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You know, you can't tear half the circuitry out of my cell phone and and expect it to still work but you can do that with the brain.
Hey everyone, it's Rosie here.
Welcome back to Radiohead Space.
So like many of you after I had COVID I didn't feel like myself.
I felt foggy, my memory was bad, and I was just off.
But a friend of mine reassured me that my brain is elastic and that everything would be fine and of course everything is back to normal now.
But that left a big question.
What exactly is brain elasticity?
And to answer that, I called up Stanford neuroscientist Dr. David Eagleman.
Much like me, David is obsessed with understanding how the brain works.
And the conclusion he's come to is that our brain is basically the most advanced piece of software in the world.
I always find it so fascinating to hear people's stories of why they decided to study the brain, because it is such a complex structure.
So I'm curious for you, and you don't have to take long to respond, but I'm just curious.
Yeah. Well, for me, I was in college, and I was taking a lot of philosophy classes, and I really enjoyed these philosophical conundrums that you spin yourself down into and so on.
But in the end, many of them, that's where it ends, there's never an answer.
And I thought, gosh, if we could understand the perceptual machinery by which we're viewing the world, maybe there would be an answer here.
Maybe we don't have to leave it with question marks.
So I started studying neuroscience.
As it turns out, my father was a psychiatrist and my mother was a biology teacher.
So it was sort of natural I ended up there, but I certainly did not think that until I was maybe 20 years old.
I never thought I'd be going down that path.
Yes, and once you were there you were just fascinated.
I was hooked. Yeah I actually majored in British and American literature as an undergraduate because that was actually my first love and then and that has helped me a lot because I write books also.
So I've been able to you know build a lab and study the brain and do hundreds of experiments on things and write books about it, which has been really fun for me.
In Livewired, you discussed the brain's incredible adaptability, and it's a topic for me, like I said, that's really fascinating.
I'm curious if you can share a personal experience or case study that highlights this concept in action.
Yeah. When I was growing up, there was a kid in Albuquerque, my hometown, who was starting to have epileptic seizures more and more often, and his parents were taking him around trying to figure out what was going on and he started having seizures really in the end by multiple times an hour, which you can't live life that way.
Anyway, the parents took him around, they were referred to specialists.
Turns out he had what's called Rasmussen's Encephalitis, which is a epilepsy that affects an entire half of the brain.
The only meaningful approach to that therapy of that is to do what's called a hemispherectomy where you remove half of the brain in a neurosurgery, you just throw it out.
And so you can imagine the horror that a parent would go through in a situation like this.
But as it turns out, kids are totally fine.
You take out half of their brain and they're perfectly fine.
They tend to have a slight limp on the other side of their body, but otherwise, cognitively they're doing fine.
They can do math problems, they can read literature, they can do whatever they want.
this was really striking because we don't know how to build technology like that in Silicon Valley, where I live now.
You know you can't tear half the circuitry out of my cell phone and expect it to still work but you can do that with the brain so I now refer to the brain as live wear.
It's it's just a totally different kind of beast. It's not like the kind of stuff we know how to So what this illustrates is, you know, I can't run over my laptop with my truck and expect it to self -function if I squish it, but the kind of computational material that Mother Nature has built out of cells over billions of years is a very different kind of thing.
And that's what we're trying to figure out as we study liveware.
Well, can you tell us a little bit more about it?
Because it just feels like, to me, this system that creates such resilience in us that the knows what to do.
It just automatically creates blood cells when we need them and it rebuilds muscle when we tear it.
You know, the brain I feel like that's just such a complex system and we still don't fully understand it.
Yeah, well you know, I have a previous book called, Incognito the secret lives of the brain and what it's about is all the stuff that's happening under the hood.
In other words, beneath the level of conscious awareness.
So even though we walk around and we feel like, oh, I'm consciously aware, I know who I am, I can say all kinds of things, in fact, almost everything in your brain is running unconsciously, and that applies, of course, for your entire body, so your blood cells and your muscles, your digestion.
It's a huge operation happening under the hood that we're not aware of under any normal circumstances.
I mean, if you go to the hospital and get anything from an x -ray to a full body scan and MRI or whatever technology you're using, you look at this stuff and think, whoa, I've read about this stuff in textbooks.
I've read about spleens and lungs and livers and whatever, but whoa, I am that.
I am the sum total of this giant chugging system that's moving along and I have access to almost none of it.
I have a question about LiveWired and if you don't mind.
The concept of LiveWiring, you describe as the brain's adaptability.
Can you elaborate on how this is different from traditional views of brain plasticity and maybe just give us a definition for the people listening what plasticity is?
Brain plasticity is just that your brain is making changes all the time.
So William James, a century ago, the great Harvard psychologist, used the term plasticity because he was referring to plastic manufacturing.
When you mold a plastic toy into a shape, it holds onto that shape.
That's what we like about the material plastic is that you can mold it and it'll remember what you molded it into.
And so he said that's kind of like what the brain is doing.
Now, the reason I use the term live wiring, I'm referring to exactly the same thing, but I think the days of being impressed by plastic manufacturing are past us because what's actually happening there is you've got 86 billion neurons, these are the cell types of the brain, they're constantly reconfiguring, they're moving and changing every moment of your life from cradle to grave. Each neuron has these processes that come off of it and they're connecting to about 10 ,000 of their neighbors, you've got 200 trillion connections and you know every one of these is like a little creature they're they're
seeking and trying plugging in various places and they're you know trying it out and then they unplug and reseek and plug in somewhere else and that's going on every moment of your life and so that's why I use the term live RNA but it's the same thing as brain plasticity.
So I have read about plasticity for many many years and I think what fascinates me the most is the fact that we continue to have this process happen until, like you said, we're at the end of life.
And the reason that it fascinates me so much is because I go back to this idea of like teaching an old dog new tricks, right?
So can you if it's possible for your brain to be changing, to be in a sense like you said, live wiring, then does that mean that I can still change habits at a later age?
No, you're done, Rosie, it turns out.
No, I'm kidding, here's the thing, your entire life, your entire life, you're changing.
Obviously, it's easier for children to learn languages, for example.
That's because it is extremely relevant for them.
In order to get what they want and get the food and this and that, they need to learn how to communicate and do that.
If you, as an adult decide you want to move to some other ...
You want to move to Cambodia and learn how to speak the language, you've got all kinds of different incentive structures that have lots of things that's keeping in mind now.
So you might say, well, I'm going to spend an hour a day studying Cambodian, but I'm going to spend that much time.
Okay, so things get a little harder for us, because of the success of our brains, which is to say, we have spent all these years learning what the world is and how to operate in the world.
We've moved from a very fluid intelligence to a crystallized intelligence.
That's good news. I mean, you know how to operate the world.
You know how to get a fork to your mouth and how to ride a bicycle and how to speak to people and all this good stuff, and that represents a real success.
But it makes it harder to put new things in there.
Nonetheless, you're learning new things all the time.
You and I hadn't met before today, but now if I see you in the streets, I will recognize your face.
I know you live in LA.
I know you just spilled your tea before the podcast started.
All these things that I'll remember, because even at my advanced age, I can still make changes to my brain.
I love that you're saying you're advanced age.
Like that's what I'm going to say.
God, it's so fascinating.
And to me, I think that that's the part that it gives me.
It makes me an optimist in a way.
I'm curious what your perspective is in the role that mindfulness plays in plasticity.
Well, you know generally the brain is running many tasks at once, but at the highest level, what it's doing is it's monitoring the outside world for threats and opportunities.
And it's monitoring the inside world to make sure everything's running in there, and also doing reminiscence and future planning.
And so there's always this competition between how much of your attention you're spending looking at the outside versus internally focused.
And so there are many different sorts of mindfulness practices, but all of these have the same goal, which is, hey, let's turn the spotlight inward. And there have been neuroimaging studies on this kind of thing.
So for example, you take advanced meditators and you put them in a brain scanner and you make a sound in their ear.
And what you'll see is that their auditory cortex lights up and all kinds of other activity in the brain comes online when you do that.
But then you ask them to meditate.
and whether you're deep in their meditation, if you make that same sound, what you'll find is that their auditory cortex becomes active, but the rest of the stuff kind of doesn't.
In other words, the activity doesn't spread.
And it's because they're not monitoring the outside world the way that we spend most of our time doing.
So, you know, that's what mindfulness practices of all different flavors are about is turning the spotlight inward. As you're saying that, I'm thinking about music and the impact that it has and how it's able, it has the capability of changing our mood and or influencing us, I'm curious what your thoughts are on that perspective.
Yeah, I mean, music is obviously one of the things that can help you do is get into a meditative state and in part that's because it has real predictability to it which is to say what we love about music is the rhythm and the rhythm at each moment, your brain says oh wait I know what's coming next ah good I made a successful prediction and so the point is there's lots of predictability which is very relaxing.
So you can get into a nice state that way.
Obviously music and language have a lot of relationship.
Music is like a very simple language to the brain.
Language is mostly processed in the left hemisphere in a particular area and music is processed on the mirror image side on the on the right hemisphere and they're very very similar structures.
Okay so the next thing that I wanted to ask you about I wanted to ask you about dreaming and how dreaming affects our brains and elasticity.
Well so you may know I I proposed a completely new theory about why we dream, and I think this is right.
So it's this completely bizarre thing, dreaming, which is, you go to sleep, you close your eyes, you have these images that come to you.
We layer stories on top of that, and what's this about?
Well, no one has ever known.
But it turns out, let me back up one step to explain the hypothesis, which is, so we talked about brain plasticity And part of what happens there is that, whatever data is plugging in, that structures what parts of the brain are taking care of what kind of information.
So for example, the back of the brain is the visual cortex and that's because visual information is plugging in back here.
So for most of us who are sighted, that's our visual cortex. But what happens if you go blind?
If you go blind, it's no longer your visual cortex. Now those same cells are taking care of hearing and touch and other things like that.
Okay, so we've known that for a person who's born blind, the visual cortex gets taken over by these other things.
But what came as a surprise about 10 years ago was how fast this can happen.
So some colleagues of mine at Harvard did a study where they blindfolded people tightly and put them in the scanner, the brain scanner, and they were measuring various things like, you know, sounds in the ear and touch on the hand.
And what they found was that the visual cortex starts to get activated within 60 minutes.
In other words, just an hour after you take away somebody's vision, the visual cortex starts getting encroached upon by these other senses.
And so what I realized with my student Don Vaughn is that because of the evolution of all animal species, they had to all deal with the problem, which is the rotation of the planet.
So what happens is the planet rotates into darkness, you know 12 out of 24 hours and obviously historically We never had electricity or lights at night or something like that.
So it can be really dark And what that means is that your visual system is disadvantaged compared to hearing or touch or taste or smell and what that means is that the visual The visual cortex is in danger of getting taken over every night.
So what we realized is the brain is is blasting random activity into the visual cortex every 90 minutes just to keep it defended, to keep the territory defended against takeover during the night.
It turns out that the more plastic your brain is, like for us homo sapiens, the more dream sleep we get because there's more changes that can happen.
Dreaming is about defending the visual cortex. And by the way, if you look at the circuitry of dreams, It starts in the midbrain and just pops activity straight into the primary visual cortex. That's the only place activity is going in a dream.
It turns out because we are natural storytellers, we impose meaning and interpretation on dreams. And then, of course, you roll over in the morning and you tell your spouse, well, I just had the weirdest dream.
In the retelling of it, you're adding even more story and structure to it.
But they're not particularly structured.
They're just random visual things, and they're there just for that reason.
I love that we're just like, the dreams mean nothing.
Yeah. Your dream doesn't mean anything.
Well, they don't, but one can always interpret, one can always, you know, it's like you pick up any book off the shelf, you can open any random sentence, and the sentence might mean something to you, it might change your life, but it's not because there was something inherent about you in that sentence, it's just that we can interpret things and use them as we want.
Wow, this is so, this is so cool.
Like, just the thought of our brain having this system in place so that part of the brain doesn't get taken over?
Yeah. And what exactly is taking over it?
The neighboring senses.
So, for example, hearing and touch. So, for example, in a person who is blind, this whole back of the head, the occipital lobe, Staying here if you're hearing, touch, and other things too like memory and so on.
Is that the only part of the brain that gets, tries to get infiltrated?
Nope. Nope, any part.
So if you go deaf, for example, your auditory cortex will get taken over by other things.
Anything that's not being used is going to get taken over.
The brain doesn't let any real estate lie, fallow.
Oh my God, we're literally wired for conquest. What we're wired for is optimization so that the system says oh I used to be getting a bunch of visual data now something's wrong with the eyes I guess I'm not getting any okay fine.
I want to give that you know processing power to other things which is why for example blind people you know literally quantitatively have better hearing and touch discrimination than you are eyesighted people do.
It's because they just have more real estate devoted towards these other things, or a person who's deaf can read your accent from your lips, which I can't do with somebody, but they're practiced on that, and they're using their vision in these very high resolution ways.
I love the reframe, thank you so much. I'm like, conquest, you're like, optimization, that's actually where we're going.
Dr. Eagleman, I am so grateful.
Thank you so much for being on the show and for joining us today and sharing some of your wisdom and expertise here with all of us.
Is there anything else that you want to share with our listeners?
Yeah, which you know, the main thing about brain plasticity is that what the brain is trying to do on this topic of optimization is always find the best route, the best way to do something and the problem with that is that we tend to fall into routine and so So my biggest piece of advice from the point of view of brain health would be seek novelty, figure out ways to challenge yourself, figure out ways to always keep yourself between the levels of frustrating, but achievable with new tasks so that your brain always has some hill to climb.
That's really the most important thing.
Shit, let me do that last sentence over again.
I thought I had my ring off.
I hope this isn't as memorable for you as it is for me.
I'm just going to say that.
Damn it, what was I saying?
I'm just trying to remember where I was in that sentence.
So that's the key, keep your brain challenged.
Seek novelty. That's how you can keep a healthy brain into the future.
Oh my god now. It's me over here on this.
I don't know if you heard that fall Go ahead go ahead It's fine we got you but but I would just repeat it like just as a you know We can use that as a little sound bite.
I love what you're saying the seeking novelty I think is is one of the most important things that I think just we can do for our overall health and well -being So yeah, just repeat that so to keep a healthy brain.
Just make sure you're seeking novelty and always, always challenging the brain.
Yes, keep challenging and keep meditating and doing things that make you feel good.
Thank you so much, Dr. Eagleman, you are the best and I'm so grateful for you and everything that you're doing and all your work.
It really benefits us and we appreciate it.
Great, thank you, Rosie, great to be here.
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