122 | David Eagleman on Tapping Into the Livewired Brain

<p>Imagine you were locked in a sealed room, with no way to access the outside world but a few screens showing a view of what’s outside. Seems scary and limited, but that’s essentially the situation that our brains find themselves in — locked in our skulls, with only the limited information from a few unreliable sensory modalities to tell them what’s going on inside. Neuroscientist David Eagleman has long been interested in how the brain processes that sensory input, and also how we might train it to learn completely new ways of accessing the outside world, with important ramifications for virtual reality and novel brain/computer interface techniques.</p><p><em>Support Mindscape on&nbsp;</em><a href="https://www.patreon.com/seanmcarroll" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank"><em>Patreon</em></a><em>.</em></p><p>David Eagleman received his Ph.D. in neuroscience from the Baylor College of Medicine. He is currently the CEO of Neosensory, a company that builds sensory-augmentation devices, as well as an adjunct professor at Stanford. His research has involved time perception, synesthesia, and sensory substitution. He is the founder and director of the<a href="https://scilaw.org/" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">&nbsp;Center for Science and Law</a>. He is a bestselling author of both fiction and nonfiction. He was the writer and host of the TV show&nbsp;<em>The Brain with David Eagleman</em>, and writer of the Netflix documentary&nbsp;<em>The Creative Brain</em>. His most recent book is&nbsp;<a href="https://www.indiebound.org/book/9780307907493?aff=penguinrandom" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank"><em>Livewired: The Inside Story of the Ever-Changing Brain</em></a>.</p><ul><li><a href="https://www.eagleman.com/" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">Web site</a></li><li><a href="https://profiles.stanford.edu/david-eagleman" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">Stanford web page</a></li><li><a href="https://scholar.google.com/citations?user=wCMlrLAAAAAJ&amp;hl=en" rel="noopener no