Your Inner Cosmos with David Eagleman

About This Episode

What are the limits of the human mind? Neil deGrasse Tyson and co-hosts Chuck Nice and Gary O’Reilly turn the telescope inward exploring sensory perception, dreaming, synesthesia, time, and the astonishing flexibility of the human brain with neuroscientist David Eagleman. Why does time seem to slow down during an emergency?

We explore the brain’s flexibility in how it receives and interprets sensory signals. Can you see with your tongue? Eagleman explains how the brain doesn’t actually care where information comes from. We explore sensory differences like blind people navigating the world through vibrations on their skin, echolocation, and tactile reading systems like Tadoma, and how the brain repurposes space for what’s needed.

Could dreams be the visual cortex defending its territory against a takeover from other senses during sleep? Learn about the transitions your brain makes in modulating sensory data. Are dreams the brain’s screensaver? We discuss how the more neurologically plastic the species, the more it dreams. Why don’t we remember our dreams? Why does eyewitness testimony fail so dramatically? What does the invisible gorilla experiment reveal about how little of reality we actually perceive? We explore how memory isn’t a recorder, it’s a reconstruction.

Learn about synesthesia, aphantasia, tetrachromacy, and how some of Pixar’s best animators turned out to have no visual imagery in their heads at all. We break down time perception and why time seems to slow down in life-threatening situations. David tells us about how he dropped subjects from a 150-foot tower to find out. We explore memory density and why childhood summers felt endless and adult years blur past. Could time perception be the key to understanding and developing treatments for schizophrenia? Plus, the hardest question in all of science: why does it feel like anything to be a brain?

Thanks to our Patrons Wynona Pyrtel, BarefootCajun, Jaap Ouwejan, Ananda Mills, Rob Schebel, Ray J, Larry Chan, Steve Pynn, Andy K, Chefscary, Rebecca Tibbs, DucksOnQuack, Deatric Wilson, Dominica Larissa, Amy Morgenthau, 芽美 湯浅, Lisa Jones, Mandie Mack, Noah Henscheid, Ethan Brady, Paul, Scott Brasfield, Alfonso Moreira, Denislav Tsankov, Chris Clawson, Miranda Kagy, Jack Frosty B.B., Rohan A, Kevin Turpin, michelle palmer, SMAYS, Francoise De Larkeen, David, Anita Taesali, Atum Ra, Ty, Joel, Emerson Castaneda, Julie Hendrickson, Mike Bayliff, John Dunn, Julian James, Davit Harutyunyan, Jakub Schmiedberger, Tristian Phillips, Tristian Phillips, Michael Pennywell, Doguhan Uluca, Aislinn P, Andrew Hatton, Misti, WB, Lindsey Walker, Clifton Beasley, Shawn Grider, Patrick Rizio, Neil LaGrace, Brooke, and keith becker for supporting us this week.

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