we love. That’s what we seek as consumers. And so because AI can only be trained up on what already exists, it’s never going to get the new thing at the edge.

STEVEN BARTLETT: But if the AI was asked to— because I think the reason why a new song would break out, let’s say a new Drake song comes out and it’s a smash hit. If we think about that distribution curve, so like if I draw it on the graph, you’re saying that this middle section here is what AI will aim at because it’s the popular and the known.

DR. DAVID EAGLEMAN: Yeah.

STEVEN BARTLETT: Well, if I tell AI to make a million songs, which is kind of what I guess is what’s going on every day around the world, if you scattered them on this graph— and then the AI’s most unusual song ends up taking off, but it’s just because there’s so many of them.

DR. DAVID EAGLEMAN: Quite right. But that’s the human selection part that we’re seeing over there. If you asked, “Okay, out of all these dots, which do you think AI is going to suggest?” it’s going to tell you the middle of the curve. But the surprising part is the part that you circled there, which is the one on the edge is the one that humans like. Why? Because we’re constant novelty seekers. We care about the things that are new.

STEVEN BARTLETT: I think the point I’m getting at is that the creation of it, the creative process, is still the same, which is like, AI or humans just trying a bunch of shit and then the world going, “Oh, that—”

DR. DAVID EAGLEMAN: Oh, I totally agree. This is consistent with what I’m saying, which is that AI can be massively creative in terms of the generation of something, but you need humans to do the selection. I’m only arguing the point that AI is not good at saying, “Okay, I’ve generated 100 songs, this is the one humans will choose.” We end up saying, “Hey, wait, this one is just weird and unique enough that I really like that.”

The Formula Behind Hit Songs

STEVEN BARTLETT: It’s interesting because when you speak to record labels about music, what they’re often doing is getting a format of a song that they know will work. So they’re like, “Right, so it’s got to be 8 bars here, it’s going to be this here, you’ve got to have a chorus that’s hooky, it’s got to come back around, it’s got to build up pace.” And there’s like a rough format to it. And it’s no surprise that someone like Ed Sheeran has written so many songs for so many f*ing people.

DR. DAVID EAGLEMAN: Yeah.

STEVEN BARTLETT: When I spent some time working with Sony, they had a brand new boy band in the wake of One Direction. And when I sat with the boy band and was introducing myself, they said to me, “Oh yeah, so here are the boy band’s first 3 songs, and Ed Sheeran has written all of them.” And I was like, “What?” I thought— they’re like, “No, Ed Sheeran’s written all of them, and then what we do is we give them to the boy band and then the boy band sing them and they’re pretty much guaranteed to be hits because Ed Sheeran has like a formula. The way he writes is really in vogue right now.”

People tend to think a lot that the songs that are number 1 in the charts are there just because someone had creative genius. And of course, that is the case sometimes. But there is a lot of this writing going on and then handing the formula over because someone has cracked the code of a hit.

DR. DAVID EAGLEMAN: Right. But here’s the thing, and we all know this, which is that the code never lasts. So, humans have this pull where they’re always seeking things between novelty and familiarity. So, we like things where we recognize the brand and we recognize what the singer has done before, but there has to be novelty or else we’re not going to go for it. We’re not going to listen to that boy band for the next 10 years doing the same song over and over.

So you’re of course right that we want a bit of familiarity, we want to be anchored, but we definitely seek the new. This is what humans always do. This is why car companies always release the next model even though the current model is perfectly fine. This is why haircuts evolve. This is why fashion evolves through the years, because we always care about novelty.

The Psychology of Familiarity and Novelty in Music

STEVEN BARTLETT: And the other thing in the music industry that I think is also creating a hit is— I was reading many years ago about some psychology, which you’ll probably know much more about, that says exactly what you just said, which is we love something when it is familiar but new.

DR. DAVID EAGLEMAN: Exactly.

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

DR. DAVID EAGLEMAN: Yeah.

STEVEN BARTLETT: And it comes back down the other side of the curve where it’s now too familiar.

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

The Brain, AI, and the Future of Human Roles

STEVEN BARTLETT: When you think about the brain and how it’s built, and then you think about the exact technology that they’ve used to create AI, isn’t it very, very similar? And if so, if it is similar, what does that say about humans’ role in the future?

AI vs. The Human Brain

DR. DAVID EAGLEMAN: It’s similar, but it’s not the same, which is why with AI you get what we call jagged intelligence, meaning that it can do something so extraordinarily smart and then in the next moment give an answer that’s weird and doesn’t make any sense. AI still is doing this. It’s not thinking like we think.

Okay, why? It’s because AI, as we think about it now, really started of course decades and decades ago where people said, look, you’ve got all these billions of cells, neurons in the brain that are connected to each other. What if we ignore all that complexity and we just say, look, imagine that you have units that are connected to each other. We’re going to forget about a single cell in the brain is as complicated as— it’s got the entire human genome, it’s trafficking millions of proteins. Let’s put all that aside. Just imagine it’s a circle and it’s connected to other cells, and each connection has a certain strength. And that’s what we call an artificial neural network.

Now, that went off in its own direction, and the kind of amazing, surprising part is how successful it’s been to just get rid of all the detail. But it’s still super different than what human brains are like. So just an example — this thing I mentioned at the very beginning about how we’re a team of rivals under the hood. You’ve got all these different competing neural networks that are trying to drive your behavior and so on. The fact that we’re emotional, the fact that we are driven by different appetites, whether food or sexuality or whatever it is. But you’re ChatGPT. You don’t want that in the ChatGPT.

So it’s just an artificial neural network, many layers deep, and it’s extraordinary at what it does, but it’s so different than a human. For example, the fact that it’s read everything on the planet and remembers it, and you haven’t — you would need to lead a thousand lifetimes to read that much, and of course you wouldn’t remember much of it. It’s very different, is the point I’m making. They both have converged on something that we would call intelligence, but it’s a pretty different structure, even though AI was inspired by the brain.

STEVEN BARTLETT: That’s what Geoffrey Hinton was telling me. He was telling me that much of the breakthroughs that have made AI what it is today came from understanding how the brain works.

DR. DAVID EAGLEMAN: Yeah, but that’s interesting because Hinton isn’t incentivized to say that, but a neuroscientist —

STEVEN BARTLETT: He’s incentivized to say that.

DR. DAVID EAGLEMAN: People doing AI, of course, are paying a lot of attention to how this is structured like the brain, because before that, people would do things like probability theory or rules, or they would try to do AI by trying to say, okay, if this, then do that. But when people started doing artificial neural networks, that led to a lot of success. I’m only pointing out that the artificial neural network looks a lot like the brain on the surface. You say, hey, you’ve got units and you’ve got connections, but beyond that, there’s a lot of differences.

STEVEN BARTLETT: And why are those differences significant as it relates to what’s possible?

DR. DAVID EAGLEMAN: Because what we’ve developed is a new species essentially that is incredibly impressive, but it ain’t a human brain. It’s different than a human brain. There may be all kinds of similarities, things that we even come to understand are similar, but there are so many differences.

Here’s an example. We humans do one-trial learning all the time, meaning if I say — or when you were a kid and your mom said, “Hey Stephen, this is a pomegranate,” you say, “Okay, pomegranate, got it.” But when you’re training up an artificial neural network like at OpenAI or Gemini or Anthropic, you have to give thousands or millions of examples of everything for it to learn anything. There’s no one-trial learning on those systems, and they have to be trained at the cost of billions of dollars. Then they can do a run where you ask a question and it answers the question. But brains in the real world don’t have that luxury of having a training phase and then an action phase. We have to learn on the fly. It’s very different.

STEVEN BARTLETT: So I guess the pertinent question is, does it change what’s possible for the brain versus the artificial neural networks we see in AI? Like, is there some limitation based on what you’ve just said that means this brain in front of me, this human brain in front of me, will always be better than the AI at something? Because I’m trying to track forward about what this means for the future of humans.

DR. DAVID EAGLEMAN: Yeah, I think it’s an interesting question that we’ll have to see, but it’s clearly the case that we know what it is to be a human from the inside. And when I’m making a model of you and who you are, and you’re making a model of me, we have assumptions about what it is like to be a human. AI only watches human behavior from the outside, and so it can tell a lot of great stuff, but it doesn’t really know what it is to be a human. So if I ask it some question about what would it be like if this or that happened, it can answer based on observing lots of things, but it can only ever know from the outside.

STEVEN BARTLETT: In terms of why that matters. Yeah, because if I ask my AI, “My fiancée’s been like this today,” or if I ask my best friend, “My fiancée’s been like this today,” if both of them give me the same useful answer, it doesn’t really matter what’s going on.

DR. DAVID EAGLEMAN: I agree with you. I’m actually writing a new podcast on this about what you can tell from the outside and what you can tell from the inside and whether that difference matters.

Look, an example is, I last year got a Tesla with Full Self-Driving, and I was watching as it was Full Self-Driving, I was coming up on a very complicated traffic situation. I thought, “Whoa, what’s my car going to do here? How’s it possibly going to understand?” But what it did is it slowed down and came to a stop, which was exactly the right thing. And I thought, “Oh, that’s interesting.” Algorithmically, it might think of it very differently than I am thinking about the situation. Doesn’t matter, it comes to the same conclusion, ends up in the same place. Yeah, I agree. We have yet to see where these differences matter.

The Human Renaissance in the Age of AI

But I can tell you one thing: we care about other humans. So here’s my little prediction, is that there’s going to be actually a renaissance in things like live theater and live performances. When things first came out like Napster, everyone thought, “Okay, that’s the death of concerts, that’s the death of musicians, right?” But in fact, you look at a Taylor Swift concert, gajillions of people there paying lots of money. Everyone loves the thing. Why? Because they’re going to see the real Taylor Swift in person.

And I have noticed — I give a lot of talks on the road — I have noticed an increase in the number of talks since AI came out a few years ago. The first thing that my friend said to me is, “Hey, did you know, David, that you can use ElevenLabs and HeyGen and you can make an avatar of yourself and you can use your voice and use ChatGPT to generate what you’re going to say and have a fully virtual version of you?” She said — my friend who gives talks too — “Maybe we can start doing this and do virtual talks.” I said, “Nobody’s going to want that.”

In fact, what’s happened is more people want to fly us across the country to have us stand there in person because it really matters to see fellow humans. And I think that’s only going to increase.

STEVEN BARTLETT: I completely agree with you. I think it’s so funny. I did a post on my LinkedIn the other day saying that maybe the interesting paradox or interesting outcome of AI is that every other iteration of technology made us less human. And maybe the intelligence now has gotten to a point where it’s now forcing us to be more human because that is all that kind of remains in a way — that maybe the technology has gotten so good.

Like, social media didn’t make us more human in any capacity, but maybe this is the moment where it goes, “We’ve got this now. Go do what only you as a human can do,” which is like go out there, Taylor Swift, and sing in front of people IRL. Go and do something in the real world. Even for nurses and doctors, maybe they shouldn’t be filling out admin and paperwork anymore. Maybe they should be holding your hand and giving you in real life care that only a human could do.

DR. DAVID EAGLEMAN: I totally agree.

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

DR. DAVID EAGLEMAN: I totally agree. And by the way, by one estimate, there’s a billion people having relationships with AI, like a girlfriend or boyfriend kind of thing. Okay. And so for people like us who grew up before that existed, we think, “Oh my gosh, that’s weird.” But in fact, I think it might become helpful because it can be a sandbox as long as we have the proper feedback.

In the end, we have millions of years of evolution driving us towards being with the person you love, touching another human being, watching the stars, taking her out to dinner with your parents. We care about that. And so this worry that people sometimes talk about — “Oh, people are just going to be on their phone with their AI relationships” — I don’t think is realistic for almost everybody because it gives us the chance to hopefully sandbox some things about relationships and get over some dumb things with relationships, and then we can actually be with our fellow humans.

The Risk of AI Addiction and Social Bifurcation

STEVEN BARTLETT: Counter-argument would be that maybe there’s going to be a bifurcation, a splitting of society where some people are going to become even more addicted to the technology because the AI is now much smarter at retention. Like, “I know exactly what I need to say to you based on your brain, Dr. David, to make you not put this device down.”

DR. DAVID EAGLEMAN: Yes, but fundamentally, I want to be in contact with my wife. I mean, that’s the evolution of hundreds of millions of years — that I want to make babies, I want to go and eat dinner with somebody. And as much as I might find my phone appealing, I’m not going to sit across from me at a nice Italian restaurant and sit there like that.

STEVEN BARTLETT: A lot of people do. Me and my fiancée, when we’re at restaurants — because we have a rule where we don’t touch our phones when we’re at date night — I have to look around and I’m like, “Oh my God, how are all these guys getting away with this?” But you see what I’m saying? Some people, they just have a different sort of proclivity, or they have a different wiring, which means that instead of doing the hard thing of going out there and going on a first date and being rejected, pornography or a virtual wife might be a substitute for that.

DR. DAVID EAGLEMAN: Yeah, I agree with you. There will be bifurcations. One question I don’t know the answer to, but one question is, what would that person have done in previous generations? You know, is it really the case that person would have gone out and had a great successful relationship, or would they always have had troubles relating to people?

STEVEN BARTLETT: Yeah, I sat with a few neuroscientists and experts that are studying dopamine. Dr. Anna Lembke was one.

DR. DAVID EAGLEMAN: Yeah, she’s my colleague.

STEVEN BARTLETT: She’s your colleague. Yeah. And she talks a lot about how we all have different types of addictive substances. Like, we will think heroin’s addictive for everybody and alcohol’s addictive. And I used to think of it on a spectrum, but actually she said for her, her addiction was romantic erotic novels.

DR. DAVID EAGLEMAN: Yeah.

STEVEN BARTLETT: And she almost ruined her relationship because of erotic novels, which is something that I would read and just throw in the bin. So maybe this new technology is particularly addictive to a certain type of person.

The Spectrum of Human Perception

DR. DAVID EAGLEMAN: Yeah, I think that’s exactly right. And I think we’re going to see that with everything. I mean, the wild part about human society is that there’s so little that we have in common, meaning everybody is really different. This is something I’ve studied in my lab for decades, is this issue about what are the subtle differences from person to person. Not big things like, oh, this person is a psychopath, this person has schizophrenia, but the more subtle things.

I’ll just give you an example. If I ask you to imagine, to visualize, let’s say, an ant on a purple and white tablecloth crawling towards a jar of red jelly. Do you see that in your head like a movie, or do you have like no particular picture at all or somewhere in between? What do you experience?

STEVEN BARTLETT: An ant crawling towards a jar of jelly?

DR. DAVID EAGLEMAN: Yes.

STEVEN BARTLETT: Yeah, I see a big black ant, and then this jar of jelly is like overflowing down the sides with a wooden lid on top of it, and the ant is almost there.

Hyperphantasia and Aphantasia

DR. DAVID EAGLEMAN: Oh wow, okay. So you have a— okay, so what you have, I’m just guessing where you are, but you are on the end of the spectrum that we call hyperphantasia, which means you have very rich visualization. You’re like seeing it like a picture or movie. Is that accurate?

Yes. Okay, I happen to be at the other end of that spectrum called aphantasia, where I don’t have any visual images at all. There’s no— I don’t see things visually in any way. And it turns out the whole population is spread evenly along the spectrum.

I’ll just give a quick side note, which is that for many years I’ve been talking with Ed Catmull about this. He’s the guy who started Pixar Films, so he’s got all the patents on how to do ray tracing and how to make these beautiful animated characters, right? Ed Catmull is aphantasic like I am, and when he learned about this, he got really interested, and he gave the questionnaire to everybody at Pixar. And it turns out many of his best animators and directors are aphantasic. They don’t picture anything inside their heads.

Now, this seems surprising and strange, right? But it turns out that if you are an aphantasic kid, you’re going to become better at drawing because you have to really pay attention to the subject out there and really have a dialogue with the page with your pencil. Whereas a kid who’s hyperphantasic might say, “Oh, I know what a horse looks like,” and just draws it.

So it turns out there’s a real spectrum across the population, meaning inside your head and my head, we’re having pretty different experiences. But I’ve studied this along dozens of different axes, and everyone’s got different things going on. Just as one example, do you know about synesthesia? Have you ever heard of this?

STEVEN BARTLETT: Is that forgetting or something?

DR. DAVID EAGLEMAN: No, synesthesia is having a blending of the senses. So someone with synesthesia might look at letters and it triggers a color experience in their head. So they look at J and that triggers green, and they look at M and that triggers blue, and whatever. It’s different for each person. Or you might hear music and it triggers a visual experience, or you might taste something, it puts a feeling on your fingertips, or whatever. It’s just a blending of the senses. At least 3% of the population has this. It’s not a disease or a disorder, it’s just an alternative perceptual reality.

STEVEN BARTLETT: So if you have aphantasia, does that mean that you can’t picture your kids?

DR. DAVID EAGLEMAN: It means that the way I picture them is not visually. I mean, there’s sort of a very general— but for me, it’s more motoric imagery and audio imagery. I’m imagining talking to them and being with them and being close to them, and probably some olfactory imagery, meaning how they smell and the whole thing. I have a very rich notion of what it is to be with my kids, but it’s a pretty terrible visual picture.

STEVEN BARTLETT: Not much. So I imagine people at home have done that same experiment while they were listening. Could they picture an ant walking towards a jar of jam? And if they find themselves on the aphantasi— I can’t remember the two.

DR. DAVID EAGLEMAN: Aphantasic, yeah, or hyperphantasic.

STEVEN BARTLETT: So hyperphantasic is you can picture it, aphantasic is you can’t.

DR. DAVID EAGLEMAN: Yes.

STEVEN BARTLETT: What does that potentially suggest about—

DR. DAVID EAGLEMAN: Nothing. Now here’s the interesting part. So we’ve done lots of studies about what this translates to in terms of your cognitive capacities in the world? Nothing. Why does it translate to nothing? It’s because you can accomplish tasks in 100 different ways. And so some people are doing these very visually, other people are doing it where they’re picturing it with their motor systems, others are doing it with sound or smell or whatever, or others are doing it just purely conceptually, just thinking through how the steps would go. But there’s nothing obvious other than this thing I mentioned about visual artists often being aphantasic. Otherwise you can kind of accomplish anything.

Why Do We Dream?

STEVEN BARTLETT: I heard that you might have, after many, many decades of people debating this, you might have figured out the reason why we dream.

DR. DAVID EAGLEMAN: Yeah. It’s actually after millennia of people debating this. This is the cool part. So, okay, remember I mentioned earlier that if you go blind, the visual cortex at the back of the brain gets taken over by hearing and by touch and by other things. And it’s no longer visual cortex.

Well, what we realized is that because we live on a planet that rotates into darkness for half the time, the visual cortex, the visual part of your brain, is at a disadvantage. So what I realized is that the purpose of dreaming is to defend the visual territory from takeover from the other senses.

So every 90 minutes you’ve got this very ancient thing in your midbrain that shoots random activity into the visual system, and only the visual system, only this very tiny part of the visual system. Every 90 minutes, you just blast random activity in here, and the reason is you are just defending that territory against takeover.

Now, the reason that all this came together is because our colleagues at Harvard did an experiment where they took normally sighted people and they blindfolded them tightly for 60 minutes, and it turns out that 60 minutes was sufficient for the visual cortex to start responding to sound and to touch. You could start seeing that takeover happening after 60 minutes, and that’s when we realized, wow, this part of the brain really needs a way of defending itself.

Now, because the brain is a natural storyteller, if you blast random activity in there, it’ll put that together in some sort of visual story about what’s happening. Mostly based on what connections are hot from the day. But that’s why we dream.

STEVEN BARTLETT: So we dream to stop the other parts of our brain overtaking the visual part of our brain, overpowering it, and I guess ultimately making us go blind.

DR. DAVID EAGLEMAN: Yeah, that’s exactly right. If we lived on a different kind of planet that did not rotate into darkness, then we presumably wouldn’t dream.

STEVEN BARTLETT: Would we even need to close our eyes?

DR. DAVID EAGLEMAN: I mean, not necessarily. Yeah, it may be that in the sleeping state, in the state of deep sleep, the brain is doing particular things like taking out the trash and cleaning some things up. That might be necessary, who knows. But yeah, I don’t think we would need to dream. We wouldn’t need to blast random activity in there if our eyes were always open, for example, and it was always light out.

Dreaming Across the Animal Kingdom

STEVEN BARTLETT: Are there other examples in the animal kingdom? Support this?

DR. DAVID EAGLEMAN: Yes, thank you for asking that. This is why this new theory about why we dream has taken off because we can make quantitative predictions across animal species. So for example, in our last paper we looked at 25 different species of primates, apes and monkeys, and we looked at how plastic their brains are— in other words, how flexible the whole circuitry was— and how much they dream at night, which you can tell by looking at rapid eye movements. You know, when you dream at night, your eyes are shooting back and forth like that. It’s called REM, rapid eye movement sleep. So you can measure that in other animals, their eyes moving back.

So we correlated how plastic the brain is and how much dream sleep you have, and it correlates perfectly, which is to say humans, which are the most plastic, have dream sleep all the time. And by the way, when you’re an infant, you sleep— you have dream sleep for half of your sleep time, 50% of the time. As you get older, you get less and less dream sleep because you just don’t need it as much anymore.

But anyway, when we look across species, it correlates perfectly. If you’re a monkey that drops into the world already fully baked and you don’t need to have much plasticity, you don’t have much dream sleep either.

STEVEN BARTLETT: Interesting. It sounds like a very strange thing for the brain to do, but it also is perfectly plausible based on everything you’ve said.

DR. DAVID EAGLEMAN: And by the way, I just want to mention dreaming is across the animal kingdom. Everybody dreams. All animals dream at night.

STEVEN BARTLETT: Even like animals at the bottom of the ocean?

DR. DAVID EAGLEMAN: Yes. It’s harder to measure stuff all the way at the bottom of the ocean, but fish do have what is equivalent to dream sleep, where you’re just zapping activity in there. And by the way, even animals that have gone blind— like, there’s a mammal called the blind mole rat which lives in darkness and has eyes, but they’re blind because over evolutionary time they’ve lost vision. But they still dream because the dream circuitry is so ancient. This is so ancient that all animals have to defend themselves against the darkness by keeping their visual systems going. And so even though the animal went blind, the rest of the brain didn’t catch up. I mean, that’s how evolution goes.

STEVEN BARTLETT: It’s funny because it’s kind of like evolution gave us this TV that comes on at nighttime when the real TV, our real life, turns off, and it just puts on this fake TV set to keep that part of the brain doing something so that it doesn’t deteriorate and atrophy.

DR. DAVID EAGLEMAN: It’s exactly right. Yeah, it’s exactly right.

STEVEN BARTLETT: Which means dreams are pointless outside of just protecting our neurological matter?

The Most Important Things We Haven’t Discussed

DR. DAVID EAGLEMAN: I suspect so. It might be that the particular pathways that could travel down, maybe there’s some meaning there. My own suspicion is that it’s like if I went to your bookshelf and I picked a random book up and I flipped to a random page and picked a random sentence, I might find some meaning in that. I might say, “Well, that was just the sentence that I needed to hear here,” but it’s not really. It’s just that it has some meaning to me.

Anyway, the point is, if you blast random activity in there, I might dream about something where I wake up and say, “Oh, that was pretty useful.” But the thing that I think gets overlooked is that most dreams are totally useless and bizarre.

STEVEN BARTLETT: Dr. David, what is the most important thing we haven’t talked about that we should have talked about, as it specifically relates to people that are trying to improve their lives, get better at whatever their subjective mission is? And the brain?

Understanding Each Other: The Importance of Human Connection

DR. DAVID EAGLEMAN: There are probably a lot of things, but I have to say, the thing that I’ve been thinking about so much lately is just about our political interfacing with one another. And so I do feel that really learning the skills of dialogue with our fellow humans, where we listen to what they’re saying and try to better understand what their internal model is— it’s not equivalent to agreeing with them, but it is saying, “Hey, somebody’s coming from this perspective. Let me see if I can understand that.” I think that matters a lot.

And I also think that because we’re so highly predisposed for in-groups and out-groups, it’s really useful to figure out how to complexify those relationships. Meaning, how do you figure out all the things that cross-cut in the relationship so that you say, “Hey, you know what, I shouldn’t dismiss this person as a member of my outgroup right away, because actually they belong to the same group I do, and they love surfing as much as I do, and they love golden retriever dogs, and they grew up in my hometown,” and whatever. Like, finding those things explicitly helps the brain to keep these circuits on that are involved in seeing another person as a person.

We have all the social circuitry that is all about understanding other people. And when things get dehumanized, that actually gets dialed way down. When we look at, let’s say, a homeless person or a drug addict or someone who we think of as our enemy or an outgroup, that gets dialed down. So we don’t think of them as a person anymore. We think of them as an object to get around. So this is what I think is really important, is figuring out what we can do to keep that social circuitry still going, which includes things like eye contact and conversation. And this is one of the most important things we can do as citizens in a rapidly changing world.

Staving Off Dementia: Keeping the Brain Active

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

DR. DAVID EAGLEMAN: Keep your brain active. Keep it active till the day you die. Take on new challenges. And as soon as you get good at something like Sudoku, drop it and pick up something that you’re not good at.

STEVEN BARTLETT: And in simple terms, why?

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

STEVEN BARTLETT: So that there’s more to degenerate, which gives me more leftover once that degeneration begins.

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

STEVEN BARTLETT: What do I need to stay away from in terms of chemicals or supplements? Or food?

DR. DAVID EAGLEMAN: Yeah, obviously there’s just been a lot more emphasis on getting good sleep and good diet, and this stuff really matters. I think that’s really useful for the brain. I mean, it’s fascinating to watch what’s happened in the latest generation in terms of alcohol consumption. I live up in Silicon Valley, and there are a lot of people who have wineries just north of me, and they’re selling half their acreage. It’s absolutely fascinating to see what’s happening there.

I will say I have a friend who’s in her 20s who said that she’s in favor of bringing drinking back.

STEVEN BARTLETT: Why?

DR. DAVID EAGLEMAN: Because she said, “We go to parties and everything’s so awkward and no one knows how to talk to one another.” And so they’re missing something else. They’re missing the dumb mistakes category that we all got to enjoy growing up. So it is a really interesting balance of how abstemious one wants to become.

Closing Tradition: What Do You Wish Most for Our Planet?

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

DR. DAVID EAGLEMAN: The whole list or the top 10?

STEVEN BARTLETT: Can’t be world peace.

DR. DAVID EAGLEMAN: You know, I think I would come back to this piece about the complexification of relationships, which is to say, if we could just get a little bit smarter about understanding people in our outgroups as being humans with lives with their own thing going on — doesn’t mean we have to love them or agree with them, but if we can just get to that point — I don’t think we’ll ever hit world peace, but at least we’d have slightly less polarization. So I’m definitely in favor of that.

And I do think it’s possible, and I do think AI can help us get there by challenging us on these points and saying, “Hey, that group that you’ve already dismissed as an outgroup, what if I told you this story about this person? What if I introduced you to this person?” That kind of stuff. And there are all kinds of social movements that have sprung up that allow people of different political opinions to come together in a room and talk with one another. Again, it’s not that anyone has to change their mind, but they can say, “Hey, you know what, I really like that person. I thought that was a cool person, a sweet person, a nice person.” And now I understand that somebody who I have seen with my own eyes has a different opinion on this than I do.

STEVEN BARTLETT: Is that wishful thinking to some degree?

DR. DAVID EAGLEMAN: I don’t think so, because these things are happening all over the place. And they’re—

Echo Chambers and the Algorithm Problem

STEVEN BARTLETT: The macro is division, isn’t it? It’s polarization, echo chambers. There’s now — I think there’s now 20 social networks, some crazy number, that have more than 20 million people in them, which means that social networks are splintering off into niches and interests. And there’s like Rumble and Bumble, and there’s like Threads and X and Facebook, Snap, Instagram. And what we’re seeing is more and more fragmentation.

And also the other thing with algorithms is we went from having a social graph where if I had 1,000 people follow me, those 1,000 people would see my stuff, to now these interest graphs where it doesn’t matter if I have one follower or 1 million followers. The algorithm is going to decide who’s interested in that thing, and it’s going to serve it to them because that’s the most retentive thing if you’re a publicly listed company that’s driven by ad revenue. So you’ve got this algorithm that’s actually forcing you into tighter and tighter and tighter echo chambers.

And even as someone that’s been on social media 15 years and run social media companies, this is one of the great things I’ve noticed — when I had a million followers back in the day, I would reach those people because they’d hit follow or subscribe. Now, even on our YouTube channel, 61% of you don’t subscribe. And please subscribe. And that’s in part because the algorithm is now doing the work of deciding who to show it to, on the basis of who will be retained.

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

STEVEN BARTLETT: What about the middle? One of the phrases — again, a principle that’s helped me think — is that the truth is in the middle. And generally I try and understand what the middle looks like. So you’ve got state-controlled over here, you’ve got an aggressive algorithm that’s reinforcing whatever you currently believe. Is there not some kind of middle ground where the algorithms have to let up a little bit? And of course we’re not going to go for state-controlled.

A Market Opportunity: The Future of Social Media

DR. DAVID EAGLEMAN: Here’s my prediction for 2026 — there is a market opportunity for a new social media company to come along, because everybody is aware of exactly this problem that you’re pointing out. Everyone hates when they surf and they get served exactly what they’re supposed to get served, and they get off after an hour or two and they feel like they’ve wasted their lives.

I think there’s a real opportunity for a social media company to come along and say, “You know what, we’re not building our algorithm like the other guys. It’s not about just trying to get engagement at any cost with incendiary posts, but instead we’re looking for ways to connect people.” So if you and I both love this particular thing — this particular cuisine or location or whatever it is — we get connected, we see each other’s stuff, and the algorithm carefully temporally sequences things so that we come to have a certain connection threshold before we find out, “Whoa, you have a totally different political opinion than I do on subject X. Wow, I didn’t know that, but I really like Steven, so I’m going to lean in and listen a little bit more.”

I think this is very easy to do, and I think that can actually be part of the selling point of the media company — saying, “Hey, we are here not to enrage you, but to actually build connection.”

STEVEN BARTLETT: It sounds like how social media started.

DR. DAVID EAGLEMAN: Yeah, and I think it’s a return.

STEVEN BARTLETT: I think there’s probably a neuroscience basis as to why we ended up—

DR. DAVID EAGLEMAN: No, it’s an economics basis. But the fact is there’s now an economic opportunity, now that everyone sees the landscape.

STEVEN BARTLETT: What I’m trying to say is that that social network wouldn’t be that retentive by design because it wouldn’t trigger my dopamine. It wouldn’t be a slot machine. TikTok is a slot machine. Ping, ping, randomized returns. Ping, ping, ping, dopamine hit. Ping, ping, ping. So this other social network that wasn’t playing with my dopamine in such a way — I don’t know whether I’d be addicted enough to return. Therefore, they wouldn’t sell their ads, the economic return. Therefore, they wouldn’t do very well.

DR. DAVID EAGLEMAN: Here’s the thing. I don’t know if the story is that simple, that we all want to do slot machines all the time. I don’t think we do. Because the fact is that a lot of people go to Las Vegas and do slot machines sometimes, but we don’t do that all the time. It’s kind of rare, actually. What we really desire are meaningful connections. We really desire feeling like, “Hey, you know what, I met this person online that I’m following and he’s following me and we really connect on all these points. And oh, by the way, I then found out, interestingly, he’s got a totally different opinion about Iran or abortion or whatever than I do. But that’s cool. Now we’re listening to each other.”

Closing Thoughts and Farewell

STEVEN BARTLETT: It kind of goes back to your point earlier about the very start where we were talking about the brain having an internal battle, like, do I want the cookie or do I want the salad? And unfortunately, in the world we live in, the cookie is going to give me a dopamine hit.

DR. DAVID EAGLEMAN: Yes, but we don’t eat cookies all the time. This is the point. We do eat salads much of the time, because we’re not just unconscious automatons that are doing the cookies.

STEVEN BARTLETT: Dr. David Eagleman, thank you so much for the work that you do. I’m going to link your book below so everyone can read this book. You’ve got a new book on the way which I’m very excited about as well. What’s that book going to be about and when is that out?

DR. DAVID EAGLEMAN: That’s about the Ulysses contract, and that’ll come out in 2027.

STEVEN BARTLETT: For anyone that wants to know how to change your life by changing your brain, I think this is the perfect book to read. It’s a New York Times bestselling author, and the book is absolutely fascinating. It was actually learning about this subject matter in LiveWired that helped me to pursue more of a growth mindset and just a growth mentality across my life, and to realize that if I’m not something now, it doesn’t mean that I can’t be tomorrow. So thank you so much for the work that you do, David, and it’s been truly illuminating. I’m sure my neural pathways have expanded in really important ways because of this.

DR. DAVID EAGLEMAN: Great. Thank you, Steven.

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