David Eagleman

It is sponsored by the singer and artist Jewel.

And I'm talking today because I just want to share the experience I don't have anything specific, you know, notes or anything like that, but I just want to talk about being in a room of individuals that are pioneers in the field and having had opportunities to interact with them, like David Eagleman, who is the leading neuroscientist in the world.

He and I have each other's phone numbers and people like Mark Brackett, who runs the Yale Center for Emotional Intelligence.

I mean, I have these guys numbers and it's amazing to have had this experience because, you know, being in Las Vegas, we didn't really know what to expect, but knew that the mission of this foundation of which I feel has been I've always had a passion for mental health.

You know, everything has been very, very strategic by design.

Even when I read the book called The Brain by David Eagleman, he's a neuroscientist and he has another book called Live Wired, which is good as well.

But I was like, man, we're stuck with one mind for the rest of our life.

It's like literally being stuck playing one video game for the rest of your life.

Can you lose your color vision? And what does any of this have to do with language or culture or why the military likes colorblind people for a particular task? And why I suggest that the cultural history of Thailand was influenced by one single unknown neurodivergent.

Welcome to Inner Cosmos with me, David Eagleman.

I'm a neuroscientist and author at Stanford.

And in these episodes, we look at the world inside us and around us to understand why and how our lives look the way they do.

Or stare at a green square for a while and then look at a white background and you'll see what's called self-luminous red, a red that is brighter than white.

These are some ways to see outside the normal fence lines of color.

And I'll put demos of these on the show notes at Eagleman.com. Now, there are other ways to see new colors that require doing so in the laboratory.

I'm going to come back to that near the end of the episode when I'm going to talk about the future of seeing color.

Why not? What does that cost you?

Yeah, there's a there's a great like, I don't know if it's a TED talk or some other talk, but a neuroscientist named David Eagleman from about like 10 years old, I think he gave a talk called possibilianism.

And so I actually asked my students to watch that before the first class, like, I don't ask, I don't actually need you to believe anything, but you have to be a possibilianist.

I love that.

Today's episode is about color.

What is the very specific reason that hunters wear orange? Why do birds and bees go to different flowers? Why do most mammals look like they've evolved, at least in part, for moving around at night? And what does that have to do with hairless humans getting angry? And what does any of this have to do with road signs or camouflage or mantis shrimp or the sun or the dress that broke the internet or women who can see more colors than you can? Welcome to Inner Cosmos with me, David Eagleman.

I'm a neuroscientist and an author at Stanford.

And in these episodes, we look at the world inside us and around us to understand why and how our lives look the way they do.

Go to Eagleman.com slash podcast for more information and to find further reading.

Join the weekly discussions on my sub stack and check out and subscribe to Inner Cosmos on YouTube for videos of each episode and to leave comments.

Until next time, I'm David Eagleman and this is Inner Cosmos.

How do you know that Claude won't become manipulative?

And both of those types of thinking generate responses.

Now, a neuroscientist friend, David Eagleman, characterizes what goes on in your brain as something like this, which is a picture of the British Parliament.

And if you've ever watched that on TV, you see one side vociferously arguing with the other side back and forth seemingly to no decision or no endpoint.

And that's really what goes on in our brain between our unconscious thought and our conscious thought.

But I will tell you something that is interesting about this.

David Eagleman, who's at Stanford.

He's

been on the show.

How much of who you are is written into the circuitry of your brain? If your brain changed, would you still be the same person, or does your personality change, too? And can someone lose who they are without realizing it? What happens when the person changing is the only one who can't see it? And what does it mean to love someone whose personality has become unrecognizable? If you carried a genetic mutation that would alter your brain in the near future, would you want to know? Today, we sit down with Robert Kolker, best-selling author of Hidden Valley Road, to discuss these questions in the context of his new book, The Vanishing Family.

[instrumental music plays] Welcome to Inner Cosmos with me, David Eagleman.

I'm a neuroscientist at Stanford, and in these episodes, we sail deeply into our three-pound universe to understand why and how our lives look the way they do.

[upbeat instrumental music plays] This is an iHeart podcast, Guaranteed Human.

Go to eagleman.com/podcast for more information and to find further reading.

Join the weekly discussions on my Substack and check out and subscribe to Inner Cosmos on YouTube for videos of each episode and to leave comments.

Until next time, I'm David Eagleman and this is Inner Cosmos.

Lisa, tell them about our new show.