Optimism for the Future

It's been a couple of years since I deleted Twitter or X or whatever you want to call it from my phone, mostostly because it had me super bummed out. L there was nothing good on it anymore. It was just people yelling and screaming, even though I had all of the filters up of like no politics on either side of the aisle et cetera etcer. But what I realized is that it instead I just ended up spending tons of time watching Instagram reels, like a lot of Instagram reels. I'm a little too old to watch TikTok reels. I just like wait for them to show up on Instagram. And what I learned from these videos was absolutely nothing Nothing. They're really fun. It's a lot of dog content, a bunch of Grati jokes. No news, no politics. I still have those filters up I felt like a bit of a drug pusher because I'm sending these reels to my friends wasting hours of their time. I do know they watch them because they send reels back to me, but I couldn't help but wonder Does this mean I'm getting dumber It's not just those videos, it's also the ways in which I'm constantly using my phone in ways that reduce the necessity of brain function. using Google Maps to get to a place that I legitimately do know how to get to using just my brain For all the good that technology has done, Is it also scrambling our brains The circuitry of your brain is reconfiguring every moment of your life from cradle to grave By the time you are several years old, you're already absorbing everything that all the homo sapiens have done before us. And then you know you progress and you can springboard off the top of that. David Eagleman is a neuroscientist at Stanford University. He's the author of eight books. hisis most recent is called Live Wired which tells the story of brain plasticity. And he's also heavily researched the brain's relationship to sensory substitution time perception Vision and syesthesia, and he works with and advises tech companies in the Silicon Valley which is why he's here today to help me understand Concept of brain rot Is it? and have we been here before Here, we go Again Again, Again. Hey, I'm Kalpen and this is Here We Go Again, a show that takes today's trends and headlines and asks Why does history keep repeating itself? Here. We go This is an IiHart podcast Guaranteed human If you love audiobooks or you just really love a great story, I want to tell you about my other podcast, Earsay, the Audible and IHart Audiobook Club Every episode, I nerd out with amazing guests and dive into the best new audioobooks from Audible. Sci fi, comedy, romance, thrillers, You name it No reading required. Just listening Beause let's be honest, having a great story read to you is kind of next level Check out your say on the Hart Radio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts OnDeck is built to back small businesses, like yours. Whether you're buying equipment, expanding your team, or bridging cash flow gaps, ONDecks loans up to four hundred thousand dollars help make it happen fast. Rated A plus by the Better Business Bureau and earning thousands of five star trrust pilot reviews, ONDeck delivers funding you can count on. Apply in minutes at onndDeck dot com d Depending on certain loan attributes, your business loan may be issu by OndDck or Celtic Bank. OndDeck does not lend in North Dakota. All loans and amount subject to lender approval. When it comes to looking your best, Beachbum tanning does it better. Beeachbum delivers advanced sun and spray tanning, luxury skincare, and an elevated salon experience designed around you. 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How are you Good, good to see you. Last time I saw you was in twenty nineteen. I don't know if you would remember this, but I You came to P. I'm Dave Ggman. I am a neuroscientist at Stanford and I run a podcast called Inner Cosmos David, welcome. Thanks for coming on the show. Great to see you again, Cal. So I was excited to talk to you. We did do this documentary. I couldn't remember the location, but twenty nineteen right before COVID In Palo Alto, this doccus series is called this Giant Beast that is the Gobal economy, which is still on Amazon a limited series. So I couldn't remember if we did that in Palo Alto in Cyprus or in Germany because we shot this show, I think in like twenty three different locations around the world. And this is now relevant to our conversation here because the fact that I couldn't even remember that, I had always chalked up to just like, oh, it was pre COVID and you know, we werere in twenty three different locations. But since we're here to sort of talk about brain rot, I was like, is that the reason? or is it just that I'm like living life through My fucking screen that that my brain is slowly decaying But before we get into all that, Just tell us quickly about yourself where were you born? Did you come from a family of scientists Yeah, actually. so I was born in Albuquerque, New Mexico. My father was a psychiatrist and my mother was a biology teacher. And so I thought that was the last thing I was going to do Neuroscience ended up being this real gravitational poull for me and I ended up there What's the gravitational pull? Did you have like a first memory of it of wanting to do it Well, you know, the truth is when I was a kid, I fell off of a roof and I broke my nose very badly on the floor below. The whole event seemed to have gone in slow motion It seemed to have taken a very long time to fall. And when I got to high school physics and I calculated it, turnurns out point six of a second to get from the top of the roof to the bottom. And I was really I was really interested in that. How had it seemed to have lasted such a long time, even though it didn't. And it turns out when I grew up and became a neuroscientist No one had ever done an experiment on that And so I ended up running what remains the only experiments of putting people in life threatening situations and and measuring what's going on with time perception there, the one sentence punchline of all this is that It has to do with when you're in a life threatening situation your brain writes down everything as in you're writing down all these memories. and therefore, when you read it back out when you say, what just happened, what just happened? it seems to have taken a long time because you've got such detailed memories like when people get in car accidents and they say, look, I watched the hood crumple and the rear view mirror fall off and the facial expression of the other guy And so your brain says, well, that must have taken several seconds, even though it was shorter But anyway, all of these things are part of what got me into neuroscience Plus, I grew up watching Carl Sagan on PBS and I know I know you also are a sagan lover and And, you know, it was so influential on me. it turned me on to the beauty of science and I thought Someday, I'm going to do that When your brain does that and registers everything, is there a chemical that's released that allows it to happen? why does that chem or b whatever the word is Yeah, it's not a chemical. It's because of you've got essentially an emergency control center in the brain called the amygdala which says, whoa, everything is hitting the fan Everybody pay attention. So normally your brain is doing fifty things. You're thinking about what youre going for lunch and how you have this deadline and blahah. But when something that when something salient is happening, your brain recruits everything to pay attention to what's going on. And part of that paying attention has to do with writing everything down. which is actually a great transition to this idea of brain rot and I think about it the most in two Two scenarios. One, I'm a New Yorker and I have been for quite some time. and I remember I still prefer a physical book. to bring with me instead of reading on a screen I've noticed that over, you know, over like a decade and a half, people have gone from reading a physical book to reading a Kindle to just like scrolling through videos or playing games on their phones on the subway And also then just the idea that you're in a public park or a place that is used to be for conversation and more human to human interaction And half the people are sort of on their phones or taking pictures of their hot dog before they eat it. and and things like that. And so I guess my question is as somebody who studies neuroscience Is there a fear that these things will change our short term perception? does it change our ability to focus or am I just now old and These are real things that We actually shouldn't worry about Yeah, here's what I would say. I think it's much more nuanced than many people take. And one thing I love about this podcast that you're doing is That really asks the question of which things are new and which things are old.. The fact is that people not paying much attention, nothing new about that. We're probably about the same age. You know, if you can remember back to when people would take airplane flights, they'd play solitaire all the time. Yeah Now they play solitaire on their phone, but it's not meaningfully different, I think that people did plenty of things to just waste time. So What I see is the big differences is We have much more choice now than we did. So when you're scrolling TikTok or Instagram, you can swipe if something isn't holding your attention pros and cons to that. The pro of course being that there's just there's a lot of wonderfully produced stuff out there and you can find the stuff that maximally floats your boat instead of having to sit through along, you know, watching the Brady Bunch or Gilligan's Island or something and thinking, okay, well, that's the only choice that I have. And so I'm just going to do that. Whether this affects attention span I don't know. We all we all sort of share that intuition, but it's very difficult to test these things because in fact, it's impossible to test these things. Here's why There's no control group that you can find. So let's imagine you took kids growing up now and you said Hey, we want to know if their attention is, you know better or worse than peopleeople who came a generation before The problem is there were a hundred other differences the generation before. you know, differences in politics and diet and pollution and I mean culture is different And so you wouldn't be able to say, oh, it's because of the internet if you do find a difference And you can't find a control group within their generation becausecause all kids are growing up at the internet, except for, let's say, Amish kids or kids somewhere in the world who are incredibly impoverished. and There are a hundred other differences between those groups. And so you wouldn't be able to find something and say, oh, it's because of the internet. they have this Here's the thing Because of what's called brain plasticity, we are wired up by our culture, by our moment time by our neighborhood by everything going on around us. And so It is the case that the brain is influenced by all the inputs that we're putting in So that tells us that when we put in different inputs, we're going to get different outputs. It's just very difficult to know exactly how that is. And by the way, every generation has differences in that, depending on whether there's a war going on or the radio gets invented or the steam engine gets invented or whatever, the printing press suddenly allows the proliferation of books. All these things change generations along the way. What interests me is how each generation thinks that the kids are now going to be worse off in some way. One example that I recently came across is I hadn't realized this, but when the printing press was invented in fourteen forty Immediately, people started saying Look, this is a real problem. The kids of the next generation are going to be morons. why? Because as soon as they want to know the answer, it's right there. They just pull the book off the shelf and there's the answer. And they're not going to memorize things. They're not going to understand things anymore. They're just going to find it right there. So what we see from that is in fact, we all became much smarter as a civilization because of the availability of information. And I think The same thing happened thirty years ago with with Google the internet more generally. Everyone said, lookook, these kids are going to become morons because if you ask them, what's the capital of France, they'll just Google it But in fact, the availability of information has made the whole society smarter And, you know, I run into thirteen year old kids all the time who say something really smart. and I say, wow, how did you know that? And they say saw it on a Ted talk or you know, I just looked this up and now we've got PT and again, I think this is going to make kids even smarter. I'll tell you why I'm saying this. because Back in the day when we were in school, We got a lot of just in case information, like Just in case you ever need to know that the Battle of Hastings was in ten sixty six, there you go and then we're testing all that stuff and so on What kids get now is just in time information as soon as they are curious about a subject They get the answer right then And that makes an enormous difference from a brain plasticity point of view because When you are curious about something, you have the right cocktail of neurotransmitters present. so that the change actually sticks. So if you say, hey, how do I fix this bicycle tire? or what's the answer about you know Venus and the temperature or whatever All of this stuff sticks if you're the one asking the question. And so I think it's going to be a massive opportunity for education, and I'm quite sure O children and grandchildren will be smarter than we are. So how do you then as how do you respond to the lay personon who says Well Why are we getting dumber and dumber hereere's what I would say is look at a graph of human history So we invented agriculture many thousands of years ago that we, you know, and there was the invention of writing thousandousands of years ago, and then stuff moved along pretty slowly for a long time And what's happened is essentially ever since the industrial Revolution, the pace of discovery has gone up and now We are on this partart of the curve that is so steep it you know, you look at it and so it looks vertical because Everyone is getting an education or at least has the opportunity for education. So now instead of having a few people on the planet who are educated in making the work happen You've got almost eight billion brains who have access to information Pace of discovery has outstripped anything we've ever seen. I mean in my field of neuroscience and this is true across scientific fields Most of what we know has been discovered in the last five or ten years. I mean, the huge majority of the data that we're sitting on, the new theories, the new everything, it's all happening right now. It's the most exciting time to have ever been alive The pace of what's going on is so incredible that It would be very hard for me to accept any argument that somehow as a species, we are getting dumber. And I understand that what I've just been talking about is people who are making these discoveries and somebody might counter argue, yeah, but the average person is getting dumber. But I don't think so 'cause now the average person has access. They don't have to get over the momentum of driving over to the library and finding a book and seeing if they can find out about something. They can find out about stuff right away If you're listening to herear We goo again, chances are you enjoy smart conversations, great stories, and maybe discovering something new along the way. That's exactly what we're doing on my other podcast, EarsSay, the Audible and IHart Audiobook Club Each episode, I'm diving into some of the most exciting new audiobooks on Audible. Every from big sci fi adventures and unforgettable fiction to romcs, thrillers, and laugh out loud comedy. And I'm joined by great guests to help unpack why these stories are such great listens Because there's just something different about listening to a story When it's really good, it pulls you in. you start seeing it in your head. and when it's over, you immediately want to talk about it with someone That's what he say is all about Listen to Earsay, the Audible and IHart Audiobook club on the IHart Radio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts Cash fllow crunch? 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Download the shell app to find it Formmulation Unique to Shehll In gasoline direct injection engine fuel injections, with continuous use of Sheelvy power Nitro plus premium gasoline. Shehelvy P power Nitroplus gasoline compared to lower octane minimum detergent gasoline, actual effects and benfits vary according to vehicle type, driving conditions, and driving styles. See shell.s slash more for more information You touched on this idea of neuroplasticity. You wrote a book called Live Wired about the neuroplasticity of our brain Can you explain what live wired means, where it comes from And then how does neuroplasticity of our brain speak to this notion colloquially of brain rot if it does at all Yes, so neuroplasticity just means that the circuitry of your brain is reconfiguring every moment of your life from cradle to grave And so this is what is special about brains and human brains in particular. We have more plasticity than any other species So what Mother Nature figured out was, hey, if I drop these creatures into the world half baked, they will absorb the rest from everything happening around them. And what that has led for us as a species is that By the time you, you know, are several years old, may eight years old, whatever, you're already absorbing sessentially everything that all the homo sapiens have done before us. and then, you know you progress and you can springboard off the top of that. Contrast this with, let's say An alligator who, you know, an alligator born thirty thousand years ago and born now. They have the same life. They have certain neural circuits that just say, okay, eat, mate, swim, whatever And there's no difference with alligator culture, but with human culture We just keep getting better every single generation precisely because we are able to absorb the lessons that people have figured out before us. This is what has allowed us to build skyscrapers and compose symphonies and invent the internet and get off of the planet. I call that live wiring. But it's the same idea. It's that every one of your eighty six billion neurons, these are the specialized kind of brain cells, every one of these, your whole life there plugging and unplugging and seeking and replugging. and it's like if you can imagine a circuit board that's actually alive and moving around. So what does this mean for brain rot? Again, unfortunately, I think it's really difficult to know because people have always pursued goofy ways of wasting time, whether that is card games or watching Gilliggan's Island or whatever. People have always done that. And there's a lot of retrospective romanticization where we say Oh, when I was a kid, you know, we did this and that and we you know, we read Plato and discussed this at the dinner table. And that's generally not true. I mean, obviously that happened in some families, but not in most You know, when I think about younger people, the fact that research you can just do on Cch APT, like you mentioned Obviously the benefits of like getting an answer right now, hoping it's accurate. you don't know for sure. but generally, the framework of something is there That's obviously a plus. The downside to that is I just remember because I had to look things up, whether it was on an early early form of the internet or physically going to the library and reading al long articles with a highlighter. is that to me, it taught me both patience and critical thinking skills because you had to sit with the information a lot longer than if you're just immediately typing it in, getting the answer and moving on with your life You had mentioned analog solitaire versus playing it on your phone on a plane, for example. Is there a difference between how screen time, let's say, scrolling on social media affects the brain versus, let's say that same thirty minute period you listened to an audiob book or a podcast like yours Is there a difference there? You know, it's a good question. The initial studies that we have right now don't seem to indicate one. For example, my colleagues at Berkeley did a study where they looked at what if you read a book versus listen to an audio book and they found no difference in the brain. Now, I actually found this not surprising and I'll tell you why. it's because Let's add a third group, even though they weren't looking at this People who are blind read with braille. So they're touching bumps with their fingertips, they're reading,'s say the same book All the brain is doing in any of these cases, whether you're taking them through your eyes or your ears or your fingertips, your brain is translating that into meaning As in, oh, this character just said this and what did she mean by that? And o, what's this next character going to do and so on When you're reading a book, your brain doesn't care whether it's coming in through squiggles that you're getting through, you know, photons through your eyes or air compression waves through your ears or bumps on your fingertips because all it cares about is, okay, fine, how do I translate this into social meaning And that's why I think it just doesn't make a difference. So then the The follow up to that is, I guess, relatedly, does the type of content make a difference. So for instance, is there a difference between watching a Wes Anderson movie versus Planet Earth or a reality TV show like Real Housewives Is any of that valued differently by your brain? Does it impact your brain in different ways. AKA, how should we be spending our time Yeah, great question. The truth is that What we always want to be doing with our brain is expanding the fence lines of our internal models. So Let me explain internal models. Your brain is locked in silence and darkness, and it's trying to build a model of what the world is. and we all have different internal models because we've had different trajectories through space and time So we all have these, you know, slightly different models But what you really want to do from the point of view of brain plasticity is constantly expand that. offten, you know, challenging that One way to do it is to watch things that are really meaningful things that are surprising and meaningful and you've never seen a documentary on this. You had no idea that animals could do this or that people have done that. Thats defin really matters. if somebody watches real housewives, of course it's peing because it plugs right into these very basic things about, o, there's conflict, there's drama and so on, but you're not expanding your brain in any meaningful way. And I'll just mention that for people Tire The most important thing you can do for your brain is to keep it challenged. I'll just mention because I think this is really important. There's a study that's been ongoing for a few decades now. where a bunch of nuns, Catholic nuns agreed to donate their brains when they passed away. for years the researchers, when the nuns pass away, they autopsy the brain and they look at what's going on and what they discovered is that some fraction of these nuns hadad Alzheimer's disease But nobody knew it when they were alive They didn't have the cognitive deficits that you would expect because of God Yeah Anice, sorry That's one hypothesis. The other one is it's because They lived in conents till the day they died And so they had social responsibilities and they were having, you know fights and arguments with their fellow sisters and they were doing chores and they were playing games and they were singing songs. they were doing things all the time And therefore, even as their brain was physically degenerating with Alzheimer's disease, they were building new roadways and pathways And so tells us is that it is just massively important to always challenge the brain. And by the way, I just want to say for your listenership, it might be useful. It is so easy to do this. So one of the things, do this tonight, brush your teeth with your other hand. It's not hard, easy to do drive a different route home from work every day. It's easy. just you take a slightly different route, you see new things anything to keep novelty in your life just to make sure you're switching stuff up.'s there are a million ways to do this reallyally important for the brain. Awesome, right on. So the nineteen seventies Ky partarty crowd had it right continue to switch things up There are probably other consequences. No. I just kidding If you're listening to hereere We goo again, chances are you enjoy smart conversations, great stories, and maybe discovering something new along the way. That's exactly what we're doing on my other podcast, ESay, the Audible and I Heart Audiobook Club Each episode, I'm diving into some of the most exciting new audiobooks on Audible. E from big sci fi adventures and unforgettable fiction to romcs, thrillers, and laugh out loud comedy. And I'm joined by great guests to help unpack why these stories are such great listens Because there's just something different about listening to a story When it's really good, it pulls you in. you start seeing it in your head. and when it's over, you immediately want to talk about it with someone That's what he say iss all about Listen to Earsay, the Audible and IHart Audiobook club on the IHart Radio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts Cash fllow crunch? OndDeck's small business line of credit gives your business immediate access to funds up to two hundred thousand dollars right when you need it. coover seasonal dips, manage payroll, restock inventory, or tackle unexpected expenses without missing a beat. With flexible draws, transparent pricing, and control over repayment get funded quickly and confidently. Apply today at onndDeck dot com d Funds could be available as soon as tomorrow. 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See shell. uss slash more for more information. I want to go back to the Bay Area of it all. You're a neuroscientist at Stanford. You live in Silicon Valley. U I love that you are a neuroscientist in that world. the tech giants are obviously in your backyard. And so I'm I have the rare opportunity to ask you sort of, when you engage in conversations with people who are at the forefront of leading all of these technological advancements, you have the skill set to not panic like the rest of us do When you talk about the impacts of these things on the brain What do you talk about? And have you found yourself Is this also a job? Do you get to work with These tech companies or they strictly like podcasts or academic conversations I am a scientific advisor for several You know, probably a dozen different startups doing things. Oh, cool. I generally lean dyomistic about this stuff because Um And by the way, the only companies that I advise for are ones doing meaningful, amazing stuff. Plenty of ways to do that a lot of it's going to really change education for the better. In terms of the digital revolution, there was an interview and correct me if I'm wrong where I think you said There is a widespread feeling that the digital revolution has already changed the mechanisms of the mind in fundamental ways. And I was curious what you meant by that? Is it that we should be excited that our brains are moving in a particular direction? Should we be worried? orr is it what you had mentioned earlier that that no matter what happens, because we're humans when we evolve, our brains are always going to move in a particular You know, that's exactly it as you can see, I tend to lean optimistic on this Yeah One thing that is worth mentioning is this concept of misinformation or disinformation, which everybody loves to to throw around as though it is a new thing. This is the oldest thing in the book. I mean Just look at let's say the last century, the twentieth century You look at Naziism in Germany or fascism in Italy or you look at Polpot in Cambodia or you look at the Hutu and the Tutsi in Rwanda or the Communist revolutions in China and Russia What you see in all of these cases pre internet, pre digital revolution is massive polarization, massive misinformation and disinformation peopleeople taking up arms against their neighbors, I mean, collectively, just with those things I just mentioned this, hundreds of millions of murders Where we are now, we happen to be in a pretty polarized part of the cycle right now. Boy, there is nothing new about this sort of thing partart that I find hopeful about the internet is people can find out, people can sort through the stuff and figure out, okay, well, what do I think given all these different claims tootally agree with you that the misinformation, disinformation is nothing new. but what I find deeply concerning is that the way these social media algorithms work is they continue to feed you the things you already agree with or that you've engaged on. So It's these private companies, many of which are well documented run by hardwite and I'll say this independent of what somebody's beliefs are because I would say the same if it was run by somebody who was hard left and maybe a little more aligned with my politics. I would find it equally egregious that if the thing that you're getting pushed is the misinformation that you already agree with then there's no debate. So that's kind of the piece of it that it's not that misinformation is new To me and the people who I talk to about thosen those are the concerns that people have is that the mechanism of of that silo being run for profit. is equally concerning the way that it may have been when governments were controlling it. Do you find that in the work that you do with these companies? Does it concern them or what's there What's their view on that I mean, look, the fact is you're absolutely right, you know, Twitter was left leaning, then became X right leaning then Blue Sky came along, which is left leaning and so on Nonetheless on all of those, you can always find the other side. I totally agree that the algorithm tends to serve up to what you already believe But the internet in general and even those platforms in particular, you can always find other voices. and it's not that hard Again, this comes back to education. The really important thing for us to be teaching in schools is How to not except particular story that your friends or maybe your online people that you follow are saying, but how to dig deeper What you're pitching, I agree with, which is that we should each independently have the desire to fact check things And I would say also to your point, that goes beyond just digital stuff. Like when the New York Times says that Maduro and Mamdani are both socialists as if they're both the same type politician is like obviously egregious And there's a reason they do that because of their own political slant. But it's up the fact that it's up to us to actually Google that or to look and research that, I feel like very few of us would do it because New York Times or a source that you might keep getting pushed if you follow somebody on Twitter that already aligns with you or someone on Instagram is they've already built that trust with you. So the idea that you want to go and find some other point of view. I may do that because I'm a nerd. But I can understand how if this stuff is designed and I work you know, I work in media. so I can say we plenty of the stuff that we put out there is based on making you feel good or feel angry right away even old school, you know, nightly news broadcasts are like They keep you around through the commercials by scaring the shit out of you on purpose And there is I promise there's a neuroscience question here, which is that since so much of that is based on I don't know if it's an actual dopamine hit or, we just colloquially say that it is, but the thing that makes us feel good like, okay, I'm angry at this. and this is somebody who I agree with. And so this must be the facts. When I feel that way, I certainly don't immediately think like, let me go and read the opposing point of view. So I guess that's my concern, but also the question of does that affect our brains Yes. So againgain, as we've been discussing, there is nothing new about it in the sense that in all you know, if you lived in Rwanda and the state sponsored media is saying the Tutsi are cockroaches and doing that kind of stuff over and over could go and research and see if the Totsi actually have, you know nice things about them and so on, but This stuff does have an effect on us. It's absolutely true. and we are humans But I want to come to this point about Th' making us feel good is this is just a little hypothesis I've been working on on this side, but I definitely have been feeling lately like the things that attract people to one political party or the other or one speaker or another isn't so much it makes me feel good. It actually has to do with anger towards the other side. That's the thing that seems to really hook us in to one side or another. So it wouldn't even colloquially be the dopamine hit, but it's something deeper. It's like, I hate those guys so much then you're willing to listen to the things on your side. and say, yeah, you know what? mayaybe the thing that the person is saying is a little cruel and a little unfair, but I don't care. I like it anyway because I want to get at them. So let me pull all these threads together. So what I recently patented a new social media algorithm that I think might be able to solve some of these points. cool Here's the whole way that it works. It's very simple. It's just that People get connected with each other