David’s Comments (group member since Jun 06, 2011)

David’s comments from the Ask David Eagleman group.

Ruby wrote: "What are some of the most exciting neurological enhancement gadgets the average person can look forward to enjoying in the next 10 years?

I think these will involve new peripheral bionic devices that will allow the blind to see, the deaf to hear, and everyone else to enhance their senses beyond the normal human range. For example, my laboratory is just now starting to experiment with hooking ourselves up with 'super-senses' such as 360 degree vision, ultraviolet vision, etc. This is partially the topic of my 2012 book "LiveWired" about brain plasticity.

"Also, do you think that brain training programs can improve function in everyday life (not just in the brain training program's assessment tests)?"

Great question. I think there's real hope for brain training programs that transfer to daily activities. The trick is to exercise several different aspects of the brain, to make the tasks emotionally salient, and to make them sticky for continued compliance with the training regiment. This is also something my lab is working on -- please keep an eye out for our smartphone app on this in October.

Fenella wrote: "if you hadn't had that fall as a kid do you think you would have spent so much of your life studying 'time'..."

Such an interesting question. And so impossible to know. That's the funny part about our lives: we have no control experiments, no way to know who 'we' would be if even one event had been different.

Jonathan wrote: "I'd like to know where you see SUM existing on the continuum of literary history...."

Indeed, your guesses are correct: I've always had a great love for non-traditional storytellers such as Calvino, Borges, Garcia Marquez, Lightman, and so on. I was certainly aware of these influences while writing SUM, and I was also aware of moving into new ground.
You asked what my research in neuroscience has taught me about literature. It has taught me that science often deserves a place at the table in conversations about our most important life-concerns. Further, my science life and writing life have many similarities: they both involve making up stories: competing stories, incompatible stories, often wrong stories. In science, this is the only way forward. Same with literature.

Roseanne wrote: "I was blown away by the profile of you in the New Yorker recently.... I was also wondering, having seen the story on superior autobiographical memory on 60 Minutes, what you think of this phenomenon."

As far as my colleagues and I can tell, all the people with superior autobiographical memory also have synesthesia. The synesthesia helps them to link events to spatial layouts, which makes it easier to recall (in the same way that poems are difficult to memorize, while lyrics to a song are easy because of the extra dimension to hook the words to). For more on this idea, see Simner at al (2009) A foundation for savantism? Visuo-spatial synaesthetes present with cognitive benefits.
For those who think they might have synesthesia and want to test themselves, please take the online tests developed by my laboratory at The Synesthesia Battery.

D wrote: "I'm puzzled by how little conversation there is between neuroscience on the one hand and the meditation-centered wisdom traditions on the other."

Happily, there is an increasing amount of crosstalk between these fields. Several of my neuroscience colleagues have been studying the neural basis of meditative states and mindfulness. To name a few, I'd point to Richard Davidson, Read Montague, and Jonathan Downar. And one of my colleagues in Germany, Thomas Metzinger, wants to get legislation passed that would require meditation for all elementary school students; he insists it should be part of their 'brain toolkit.' And you may know that the Dalai Lama has played an important role in bridging these fields: he's a big fan of neuroscience.

Faith wrote: "Your book, Sum: Forty Tales from the Afterlives, is an amazing piece of literature.... How did you come up with the idea for Sum? Also, what were the easiest and hardest concepts for you to explore? "

Thank you for your kind words, Faith. I think the seed of SUM started when I was a child and asked a rabbi about the Jewish view of an afterlife. He said, "well, you ask two Jews, you'll get three opinions." The liberation-from-dogma inherent in that answer stuck with me powerfully, and the book grew into shape slowly over the course of many years.
All the stories have elements of easy things and hard bits. The latter typically make their appearances right at the end of the story; those are the ones that hit you in the gut and make you realize what the story was about all along.

Nova wrote: "I am not sure that I find much comfort in knowing that some other me will live on, but the me that is the me right now making the decision to upload or not is either not going to survive the process or will live in a parallel existence and still face death."

I agree, but note that this is similar to the situation we enter every night upon going to sleep: our consciousness dies, and when we wake up in the morning the creature that gets out of bed assumes it the same as the one that went to sleep. Is this really so different from Kirk stepping into the transporter, getting pulverized into molecules, and getting reconstituted somewhere else? Or you getting destroyed and simultaneously uploaded into a computer simulation? In this sense we already have experience with this conundrum...

Janet wrote: "Do you think science is less trusted than it used to be, in terms of leading to the truth? If so, why?"

I don't have the impression that it's less trusted. If anything, I sometimes worry that it's too trusted. Scientists are generally careful thinkers, but sometimes the interaction of science with the media makes a hypothesis seem like gospel. I often hear people say things like "it's been scientifically proven that... [some opinion here]". I always stop to point out that we don't actually use terms like "proven" in science -- because all we ever have are the best narratives of the moment, but narratives that we recognize will shift and change. I don't have the impression that the changeability of science is always recognized by the wider community.

Janet wrote: "All of us scientists probably need to get better at general communication outside of our own fields. What do you think are the most important ideas for us to communicate clearly? Any advice?"

Many ideas in science matter for education, legislation, and domestic and international policy. It is critical to (carefully and with nuance) get the word out about what's happening in the labs that might reflect on these.

Neil wrote: "How do you control the scope of a book like Incognito so that you don't end up writing something that's 2-3000 pages long?"

The more we understand about a topic, the shorter our books can become. There is a standard book in the field called "Principles of Neuroscience", and it runs over a thousand pages. To my mind, this tells us that the title is incorrect. If we understood the principles of the brain, the book would be much shorter.
If we do our job correctly, then in a century that book should be the length of a pamphlet. In two centuries, a haiku.

Nova wrote: "I read recently that the triune brain model, popularized by Carl Sagan's Dragon's of Eden, has largely been abandoned by neuroscience. What replaced it and why?"

The spirit of the model -- that there are multiple, competing parts of the brain -- stands strong. The details haven't been specifically supported by modern neuroanatomy.

Nova also wrote: "Douglas Fox offers some convincing arguments that the evolution of the human intelligence may be close to its physical limits. Do you agree? Is this a concern? Fox's arguments ran on physical problems (hardware)...."

We probably are coming up against our brain-hardware limits. However, we are getting so much better at offloading data into the cloud around us (books, experts, hard drives, Wikipedia, Google, etc) that we can clear up a great deal of neural space for optimizing how to think rather than filling that space with memorized, just-in-case material.

Heron wrote: "I loved Sum, but I kept returning to a central thought. What do you think are the bounds of human imagination? Are there futures, life forms, parallel worlds, inventions that we truly cannot dream up? Was Hamlet right?"

Indeed, there are limits to the kinds of thoughts we can think. In the same way that our spleen, skin and hearts have been carved by evolutionary pressures, so has our psyche. And that means there are whole categories of thoughts that are unthinkable, and others that we are funneled into. Chapter 4 of Incognito is all about this topic, which I call the "thought umwelt". (For more on the concept of the umwelt, see a short essay here).

Neon Bible Thumper wrote: "I would like to start by saying Sum is my Favorite book, and I don't think I'll ever get tired of reading it. It seems to surpass anything our conditioned brains could comprehend, and I want to thank you for sharing it with us. My question: what do you really think happens to people when they die, and, given an option, what would you want your afterlife to be like and why?"

Thanks for your kind words. I've gotten the question about afterlives a lot since writing Sum. Of course, my answer is that -- like everyone -- I have no idea what happens. It's one of the great unknowns, a question for which we as a scientific community have no ability at the moment to do experiments or gather meaningful data. Many neuroscientists will argue that we shut off when the brain shuts off, and that's likely to be true -- but truthfully we don't know that with certainty. (I address this point in detail in the final chapter of Incognito, in the section about what we can and cannot conclude from our current biological knowledge). Therefore the afterlife remains in the realm of imagination and literature.
As for what I would want my afterlife to be like: I suspect that living forever could have the potential to be pretty awful. Perhaps my ideal afterlife would be any one in which we get to rise above time and are no longer slave to it.

Julia wrote: "There have been studies that show eye witness accounts are unreliable, do you think your investigation could shed light on how to get more accurate recall? "

Unfortunately there is no known way to make memories more reliable. Scary, salient memories (such as those laid down during a traumatic event) are more difficult to erase from the brain, but they have been shown to be no more reliable than normal memories. Memory is not like a video recorder; instead the reconstruction of an experience is tied in to one's experiences, expectations, and prejudices.

Aticodejon wrote: ""Incognito" is still on my 'to-read' shelf, so the answer may well be in it, but just in case: my uneducated hunch is before progressing past the next huge wall in scientific knowledge we need to f..."

I couldn't agree with you more, and that's why about half of my lab's research is devoted to understanding time. For more on this topic, please see any of my scientific publications, and/or see a popular science essay I wrote called Brain Time.

Sarah wrote: "If you could have the answer to any question, which one would it be?"

Are there entire civilizations living in other dimensions of time or space that we can't see?

Marian wrote: "How does the brain influence what we listen to/for as well as what we ignore? Is that selection process a habit we've cultivated over time, and if so, can that habit be modified? How? Love your..."

Indeed, everything is passed through our filters. The filters presumably come from a complicated interaction of genetics and experience, making us who we are and defining the sorts of issues we care about in the world. I do think these things can change, but only when long-term parts of our brains want them to.

Ch.J. wrote: "With regard to uploading human minds; do you believe that time will play any part?"

Glad you asked - that's a part of my next two books (one fiction, one non-fiction). The short answer is that once we're able to run a simulation of a brain, then we can run it at any speed. We can simulate 30 years of your existence in 30 seconds of run-time. Or vice versa.
In general, time is absolutely necessary for a simulated consciousness. Otherwise one has no change, and therefore no experience as we would recognize it.

dirt wrote: "Hi. With new research showing that mouse memory can be improved using chips implanted in the brain, what is your opinion of augmenting human memory? Do you think that this technology will be a he..."

We'll likely to be able to augment human memory someday, but I doubt it will be via chips. There are several issues here: the first is that brains have a lot of territory to cover, and chips only measure a handful of neurons (even up to, say, a hundred or so). That would be like trying to measure the sentiment of the planet by asking 3 people their opinion. One should also note with the mouse study that a particular 'memory' (in this case, which of 2 levers to press) had to be recorded first, and then played back in via electrical stimulation. This would have obvious limitations for wanting to pull up arbitrary memories in a human, and it sheds no light at all on how to teach something new (like Trinity downloading the instructions for flying a helicopter).
If you're interested in more on this topic, I recently spoke about it on NPR's Fresh Air: episode.

Jesse wrote: "What would you like to know about attention?"

I would like the neuroscience community to be able to figure out a good definition of attention. The word is often used in a circular manner: in half the papers, attention is what increases the firing rates of neurons; in the other half, the increased firing rates causes (or is) attention. There is still a good deal to be understood here.

Brian wrote: "What are the major hurdles to "uploading" a human brain (memories) as seen in so many science fiction stories?

There are three hurdles: one technological, one empirical, one theoretical.
The technological hurdle is coming up with enough computational power to simulate the massive complexity of the human brain. Prognosis: this hurdle will be quickly surmounted by the pace of technology.
The empirical issue is the problem of understanding which are the important details to 'copy' about the brain. Do we need to replicate a map of all the neurons and their connections? Or additionally the states of the proteins in the cell membranes? Or also the biochemical cascades inside the neurons? And so on. For more on this issue, see a short essay I wrote called Silicon Immortality: Downloading Consciousness into Computers.
The final hurdle is a theoretical one. We assume that if we replicate the pieces and parts of the brain (and the software programs running on top) then we will have something equivalent to the experience of being that person. Although the arrows of our current knowledge point in that direction, we have no real proof, at this moment in history, that this will actually work. Like every generation of scientists, we might be missing big pieces of the puzzle.