Neurotech: The Future of Brain Enhancement | David Eagleman

Can you feed information into the brain via unusual channels, and will the brain figure out what to do with it, how to interpret it? And the answer to that is yes.

What if you could hear with your skin? Yes, I said that right. Or see with your tongue? It may sound like science fiction, but neuroscientist Dr. David Eagleman and his team have made one of these sensory superpowers a reality through their groundbreaking work in sensory substitution and neurotechnology. And we're about to find out how.

You can do 4 billion combinations of these vibratory motors on your skin, and people come to hear the world this way.

This is mind-blowing to think about the possibilities of enhancing our senses and perception through these devices.

Your child's child, they will be more different from us than our ancestors 10,000 years ago.

What is your favorite kind of top recommendation based on your research for our listeners to have their best brain?

The most important thing you can do for your brain is to challenge it. Parking On a different side of the driveway and switching the art on my walls and rearranging my desk and driving a different route home from work every single day, constantly doing things like that is really important for brain health.

Welcome back, Kwik Brains. I am your host and your brain coach, Jim Kwik. The limits of your 5 senses are just an illusion, and you can hack your brain to experience reality in an entirely new way. And this is exactly what our guest today has done. Through his pioneering work in sensory substitution, we'll be discussing the mind-bending devices that allow deaf people to hear through vibrations on their skin and latest developments in neurotech. Dr. David Eagleman, he's also spun several companies out of his lab, including NeoSensory, and is the writer and presenter of The Brain, which is an Emmy-nominated television series on PBS and the BBC. Part of the conversation, which I encourage everyone to do, we know You Read to Succeed. He is author of Livewired: The Inside Story of the Ever-Changing Brain. Welcome to the show, Dr. Eagleman.

Great to be here, Jim.

In this conversation, everyone, we are going to talk about some of the latest fascinating developments in the area of neurotech to help us hear and sense the environment around us even better. Before we dive into sensory substitution, I wanted to ask you, 'cause I know everyone would be interested in this, is you have a quote that, oh, it opens up Livewired, and it says, every man is born as many men and dies as a single one. And so I wanted to ask you, what does that mean to you?

Yeah, this has to do with brain plasticity. So we drop into the world half-baked. I mean, this is what's special about humans. Other animals generally drop into the world pretty much pre-programmed. Eat, mate, swim, do whatever. They live their lives and so on. But what's different about Homo sapiens is that we drop into the world and we absorb everything around us. This is what's known as brain plasticity, our— the ability of our brain to readjust itself. And that's what's allowed us to become a runaway species, totally different than all our cousins in the animal kingdom. And we have taken over every corner of the planet. We've invented, you know, cities and symphonies. and gotten off the planet to the moon and so on. We're doing all kinds of things specifically because when we come into the world, we can learn everything that's happened before us, and then we can springboard off the top of that to invent new things. So as a result, when you come into the world, exactly where you drop in, in terms of your culture, your time in history, your family, your neighborhood, and so on, that You know, ends up putting you on a particular trajectory. In other words, if your brain was born, you know, 1,000 years ago in medieval Europe or wherever, you would've been a totally different person. You would've spoken a different language, you would've had different beliefs, different deities, different whatever. Okay, so, um, this is the sense in which we drop into the world with all kinds of potential, and you make choices in your life, and, uh, and you end up the day you die as one person, um, because— You've gone from this huge optionality to who you become.

Yeah, I'm seeing that. We have a 1-year-old and just watching his brain develop and learning new things. So as a leading neuroscientist, what would you say before we get into neurotech, what is your favorite kind of top recommendation based on your research having for our listeners to have their best brain?

Ah, you know what it is? I'm actually writing one of my next books on this topic. To my mind, it's this issue about understanding that you are different people at different points in time. So sometimes you can resist temptation, and sometimes you're going to fall for it. And so my book is about what's called the Ulysses Contract, which is making contracts with your future self to constrain your behavior. So you remember Ulysses, when he was coming back from the Trojan War, was going to pass the island of the sirens. And there were these women on the island who sang songs so beautiful that it beggared the minds of sailors, and they would crash into the rocks and die. And you remember Ulysses or Odysseus wanted to hear the sirens' song, but he knew that like any other mortal man, he would end up crashing. So he had his men lash him to the mast and fill their own ears with beeswax, and that way he could hear their song, but he was unable to do the wrong thing. And so this is what philosophers call a Ulysses contract, where you're You know, the Ulysses of sound mind, several miles from the island, knew that the future Ulysses would behave badly, and so he constrained his behavior. So to my mind, this is one of the most interesting things. In a book that I wrote a while ago called Incognito, which is about the secret lives of the brain, all the stuff running under the hood that you don't have access to, I put forward this framework that really the way to understand the brain is as a team of rivals. You have all these different drives all the time, and they're always competing to steer your behavior. So for example, if I put some warm chocolate chip cookies in front of you, you know, part of your brain wants to eat the cookies. It's a rich energy source. Part of your brain says, don't eat it, you'll get fat. Part of your brain says, okay, I'll eat it, but I'll promise to go to the gym later tonight, and so on. And you can fight with yourself and argue and cuss at yourself and cajole yourself and contract with yourself. Who's talking with whom? It's all you, but it's different parts of you. And that's what makes humans so—

Interesting.

interesting and nuanced. So that's the— that's what I think is one of the most interesting areas going on is understanding what's happening under the hood there in terms of the different networks. And, you know, we do neuroimaging to expose what these different voices are and then how to actually navigate ourselves.

I always wear a brain on my shirt and pictures. I'm always pointing to my brain. It's one of the things where I feel like what you see, you take care of, and we don't see this thing that takes care of us. 86 billion neurons, upwards of 10,000 potential synaptic connections. I mean, it's just, it's so vast. So, well, let's get into neurotech. What, for those listeners, maybe we could, that's, it's new, maybe we could give them a brief introduction. What is neurotech?

Neurotech is any technology that interfaces directly with your brain. And of course, there's a sense in which our cell phones are neurotech and VR and whatever. I mean, they're all ways of just pushing information into the brain. But my interest has been this issue that, you know, the brain Your brain is locked in silence and darkness. It's your mission control center, but it's living in the dark, and all it ever sees is electrical spikes. That's all it has to work with. So your eyes capture photons and turn those into electrical spikes. Your ears capture air compression waves and turn that into electrical spikes. Your skin captures pain and touch and temperature and itch and whatever and turns that into electrical spikes. So your brain just has this giant hurricane of activity going on in there. And we're so used to thinking of it like, oh, well, when I open my eyes, I'm just seeing the world, like light is piping in there, but it's not light that's piping in there. Or, oh, I'm just listening to the world. Maybe there's sound coming into my brain, but it's not sound. It's all getting converted to a common currency. Why does this matter? It's because the idea of sensory substitution, which I've sort of been obsessed with now for about 15 years, is can you feed information into the brain via unusual channels? And will the brain figure out what to do with it, how to interpret it? And the answer to that is yes. Yes. So the first demonstration of this was in 1969 in the journal Nature. Um, a scientist named Paul Bockyrida took blind people and put them into a modified chair that pokes you in the back with a bunch of little solenoids, and he set up a video camera. So whatever the camera is seeing, like a face or a telephone or whatever, you feel that shape poked into your back. And blind people could come to understand what was in the visual world just based on what they were feeling on their skin. So there have been many versions of this for people who are blind, you know, like where you have a camera and maybe you turn that into sound. So you hear, you know, as you're moving around the world, you're hearing different sounds and that gets turned into a, you know, the sound landscape. And blind people can get really good at understanding what is in the world based on what they're hearing. Anyway, my lab got interested in, could we do this for people who are deaf? Could we capture sound and push it into the brain via an unusual channel? So we ended up building a vest with vibratory motors on it, and it captures sound and turns that into these different patterns of vibration. It breaks the sound up from frequent— into frequencies from low to high, which is just what your inner ear is doing. So we're just transferring the inner ear to the skin, and it worked. And people who are deaf can learn how to understand what is happening in the auditory world based on what's happening on their skin. And then about, gosh, 9 years ago now, I gave a talk at TED. And then immediately after that, I started this startup, Neosensory, and we shrunk the vest down to a wristband. And so this wristband has vibratory motors on it. It has full computational capacity in the top, and it captures sound, for example, and, you know, turns that into patterns on the skin. doing exactly what your ear is doing. And we, you know, you can do 4 billion combinations of these vibratory motors on your skin, and people come to hear the world this way. So that's the idea of sensory substitution. And, and then what we did is we did a level beyond that about a year ago, which is, so for, so what happens is people get older, they lose their high frequencies. So, you know, uh, that's 'cause that has the most energy and the cells in your inner ear eventually die. And so people just lose the capacity to understand high frequency. And so that's why they need hearing aids. So what we did is we're using very sophisticated machine learning to listen in real time for just those high-frequency sounds of speech. And we use different patterns to tell you, oh, an S just got said, a TH just got said, a V just got said, a B, and so on. We just buzz in different ways. So the idea is your ear is doing all the work at the medium and low frequencies, no problem. And the wristband is simply clarifying what's happening at the high frequencies. And so that's been a tremendously successful thing for people with high-frequency hearing loss, where they don't need hearing aids anymore. They can just wear what, you know, a little wristband, looks like a little Fitbit. And I'll just mention one other thing we're doing, 'cause it's been very cool. So tinnitus is a big problem. About 15% of the population has ringing in the ears. You know, it sounds like beep that's in their ears. So what we're doing there is we play tones, boop, boop, boop, boop, boop, and you're feeling the tones, you're feeling the corresponding buzz on your wrist. This is called bimodal stimulation because you're hearing sounds and you're feeling the vibrations on your skin. And that drives down tinnitus as well as anything in the literature. It's the most successful thing that exists in the literature for driving down tinnitus. Why does it work? Essentially, it's because You're teaching the brain what is a real external sound because it's getting verification on the wrist, whereas the internal beep, that's fake news. And your brain realizes, oh, that's not getting any confirmation on the skin. And so it ends up driving that down. So those are examples of the kind of things we're doing with sensory substitution.

And what role does neuroplasticity— I know you talk a lot about it in your books— what role does neuroplasticity play in this? Helping what Neosensory helps to resolve, you know, these kind of situations or these common neurological disorders.

It's all about the neuroplasticity, which is to say you've got this forest of these 86 billion neurons. And the thing that goes underappreciated, I think, is that every moment of your life, this forest is reconfiguring. I mean, each of these— think of a neuron like a tree. It's shifting and moving. It's plugging in and, you know, changing the strength of its connections with the neighboring trees. It's plugging certain connections, seeking, you know, plugging in somewhere else. This is happening every moment of your life. And the extraordinary thing is you have brain plasticity that lasts your whole life. So, um, that's why even at any age you can learn, uh, you know, learn how to use this wristband or whatever, learn a new person's name or learn a new skill.

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And how close are we to widely using these technologies in So I'll say something at the short term and the long term. In the short term, you know, people have been very interested in what are called nootropics, which is, you know, any kind of drug that will help, let's say, enhance memory or recall. So there's always a buzz about this every few years in the neuroscience community, but I would say we don't really have a great nootropic yet. I mean, yeah, there's caffeine and things like that, but we don't have a new one just yet. But, you know, something might come around the corner. The thing that has captured my attention for the last X amount of years is number of years is, you know, is actual technology that we're building. So I'm building what's called a non-invasive brain-computer interface, which is, you know, something you just strap on your wrist and it's pushing information to the brain. There are lots of other companies that are doing invasive brain-computer interface, like Neuralink, you've probably heard of, and there are many others, BlackRock, Paradromics, lots of others, who are working on saying, hey, how can we plug electrodes directly into the brain. And this is actually something that goes back to the 1960s where people stick electrodes in there, you know, these little thin metal wires, and you can measure what's happening in the neurons there and you can actually— and you can stimulate them also. There's a lot of, I would say, mythology currently about where this will go. With Neuralink, part of the— part of that mythology is, hey, everyone will get this sort of thing and you can interface faster with your phone and so on. Truthfully, I think nobody's going to get an open head, you know, neurosurgery so that you can interface faster with your phone, um, because there's always dangers on the operating table and you don't necessarily want to do that. But I think if we're looking maybe 30 years in the future, nanorobotics is what's going to change everything, which is making super, super tiny robots by, uh, 3D printing atomically precise Proteins where you define exactly what you're doing, and then you put, you know, 100 million of those, billion of those in a capsule, and you swallow it. And these little robots go and swim up your bloodstream and pass the blood-brain barrier and impregnate the neurons, and there they can send and receive signals. So this sounds completely insanely futuristic right now, but in whatever, 2050 or 2060, I think that's probably what's going to be standard. And then And then that opens up a completely different ballgame for, for brain enhancement.

For what kind of applications?

You know, really you could do anything. I mean, in the same way, there's a sense in which we've already enhanced our brains, 'cause we all walk around with these rectangles in our pocket that have the entirety of humankind's knowledge stored, but, but we still have to interface with them externally. You know, I have to get out my phone and type with my fat thumbs and so on. But imagine that you could have, you know, the entire knowledge of humankind and AI to summarize things for you. But all of that's happening internally. This is a long way. I don't even know that this is in our lifetime. But if you're asking about the future of brain enhancement, I think we could get to a point where we say, hey, I need to fly that B-212 helicopter, upload instructions for that. And the idea would be there's no single set of instructions that'll work for me and for you because we have different brains. But If we get to a point where we have system identification, in other words, we know Jim's brain in infinite detail and we know my brain in infinite detail, then you can put in the instructions for flying the B-212 helicopter into your brain or into my brain, predicated on what's already there, on the structure that's already there.

Yeah, because I didn't think it would be possible to do that, like in The Matrix. But people are very individual.

Yeah, exactly. I think it will be absolutely possible. with system identification.

Right.

And I think it's not that far off. I mean, you know, who knows, 100 years, 150 years. It doesn't even matter what number I say because we'll both be dead by then. But it's somewhere around there. And what I think this means is that our near-term descendants, like you mentioned your 1-year-old, you know, maybe by the end of your 1-year-old's life or, or your child's child, they will be more different from us than our ancestors 10,000 years ago.

Let's bring it back from the future back to the present. How has your deep dive into the workings of the brain influenced your personal life, your habits, your lifestyle? And are these practices, how they've been adopted as a result of the discoveries in your own personal research?

Yeah, I'd say it's 2 things. One of them is always about seeking novelty. The most important thing you can do for your brain is to challenge it all the time. And so what happens, you know, we all know people who, let's say, get to retirement age and their lives really shrink and they're not doing anything new. That's the worst thing you can do for your brain. The most important thing is to constantly force it to build new bridges and roadways by taking on new tasks that are somewhere in between frustrating but achievable. And, um, so, you know, for any listeners who have retired parents or grandparents, make sure you're really encouraging them slash forcing them to, to do that. And if they say, oh, well, I do Sudoku or whatever, that's fine. Except as soon as they get good at it, they have to quit that and do something else. So I think this is one of the main things where my life on a daily basis is influenced by this because I always try to switch things up and Even stupid stuff like, you know, just parking on a different side of the driveway and switching the art on my walls and rearranging my desk and driving a different route home from work every single day. And just, you know, constantly doing things like that is, is really important for brain health. The second thing is the piece that I mentioned before, which is the Ulysses contract. Always just trying to think about, okay, I, you know, I feel like, okay, I'm, I'm a good long-term thinker. I know who I am. I know who I want to be. But I know if I get into situation X, I will face temptation to do the wrong thing. So I just try to figure out how to contract with myself so that I can't do it, how to lash myself to the mast in advance. And I feel like that's something that's really come, you know, again, I'm writing a book on this. And so I probably think about this more than other people, but it's super useful to do that.

I look forward to reading that book. Also recommend If you're watching this on YouTube, we put the extended version. I mentioned Livewired. It presents new discoveries from Dr. Eagleman's own lab, from synesthesia to dreaming to wearable neurotech devices that really could revolutionize how we think about our nervous system, our senses. Maybe— I know people are going to ping us asking about Neosensory. What is Neosensory and What do you have to offer there that some of our listeners could benefit from? Who would be of interest to be able to go and where do they go? What website or how do they stay connected?

So it's neosensory.com. It's a wristband, a very simple little wristband that has these vibratory motors on it. We have 3 different products, but it's the same physical thing. But, you know, one is for high-frequency hearing loss. One is for tinnitus, which is ringing in the ears, and one is for for greater forms of hearing loss, like profound or severe hearing loss. We have all kinds of other things too that you can do with the wristband, like listen to music in this mode or set your alarm and have it wake you up that way, a million things. But so, so that's neosensory.com. And by the way, we just set up a discount code with the word Kwik. So K-W-I-K, go there. Type that in, you get a 10% discount on the product. I will say, for anybody who's a hacker, I just want to mention we have currently 70 other projects in the realm of sensory substitution, which is using the same wristband, but putting in other kinds of things, whatever that is, infrared light or stock market data, or physiology from a smartwatch, like your heart rate, heart rate variability, galvanic skin response, things like that, and you're feeling these signals that are normally invisible, you make them visible and conscious. So we have people experimenting with all kinds of things like that as well.

Such a fascinating conversation. If you're joining us, we were with Dr. David Eagleman. We're talking about the cutting-edge world of neurotech and sensory substitution. I really find this is mind-blowing to think about the possibilities of enhancing our senses and perception through these devices. So I highly recommend you go to neosensory.com. Grateful to offer this discount to our community. Just use the discount code KWIK, K-W-I-K. You know, as we already know, the human brain is an incredible technology that has created all the other technologies outside of us and that it's constantly adapting and rewiring itself. And I want to remind everybody that by tapping into that neuroplasticity through innovative tools like some that were mentioned just now, we can essentially be able to enhance, quote unquote, hack our brains to experience reality in entirely new ways that are truly, truly limitless. David, I want to thank you so much. I'd love to have you back for when you publish your upcoming book.

Great.

Because that's something I would imagine a lot of people struggle with, you know, these contracts they make with themselves, you know, these internal conversations. that are going on. And I'm really looking forward to reading it. So I appreciate your research. As always, everybody, don't forget to subscribe and join our 1.5 million YouTube subscribers there online where we put the extended version. Make sure you leave a comment on whatever platform you're listening to this episode and join us both. Can people connect with you beside your website? Social media?

Yeah, eagleman.com is the website and I'm on all the social media channels.

Perfect. So I would encourage everybody to take one quick action. Take a screenshot wherever you are consuming this right now and tag Dr. Eagleman, tag myself @JimKwik, and share your thoughts, share this episode. I feel like we learn things better when we share with others, right? When you teach it, you get to learn it twice. We talk about the explanation effect often in this series. And yeah, Dr. Eagleman, I want to thank you so much for your work. Thank you for contributing to our community.

Great. Thank you, Jim, and thank you for building this community.

Amazing. Everybody, thank you. This is your brain coach, Jim Kwik. Until our next episode, make sure you subscribe. Until next time, be limitless.