David Eagleman: The Creative Brain

[Music] welcome to mayhem at the Athenaeum theater as part of the wheeler centers series of fabulous events tonight is all about brains and creativity and pretty much anything else we can squeeze out of this incredible brain sitting next to me dr. David Eagleman who is an acclaimed neuroscientist writer author a man of many hats as you'll hear my name is Natasha Mitchell from ABC Radio National I would like to acknowledge the enduring creativity of the people of the Kulin nation and their elders who let whose land we are on today the first scientists the first artists who lived and breathed life in this place we will be having a chat onstage and then you'll be joining us so we are very lucky to have David with us tonight he's come from America he's gone to walk hland for the festival Varon had a lovely time he's a neuroscientist he's an international best-selling author he's a Guggenheim Fellow he's an adjunct professor at Stanford University he's a writer and presenter of a series called the brain emmy-nominated series on PBS and the BBC his research includes sensory substitution and time perception and vision and synesthesia which we've talked about before and he also directs the center for science and law you know he's just got a few things going on and he jumped out of academia bravely headed to the Bay Area and set up a business one of a number of businesses I think this one's called neo sensory which we'll talk about because there's some fascinating science involved in that and these books include this some the brain incognito Wednesday is indigo blue and others and we will be having a book signing outside as well afterwards but your latest book is with composer anthony brand the runaway species how human creativity remakes the world yeah I was very interested in an issue that has not escaped my notice as a biologist which is that all of our cousins in the animal kingdom are living exactly the same life that they always had when you look at a forest all the animals are doing what they've always done and yet there's one species us that you know when you fly into Melbourne or Auckland or San Francisco the whole place has risen out of the ground like a motherboard we have theatres and get together as we write books we do all you know we have radio programs all these things that no other species is doing and so I started wondering why that is why we are this runaway species it all has to do with creativity and it all has to do with the structure of the of the human brain which just changed a little bit from all our cousins we just essentially got an expansion of the cortex which is the wrinkly bit on the outside we just got a lot more of it and that led to two things which is we got more space between input and outputs so when stuff comes in and stuff goes out most animals those are very close together so they have essentially their reflexive in their actions whereas with human information comes in and then maybe we you know we chew on it or we think about it maybe we do something maybe we don't and the other thing is we got a much bigger prefrontal cortex which is the part behind the forehead and that is what allows us to unhook from our moment in in time and think about possible futures to simulate what-ifs where a what-if creature out where exactly we constantly rehearsing and trying out and predicting possibilities for ourselves exactly as one philosopher said this is what allows our hypotheses to die in our stead and so we actually spend very little time in the here and now because what we're always doing is thinking about possibilities well what we also do is we think about what could have bins you know so if I had done this thing back then what would have anyway as a result of this that's how we've been able to build this whole civilization because we've said hey what if I mash those two things together bro that or put that together then we're able to simulate that and most of our ideas I'll just say well that's thing that's most already a stink but it's just once in a while we have something that kind of works it kind of sticks and then that's what drives things for it yes but the problem is some of the really stinky ideas stick - I say nothing is this relationship that you developed with the fellow they compose Anthony Brant that you have written this book with I gather it started with you panning and ode to matriarchs and not just the matriarch senior life but the matriarchs right back to the very first woman I wrote this is a short story right called an ode to my matriarchs and it was about so I said in the story the conceit was I'm gonna spend five seconds thinking about each matriarch in my life so so I I do a couple senses on my mother and then on my grandmother my great-grandmother and I keep going back and then the idea is that you know I skip a month and I'm back to my 970 ninth great-grandmother and then I then I skip back to my 1000 somethings grandmother and ten thousandth grandma and so on and I just thought this is a very interesting exercise to think about my line of mothers might as well as about all of whom were completely necessary for me to exist every one of them had to be a winner in terms of mating and in terms of you know living and so on hopefully more than writing at least that and excited on a number of other fronts maybe but we don't know right I mean some of them probably in the in the past 10,000 generations had great love stories of them had rapes other of them had you know with things where they died childbirth I mean all kinds of of stories that are there in your you know hundred thousand great-grandmother's so yeah and so I followed the story as he said back to the first single-celled creatures where you know where where's mother the first mother right where we're gender split into being and there was a yearning for this other thing that's that's like you but just a little bit different this became a piece of music though I did it not that's right so the composer Anthony Brandt's read that story and said he wanted to write an operetta about it that's exactly right I'd forgotten that so we we did that and and then yeah years later we were talking about creativity we were just having a coffee and talking about stuff we realized that we'd both been doing a lot of thinking about this that we decided that we were gonna write a book on this together so a common refrain it's almost as common as people saying I'm bad at maths is I don't have a creative bone in my body and does that annoy you as much as it knows me because you say that creativity is our biological mandate exactly it's just what brains do so what we love about computers is that we stick in some zeros and ones and then it gives us back exactly the zeros and ones later the human brain is nothing like that instead whatever goes in gets mashed up with other things and so what we're constantly spinning out our mashups of the world that we've experienced and everybody's brain does this all the time and whether it's thinking about how to put together something from what's in the cabinets or what I'm gonna say next or a new musical riff or whatever it is it's all that same process and one of the things as you know that we emphasize in the book is that the creativity that you see in the arts and the creativity that you see in the sciences is exactly the same cognitive processes it's essentially just very basic operations that are happening under the hood and we divide that cognitive landscape into three main operations which is bending breaking and blending the three bays the 3b it's it's almost unfortunate that they're all starting with because then it sounds like a shtick but it's not it's actually it's actually these are these are the things that are happening we're you know we take in ideas and we bend them we bend them in size or shape or whatever and make sort of variations on a theme the second cognitive operation of the brain is always doing is breaking things and then you know seeing things in the world and think you know what if I you know just took a piece of that remove part of that or so on and then blending is when you have multiple idea you know multiple things you've seen and you smoosh them together in various ways well let's blend break Bend all of those concepts but what's that about I just want to go back to this relationship with your collaborator on this book so he's a composer you're a neuroscientist and a novelist and a writer was there something about that collaboration that distilled for you some of the themes that you explore in this book sure well yes plenty of blending plenty blending of ideas it's also I mean Tony Brandt is just a terrific co-author I know essentially nothing about music I'm a total ignoramus and so he brings to the table so much rich knowledge in that and in other various forms of the visual arts and so on so yeah it was just a terrific collaboration of two people getting together and drawing on their respective fields to put together a bigger structure so some of the ideas that you present oh actually one thing I do love is that we often you know innovation speaks become really tedious you know as soon as you get politicians and managers talking about creativity and fostering it it just kills the spark right away it is out the door and often it's assumed that to be creative or innovative it's about throwing out everything that's gone before you it's about you know wiping the slate coming up with a fresh idea and in fact what you reinforce here is that there's this constant building on the past constant tweaking bending breaking remaking yeah exactly there's this notion I don't know why it's such a sticky myth but this issue that great ideas are like a bolt out of the blue and things are this you know someone has this aha moment that's completely novel but but in fact every idea has a very clear genealogy any great event I mean look here's an example that when the iPhone was introduced in 2006 and Steve Jobs did the announcement one of the reporters described as the gee this phone cuz he said it's like a that a virgin birth but in fact um you know the IBM Simon was a touchscreen cellphone introduced in 1993 it was a big brick II looking thing but but there's a clear line from there to here and it's like that was every invention and Henry Ford when he was talking about the Model T said I have invented nothing new I simply reassembled into the shape of a car the inventions that centuries of men have put together before me so everything is like this all ideas evolve everything has a history to it and so this is kind of what got me and Tony interested and figuring out well how do ideas evolve how is it that you can take what's going on and and you know see what the next versions are and there's some lovely examples of it's not just inventors it's artists as well and how they their palette morphs or it morphs out of another body of work by another artist it's not plagiarism it's not necessarily borrowing it's just an evolution that's right and it actually can't be any other way because we take in the raw storehouse of materials around us we are each vessels of our space and time and we absorb the world around us and then we we make new things on top of that but if you compare you know 18th century music from different countries around the world it's very different and it's not that people over here in Japan couldn't have done what was done in America or Cambodia or Nigeria it's just that it would have never stuck in their society because there's a certain way to do it and so on and and just like the way that manufacturers are always doing the new and improved version of whatever because each year we want something a little bit different and the way the music evolves in each country or the art or the lawns or the whatever the architecture you know people want a little bit of newness in each generation but fundamentally it's growing along whatever tree branch it's it's come along but something else that you explore and there's a there's a neuroscience service as well there's a neuroscience to everything let's face it is we we crave novelty we are a novelty seeking device our brain is a novelty seeking device but we don't want too much novelty we don't want too much change so there's that and you talk about that as being at the heart of that tension is at the heart of all creative effort exactly right everything that actually sticks in this society is somewhere on this you know it's always in this tug of war between novelty and familiarity so exactly as you said bro ease we're always seeking novelty because of something called repetition suppression in our brains you know essentially the brain's job is to put together an internal model of the world and so it says okay I kind of get the rules of the world but when it see something novel that it wasn't expecting it has to burn a lot of energy to figure out how to incorporate that why say that Yusuke exactly if you're looking at somebody using functional magnetic resonance imaging for example which is just yeah it's just a way of seeing where the activity is in the brain the first time you show it something new but where there's a big activity and then you show it again and you show it again a little less and so on and by the twelfth time you show there's just there's nothing exactly this is what causes us to lean into the future the interesting part as you pointed out is that you know we want to go to Burning Man for five days we don't want to live there all year right we want to we want novelty but but we also need things that are sort of you know centered and we have familiarity and so it's that tension that that drives everything that sticks in society it's a very profound tension that one this this this fear of change and unfamiliarity can sometimes suppress the creative impulse that is innate to us mmm here's what I think there's always it's impossible at any moment to know how far away from the standard to move and so what all really great creators do including individuals artists companies and so on is they cover a range of things where they do some things that are sort of standard and and other things that are completely wacky just as one random example there was an industrial designer named Norman Bel Geddes in the states who created sort of new furniture and cocktail shakers and radios and things like that and also created stuff way out on the spectrum like a flying car and a restaurant that was on a thing that when 20 stories high and would spin around as you're dining or or houses where the walls rose up like like garage doors in Essos it became a Wallis house he did all these things and obviously useful things you saw some less you sort of everywhere in between and that's how you're able to feel out the border of the possible because it's impossible to know otherwise what's gonna land and so all creative companies do this sort of thing where they have sort of their next model of their car and they have some completely wacky concept car and various things in between and that's how you're able to figure out what's going to stick you know one of the examples that I really love on this topic is is skew morphs how many people Lotus skeuomorphism I love decides yes cue morphs are these they're these digital icons that represent something physical in the world so for example when you're writing a document you click Save the icon is of a floppy disk so I'll just do a quick survey who has ever used a floppy disk okay and who hasn't okay well that's a demographic summary of the audio I'll just throw out my last floppy disk recently but the iconography persists and there's something that exactly and just like when when you know Google sorry Apple was first introducing their you know digital books the books sit on a wooden bookshelf and their book covers sitting on the wooden bookshelf they've since evolved away from that but but that's what people want to see is well this is really weird it's a digital book but I would feel familiar I see the wooden bookshelf you know main buying a digital radio and it's one of those old-fashioned sort of right but its digital and we still throw out our files in a digital trash can and we send email by clicking on an icon that's an envelope letter and you know all these do we do that it's because having this umbilical cord to the familiar is really useful to us we feel as we move into this digital age that we want things that sort of remind us of of what was any detect ility of life as it was yeah that's right you know we're embodied beings cognition is embodied right and increasingly we're taking it away from the body aren't we and and kind of creating a digital environment within which we become cognitive things you know yeah that's right you know it's interesting because we're very good with our children in preschool elementary school where they get to do lots of tactile stuff and play but by the time kids are in high school it's it's totally a lost art there anything touching at all it's all PowerPoint presentations and it's such a shame that that we're losing that well why you mentioned education one of the interesting arguments cases you make in this book is for a shift away from an education system that came out of the Industrial Revolution yeah so take us to the classroom of the day and I'm sure there are teachers in the room and you will beg to differ but there's something at the heart of the model of Education in the that that is is a stifling of creativity you feel yeah exactly and let me start by saying why it's so important that we teach creativity to our kids because when we were in school so many of the jobs that is just right now didn't even exist when we were when we were there and certainly the children that were teaching now did the things that will exist in 20 or 30 years we cannot even imagine what their so the important thing is not to teach them hey here's how to get to the answer in the back of the book okay great but instead to teach them how to think how to think creatively how to invent new things so that's why it matters structured manual is the starting point well exactly that's the key is that the way that we teach now is to the back of the book but it's actually really easy and inexpensive free essentially to to change our school system just slightly so that we're capturing the important bit which is kids of course have to know everything that's come before them so they can stand on their shoulders but that shouldn't be the landing point that should just be the springboard and so the last few weeks of the semester all it is is you say to the kid okay now we've taught you all this now make your own thing whatever whatever the class is so hi I've taught you how to impersonate all the painting styles and masters great now do your own thing go mashes together blend them break em in hi I've taught you electrical engineering now go make something that's not the flashlight circuit that is in the instruction manual but just go build your own thing it's a beautiful example I think it was from Vermont of a high school that was really going pear-shaped country without a toe wells or something from a school and they lost the plot do you remember that example I don't remember it was a school that was pretty much the worst in the state or there abouts and everyone was scared to go anywhere near the campus and there were beer bottles strew and all over the classrooms all over the playground and it was pretty scary stuff and they decided to bring in the concept of steam that seems not just STEM education science technology engineering maths but right at the heart of it was art yeah the key thing is that and I'm sure this is the same in Australia in putting art inside the maths classroom and the science class exactly exactly the key thing is that arts are always the first thing to get cut when budgets get tight and this is a real shame because by the way just as a quick side note there was just a study that came out in America about the socioeconomic status of different neighborhoods and how likely you are as an adult to take out a patent on something that you've invented and it turns out you're ten times more likely if you grow up in a wealthy neighborhood than a poor neighborhood now here's the important part all kids are equally creative as proven by tests of creativity with little kids they're all equally creative but what happens when you grow up in a poor neighborhood is one of the things is that the arts are always the first thing to go and so all you ever learn is here's the way to get to the answer in the back of the book here's a way to get a job and go the reason the arts matter is because this is where you get to do bending breaking and blending explicitly overtly as opposed to all of the stuff in the sciences which as I mentioned is the same cognitive operations but that's more covert as in you know when you look at a cell phone it's an incredibly ingenious rectangle of innovation but you're not typically aware of what's in there that's covert but but the arts you just look around and there's so much terrific architecture around here that I'm enjoying today um you know that's bending breaking and blending in various sorts of ways that you can see and in arts class that's what you do you just practice that and practice that it's like a sandbox and once you get to get good at that well also you point to that you know we need fact but we also need to dabble in fiction yeah and that's where the arts allow us to play yeah that's right that's exactly right I mean that's it's an interesting think is right so I spend most of my time writing science books but the fact is that when you take an idea and you wrap it in fiction first of all you can you can move farther along on it because you know the there's a sense in which what's happening in Arts and Sciences same thing where you take a leap to some Island and then you look back to see if you can you know build a bridge there this is what we do in science all the time is you try some wacky idea and you see hey maybe that worked but arts you get to take a leap to some crazy place and then just enjoy the island and so you have to come back right so for example my books New Zealand and I'm going tomorrow so for example with my books some I you know I got it was 40 short stories that were all mutually exclusive an awful yeah your first novel yes exactly quite a different process yeah well that's interesting there's a sense of which is a very similar process though just in the sense that I got to take leaps and and you know instead of saying okay so now I have to go out and write a grant to try to see if I can prove this right I got to take big leaps and just sit and enjoy the view and write about it so the one was a book a bet for those who haven't read it some is a book of 40 stories that are all mutually exclusive and in in theory they are different possible after lives but it's not they're not actually anything to do with the afterlife it's just it's a terrific stage upon which to examine what is important to us as humans so that's what the book was about and and actually that was the last time I was in Australia because Brian Eno turned it into an opera at the Sydney Opera House 90 doesn't end so we have to come here for that and imagine that it was imagine that imagine negating that you know this novel you know turned into an opera at the Sydney Opera House by Brian Eno yeah that book is a very special part of my life actually it's it actually also got turned into an opera by Max Richter it's a Royal Opera House in London a totally separate off Wow Wow so anyway that was collaborations there and another thing that you do is challenge the mythology is it a mythology of the creative yes certainly certainly there are creatives that self-generate but you see their socialization as being fundamental to where the sparks come from yeah exactly and this has to do with just absorbing the world so I think it actually is completely a myth this idea of the lone artist when you so Tony and I might call there we looked back at various case studies of people and say oh that's definitely a lot of Van Van Gogh or whoever you definitely alone artists none of them were they were all very invested in their their space and time and they cared about the critics reviews and they had friends that they bounce things off of and so on so this is the sense in which I mentioned that we're all vessels of our space and time yeah none of us are alone and in fact you know so much of so much of what happens in in human culture has to do with people getting social feedback from their community and one thing that I think that I thought was the interesting funny part that we touched on was just this issue that what humans are constantly trying to do is surprise one another and this is what drives so much you know hey I've written this new thing I've had that new piece of art I got a new piece of music one of the suggestions that we make in the book is that when it comes to artificial intelligence if we really want to bootstrap AI what we should be doing is building a society of AI agents that are all trying to surprise and impress one another and now you're talking yeah that's how we'd get some action there yes I wonder I've always been intrigued by that possibility of whether an artificial intelligence will be able to simulate the creative process authentically hmm so so I think the answer is sort of which is to say Google for example has various projects where they will take for example a painting style and a photograph and put these together and it's extremely beautiful it's extraordinary what what they can do with this they have an equivalent project with music or you can mix different circle styles and so on so the answer on creating things is yes what's interesting about human creativity is the the other half of it which is the filtering process which is to say that you know what I'm trying to do a new piece of art or whatever I come up with lots of ideas that stink and I know generally how to filter most of those out and just pick the ones that my community will care about and that's the part that computers are missing right now because in the absence of being a human you wouldn't know which ones are gonna stick her which ones aren't so so anyway Google can create terrific stuff it's just not so good at at knowing what's gonna work what's not yes but the question of whether you can come up with an algorithm that is real a real freeform creator you can you can't yeah yeah I mean these things for anyone is curious go as AI yeah so as I I yeah you reckon yeah that's already there that's already there the for anyone who's curious you know you can look up afterwards about the can't remember the name of the project is Google but deep dream is one of them Google deep dream and Google magenta is one of the other ones and these are what you can see it's quite extraordinary what this might speak to is the fact that we put a lot of romanticization on on what humans can do we say well computer will never touch that but but in fact computers can do extraordinarily beautiful things as I said the part that's harder for them is to know what it is to be a human of what we care about and what will stick I mean I think also we're hanging onto our humaneness because it's bloody scary to think that you know these entities artificial intelligences might become socialized beings might be able to do what we take pride in is being distinctly human might just take us over so so I think those are all separable issues so the thing about what is distinctly human is something that I think is going to change rapidly year-to-year and and our children will grow up and have a very different view of what is distinctly human and what's not after after hearing gorgeous pieces of music and seeing beautiful artwork that had no human involved so so there's that as far as the will computers take over I actually don't think we have anything to fear there because we are building these things exactly the way we build dishwashers or clothes washing machines or whatever to do particulars that we need but in order to build a device that says I want to take over the world and here's how I'm gonna do it here's my strategy that is something that's so far off that there's nothing that we're looking at in terms of an independent thought that might be a swarm of artificial intelligences but look I'm just riffing here but there might be a swarm of dishwashers or washing machines that do that but there won't be right because they don't have the evolutionary pressures we have about survival and desire to dominate and take over and have warfare that the dishwashers just I mean I know there are people like the late Stephen Hawking and Elon Musk who are on one end of the spectrum of saying wow I've got a lot to worry about I'm totally on the other end of that spectrum yeah I can't reconcile with the late Stephen Hawking just at the moment it's all too recent isn't it yeah one thing just thinking about artificial intelligences thinking about what's distinctly human why do you think it's only is it language is it music what why is it that other species who are socialized in complex ways as we are haven't managed to kind of rival our creativity I think the corvids the but you know the crows and the Ravens get pretty damn close they don't get close so they're smart for sure they're smart and I was just looking at the bower birds at the Melbourne Zoo today and there they beautiful little nests and collect blue things and stick them there but it's it's as I said a big part of this has to do with generating ideas at this blinding pace almost all of which happens unconsciously you know our unconscious brains are the ones totally running the show the consciousness is like the broom closet and the mansion of the brain but the so you're constantly mashing and bending and breaking blending and spitting things out and trying to matter only the good ones come up to consciousness and most of those think to but it's just we're just looking for the ones that actually make a difference let's um let's just briefly unpack bending breaking and blending yeah I think blending is where it gets really exciting for me because you know you give beautiful examples of how engineers and others borrow from nature for example so that sort of wonderful interdisciplinary clash of ideas that create new ideas you know the biomimicry sort of phenomenon yeah there's so much biomimicry the just as an example the Japanese bullet train got their shape and their idea from these birds that have the same sort of beak shape and they fly through the air and they're very aerodynamic that way and so when building the bullet train they do that and of course there's lots of stuff happening in robotics now which is instead of building you know big clunky metal things can you make things more the way that that animals do it so you make robots that look more like animals and and then of course there's lots of study about how brains you know like your brain is 3 pounds of locked in silence and darkness that doesn't know what your body looks like but it figures out how to operate this giant structure just by trying things out so people are building robots that way they kind of figure out that their own body shape by testing things out seeing what the consequences are well speaking of bodies in space the project that's taking up a lot of your creativity and your time because you're a serial creative is this incredible vest and I gather it's kind of make a cameo in the next of Westworld that's right and I'm the card-carrying nerd and I've never seen Westworld have you seen worse world who seen Westworld here yes so david eagleman has been an advisor in this next series of Westworld that's worse world that's about to land yep it's already playing and it's already fine and yeah right and and the vest makes a cameo but the vest is an extraordinary device that is a testimony to the sensory plasticity of our brain yeah here's the idea with the vest what I've been fascinated by is what I mentioned how the brain is locked in silence and darkness and you had to put together this whole subjective world for you so for example you're seeing me a Natasha up here on stage but that seeing is actually happening there in your skull inside your skull all that activity it's getting constructed colours of course don't exist in the world but your brain is constructing that because of certain wavelengths of light that carries interesting information for the brain anyway it's it's super weird and you know all that we're doing is causing air compression waves but you interpret that as sound and so old data it's all data exactly and this has been the thing that's been fascinating to me for a long time is that when you look in the brain if I were to show you a little piece of cortex and and you look to the activity boo-boo-boo there's all this you know spiking going on you couldn't tell me am i looking at visual cortex or auditory cortex or somatosensory or gustatory or anything because it all is the same stuff just zeros and ones and so and some chemicals in there so the that's the interesting part about brains is it's it's somewhere between analog and digital we've got these digital signals that are going but then you've also got chemicals yeah it's yeah what she exactly yes yes so it's got to bring it back to the basics we're not that special well that works well summary orders the point is the point is that all of this all this information comes in it just comes in along different data cables in the brain figures out what to do with it and those data cables might be carrying what we would think of as visual information or auditory or taste or whatever but the brain doesn't know that and till it gets the information then figures out what it's gonna do so I got very interested in this idea of can you feed information into the brain via unusual sensory channels so what the vest is is we made this for deaf people sound gets captured and turns into patterns of vibration on the torso so you're feeling this pattern of vibrations based on the sound in the world and deaf people can figure out how to use this quite rapidly by day five they're already quite good at it and so you know there's 77 million deaf people in the world with severe profound hearing loss and this just fixes it for a few hundred bucks their only other option is to get a cochlear implant which is a hundred thousand dollars an invasive surgery so well another option is to learn the complex artistry that is sign language and you know the whole oh sure they do anyway but no no but lighting an auditory experience into an equivalent yeah right that's the thing that deaf person can't get from learning they don't know when the smoke detectors off where there's a dog barking on the other side of the fence or where there's you know a door slamming or someone coming up behind them stuff like that it's know sign language helps with that so so deaf people are really at a disadvantage in that way and anyway so for a few hundred bucks we can do this so what we've done actually recently is we've turned the vest into a wristband it looks just like a Fitbit and it's got vibratory motors on the band and it captures sound and little microphones there it turns into panel abrasion on the wrist okay so just explain it again so you put on the vest and then what happens so what happened actually with the wrist band on the wrist yeah you put all the wrist band sound is getting captured so your voice and knock whatever happens the smoke detector goes off and the sound is getting turned into this pattern of motors every 16 milliseconds from high to low frequency these motors represent high to low frequency this is precisely what your inner ear does it's just capturing sound busting it up into different frequencies and shipping that off to the brain so all this is doing is shipping it up the spinal cord into the brain so it actually translates the auditory signal into a sensory a physical touch exactly physical touch right now exact either on the back of the jacket or on the exactly right and so yeah and so what we're doing is we're just transferring the ear to the wrist and it works what about how do you distinguish between a small child screaming and far alone this is exactly the challenge that your inner ear faces so your inner ear is capturing the sound break separate of frequencies and sends to the brain along different channels what that is now you because you're an expert hearer feel like oh well obviously that's this thing and that's this other thing but if I actually stuck electrodes and all of those little cables all you would see is okay baby is and if I that's all thanks to you it's the same thing here it's hard to get your head around but that's a tease but actually if you go and say David Eagleman TED talk you'll see a demonstration of a man who who is a you know a scientist or a scholar and he is deaf and he you in a couple of days using the video 5 that yes say a word and he would write that word on the screen on the basis of the sensory experience amazing but you see all sorts of applications for these exactly my interest is not only sensory substitution but sensory addition so adding in completely new data streams to provide new what flusters call qualia which is you know internal subjective experiences about things so so for example you know we have vision and hearing in touch or whatever as I mentioned all looks the same on the inside but what if you fed in something that was completely new like you know real-time data from the stock market or or or Twitter data or perish the thought oh yeah exactly where infrared or ultraviolet or whatever it is or the invisible states of your own body like your microbiome or blood pressure or whatever and you're feeding that stuff in can you develop a new qualia a new internal experience that's not touch your vision or hearing or smell or taste but it's like this other thing which is so impossible to imagine just as an example Wow if I asked you to imagine a new color you can't do it like it's so weird but you just can't imagine new color but this is the same thing if I ask you to imagine a new sense but what I had pathi sighs is that the senses we have are all just ways of representing information there's a certain structure to the data with each of these and the brain you know put some feeling on that like oh that's the feeling of vision oh that's the feeling of hearing that's feeling of touch and it doesn't confuse those feel completely different even though they're made out of the same stuff amazing and you envisage that pilots could use it sure yeah we're we've actually done this with drone pilots where the pilot is feeling the pitch yaw roll orientation and heading of the drone while they're flying it so it's like they've extended their skin up onto the drone and they can learn how to fly in the fog or in the dark as a result of this yeah there's this wonderful idea that the philosopher Andy Clarke developed around the extended mind that we are always cognitively we're just a sort of bag of you know flesh and bones and we are always cognitively coupling with the world around us the pen our phone a map other people the laptop the chair you know and it's this lovely idea that we are we have an extended mind it extends beyond the ancient skull cave as he put it originally and in some ways this is a sort of similar idea isn't it that the cognitive experience is coupling exactly this is actually the theme of my next book which won't come out till 2019 but it's called livewire and it's about how you can't really think about the brain like hardware and you can think about like software but it's this other thing which I'm calling live where which is you know it's constantly reconfiguring itself and so on but but yeah when I'm driving car and my front wheel hits you no hits a bump it's like I've hit that thing or you know yeah and we're constantly doing this and one of the things that we can do with the vest is you know I can control a robot we're trying this with avatars now where you're controlling a robot that's you know a thousand miles away from you and you're feeling what the robot feels so as it lifts its arms you feel that if something hits the robot you feel that that kind of thing so we're sending it over great big distances now that TED talk you gave where you demonstrated this jacket received a standing ovation and it spun you into a whole other reality didn't it yeah that's right I ended up I ended up starting this company called neo sensory because I got funded right there basically venture capitalists went up and said right what do you want imagine that it wasn't quite what do you want because I would have had a higher number but they no they said like hey we want to fund this as a company and the reason it's so special to me is because you know in my entire life is an academic and I've written 120 academic papers and science nature and so on and and that's great but you know six people on the planet read this stuff and so I here's an opportunity to affect the lives of 77 million deaf people all at once and so that was a very special thing for me so I'm still teaching at Stanford but I'm spending almost all of my time now in the entrepreneurial world amazing transition to make an interesting one too lots to talk about there thank you hey David hi I'm Nicole I'm a pre-service teacher and just today actually in my English lecture I was pushing forward the idea of the benefits of bringing art outside of the art room and that's what I do in my in my teaching I sort of fuse odd in English could you please help me express to people with your beautiful wisdom the benefits of this yeah thanks for that question I wish you the best of luck on that it's it's it's easy no I mean you know in the real way it's it's easy to do it you can do in a way that doesn't cost your school administration anything and it's so useful for the reasons that I mentioned before which is that you know arts are where you get to explicitly do the stuff and bacon breaking many but how does she convince her colleagues what's the argument she needs to make so here's what I would say so what we did is we outlined in in in our book our latest book called this chapter called the creative classroom it's exactly about this and I would steal all those examples and run to your principal and say look at all these examples of schools that have done this and taking themselves out of being last in the state and you know to being first in the state this kind of thing thank you for the question thank you hi David um thank you for coming down um I guess my question is I've got to it's two-pronged to some kind of blending forgive me I so not sorry to the psychiatrist in the audience but I was diagnosed with Bipolar years ago and I reject the diagnosis I would say more that I have hydron sensitivity and a high level of creativity so I was wondering if you could speak to you know bipolar and what you would say about it I'm much more interested in what you have to say than a psychiatrist and also if you spent any time in psych wards and your take on psych wards because I find them to be particularly traumatic and detrimental to the spirit okay thank you yeah thanks actually so my father's a psychiatrist so I grew up seeing psych wards on I didn't know I'm curious to know if you guys had a similar history in Australia but in the United States we had psychiatric institutions where people who had mental illness were put there that ended up becoming a thing that sort of went had a stitute realization that what's it we had de institutionalisation as well well right so that came that came later so what happened is it went sideways for his I don't know but people found that it wasn't people were being treated well there so then there was the institutionalization and what happened and I can only speak about America but the entire population who suffered of some sort of mental illness flowed into the prison system so now our prison system is our de facto mental health care system which is a real shame so okay so there's good let me say two things there's good news about is the the the the good news is neuroscience laboratories all over the world are working really hard on issues of mental illness because it can be quite debilitating you know as a society there's a lot of variation that we have and a lot of that's really useful and good not everybody should be exactly the same way but instead along any access that you measure humans you find a lot of variation and as a result of that we have an extremely rich society with a lot of creativity one of the questions that my costs aren't i asked during the writing this book is is there a relationship between mental illness and creativity I'm not sure that there is only because at the levels of mental illness that I typically see in psychiatric wards people are debilitated by it and so it's not necessarily the case that they're saying okay here's I'm going to sit down to write my great novel or write the great painting so you know it's somewhere between it's a big pluralistic world and we've got a lot going on on the mental landscape it's just that when things become distressing and debilitating for people that's when that's when you know neuroscience and psyche psychiatrists try to find some way to help and Kai Redfield Jamison written in interesting ways she is a psychiatrist who has was diagnosed with bipolar disorder and has written some interesting work hello David my name is still one thing you mentioned earlier was about generations from now their children or our children's children would have a different idea of what it means to be human yeah it seems to me that our idea of being human is being diminished or is slowly being eroded and we've been too thrown but by being like the pinnacle of creation and now we've found that animals do lots of things that we can do and now our even air intelligence is going to be super seated and can you I mean can you see a future where being human is really a very small thing I said it's such an amazing thing that we think it is now oh okay thanks for a question it's very interesting one I think it's I don't perceive it as an erosion what I perceive is our capacity to be human is expanding so rapidly so just as an example when we look at children growing up with the internet right a lot of parents have concerns about this and they feel like oh my kid is spending all this time there it's incredible what that gives a child it means that instead of eating the world just their local little thing with their local homeroom teacher or whatever they get the entire world they can watch TED I mean look I run into 13 year old kids all the time we see something really smart I say how did you know that I saw a TED talk I mean they get the best teachers in the world anywhere talking about any subject they want I think what it means to become a human is becoming much more global soon it'll become interplanetary and I think this only speaks very wonderfully about what is what is coming next and and the thing about finding that other animals can do what we do I don't I don't buy that other animals can do some you know bowerbirds can make beautiful little s and so on but boy they ain't building civilizations or the Falcon heavy rock yet or things like that but way good at building civilizations and then stuffing them up well there's been a big addressing them I mean I disagree I totally disagree I mean if you look at the decline of violence it's just going down and down and this includes things like last century World War one or World War two and it's worth writing Steven Pinker's book on total he's got a great book called the better angels of our nature and he's got a new one called enlightenment now and it's those you don't know him he's the Harvard psychologists rific writer and he just went through a collect all these things you know okay child mortality block you know age expectancy you know anything what death in wars death from you know what I mean it would have been 500 years ago if we were sitting here we'd have to worry about bearded horsemen riding in and slaying us or something but probably no one's worrying about that tonight and so decent Yeah right every kind of disease state and so on many of which we have wiped from the face of the earth so yeah things are getting a lot better than they've ever been so creativity human creativity always is two-sided like any scientific invention where there's good and bad and things that can be used for good or evil with it but on par with things are getting a lot better you call us the runaway species and do you think we have a self limiter I wonder whether we have a sense of really deep understanding about for example how our natural environment sustains us you know I just made a show about insects and now you know how we are totally reliant on the world's insects not just bees but all of them we don't really know that we're oblivious to that well except you made a show on it so what that means is as a society we've gotten really smart about we're not gonna save the insects and if we don't save being 6 but at least we're putting the you know the momentum of mankind's efforts behind doing the right thing obviously a lot of the stuff comes a little bit late we often need to get hit in the knees before we realize oh there's something going wrong here and then we try to fix it so I'm you're the half glass fallen on the hot glass thank you sorry Carol my questions around cultural appropriation and the concept of creativity needing to blend a brand and break in a global I know some people are really concerned about culture appropriation and yet so in a global world is creativity possible while still respecting cultural boundaries well art fashion wearing varieties of fashion creating blending cultures together to come up with something that's completely unique that might be considered offensive that we've stolen that something's been stolen it's such an interesting question the history of art is always this it's always appropriating what has come before what other places you can get ideas from I mean if you look at the writings of Coleridge or the art of Picasso or any of these things it's all of I mean Picasso loved African masks and that's became sort of a thing that he used but I don't think of it as appropriation it's just you know going into the blender and coming out and in fact when you go to countries with a lot of immigration like Austria like Melbourne in particular is quite international all over America different countries where you see lots of cultures coming together you get the best food and music and art and so on as a result of these cultures bashing together and someone's got an instrument from here it's almost got art from here and this particular style yeah I think if a culture worries about hey our stuff is getting copied into the next thing they can worry about all they want but but they can't stop that from happening one of the auditory examples that I love is just there was a drum solo in 1969 song by the Winston's called the AH men break and that drum solo got appropriated into a song by mantronix and into a song by salt-n-pepa and what we discovered when we looked into this is that it's been that drum cell has been used in over 2,000 songs the same drum cell but this is part of what hip-hop does is it's always taking snatches of music from other things in reasoning which is really one and to make pie yeah we are neg pies yeah hi you think about the brain being a data processor and I was just wondering what your thoughts are on the thing that processes and interprets that what and where that is so it's so I didn't use the term that is the data processor because the computer metaphor ends up limping after a while but as far as what and where in the brain takes in data and does things with it that is brain wide and we we know that because anywhere that you get damage to the brain from a tumor or a stroke or traumatic brain injury you always mess something up there's no part of the brain that you can sort of X I is not worried about it so that's how we know it's a distributed process but what you may be asking is the fundamental issue about why are we conscious why do we have a private subjective experience of the world that's that's not known yet we don't know why we have consciousness why it feels like something to be alive because you can imagine building a robot that's just like us but doesn't feel like it it's just processing zeros and ones and and it doesn't have an internal experience to it so ask me again in 50 years I'll tell you so I'm gonna we've only got two minutes left can I just take all the three questions in a row from here and then I'll grab one from here as well so you're amazingly productive what is a really busy day for you what is a really slack day for you and then what is the ratio of those days ago okay next thank you thank you I was really excited by the idea of the vest and the wrist band as a way of replacing the dysfunctional hearing function someone I care about very deeply is currently disappearing with dementia I'm just wondering is there anything on the horizon technologically speaking from your deep knowledge of neuroscience that is potentially going to help probably the 77 million people around the world heading for dementia hi David I just thought it'd be as de niro since last year and I've been having conversations with my supervisor on creativity and coming up with different ideas it's just that and my question is trying to ask how could I limit all work I mean it's a overdosage of creativity ideas coming up from my supervisor who tends to kind of change them every two weeks and kind of acknowledges saying that was a stinky idea and now it's come to a point where he is telling me why did you tell me it was a stinky idea and why aren't you yourself thinking say yes can you please tell me ways to limit idea generation from the outside it's like you can start thinking is it yeah right thank you next Thanks hi I'm a master student I'm doing our medical research actually and I really enjoy music and sometimes I feel crazy if I don't just like sit down on my laptop and you know just create a piece of music once in a while and since like I've just started my Master's all my time and effort has gone into research and it's so difficult to find time for anything else so I'm wondering if our career is actually limit how much creativity we can express and whether that's actually suppressing the world from moving further because of that limit mm that's a great question so careers aren't necessarily worse than they used to game used to be that you'd work in a factory for 16 hours something so happily people have always had hobbies and and so it may be that that's going to remain what it is where you have to have hobbies to keep yourself feeling creative and so on and and I I totally get that that feeling of of going crazy if you're not doing something that expresses something amazing I mean now that I'm doing entrepreneurial business you know a lot of the stuff is just it's not terribly creative it's just making a product and getting it out there so anyway the good news is we've always got time for hobbies and you can always carve time out and this ties to the first question about which was it how much of a day you busy how much you you slack and what's right I essentially never slack because I but here's the whole trick you have a two-year-old in the six year exactly also so but the trick when I when I'm not you know having follows my family is this issue about what do you call them lazy susans here in Australia you know this thing this thing you put in the middle of a table and you can spin in whatever I have a lot of different projects going on at any given time and so as soon as I start slowing down on something I spin and I'm doing different one of the projects I mean that trick works well for me I have I have many friends who do the opposite sort of thing where they'll work on you know one novel and they'll just do that and nothing else but anyway using the lazy susan technique I never have any slack tab which is great which is relevant to the woman who's supervisor just doesn't it just it's too much what the limitations these are their limits on how many ideas one should generate I mean in a way you know sometimes consolidating and focusing and giving yourself time to think just think yeah well yes part of the analogy here is that we need to go out and eat the world absorb the world but you also need time to digest the world and and to sort of say okay now I've taken all that stuff here's what I'm going to do with it and of course this is what I do when I'm you know writing a book it's that process of digesting me you'll say okay here's what here's what's going on there and so it's it's always finding a balance it's different for every person how they want to do it between eating and digesting the world I'll just answer the very last one about dementia which is happily there labs all around the world studying dementia and trying to find molecular basis for things and how to help there but the the better news and that is that there are things you can do that aren't even highly technological and the most important thing for staving off dementia has to do with being cognitively active keeping cognitively active I'll just mention briefly there's an ongoing study it's been going on for at least fifteen or twenty years now with with nuns who donate their brains when they pass away and what the researchers found is that a number of these nuns have Alzheimer's disease their brain is actually getting physically chewed up with Alzheimer's but nobody knew that when they were alive they didn't show the cognitive symptoms of Alzheimer's why it's because they lived in convents till their last day and they were socially active in they played games they had chores they were dealing with other people and all that stuff takes a lot of work mentally so even as their brain was physically falling apart degenerating the tissue they were making new roadways between A&B in C and D all the time because they were keeping cognitively fit I wonder whether there's something else was going on there and just two and Andy Clark comes up again the guy who wrote the stuff around natural-born cyborgs embodied cognition and the extended mind he was involved in a fascinating study where if so people with dementia who went into a care facility if they if they didn't have or the simple thing of all their photos and just accoutrements from their life around them they did worse cognitively then if they had familiar objects around them and photos because that became their cognitive scaffolding so as they lost their own cognitive scaffolding the objects from their past provided a scaffolding of a kind and you can imagine a nun in a community of nuns that's the cognitive scaffolding isn't it oh yeah the people I have I think that's probably a very minor part of this story only because the person that you know is cognitively disappearing and I know people at dimensions there are still at home they're still at home they're surround with everything familiar including their photographs and still there they're they're diminishing part of the reason is because often when people retire their lives start shrinking and as they start losing their hearing it's annoying to go out to parties and their lives Frankenstein and so they end up just sitting on the couch watching television or something and that's the problem it's it's all the ways of keeping keeping cognitively active that's that's disappearing from their lives so anyway that the good news is that by keeping cognitively fit you can stave off dementia and so that's the technology that's that's useful there well we would like to extend our thanks to David Eagleman thank you so much thank you here visit we listen TOCOM for the best in books writing and ideas from Melbourne Australia and the world [Music]

Channel: WheelerCentre

Views: 67,712

Keywords: Ideas, Melbourne, Australia, Conversation, The Wheeler Centre, Victoria, Writing, David Eagleman, Neuroscience, Creativity, Brain

Id: 8tN3J_V-J5w

Length: 64min 50sec (3890 seconds)

Published: Tue May 29 2018