Shrink Rap Radio #274 October 9th, 2011 "The Secret

Lives of the Brain"

David Van Nuys Ph.d."Dr. Dave" interviews David Eagleman

Introduction: Do you really know why you do the things that you
do? You probably think that you do. I think most of us think that or
at least that's how we behave most of the time. Even though we have
heard that Freud had this notion of unconscious motivation. In fact he
gave the illustration of an iceberg that only maybe 5 percent is above
the surface and the remaining 95 percent is below the surface of
consciousness in this case. And even though he was trained as a
neurologist, he didn't really have the tools that exist today. For
example, he didn't have the FMRI or functional magnetic resonance
imaging machine. So maybe you think you know why you do the
things you do or maybe you think that the whole business about the
unconscious is just for people with emotional problems. Well, today's
guest offers a much expanded view of the unconscious using the
modern tools that are available today. My guest is brain scientist
David Eagleman Ph.d and he holds joint appointments under the
Departments of Neuroscience and Psychiatry at the Baylor College of
Medicine in Houston, Texas. Dr. Eagleman's areas of research include
time perception, vision, synesthesia, and the intersection of
neuroscience and the legal system. He directs the laboratory for
perception and action and is the founder and director of Baylor College
of Medicine's "Initiative on Neuroscience and the Law". Now I got onto
Dr. Eagleman as the result of a fascinating profile of the man and his
work in the New Yorker magazine. Which led me to his newly released
book, "Incognito: The Secret Lives of the Brain". I feel fortunate to
been able to speak to this very busy and prolific scientist. Now here is
our conversation.
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Dr. Dave: Dr. David Eagleman, welcome to Shrink Rap Radio.

Eagleman: Thank you, good to be here.

Dr. Dave: Well, I am so pleased to have this opportunity to speak with

you. I enjoyed your interview with Terry Gross, the profile of you and
of your work in the New Yorker, and so I'm really pleased to be able
to grab a bit of your time. And I've been reading your rather
wonderful book, "Incognito: The Secret Lives of the Brain". So what
do you mean by the 'secret lives of the brain'.

Eagleman: Well, it turns out that pretty much everything your

brain is doing is running under the hood of conscious awareness; your
brain is constantly performing these tremendously complex operations
that you have no access to or no acquaintance with so you know,
when you do something really simple like pick up a telephone to your
ear, it's underpinned by a lightening storm of neural activity but you
don't detect any of that and if it weren't for biology, we wouldn't even
have any reason to suspect the existence of muscles or nerves or
electrical signals because it's all totally invisible to us and of course it's
not just motor acts like picking up the telephone, but it's recognizing a
friends face or falling in love or making any of the decisions we do or
the beliefs we have or the actions we chose to make. All of these
things are underpinned by these massive operations that we are just
not aware of. All we ever receive is the sort of end product and this is
what we think of as the conscious mind but the conscious mind it turns
out is the smallest bit of what is happening. . .

Dr. Dave: . . . didn't Freud . . .

Eagleman: . . . in the brain . . .

Dr. Dave: . . .yeah, didn't Freud say something very similar to that,
that we're mostly unaware of the processes that drive us?

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Eagleman: Exactly right. You know, I went back and I did a

historical analysis. Freud is really the first person to nail this and get
this idea right. There are little hints about the unconscious starting
from even St. Augustine who realized that he had sort of a full model
of how humans act and with their rational behavior but he realized
there was a little flaw in his model when people would do things like
laugh suddenly at a joke or sneeze or hiccup or something he couldn't
quite explain in his model. And so he started suspecting something
but then the idea kind of got dropped for many decades and then it
got picked up sort of every hundred years. Somebody started to
suspecting that maybe in order to understand human behavior, we'd
have to imagine that there is a part we don't have access to but Freud
was really the first person to nail that idea and he was right. He of
course lived before the blossoming of modern neuroscience so we
know a lot more now about the details and the possibilities there. He
was only able to speculate on things. Of course many particular ideas
he had about what the subconscious represented, many of those
have fallen out of favor. I my view of it, I just I find it so weird, it's
essentially that the subconscious speaks a completely alien kind of
programming language that wouldn't make sense to us even if we
could understand it. As opposed to the view that the subconscious is
speaking some sort of language that we get but it's speaking in
metaphors or something. It really seems like it's, it's just a
completely foreign thing going on down there. I like to think that in
some ways it's analogous to what happens with, let's say, with the
quantum mechanics which is the physics of what happens at the very
small level, the subatomic scale.

Dr. Dave: Yeah, well, there are different levels as you are alluding to
and I think that one level may be suitable for one kind of
understanding or explanation and another level for another because I
know there is a section in your book on reductionism and that'll
probably take us way off in a direction that we don't need to go right

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now.

Eagleman: Okay. But that is exactly right. There are different

levels. It turns out that the fabric of reality that we come to
understand either in physics or in neuroscience, can be very distant
and in some sense not even related to the sort of reality that we
experience at our spatial-temporal scales where we care about, apples
and rabbits and mates and rivers, that's all we really have evolved to
care about but it turns out that all the underling stuff that makes that
true is totally different language.

Dr. Dave: Yes, and your book is so rich with examples of that and one
that I particularly loved was the example of the men who looked at
photos of women and were asked to choose the prettiest ones. Maybe
you can tell us about that experiment.

Eagleman: Yes, so men were looking at these 8 x 10 photographs

of women's faces and what they didn't know was that there were two
sets of photographs that had the same women in them but in ones
that the women's eyes had been dilated. And it turns out that the
men were uniformly more attracted to the women with dilated eyes.
And the interesting part is that the men, none of them identified that,
none of them said, oh, I noticed her pupils were larger over here, but
more importantly, none of the men had any conscious access to this
issue that dilated eyes is a sign of sexual readiness in women. So
their brains were picking up on the signals loud and clear and driving
their behavior and making them think that these women were more
attractive. Their brains were running these deeply imbedded
evolutionary programs that drove the men towards the right sort of
behavior but the men, the conscious men had no access to what was
going on, they just felt more attracted over here.

Dr. Dave: Yeah, I thought that was just a wonderful demonstration of

what you're talking about. Most of us think our senses are a window

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to the real world, to the world outside ourselves. But that is not
exactly the case, is it?

Eagleman: That's exactly right. When we start deconstructing

what's going on out there, it comes clear that everything you -- take
vision. It's a construction of the brain, I mean, your brain is
ensconced in darkness, inside of your scull and all it ever sees are
electrical signals. And of course, the electrical signals that it sees that
represent the information coming in through your eyes, is the same
electrical signals that you have coming in from your ears, your
fingertips, or any other part. And your brain has to take these signals
and depending on their different features and so on, it constructs
vision or hearing or so on but it's all an internal model of what you
believe you're seeing out there. Just as one example, that I think
illustrates it usually is take the fact that your eyes are constantly
jumping around the scene and yet your vision doesn't feel the way it
does when somebody is holding a jerky video camera, right? I mean,
if somebody were moving the video camera around the way your eyes
actually move, you'd barf. So the reason that our visual world doesn't
appear to be moving around, is because all we're actually seeing is an
internal model of what we believe is out there and we're just updating
that model with different information depending on where we are
casting our central vision and collecting more information. But you
don't need your eyes at all to see of course, when you're dreaming,
and your eyes are closed, you're having full, rich visual experience and
what this illustrates is that it's not even about the eyes. When your
eyes open, you're pulling in data through these 2 holes in your skull
and you're updating your model a little bit better, but it's essentially
the same process as awake dreaming.

Dr. Dave: You know, your observation that the brain is encased in
darkness within the skull seems so obvious and basic but I have to
say, I never thought of it that way before.

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Eagleman: (laughs) Yeah.

Dr. Dave: So that's kind of interesting. And you also say that vision's
job is to create a useful narrative at our scale of interaction.

Eagleman: That's exactly right. That's all it's trying to do. This is
proposed to be the basis of why we have consciousness and memory is
simply to upgrade predictions so the whole key is we want to be better
prepared the next time we come across a situation and so we have all
these mechanisms that sort of take their time and write down a story
and tell us what they think just happened out there so that we'll be
better prepared the next time. Now we come around to it but it turns
out that it's not necessarily the correct story and of course we know
that memory is quite fallible.

Dr. Dave: Yes.

Eagleman: Yeah, but . . .

Dr. Dave: . . . yeah and also it may not really be the current story
because you say we're living in the past because it actually takes time
for our senses to send their messages to the brain and some senses
are further away than others and so there are sort of these different
time frames.

Eagleman: Exactly. This is what my lab discovered over the last

11 years or so is this really deep problem that information gets to the
brain at different speeds through different senses and it's processed
very differently. Your visual system has a very different architecture
than your auditory system for example. And a signal from your big
toe arrives at your brain much later than a signal from your nose. And
so it turns out that the challenge the brain has to deal with is it's
trying to put together this narrative about what the heck is going on in
the outside world and yet the problem it's confronted with is that the

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signals are streaming at very different times and so the only solution
is-- this is what we've figured out over the last decade-- the only
solution is that your brain has to wait and collect up all the information
and then stitch together a story about what it thinks it just saw and
the consequence is that you're living in the past. By the time you
believe the moment now occurs, it's already happened a long time
ago.

Dr. Dave: Yeah. One of my listeners just so happens coincidentally

yesterday, sent me an email saying he was asking various people the
question, "what is consciousness?" And I just read your book and I
think, oh, what did Eagleman say? I didn't quite remember, I had to
come up with my own but what is consciousness?

Eagleman: (laughs) Well, people debate a lot about the definition

but I think it's easy to understand that it's the thing that flickers to life
when you wake up in the morning. So your brain is the same when
you're in a deep sleep and when you're awake in the morning but
there's some different algorithms, some different software program
that running that makes you conscious now and not conscious in the
middle of the night. So that's what we're talking about is that bit, that
bit of having experience, private subjective experience that's going on.
That's what we mean by consciousness. And . . .

Dr. Dave: . . .and what the role of consciousness?

Eagleman: Well, I think that consciousness is essentially like the

CEO of a company. So once a company reaches sufficient complexity,
it needs a CEO to organize things and that's seems to be the job of
consciousness. In a same way that a CEO doesn't know about all the
details of how this department actually runs and where the sockets are
in the cubicles, and who's doing what and how they're getting paid,
the CEO doesn't want to know about all that. In the same way you
don't want to know about the lightening storm of neural activity when

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you pick up the telephone. You just want to know that its worked.
The CEO also sets the long-terms goals for the company and says
okay, look, here's where I think our company needs to go over the
next 5 years and the CEO passes that mandate and then all the rest of
the machinery of the company adjusts itself to match that goal. And it
takes time. But of course this is what we do. If you say that you
decide you want to be a better tennis player and you hire a coach so
the coach tells you all this advice like okay, step forward into the serve
and grip your racket lower and so on, so consciously the CEO, the
conscious you says okay, step forward, grip the racket lower and so on
and you do that a bunch of times and what you are doing is you're
training up the rest of the machinery of your unconscious brain, your
training all that up you're forcing it to meet that goal and it eventually
becomes good at it, it becomes automatized and then you no longer
even have conscious access to it. You don't know how you are hitting
the tennis ball, you're just doing it. And it's the same way that the
CEO set the long-term goals and the rest of the company adjusts and
all the CEO ever really wants is to high-level summary, headlines of
how things are going.

Dr. Dave: Yes, I guest that's what you meant when you wrote that
consciousness is useful in limited amounts and so it really doesn't
serve us to be aware of everything down to the most minute levels
and to automatize as much as can be made automatic as is useful.
And also, it's interesting to reflect that how much is going on around
us that our senses don't even pick up on. For example, we're both
probably bathed in radio waves and TV waves and gamma radiation
and who know what else and that's not even fitting into the picture of
our internal experience.

Eagleman: Exactly right. So all that stuff, the radio waves, TV

and cell phone all that, is electromagnetic radiation which is exactly
what visible light is. What we call visible light is just a very small slice
of that spectrum of electromagnetic radiation but it just so happens

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that we have biological receptors that can detect that stuff so that we
treat that very especially and we think that represents reality. But as
it turns out, the part of the spectrum that we call visible light, is only
one 10 billionth of the spectrum. So most of the stuff happening we
don't have biological receptors for and so we would have no reason to
even suspect its existence if it weren't for building of machines and the
understanding of physics and so on.

Dr. Dave: Okay, well, talking about a consciousness, were does

attention fit in? There's some kind of tight relationship there I think
between consciousness and attention. How would you describe that?

Eagleman: I think what attention is is this thing that pulls more

detail into your internal model.

Dr. Dave: Um humm

Eagleman: For example, let's say you are looking at a scene in

front of you, you're not actually seeing most of the details even though
they're sitting right on your retina. But if I were to ask you, okay,
what exactly is the color of your coffee mug? Then you can turn your
eyes to that and attention is the process of saying, okay, I'm going to
now pull that detail into my internal model even though it wasn't there
a moment ago. But similarly, if I were to ask you the position of your
tongue in your mouth right now, you could answer that question but
you weren't aware of it a moment ago. You attend to it, you pay
attention to it and that's how it becomes part of what your aware of .

Dr. Dave: . . .and now I'm gagging on my tongue.

Eagleman: (laughs)

Dr. Dave: Once I become aware of it. (laughs)

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Eagleman: Exactly. Well, then I won't talk about blinking or

breathing, because that would be terrible.
Dr. Dave: Right.

Eagleman: But it turns out that, when the company is running

itself perfectly, the CEO doesn't need to know anything. If the CEO
has everything set up so things are going perfectly, you don't need
any action out of the CEO. In other words, when you're driving to
work, it's just a normal morning, you're essentially not very conscious
of what's going on. Because you don't need to be. And what happens
is it's only when there's a violation of your expectations, that attention
comes online and feeds information to consciousness. So it's only
when suddenly something's different, or there's an overturned car in
front of you or something, then suddenly, your attending to that
because it's a violation of your expectations and you have conscious
awareness of that situation.

Dr. Dave: What's the relationship between attention and memory?

Eagleman: Interesting question. It turns out there's at least two

different forms of memory. And so normal memory is a function of
what you're attending to so it is possible to get stuff into the system
without even attending to it but that's sort of a rare, more rare thing
that happens. Normally, what you remember are the things you'd paid
attention to. If you didn't pay attention to the number of cracks in the
sidewalk this morning, then it's unlikely you're going to have any
memory of that. But it turns out that when something is really salient,
really emotionally salient, let's say a car accident. Then you are
attending to that with a completely different level of focus and there's
another part of your brain that comes online and lays down memory
on a secondary memory tract. And this is the amygdala comes online
and you're essentially laying down memories on a different way that
are unerasable. So these are the memories of post traumatic stress . .

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Dr. Dave: . . .um hmmm

Eagleman: , , , disorder . . .

Dr. Dave: . . . right, right . . .

Eagleman: . . .yeah

Dr. Dave: And what about meditation and mindfulness as tools for
developing more awareness of some of these underlying processes?

Eagleman: Well, I'm a big proponent of meditation and

mindfulness. I've noticed in the literature and even in discussion that
no one has ever has anything bad to say about these things. So I
think that . . .

Dr. Dave: . . .right . .

Eagleman: You know, everything else is debated, right? Should

you have carbs or protein or not but not meditation or mindfulness.
These seem to be just really good things and in fact [undecipherable
name] in Germany is trying to get legislation passed to make
meditation mandatory for all elementary school students.

Dr. Dave: Um hmm

Eagleman: Because he argues that it's an important part of the

brain tool kit and you don't get a user's guide to your brain but in fact
especially in this era, everybody's trying to get your attention with
advertising in the Internet, text messages, and so on and here is what
children need more than ever now is a way of just being able to turn
inward and not be so reactive to the outside world. And this is what
meditation gives you is an ability to sort of see the outside world but
not be as reactive to it. Every time a text message dings it changes

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your trajectory for the next minute. So now that said, I do think that
even people who are expert meditators, they're getting slightly down
deeper into their unconscious but I don't think it's very far at all. I
think it's essentially just dipping their toes into the water. They're
doing it a lot better than the rest of us but in fact these are such vast
waters and deep caverns that I think they are not actually getting that
far because as I said at the beginning, I don't actually think that we
would understand the language down there.

Dr. Dave: Yes. Now, one of the things that you spend a fair amount
of time on is the idea of multiple selves that were again going back to
the subtitle of the book "the secret lives of the brain" that there are
sort of autonomous subsystems and subroutines that are running sort
of beneath the surface of consciousness and I'm just wondering about
the possible relationship to things like multiple personality, automatic
writing, channeled personality, some of that far-out stuff.

Eagleman: Yeah, I mean, the interesting part about the multiple

selves is that the only way to really think about the brain is to think
about; you got these competing networks that are always battling out
in the brain to control your behavior. And this is because evolution
doesn't sort of come up with one solution and stop there but she's
constantly, chronically, reinventing solutions to things. And so it turns
out that you end up with all these different parts of your brain and it's
just like a neuro parliament where you have different political parties
that are fighting it out to control the ship of state, to steer where
things are going. And you don't have any central leader that makes
these decisions about the parliament and instead they debate and until
they come to some sort of solution. And so as a result, people can
argue with themselves, and feel conflicted with themselves, and
contract with themselves, cajole themselves, and I think this gives us
a much more nuanced view of who we are when you realize that you
are not one thing you're more like a multiplicity and some of those
people who got back on their behavior and they think, how did I, how

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could I have been the one to do that? Well, the answer is you are not
one thing. As Walt Whitman correctly surmised, he said, "I am large, I
contain multitudes" and that's exactly right.

Dr. Dave: Well, there are people who report for example, writing
whole books that they claim it really wasn't them, it just came through
them. Do you think there might be some kind of a subsystem that
spun off . . . ?

Eagleman: . . .yeah . . .

Dr. Dave: . . .that it's coming from . . .?

Eagleman: I mean, so okay here's what I think. I think it's a little

bit of an exaggeration when people say they wrote things without
having any part of themselves in them. But it is the case that all of
our ideas are served up from the subterranean caverns and we don't
know where these ideas come from, right? So pay attention to your
next time you have a good idea and you say, oh, I'm a genius, I just
had an idea that I'll invite so-and-so to be on my show. Well, it wasn't
really you that thought of it, right? Your brain has been working on
this for hours or weeks or months, it's been consolidating information,
you've seen that speaker before, at some point, your brain puts it
together and serves it up and then you take credit for it. But it's not
clear who the credit actually belongs to. It belongs to you as a person
with a brain, but it doesn't necessarily belong to your conscious mind.

Dr. Dave: Right. I totally identify with that. What do we learn from
the example of Charles Whitman the former Eagle scout and high IQ.
bank teller who shot and killed 48 people from the University of Texas
tower in Austin.

Eagleman: Well, he had detected that things were changing

inside of him for about a year. He was writing in his diary about this,

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he went to see a psychiatrist about this, he felt like something was

changing inside of him. And he wrote in his suicide note the night
before, the night before he went up on the Texas tower and shot
everybody, he said when this is all over, I want an autopsy to be
performed. And that is exactly what happened and it turned out that
he had a brain tumor. The brain tumor had been growing and
pressing against the part of his brain called the amygdala which is
involved in fear and aggression. And so we, there are hundreds of
cases like this. It turns out of course, when your brain changes, you
change and if you get a brain tumor which is of course the not
something you choose, any of us would choose to get, that can change
your behavior and it leaves a strain part of these very deep questions
about culpability, right?

Dr. Dave: Yes.

Eagleman: Because Whitman didn't choose to get a brain tumor

and yet this is what happened. And of course Whitman is not a one-
off example. There's so many I state another case in my book also
about this guy who at 40 years old started becoming a pedophile. And
started collecting child pornography and he eventually made an
inappropriate move on his prepubescent step-daughter and his wife
had him arrested. And the night before his sentencing, he was having
these terrible headaches and he finally went to get a scan and turned
out he had a massive frontal lobe tumor. So they did an emergency
surgery on him and they removed the tumor and his sexual behavior
returned completely to normal. And then about 6 months later, he
started becoming a pedophile again. And he went back to the
neurologist and it turns out the surgeons had missed a section of the
tumor which was now regrowing and they resecting the tumor a
second time and then his behavior returned completely to normal. So
this is just another illustration of hundreds that you are your brain and
the reason that this becomes so difficult about these issues of
culpability, is because we are naturally very rettributive, we say, okay,

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if you did this thing, then you deserve the punishment. But who's the
'you'? If things change in your brain, and it wasn't your choice, does it
still make sense to punish you in the same way? So what I argue for
in the book is a forward-looking legal system which is to say, instead
of imagining that all brains are created equal, have equal capacity for
decision making and so on, and therefore, it's okay to punish
everybody equally instead of forward-looking legal system that takes a
very different approach and says look, what do we do with the person
from here, it there anything that we can do to help? And if not, how
can we modulate sentencing based on future dangerousness? So in
other words, you do risk assessments on people. Some people's
brains are not created equal, some people are very dangerous and
need to be taken off the streets for a long time. At the other end of
the spectrum, some people are not very dangerous and they ended up
in some situation that is very unlikely to repeat. And so a tailored
customized legal system will be one in which we treat people as
individuals, we try to understand what is going on with their brains, if
there is anything to do to help them, and if there's not, we sentence
them appropriately instead of imagining that there is sort of a one size
fits all solution in terms of incarceration, of prison terms. This is not
only more humane and neuro-compatible, but it's also most cost-
effective.

Dr. Dave: Well, this fits in with one of the themes of the book which is
essentially, that we're not driving the bus, in other words, the thing
that we identify with the 'I' when I say me and you talk about things
like rabies. and narcotics, and genes, and brain injuries, which you just
talked about, and toxins and diseases. I particularly liked the rabies
example. Maybe you could quickly touch on that.

Eagleman: Yeah, rabies is also one of my favorite examples which

is ah, essentially you get bitten and the rabies virus works its way up
your nerves, up into your central nervous system, up to your brain.
And once it's there, it goes to a couple of different places, it goes to

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your areas of your temporal lobe one of the lobes of your brain. And it
also goes to your salivary glands. And what it does in your temporal
lobe is that it essentially controls your behavior and makes you more
aggressive and more prone to bite somebody. And its positioned itself
in your salivary glands that when you bite somebody, it passes itself
on. I mean this is crazy but this is how rabies gets into wild animals
and passes itself to the next wild animal. And the reason its so
remarkable is because what's it is doing is this very tiny little thing is
controlling a creature billion of times larger than it. It's like its
stepping into the cockpit and driving this creature around. I just have
always found it an amazing thing. That's in the point of view of the
rabies. We get to see how it jumps in the cockpit and passes itself on
that way. From the point of view of us, what it makes is very obvious
and clear, is that we are able to be controlled. We got out all these
lock and key mechanisms in our brains and all it takes is something
getting in there and then we become a very different kind of person.
We become aggressive . .

Dr. Dave: Yes, its amazing. It's like the Transformers or Iron Man.
Somebody gets inside there and controls very large person.

Eagleman: Exactly.

Dr. Dave: Well, I know you're short on time. You've just come off a
thirty-day book tour and I know you got a lot that you are trying to
catch up on. I would really love to talk to you at greater length. As
we wind down here, is there anything you'd like to add?

Eagleman: Umm, well, I mean, I'd, just to finish off the neuro law
thing. I think that this is one of the real directions that neuroscience is
going is in navigating our social policy. I think that neuroscience is at
a point where it can really, in a meaningful way, step out of the
laboratory and change the way that we run our society. And there's
no reason that social policy should not be run as rigorously as we do

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scientific experiments were we base it on data, and every once in

awhile somebody will say to me, gosh, don't you think that sounds
creepy to bring science into let's say sentencing decisions? And the
important question though is: compared to what?

Dr. Dave: Yes,

Eagleman: And the way it stands now, ugly people get much
longer sentences than pretty people because there is all this extra-
legal influences that go on. So if we brought data to the table, and
saw who is actually the ones who go off and commit more crime, and
understanding the biological basis of behavior, and understanding
what can go wrong with people's brains and so on, and how we might
help them, that seems to be a much more enlightened way to run our
legal system.

Dr. Dave: Well, that certainly makes sense to me. I support it

strongly. Dr. David Eagleman, I want to thank you for being my guest
today on Shrink Rap Radio.

Eagleman: Thank you so much for having me.

Shrink Rap Radio #274 The Secret Lives of the Brain 17

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