 Well, this stuff fascinates me because our brains are a large part of what makes us us. And if I slam the door on my hand on the way out to the bathroom, that's a bummer. And it might be harder for me to write or eat. I might not be able to eat a salad with my hands like you just did so expertly. However, if I damage my brain even a little bit in a way that's barely perceptible by most people, I kind of lose a part of me in a way. And this goes down this whole Buddhism rabbit hole maybe, but I feel like anytime your brain gets damaged, the physical part, you end up with weird software quirks as well. And I want to talk about some of those as well. But is it safe to say our brains kind of are us in some way? Yeah, it's the densest representation of you. So it's exactly as you point out, even if you damage a very tiny piece that can change your decision-making, your risk aversion, your capacity to name animals or see colors or 100 other things that we see. And through centuries of these sorts of case studies, that's how we know a lot about the landscape of the brain and how we know about how this is this representation of you. Now, we don't entirely know that it is entirely you because you've got lots of communication with other parts of your body. I think of it like the rest of this is the greater metro area and this is the city here. So there's some amount of communication that happens, but yeah, that's where the action is in three pounds. The other thing that fascinated me that the concept from one of your books is that the consciousness part is kind of, because I know people are going to go, your mind isn't you and here's 7,000 books written by Indians with names that have 25 characters in them that you've got to read that prove this. But the consciousness part of our brain is kind of like the newspaper, it reports on all the other things that are happening that are already computed by the subconscious brain and I know I'm non-sciencing this up pretty good right now. But yeah, the issue is that I've been saying a lot about all the activity that happens in a nation and there's so much that's going on at any given time and so what you want in a newspaper is just the headlines, just the very top level. That's what our consciousness is giving us, is just that top headline. Just yesterday actually I looked at the activity monitor on my Mac and I don't know if you've done that before, but there are lots of little programs running that I've never even heard of, I have no idea what they're doing, but they're all doing fundamental stuff and I thought that's a pretty interesting analogy to what's going on in the brain, there's so much stuff, you know, okay, make sure you breathe, get the proper thing with your blood and your body and do all the stuff that's going on and all sorts of basic cognitive things too about putting ideas together and evaluating hypotheses and simulating possible futures. All of that is running under the hood, so to speak, where it's happening in an unconscious level and the conscious mind just gets access to the very top little bit, the newspaper headlines in this case. Yeah, it seems like, same activity monitor sort of analogy, you go, what's taking up all this memory? And then you kill one of those things of the kernel task and suddenly it shuts down and goes, ah, well, you just shut down your breathing and your heart rate of your computer, you got to restart or the whole thing is toast. Exactly, by the way, this is something that struck me as interesting because there's so many ways in which we do this, so obviously if you shut down breathing or heartbeat, that's noticeable, but with drugs of all sorts, for example, your cognition changes massively and it's like shutting down one of these sub-programs where you don't exactly know what it does, but it changes the behavior of the whole system, the whole other rest of the system operates in a different way. Yeah, I'm trying to think of an analogy for that, but it would be kind of like, all right, well, we're going to shut down the one that makes everything show up on the screen, so now you're just guessing when you're typing or moving the mouse. So everything's going to be off and kind of weird and that could easily happen if you're taking something that shuts down the part of your brain that feels a certain way and you go, look, when I hit my hand with this hammer, it's funny and it's like, oh, that's not going to be funny after this substance wears off and the rest of that brain turns back on. Right, right, right. So it's not the operating system that we see in our conscious brain, it's the screen, it's the printer. Exactly right, exactly right. And the reason is you've got almost 100 billion neurons, neurons are the specialized cell type in the brain and these are doing incredibly complicated things and by incredibly complicated, I mean, things we haven't even scratched the surface of yet in terms of the algorithms that they're running that make us up. And so I don't think we could even function at our scale of space and time if we had access to that level of detail. I mean, you can't keep 100 billion things in mind and each one of these neurons is talking to about 10,000 of its neighbors. And so to operate at this scale of getting rabbits and mates and finding the river and the tree and so on, that level of detail is completely meaningless to us and what you need at this level is something that's just very, that's higher, like how am I getting along with this person? How do I get this made? How do I get this piece of food over here? Right, yeah, something that's more top line and the rest of it gets taken care of sort of automatically. And we're the last ones to know what's actually going on in the brain because most of the time we don't need to know and the breathing, the inhale that I just took before that last sentence, that happens automatically because if I had to think of that, my processing power for holding this conversation, which is already limited both right now especially, but in general is going to suffer because of that. Yeah, exactly right. And most of what we do is we automatize behaviors. So we learn how to walk. We learn how to eat. There are various things that are already pre-programmed or pre-programmed enough that it's easy for us. We learn how to speak language, depending on what we're exposed to in our culture and so on. But when you learn something new, like how to ride a bicycle, at first you have to pay a lot of attention to it. Exactly where your torso and your balance and everything is going on. After a while that when that becomes automatized, you don't have to pay any attention to it consciously. So that frees up all this conscious bandwidth. And yeah, that becomes most of what we do is totally automatized. I mean it's trivial to drive your car, which if you can remember back when you were 15 years old, it was hard to learn how to do that. Yeah, it was terrifying. Yeah. So we get to do all that stuff in an automatized fashion and that frees us up to think about the next tasks and other longer-term goals. Sure. Or do our makeup and eat some food and make a phone call and look at the radio and all the other things that most people do when they're driving, send a couple texts. No big deal. Which is a little scary because it also, we have this sort of illusion that since it's automatized, we're doing it in exactly the same safe way that we were if we were focused on it, which is a whole probably important sport. Well, there are many cases actually where things that are automatized actually function better than if you paid attention to it. I believe that. Yeah, I mean, just look at riding a bicycle. If you really pay attention, okay, how exactly am I moving? You'll probably crash. If you play a musical instrument, you know that if you start paying attention to what your fingers are doing, you're dead. You can't do it anymore because what's happening is so fast and sophisticated that you can't possibly address that with this slow, low band with consciousness. This has to be something that the rest of your brain takes care of and just does for you. Yeah, that does make sense. Although with the drive, I'm going to stay to my guns on the driving thing and that you should probably focus on that and not let the electric go. Of course you shouldn't take your eyes off the road to text. Yeah, I guess your brain still needs the other inputs that you think, oh, I don't need this anymore. I'm so good at it. I can just look down now. Yeah. Still needs the input. Yeah, I mean, an example that I often use is the lane change example. And this isn't my book Incognito. I don't know if you remember. I did. Oh, okay, I'm hoping. I did read it. Okay, I'm hoping you don't remember this example because I'm going to ask you to do this. So put your hands under steering wheel. Okay. And you're in the center lane driving 30 miles an hour and I want you to make a lane change into a right lane. So make a lane change. Into the right lane? Yeah, go into the right lane. Okay. And then. Okay, so it turns out that's totally wrong. What that does is that just turned your car to the right and then you went over the sidewalk and you crashed. Oh, so I just, yeah, because I turned this way and then never straightened it out. No, you straightened back. What you did is you turned to the right and then you straightened back out, which makes you now going straight to the right. Okay. The way you make a lane change is you go to the right back to center all the way to the left and back to center again. That's what a lane change looks like. Right. And you do it every day and you're not consciously aware of how you do it. So this is an example of. I'm a terrible driver. It might be an example of that also, but it's an example of the way your unconscious brain can just take care of stuff in ways that you don't even have conscious access to. Because you got to correct back, right? Yeah. When you're driving, you have to correct back in order to straighten out. Exactly. So yeah, all I did was instead of going in a circle to the right, I just went into a straight line and yeah, crashed into a bus station. Yeah, exactly. Exactly. So there's so much that our brains take care of that we're not even aware of and what we have to do is try to dig and scratch to even get a sense of what's going on down there. People often ask me about this issue of, for example, expert meditators and so on, whether they're deep down in there. But I think it's more of a party trick actually. They're just scratching the surface of, so if you can do something pretty extraordinary like change your blood flow to one arm versus the other or some of these things that meditators can do, that's cool. But that's one one billionth of what your brain is actually up to down under there. Which is really neat to know that we can't ever or at least not now access that with current technology. And it's not even clear that we even want, I mean, as a neuroscientist, we want to get in there and understand that. But I mean, from a psychological perspective, if we could actually get down into there, I think it would be so alien to us that it wouldn't even be worth it. It wouldn't, when you make, I mean, just look at something like dreams. You have dreams every night. You wake up and you think, God, that was bizarre. I mean, I hate dreaming. It's like sticking my head in the night blender every night. And I have all these high emotions. And you wake up and you think, God, what a waste of effort and emotion that was. But that's just like the smallest window into the kind of stuff that's happening down in there that if you actually could get down in there, it wouldn't make sense to us at our levels of space and time. And I think it wouldn't have any meaning to us. So just as an example, if I explain to you why you love strawberry ice cream all the way down to the level of, well, this, this happens, and this really stoked me. And that's why you love strawberry ice cream. It doesn't change at all your experience of eating strawberry ice cream. Like, if I wrote a whole book and you read the book and you love the book, it doesn't change anything about your psychological subjective experience in the world. Yeah, you can keep the book. I'll just have the ice cream at that point. Exactly. And so that's the sense in which, even as we get down there and start to understand things better and better, the meaning that it has to us will be sort of an academic one, I think. Yeah, I suppose that, well, you know more about that than I do. For me, listening to all this stuff, this book is kind of like the cosmos of the brain. And we'll go down that road in a bit because I got a bunch of questions about how that sort of thing relates. I spoke earlier to this guy, Isaac Lidsky, who actually, he went blind as an adult. And he used to be unsaved by the bell, which is kind of interesting because he was like this child actor who had everything going and then he just slowly, but not that slowly, went blind and then ended up becoming the only blind clerk on the Supreme Court and everything like that. I mean, he just did not, he didn't exactly give up, right? And he was talking about how seeing and vision, it's not really about the eyes. He still sees things just as clearly as he did when he had working eyes. It's just that the eyes are no longer, the input's not working anymore for him. Yeah, I'm a little suspicious. I mean, I don't totally believe that he sees things just as clearly because- Sorry, he visualizes things. Yeah, visualizes, yes. Not seeing anything. He literally sees nothing. It's just that he still, he doesn't have any sight, but he still visualizes things as clearly as he did before. Yeah, I mean, one example of this generally is every night when you go to sleep and you dream, your eyes are closed, but you're having full, rich visual experience. So we're all used to this about not needing the eyes to be open in order to have vision. I suspect that over time, his visual experience will change and if he's a really good introspector, he'll be able to tell us the ways in which it changed because it's probably not exactly the same as it always was. But yeah, that's fascinating. I'd love to talk about it. How does the brain then construct vision? Because it's not our eyes that construct the pictures, right? Our eyes take in light and things like that, but you mentioned in one of your talks that, where we met, actually, that you can create vision based on other sets of senses. How does the brain construct a picture of things? So almost all the vision is happening internally, which is to say your brain's making guesses about what's going on out there and it's using all its past experience and its attention based on what your goals are at the moment to figure out what is going on out there and then the data that's coming up through the eyeballs is just a little tiny part of that. There's a little bit of data dribbling up through here that gets to the brain and that's just used to essentially modulate this activity. It's used to verify or discount what your internal model is. But the whole thing is, you've got an internal model of what you believe is out there and then that's what your vision is. So as far as whether we can use other senses to get information, the brain is fundamentally multi-sensory. What it really cares about is taking in all these information sources like air compression waves and photons and molecules and pressure and heat and stuff and put together a big picture of what's going on out there. So even as people lose senses, they're still able to function in the world pretty well and get by. And I think what you're referring to is one of the things that I'm working on which is called sensory substitution which is can we feed information into the brain via an unusual channel and get the brain to perceive it? Yes. Like that Mountaineer who uses a camera on his tongue somehow? Yeah, he has a camera mounted here and there's an electro-tactile grid on his tongue that represents the visual image. So if he looks and there's a rock here, he'll feel that on his tongue. It feels like pop rocks on the tongue. Sure. And people can get so good at this, it's called the brain port, they can get so good at it that they can throw a ball into a basket at a distance or navigate a complex obstacle course. People can do quite sophisticated things with this. And so the first example of that actually goes back to 1969 about using a video feed and translating it into another sense. In that case, it was a series of pokes in the back. So blind people were sat in a dental chair and there's a solenoid grid and whatever's in front of the camera, people feel that poked into their back. And blind people get quite good at telling, oh, that's a line, that's a circle, that's a face and so on. So one of the things I'm working on is how we can, for deaf people, completely replace their, if their cochlear, their inner ear is broken for whatever reason, can we completely replace that with the skin of the torso? So we have a vest that's covered in vibratory motors and we capture all the sound and translate it on the fly into patterns of vibration on the torso. And so they're feeling, and they can come to understand the spoken world that way. That's incredible. So essentially we replace the hearing, the eardrum or whatever you said, the cochlear area, which is not functioning. And we say, all right, these different vibrations on your body are now going to represent sounds. So in their brain, is that then represented as sound or are they just getting so used to feeling something that they say, okay, this is what sounds are now? Do we not know? We don't know that yet. Ask me that again in about a year and I'll have deeper insight into that. But because one of the questions that I'm very curious about is the following, which is why is it that vision feels to you so different than hearing, which feels so different than touch or taste or smell? Given that when you look in the brain, it's all the same stuff. It's all spikes among neurons. I mean, that's the common currency of every thing. If I showed you some piece of cortex, I said, oh, look at all this activity going on there. You couldn't tell me if that's auditory cortex or visual or somatosensory. It looks the same. So the question is why does it feel so different? Why does vision feel like, oh, I'm seeing whereas touch feels like I'm, okay. I hypothesize that it's about the structure of the data. So with vision, you have two two-dimensional sheets of the eyes. With hearing, you have, it's a one-dimensional signal through time. Touch is this high-dimensional signal and so on. And I hypothesize that the structure of the data is what defines what it feels like. And if that's the case, then, if we're feeding in auditory information, even though we're feeding it through the skin of the torso instead of the cochlea, it'll essentially be hearing. It'll be essentially the same thing as hearing. Now what's also implied by this is if we feed in completely new senses, new information streams, people will have another sense that is not, it's not like vision. It's not like touch. It's not like hearing. It's not, it's this other thing that they can't necessarily describe because it's not like they're not seeing it. They're not smelling it. They're not hearing it. They're perceiving it in this other way that is completely alien to us. Exactly. So let's say I feed in stock market data to you. And so all day long, you're feeding all these stocks and what's going on and you start feeling like, oh, yeah, I feel like oil's about to crash and I feel like Google's about to do something well and whatever. And you're feeling that. Yeah, that's the point. You could never describe it. Why? It's because language is all about a shared communication. Like, oh, when you say this word, I know what you mean because I have the same experience. It's hot and it looks blue and it's also cold after it turns red. You know what that means. It's weird, but it, you know what it means. Well, right. I know what that means. But if you try to explain it to a blind person, if you try to take somebody who's been blind from birth and explain what blue is like and red is like, you could try really hard and they might even pretend at some point that they understand you, but they can't understand you because they've never had that experience, that qualia. Because they were born blind. If they were born blind. And so they'll never get what you mean there. It's the same thing. If you're feeling the stock market date and you try to explain to me, well, I feel this and it feels like this, blah, blah. You could try and try and I'd never quite get what it is. Until I wear the stock market vest and experience that for a month or so and I started getting it. And then we'd have to make up a word together. Right. We'd call it the Schmagegi or something instead of vision or hearing or whatever. Right. And we'd know what we mean by it, but nobody else would. You have words in certain languages like Danish has this word like huger and it's supposed to be like comfort and homie, but this is beyond that. Because those are, that's at least an amalgamation of things that humans understand. Exactly. And you can tell me this Danish word means comfort and homie. Right. And I pretty much got what the word is. Right. But yeah, this will be something that anybody who's not experienced in that sense could ever, ever get. And do you think there's an unlimited number of those types of senses and feelings? In our brain, available potentially? Potentially, yes. I think we have no data to tell us anything about the limits of that. And something I've been very interested in is looking across the animal kingdom. I spent a lot of my time just reading very detailed papers about these weird fish and animal species and whatever that are found that have completely different sensors than we do, which allow them to do completely other. So like electro reception where you can tell about magnetic fields because you have electro receptors in your body. Certain fish have that. Other animals do echolocation. Other animals pick up on ultrasound. Obviously, lots of animals pick up in the ultraviolet range of vision and so on. So there's lots of different signals animals can get in. And I suspect that their quality, their experience of that, is just different than ours as a result. Sure. Sure. Like a flatworm senses, I don't know, electro signals from other living things in the ocean. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And so the issue is, what are the limits of this? I kind of feel like, I mean, this is almost too big to imagine that it's true, but it might be true, which is that we're just now at this moment in history for the first time in billions of years, where we can suddenly feed in completely new senses to the brain, which as you may know, I see this as a very general purpose computing device. And I see all these sensors that we have as peripheral plug-and-play devices. And so we can plug in different sorts of peripherals and have completely new experiences. And if this is right, we're going to know this in the next few years about what kind of completely different senses we can have. So does that mean that everybody's, this sounds sort of stupid now that I'm verbalizing this here, but does this mean then that everybody's experience is then super subjective because it's only based on what our individual brains are constructing? Oh, yeah, yeah. Oh, that's for sure. That's already true, even though we have the same peripheral devices, you know, everybody essentially is living on their own planet, like Matt Damon and the Martian. Everyone's on their own planet. There's enough of a bandwidth between us that we can, you know, we can talk and I can say, hey Jordan, can you pass the red thing? And you can, you know, we've learned a lot and we could, we have the capacity to have this low bandwidth in between our planets, but it's already the case that it's quite different. And the question is, now if we start having completely different senses, are we, you know, to what degree will we even be able to understand each other? And that's just a weird thing that we're walking into in the future here. Yeah, it's incredible because I'm thinking, okay, if there was a way for you to look at or experience, not even look at, because that's throwing another dimension into it, a printout of exactly everything that I see right now, that I hear right now, that I smell right now, that I'm experiencing right now, just a snapshot. It would not match the, if you were sitting in this exact same seat looking in the exact same direction, it would not match. And it wouldn't just be, well, you know, you've got some tofu from your salad that's changing the way. If even if I look at a tree and you look at that same tree from the exact same angle, your brain is making a different picture of that tree than mine is. Yeah, that's right, because it has everything to do with what my goals are, what relevance the tree has to me. Most likely I'm going to look at the tree and think, okay, how do I get around it to the right and to the left? But let's say you're a, you know, you're somebody who studies trees and you might look at it and say, oh, it's this type of tree and then someone else comes out and thinks, yeah, I really want to hang a swing. So which branch is the right branch to hang it from? And, you know, there's a million different ways you can look at a tree and it all has to do with what your goals are and what your background experience is. So that's totally right. The part that hits our retina or hits our ears is just a fraction of what is important, what we experience. I was talking with Lisa Feldman Barrett who studies a lot of emotions and things like that. And she mentioned that our brains are checking, essentially all of our, all that our eyes are doing, all of our senses, really what they're doing is kind of fact checking the picture that our brain has already made to make sure it's valid. This is exactly what I meant by the internal model, which is that your brain's got this internal model that's running and it's just with a little bit of data that comes in through the senses, it's saying, okay, you know, look, I think I'm sitting in my office at Stanford with Jordan, we're talking and blah, blah, blah. You know, and all of this is consistent. Yeah, I can feel the chair, I can see you and so on. And so it feels like, okay, that's all consistent. But if there's something really weird, I suddenly see that there's something completely off that I didn't expect, then I become consciously aware that I pay attention to that because the important thing to pay attention to are the things that violate your expectations that are not consistent with your model. That is what will grab your attention. So if I'm born without a sense of smell, is all the smell related data just missing from the model? Or do I know that it's missing or it just doesn't matter? It's completely irrelevant. Great question. It is completely missing and you do not know that it's missing. So just, you know, as we were talking before, it struck me that it would be an interesting analogy to think if everybody in the world were blind except for you. So you had vision and you could see things at a distance and say, oh, look, there's something coming over the hill, right, and everybody in the world would be absolutely blown away by this and think you're magical and think, like, how could Jordan have known that there was something coming over the hill a mile away when we had to wait for it to get close and hear it and then touch it and so on, and he even knew what it was. But, you know, I mean, it would seem completely, insanely magical, but to the people who were born blind and the rest of it, they wouldn't know that they're missing something. You may have heard, you know, an analogy that I've used before is this issue that when I look at my dog who's got a great big snout and 200 million cent receptors, you know, my dog is having this incredible experience of smell. I just watch her go around and do these things and we don't feel like, oh man, we've got this sort of black hole where smell should be and we've just got these little impoverished noses here. Instead, we just were totally ensconced in our view of the world and that, as far as we're concerned, is the entirety of reality. Sure. I'll tell you something interesting here, by the way. So, you may know, I gave this Ted talk on this concept of the Unvelt, which is the part of your ecosystem that you can detect. Sure, I was looking for an excuse to use that word during the show. Great! So, the idea with the Unvelt is, just for listeners who maybe have not seen this talk, it's just that, you know, for a tick, it's picking up on temperature and butyric acid. That's its whole world. That's what it picks up on. For the Black Ghost Night Fish, it's picking up on electrical signals and perturbations in those. For the Echo Locating Bad, it's picking up on air compression waves and so on. And we've all got our own Unvelt and for us, we've got these little noses, but here's the thing that I find amazing. Whatever our Unvelt is, we assume that's the entire objective reality out there. What I've noticed a lot now is, like, when I was giving my Ted talk, I and the audience both really got the sense of where the Unvelt could go. And then afterwards, like, I don't know, 30 minutes afterwards, everyone's back. Everyone's back in their Unvelt. And I am too. I mean, I'm the guy who put this talk together and I talk about all the ways in which we could censor. It's so natural for us to snap back to that and think, okay, well, probably this is the whole reality out there. You know, I can see things. I can smell things. That's probably the whole reality out there. Even though I know and the audience knows that it's not true, it doesn't last. That truth doesn't last long. That I find interesting. Yeah, it seems like there's an illusion. It's maybe a healthy way to live somehow. There's an illusion that we are just aware of everything that's in front of us and we get it and that's the whole of what there is to perceive. So we're under the illusion that we're not seeing an illusion. Yeah, this is a very stubborn psychological filter to get beyond. And so, this is one of science's most basic fundamental things is figuring out what are these psychological illusions that we have and how do we make an end run around these and study this. But I just find it interesting that I can spend my days really trying to get back. But as soon as I'm back with my kids on the swing and pushing them or whatever, none of that stuff matters because I've evolved. Product of four billion years of evolution of here's what your reality is and here's what you need to survive. So I forget about that other part. Yeah, don't spend too much time out of that or don't spend any time outside of that. Right, right. Which is one reason why maybe some of the drug experience psychedelic stuff is so interesting is because it's turning off certain things or at least messing with the wiring in a way where it's like, hey, a new sense maybe or a new thing is happening here. Yeah, yeah, that's right. I think that's right. And I think that once we get, so we're about a year off from having the vest on the market and one of the things we've built into it is an open API so that anybody can pass any kind of data stream into it and experience whether that stock market or Twitter data or weather data or whatever kind of data you want, you can experience that and develop a new qualia and it may be that sort of in a year from now, the human species starts proliferating into all these different kinds of experiences that can be had. So the way that people who can't hear could listen to music would just be a... If a deaf person just wants to feel the music, we've actually been doing that a lot with the deaf community and they totally enjoy that. But I mean one step beyond that, which is that they actually want to learn language, like learn how to understand everything that's going on, what you say, what I say, there's a knock on the door, there's a siren, they hear it all exactly the way you hear it. I mean the way that we hear it is, we've got these sound waves that hit our ear and from there, everything becomes... By the time you get to the inner ear, everything just becomes spikes that go to the brain. And this is the same thing, you just wear the vest, you got spikes that are going up to the brain through the spinal cord. Right. So it's electrical signals no matter what by the time it gets to the computer. Exactly right. So it doesn't really matter how they come in. It's all the same currency, yeah. That's crazy. So if our brain is constantly making these choices out of, I guess, ambiguity to make the model that we're working with, does that happen, does that make social judgments as well? What types of judgments does it make? I mean it makes every kind in theory, but... It makes every kind, it makes every kind. And so yeah, I mean it's very weird to note the amount of stuff that we come to the table with. Or so I have two kids, five years old and two years old, and I watch them about the kind of social judgments they make and about other people. And he treated me badly and this is my toy. And all these things unpack in a very natural sort of sequence as in there's nothing surprising that my five-year-old has all these particular opinions on these things. It's because we come with all this software that just unpacks in a certain way. And what's very weird is some of the programs are meant to unpack later. So when my children turn 13, suddenly they'll become interested in parts of their body. They weren't very interested in before in other people's bodies and so on. All of a sudden their cognition changes because new software that's been sitting on the shelf gets unpacked. It's very weird. Good luck with that. It's very weird the degree to which we are simply living inside the software library. Well in our live programs we teach things like reading body language and vocal tonality and eye contact. And really all it's doing or all we're trying to do is convey certain mental models that you can use that hopefully will stick in your brain with practice and things like that that say when this is what shows up on someone's face or in their body, then you can react in this other way that will give you an advantage over somebody who does not know how to handle this particular experience. Yeah. But I'm really stoked at the idea that we might be able to add new senses into this. I mean that's just like a crazy advantage. Yeah that's right. You know and teaching people, okay when this you know do this sort of response that's really useful given that we're all humans and we all have the same sort of things going on. It's helpful to tell people hey this is an effective method to get what you need which is you know whatever it is that you know not rejection or get the thing that they want or whatever it is. But fundamentally what it comes down to is you know all these desires that we have we essentially come you know pre-programmed with these. You can't help the fact that you are attracted to particular mates and that you want people to like you and that you don't want to be ostracized from a group and you know all the list goes on and on. 100 things we can name that you're just pre-programmed with. Yeah it seems really interesting in a way that we could modify these things and also a little bit unfair that we can't just choose them and make it easier unfortunately. Yeah I have some friends who are getting older by the way and they find that the amount of time they spend thinking about sex and sexuality is going down and they feel very liberated by that. They feel like okay as that module is sort of you know moving towards shutting down or slowing down that frees up a lot of mental space things that took up a lot of cycles before now you get more room to think about things. I feel like I've read about some philosopher or scientist who's like who's castrated himself and this there's maybe many of these in history because those distractions were just too much. I don't know if I want to go down that road but I definitely agree with the premise which is I would have done a lot better in school if there were no women around because I would have spent a lot less time thinking about how my hair looks or how this shirt matches with this thing or how my you know name it. I wasted most of my bandwidth was spent during this 10 or 15 year period thinking about pretty much nothing else the detriment of everything else. This is an interesting example because what it shows is that you know we as a society, as a civilization, we've grown to this point where we think look it's really important to send kids to school and do this sort of thing which it is, it is super important for us to do that given our goals and desires as a civilization but but we're really fighting what is a more natural thing which is you know by the time you're 13 or 14 years old you're shouldn't mating and that's what we're geared to do and so there's all this effort that fights against that say all right stay in your desk Jordan I'm going to teach you 10 dates in Mongolian history that are important and so on and you just have to try to fight pre-programming with this other piece. Meanwhile I was thinking oh I must have ADHD and no what I had was attraction to the opposite sex yeah and and that always got in the way. So okay if we are dealing with mental models that our brains create and that's what sort of makes up our perception and then dot dot dot our identity or whatever it seems like that our memories must which are just memories or recollections of that same perception then those are also not totally accurate they're false and so they would include maybe things that are based on not even just what we see and experience but things that we thought we saw and experienced that we maybe heard about or saw on television so does that mean that our identity and forgive me I'm going on this philosophy road here this Jason Silva type road here does that mean that if our identity is made up of memories of ourselves that a certain portion of our identity or maybe even the whole thing is basically a fabrication of our brain or by our brain. So so yes and no so there's a difference of course between saying memory is not accurate and saying it's false because it's not it's not sure that it's false it is the case that what we write down isn't like a video recording or like the way a computer stores zeros and ones it's of course as we know it's very different from that it's about sensations and impressions not all but you're accurate and of course putting memory aside you can just be in a situation where somebody says something to you think I can't believe that in your whole life you you remember that moment but actually it was totally you misinterpreted what he meant by it and so on so even even when our memory is totally accurate we might not even have the right interpretation of what it was that led up to that moment so yes it is the case that our whole identity is built from the sum total of our memories and so it is this very weird thing that the beliefs we hold rest on this and typically until people get older and a little bit wiser they really believe that their memories are correct and they believe that their interpretation of the world is correct you know we all tell ourselves stories about things and it takes some amount of maturity to realize okay well that's just a story and maybe yeah maybe that's what actually happened maybe that's what the person meant maybe not so but yeah I think it's especially tough on young people that their whole who they are is built as the sum total of these memories and impressions this the brain seems to trick us a lot almost maybe on purpose maybe maybe just a little flavors but tell me about alien hand syndrome this thing is weird a lot of this is weird yeah well it's funny because I think it's not so weird just be that's interesting but alien hand syndrome is where a you know because of a lesion in the brain damage to the brain something starts your hand for example starts having a mind of its own is what it seems like so it's called an alien hand so your hand there was some dumb movie evil dead two or something sure where the guy's hand started doing things as well but but it's kind of like this or you know just an example some like I might start zipping up my jacket with this hand and this hand pulls it down and I and I say no I want to zip my jacket up and it's doing its own thing and so you're fighting yourself although it's like you have two separate control systems exactly exactly what's happening is one part of your brain is controlling this arm another part is controlling this arm and they just have different ideas what's going on the interesting part that this exposes to my mind is the the fact that under normal circumstances you always have conflict enormous amounts of conflict going on in the brain as if you're in my book incognito you know this issue that I described the brain as a team of rivals which is to say you've got all these different networks that have different drives they want different things at every given moment and they're always battling it out to steer the ship you know so it's sort of like a neural parliament in a sense anyway the times that that becomes clear is when you do things like you know cut the corpus callosum which connects the two halves or do various things that you know brain damage in one place or another that's when you start really exposing the rivalries that are happening under the hood normally these get arbitrated so that by the time it all rises to consciousness you say oh I'm going to do that I'm going to get the tofu salad or whatever tell me about zombie routines so the idea with zombie routines is it's just that you've got all these completely automatized things going on in your brain all the time so this is an example of what we were just talking about with alien hand or whatever but all the stuff that we're used to thinking about like oh my heart beating getting taken care of my gut the digestion I'm walking I'm balancing I'm shifting my position every once in a while so that my blood flow goes through my leg as well and so on these are all zombie routines are just completely automatized and most of them we never even have access to and I just this stuff is so fascinating it's exactly like this thing we talked about with the activity monitor on the computer where you just see these other zombie routines that your computer is running that you'll never ever crack open that function and see what it's doing but it's just doing something that's super critical to the mission are there are there ways in which in the future we might create conscious machines that can control other sub routines and automatize those so that our brain power is maybe is freed up for something else or by or is it by that time that we can create those the brain is then an obsolete piece of computing I mean for better or worse the brain will never become obsolete because we are brain owners and we uh you know if I said to you hey Jordan we're just gonna kill you now because your brain's obsolete because we have better computers you wouldn't you wouldn't want to die so um I might want a better brain though I might not want this bio one I might want a better one oh well so there's a sense in which we already have that so you know we all carry around this little rectangle supercomputer in our pockets which connects us to the entirety of human knowledge and learning up to now so there's already a sense in which you've got this great symbiosis going there's been a lot of interest lately in this issue of can we make it so that we're not interfacing via our fat thumbs but we've got this faster thing that is actually an extraordinarily difficult problem to solve so you know there have been a couple of companies that have launched recently that say they're going to do this to to work on ways of doing this one is called kernel one is called neural link the difficulty is you can't do this thing of implanting electrodes which is the traditional way that in in neuroscience the neurosurgery the way of getting to the brain which is the soft pink material that's surrounded with the skull right the cochlear implants how they just kind of touch inside your brain right a cochlear implant slightly different because you're just slipping electrodes trip into the inner ear there but this is actually drill a hole in the skull stick electrodes into the brain itself that's the idea there I kind of think that idea will never catch on in the consumer space and here's why it's because there's always risk of infection and death on the surgery table and so neurosurgeons simply aren't going to do it for someone who simply wants a better interface with their computer right and I don't even know that consumers would want to do it obviously these surgeries do happen but they're for people with real disorders and deficits like you know they've got Parkinson's disease that prevents them from being able to even walk around in the world so you can do a neurosurgery there it's a big undertaking but it's worth it for the for what it gets you but the question is would it ever become a consumer thing where you do neurosurgery and I just don't think so yeah might be it's a little risky just to have a quicker access to google search engine exactly right exactly right so I think we need to come up with other nascent incipient ideas that will one day grow into something that could be consumer ready and these are issues involved in for example nanorobotics getting super tiny little robots into every neuron in your brain or genetic techniques to be able to change the way that your neurons behave and know when they're firing things like this so that we can actually read lots of brain activity in a useful way and and eventually write to the brain activity also yeah that that would be very very cool because I think everybody kind of wants to level up a little bit and I mean everybody wants to be super human if our brains can interpret data from anywhere like the camera that has the the grid on the tongue the vest that people can feel to hear then we could theoretically invent things that are external but are maybe better than our natural gear for data gathering oh yeah totally I mean one thing that I'm interested in with the vest for example is you know setting up cameras in other rooms and I can feel where people are moving around and I know oh yeah someone just entered the third room over there how do you know I felt it that's that's easy stuff and what that illustrates is just you know our eyes are limited because oh there's a wall here well that's the end of that I can't see past that but it's just super easy for us to hook up our tech to really make it better than better than the experiences we have now sure and what I'm interested in one of the things I'm interested in is you know the the spectrum of electromagnetic radiation there's a very thin strip here which which we call visible light which is the those wavelengths that we can see exactly because of the machinery our retina but there's all this other space out here of other wavelengths that are moving around that are totally invisible to us so I'm very interested in seeing those just as one example a a colleague of mine is making microwave sensors to put on satellites so he can he can look at the earth in the microwave range it's a long story why but what they discovered quite accidentally is when you look at the planet in the microwave range you can see in that range what water is drinkable in which water is polluted oh wow and that was a new discovery that they didn't expect nobody expected but they just figured that out accidentally but just imagine if I'm actually feeling in all these different wavelengths what kind of accidental discoveries I would make there about oh wow did you know that I you know if I'm seeing a person in this completely other range I could tell this other thing or the sky is the limit as far as the kind of discoveries we can make if we just strap these on humans and have them walk around and experience their daily life yeah it's it's fascinating for me to see that look in other words instead of eyes or in addition to eyes I could have sensors that can sense heat they can sense thing things motion over super long distances in the dark you could have a flare like those infrared cameras that are a heat camera that can easily be super sensitive enough to go through walls and buildings and if I'm a law enforcement military search and rescue I could theoretically instead of having this complicated piece of gear or having to radio to a helicopter or a truck I could look in a certain direction or just not even look I could hold my hand out of wherever the flare sensor is and go there's four people six meters deep trapped in something they don't have that much air and there's water in there too and blah blah I could know all of that but instead of being able to go okay I see that on this computer and it's being radio I just feel it exactly and I'm already in action exactly right exactly and it sounds so weird to think oh could you just feel that kind of information but you know if you take you I mean if you look at the amount of information coming in through our eyes right now it's so absolutely enormous and and you know colors don't exist in the outside world the colors that I'm experiencing essentially carry information for me like oh you know it's different wavelengths of electromagnetic radiation and and that tells me where the ripe fruit is against the green leaves of the tree and so on and all this stuff I'm just feeling in a sense already but we take vision for granted we think oh yeah it's fine so my eyes and there's the world sure but yeah so there's exactly there's no reason that you can't feel tons of stuff with something like the vest so all this is to say I think the vest is probably our best bet for the next 50 years or something until we figure out better ways to get deeper in there and plug things directly into the brain but but that is not as easy as people think yeah yeah it's not just the matrix worth of the little exactly because you know essentially and also if you stick an electrode in the brain the brain tries to the brain tissue rejects that the same way that your finger will spit out a splinter over time it you know pushes it out so you're the same thing with an electrode in the brain so so I think electrodes are probably not the way to go and it'll have to be something much more sophisticated than that in what timeline do you think we're on for things like that it's impossible to know but I you know 50 years will have something consumer-based if I had to make a wild guess what what what about using things like the grid on the tongue is that just there's just not enough surface area to get the right type of bandwidth well the reason I'm much more interested in what we're doing with the vest than this tongue the tongue is a terrific proof of principle but you can't eat and you can't speak with it in your mouth so that's the reason I'm not too high on that as a device the other thing is you know it hangs out of your mouth in this way and it is socially embarrassing to people to do this kind of thing I mean I don't just mean the brain port I mean something like a hearing aid is socially embarrassing sure so what I wanted to do with the vest from the very beginning is there's something you wear under your clothes no one even knows you're wearing it but it's translating the world for you're translating whatever sense you want but no one even knows you're wearing it that's the idea yeah that makes sense I'm just thinking my brain's going wild with like well what if you could line my esophagus with a grid or something that nobody could see and there's a lot more surface area there or maybe it goes under my skin which sounds gross and painful but also theoretically possible I think all these are good ideas the only problem is if you want to I love the idea of lining your esophagus but you have to actually go in there and do some sort of minor surgery to get that I don't know how minor that is right yeah it'll be relatively minor but as opposed to you buy a vest for under a thousand bucks and you zip it up under your clothes and your set it feels like it feels like there's an advantage to that that hasn't it hasn't been immediately obvious to me what the next step would be that would be better as in oh I'm going to go in and get a surgery and be out for two days and have this thing like you know maybe that's useful but you don't necessarily need it we're we're also working on many different form factors we not only have the vest but we have a wristband we're also building a pair of pants with vibratory motors in it and so you can get lots of different data streams pretty easily cheaply from the outside how quickly can I learn how to use this because if I'm wearing the vest right now it just feels like a tickly shirt right like or some kind of weird vibrating thing that doesn't mean anything yeah it totally depends on what you're trying to learn so many of the things that we're doing have zero learning curve people immediately get it they just get it others have like a fifteen second learning curve where you just really because the brain learns how to use the data right exactly but it totally depends on the kind of data so that's one end of the extreme some of the projects we're doing there are non-disclosure I'm afraid so I can't tell you much about it but the other end of the extreme is learning language learning how to use the vest as an ear that takes about a month so you train for about an hour a day using these cool games we have the you know the games are the phone presents a word to the vest so you feel and then you have let's say two words and you have to choose which word did I just feel that I feel near your door and so you make a guess and you're 50 percent at first but what happens is people's performance starts improving steadily and it just keeps on improving over the course of about a month and so that's the yeah so that's at the long end of how long it takes to learn something other things are easy that's incredible so what's one of the things you're most excited about of course allowing deaf people to be able to hear with the vest what are you going to use it for when you get one that you can take home yeah yeah yeah I am so sorry to beg off on that question but I actually some of the stuff is a little long disclosure that's what I'm yeah using for but um but in general you know I can just say as far as a clear market path because you know we have to get this out in that way we're doing things with deafness we're doing things with blindness we're doing things with prosthetic legs just as an example when you know when somebody gets a prosthetic leg they don't learn how to walk very easily they have to look at where their leg is at all times they're not getting a feedback sure so we're just looking at pressure and angle sensors and then feeding that into the vest and you can you feel exactly what your leg is doing just like you and I feel what our legs are doing so um there are lots of things like that that are addressing particular deficits and then and then there's the whole world of things we're doing about adding senses sure well when when does that NDA when are you going to be able to let the world know what this stuff is probably not a year from now all right well we'll see you in a year good good I'm looking forward to it David thank you so much right thank you Jordan cheers