Stanford Neuroscientist: Can’t Remember Your Dreams? Your Brain May Be Warning You!

In fact, our colleagues at Harvard did an experiment where they blindfolded normally sighted people, and you could start seeing that takeover happening after 60 minutes.

And that's when we realized, wow, the purpose of dreaming is to defend the visual territory from takeover from the other senses.

But what fascinates me about brain plasticity and what I've devoted my career to is figuring out the way that we can be the sculptors of our own brains and how it gives us an opportunity

to become the kind of person we would like to be.

And can we do that?

Yes.

Here's the thing.

Your brain peaked at the age of 2.

Okay, so at the beginning, you've got fluid intelligence, meaning you could learn anything.

But now that you have grown up in this world, you've got crystallized intelligence, meaning you know how to drive a car, you know how to operate a cell phone, you know how to run a

business.

And so your brain doesn't require as much change.

Which means that the structure of the brain is always degenerating.

So what are the set of actions that will fundamentally change my brain and make me that type of person who's motivated and disciplined and who has high agency and attacks the world?

So this is something I've studied in my lab for decades now, and the key is that— And what about AI and the social media debate as it relates to brain development?

Well, I happen to be a cyber optimist for young people.

I think it's gonna make them much smarter than the generation that came before.

And here's why.

Interesting.

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Dr.

David Eagleman, what made you so fascinated about the brain, and why should everybody listening be fascinated about the brain as well?

Here's what I think it is.

When I was 8 years old, I fell off of the roof of the house that was under construction, and I fell 12 feet and broke my nose on the floor below.

But the whole thing seemed to take a long time.

I did the calculation and figured out that it only took 0.6 of a second to get from the top to the bottom, and I couldn't figure out why it seemed to have taken so long.

So I think that got me really interested in perception and the machinery by which we view the world and take it in, and what is actually real versus what's a construction of the brain.

And that's what I've devoted my career to, is figuring out how the brain, which is locked inside the skull— it's about 3 pounds— how it constructs this model of the world, and which

things we can take as reality, which things we shouldn't.

I think most people don't even know they have a— that there's a brain there, almost.

It sounds like a strange thing to say, but we've never really— most of us haven't really seen our own brains at all.

We've never been able to we don't touch our own brains at all.

So it's, it's easy to fall into the trap of thinking that everything I experience is true and is reality.

So I'm wondering how a deeper understanding of all this stuff can help me live a better life.

Yeah, one of the things that I started writing about years ago is that I think we're not— I think we often think of ourselves as individuals, meaning not divisible into other things,

but really You are a team of rivals.

You've got all these neural networks that have different drives making different suggestions to you.

What's a neural network?

Um, so in the brain you've got 86 billion cells called neurons, and these are communicating with each other at a blindingly fast rate.

Many of these cells are hooked up in networks, so they're, you know, this guy's talking to this guy and this guy, and they're all in particular networks.

The thing is, you can actually get competing networks.

So for example, Stephen, if I drop some chocolate chip cookies in front of you, part of your brain wants to eat it.

It's a good energy source.

Part of your brain says, don't eat it, I'll gain weight.

Part of you says, okay, I'll eat one, but I'll go to the gym tonight.

The point is, you are arguing with yourself.

You are conflicted.

This is what makes humans so interesting, is that we have all these voices trying to drive us to different conclusions about our behavior.

So the way that your ship of state moves depends on the vote of the neural parliament at any time.

So understanding this, I think, is really critical to navigating our own lives, because all of us do things where retrospectively we regret it.

We say, oh, I shouldn't have eaten that whole bag of chips or done the, you know, the alcohol or the drugs or whatever.

Like, everybody has regrets all the time with things, and it's because You have different voices in charge at different times.

Okay.

Part of what this leads to is what we call the Ulysses Contract.

So a Ulysses Contract is where you do something now to prevent yourself from behaving badly in the near future.

Just as an example, you know, when people go to Alcoholics Anonymous, the first thing they're told is clear all the alcohol out of the house.

Because even if you feel like, look, I'm in a moment of sober reflection, I don't want to ever drink again.

If you have alcohol in the house, you're going to bust into that cabinet at some point on a festive Saturday night or a lonely Sunday night or whatever.

So what you do is you constrain your future behavior by setting things up in the right way so your future, uh, the future you can't behave badly.

We naively think, okay, well, I know who I am, I'm just one person.

But, but you're not.

And under different circumstances, you're tempted by different things and you'll do different kinds of behavior.

So having a sense of what's going on under the hood gives us an opportunity to be more closely aligned with the kind of person we would like to be.

Because it feels like there's just one.

Well, I do argue with myself in my head sometimes, but it feels like there is just one me.

Yeah.

And so when I hear that voice say, Steve, you should have that cookie and it's 1 a.m.

and then the other voice says, no, you shouldn't.

I think it's kind of the same person just tussling with himself.

Right.

Well, but that tussling with himself implies different political parties that are all battling it out.

You know, when you look at a parliament, you've got all these political parties that all love their country.

They just have different ideas of how to steer it.

And this is what's going on in the brain all the time.

So what does one do about that?

How do I make— do I have to make an Elysian contract?

I think it's very useful to make that sort of thing, but also just understanding what's— I mean, part of the— you know, there was this Greek admonition to know thyself.

This was a sign they had in various places, various temples and stuff.

But I think that becomes know thyself.

And the better we know ourselves, the more we can get rid of the illusions illusion that we are one person, because all any of us need to do is look back on our behavior to say, oh

yeah, in some circumstances I would do that, other circumstances I think it's a terrible idea.

So this is all to the goal of understanding who you are.

What are the big misconceptions about the brain that people have gone through their life believing?

I mean, that's one of them.

Something that is true that kind of could fall in place of that is just this fundamental idea that our brains are plastic or sort of adaptable, because when I found out that I could

change my brain by what I do, I found that to be really,

really inspiring.

Yes, that's exactly right.

So brain plasticity, if someone hasn't heard that term before, it sounds like a weird term, but the reason it came about 100 years ago is because the great psychologist William James

pointed out that, you know, if you take a piece of plastic, what we like about that material that we call plastic is that you can mold it into a shape and it'll hold that shape.

And that's what your brain does.

So if I ask you the name of your third grade teacher, you can remember that name even though it's been a long time because your neural networks changed and held on to that piece of

information.

Okay, well, our whole lives, our brains are changing every moment.

So now we have certain doors that close at different times.

So just as an example, um, you need to learn language in the first several years of your life.

If you don't learn language, you can never get the concept of language.

Your brain will never figure that out.

You're not saying you can't learn a new language as an adult.

You're saying the concept— the concept of language, the concept that I can name things and I can ask for things and so on, just that never clicks in the brain.

For example, in Romania at the fall of Ceaușescu, there were tens of thousands of kids in the orphanages because their parents had been killed.

It was too many kids, and so the staff there said, look, the kids will get, you know, clingy if you pay too much attention to them.

So here's what we're going to do: we're going to feed the kids, but we're not going hold them, we're not going to talk to them.

And all these children grew up with real cognitive deficits as a result.

Here's the thing about brain plasticity.

Human beings have a similar brain to all our neighbors in the animal kingdom.

If you compare our brain to a horse brain, a dog brain, anything like that, it's the same general structures and stuff.

But what we have is much more of the wrinkly outer bit called the cortex.

It's the outer 3 millimeters.

And maybe we'll come back to why that matters so much.

But the other thing that Mother Nature tweaked with us.

It's small genetic tweaks, but we have much more plasticity, adaptability, such that when a horse drops into the world, it's doing the same thing that horses did 100,000 years ago.

It's just, you know, eat, mate.

But when a human drops in the world, we learn everything that's happened before us, and then we springboard off the top of that.

So we living in the 21st century, we say, oh great, you know, physics, math, this, that, art, blah blah, great, we got everything that's happened before us, now let's do our own thing.

And that's what's so special about the plasticity the adaptability of it.

The downside, the gamble, is that Mother Nature drops human brains into the world kind of half-baked, and we then get to absorb everything.

But in the rare circumstance where you're not getting the right input, then, then that ends up really in trouble because it's only half-baked.

So when it comes to language, we can learn multiple languages when we're young.

That's very easy, but it gets harder and harder as that goes along.

And various other things become harder.

And here's why.

It's because I mentioned this earlier, but the job of the brain is to make a model of the world so it can operate within it.

So for example, you're an entrepreneur and you love doing business, so you get it.

You get, okay, here's how, you know, here's how you structure business.

Here's how you hire well.

Here's how you set up a board well.

You're doing everything because you've got a really rich internal model of how to structure a business.

That's what the brain wants to do, is get that stuff right.

As a result, if you suddenly ended up, you know, taking a trip to Mars and there's a whole very different society there that does businesses very differently, you would have to relearn

stuff really quickly.

So here's the thing:

you went from having a brain that had high fluid intelligence to now having a brain that has high crystallized intelligence.

What that means is at the beginning, you can learn anything.

You could learn any language, you could dropped into any era.

You could have dropped into 13th century Japan when I was young.

When you were young, when you were a baby, if you had dropped out of the womb in, you know, 10th century Mongolia, you would have said like, okay, cool, learn language.

You would, you would be a 10th century Mongolian.

But as it happens, you dropped into this era, you know, a certain place and time and neighborhood and culture and family.

And so you learn that.

That's who you become, is that person.

We often think that plasticity diminishes as you age, but it's not simply that it's diminishing, it's that you are getting the right answers about how to operate in the world, and so

you don't have to change as much.

Your brain doesn't require as much change.

What if I want to change?

Yes, so it turns out you still can change.

That's the key, is that the reason brains change less and less is because they don't have to, but when things get upside down, just as one example, everything about the pandemic really

stunk except for one thing.

I think the tiny silver lining is that all of us had to reassess, oh my gosh, wait, how is the world working?

I thought I knew how the world worked, but now I don't know if there's going to be toilet paper at the store.

I don't know if the bank's going to be open.

I don't know if I can get coffee at the coffee shop.

Like everything was different.

As awful as it was, it's really useful to challenge your internal model of the world and get to do that as an adult.

We don't usually get to.

So if I want to change, what would you recommend that I do?

If I want to, if I want to change who I am?

Yeah, I'm stubborn, I'm not motivated and I want to be a different person.

The key is challenge.

The key is seeking challenge.

So it turns out that where we always want to be is in between the levels of frustrating but achievable.

And you want to take on new tasks.

You want to seek novelty to find yourself in that zone.

And push yourself to do things that you just haven't done before.

And one of the things that's so wonderful about the modern world, you know, everyone's got complaints about the internet and social media and stuff like that.

But the good news is it exposes you to so much more than you ever even knew was out there.

The key is to actively seek those challenges and seek new things and seek to become expert in various sorts of fields.

And I think the key is that once you become good at something, You, you have to drop that and take on something you're not good at.

This is the best thing you can do for your brain.

The reason is because what you're doing is you're constantly building new roadways and pathways in the brain.

There's a study that's been going on for, for decades now called the Religious Orders Study, where a bunch of Catholic nuns agreed to donate their brains for autopsy when they passed

away.

What the researchers discovered when they look at the brain carefully is that that some fraction of these nuns had Alzheimer's disease.

Their brains were physically degenerating with the ravages of, of this dementia, but they didn't show any of the cognitive deficits that one normally has.

They didn't seem to be having memory problems and so on.

It turns out it's because all these nuns lived in these convents till the day they died.

They had social challenges and they had fights with their fellow sisters and they played games with their fellow sisters and they were they had chores and responsibilities and they

were doing stuff.

What that means is even as the tissue, the brain tissue was physically degenerating, they were making new roadways and bridges all the time.

And so that's what kept them cognitively healthy.

We call that cognitive reserve.

Contrast this with, with people who retire at 65 and they go home and they watch television and their social circle shrink and so on.

That's when you've really got concerns because you're not building the new pathways.

Is there data to support that, that when you retire, if you retire early, or if you retire, say, in your 60s, it increases your probability of an earlier death or cognitive decline?

Almost certainly with cognitive decline, because you're just not getting the challenge at that point.

You're just coasting on your internal model.

This— it's tragic, but what happens often is that people's hearing gets worse.

And so by the time they retire, let's say in their mid-60s, it's not really that fun for them to go out to parties and restaurants anymore because they can't quite hear.

And so So there are all these converging reasons why their social lives shrink.

But it turns out social life is one of the most important things that we can do for our brains because there's an expression we sometimes use in neuroscience, which is that nothing

is as hard for the brain as other people, because you never know what the other person is going to say and do and how they'll react emotionally and so on.

So you're constantly on your toes with other people.

And if you're not doing that anymore, that ends up being a problem.

Hmm,

interesting.

And as a, as a, I'm 33 years old, so if you were to plot where my brain is on like a graph of decline,

is it the case that I should be doing as much as I can now to build as many pathways I can so that when I'm 80, my decline sort of levels out in a, in a better place?

Oh yeah, for, for sure.

But this is true for many reasons, actually.

Okay, so like, the truth is your brain peaked at 2, at the age of 2, because that's when you get the post connections between neurons, between these cells in the brain.

You get this— at first you're born with these 86 billion neurons, and they connect and connect and connect, and it finally becomes like an overgrown garden at the age of 2.

And from there you're pruning, from there you're taking connections away.

Now it happens that that's not a bad thing, that's a good thing, because that's how you're resonating with the world that you are in, you know, 21st century London and LA versus, you

know, 10th century Mongolia, because you're, you're just strengthening those pathways that resonate and you're getting rid of everything else.

Okay, fine.

But over time, your brain cells die.

You know, every time you hit your head on something or whatever, your brain cells are going down.

So in that sense, you've peaked.

But your crystallized intelligence that you've been building your whole life, you know, that keeps going.

And you'll, you'll have decades ahead of you where you can start doing stuff.

But yes, the reason to learn everything you can is because all that stuff cashes out at various points in your life.

When you're starting your next business, or you're, you know, wanting to do the next great thing where you're surfing the web of AI, you know, you'll say, oh, I learned this thing when

I was 16, I learned this thing when I was 22, and these are paying off now.

I think I heard Andrew Huberman say that one of the most fascinating discoveries of the last century is a particular part of the brain called the anterior midcingulate cortex, and it

links to what you were saying a second ago about challenge.

And doing things that are difficult.

Yeah.

It turns out that area of the brain is involved and other networks as well, because when you're doing something new and challenging and difficult, you have stress and anxiety.

Your whole brain is active.

Let's say I measured your brain even with something like EEG, electroencephalography.

That's where I stick electrodes on the outside.

Let's say I measure your brain and my brain.

We're doing something that, let's say, you're an expert at.

What's something you're really good at?

Juggling, I don't know, some physics.

Let's go for juggling.

Okay, let's say you're an expert juggler, say I've never juggled.

Okay, if we're both juggling, you're going to be much better than I am, but your brain will be less active.

You won't have as much activity in your brain.

All my brain is on fire with activity because why?

I'm trying to figure out, okay, where do I put my hand?

How do I throw this?

And blah, blah, blah.

So when I'm a novice at something, my brain is using much more activity, not just the anterior cingulate, tons of activity all over because I'm trying to figure out the rules.

I'm trying to figure out what's going on.

You as an expert, you know, you got it.

You don't, you don't need to burn much activity.

This is what the brain's goal is, is to say, hey, once I've practiced something a lot, once I get something about the world, I'm going to burn it deeper and deeper into the circuitry

so I don't have to burn a lot of energy on it.

On this part of the brain, the anterior cingulate cortex, Andrew Huberman was saying it's larger in people that do things that they basically don't want to do, hard things.

If you spend your life doing things you don't want to do, then it happens to be bigger.

And so people have now thought of this part of the brain almost like the willpower muscle, because for some reason those that are doing hard things have bigger ones and those that are

not have smaller ones.

I mean, it wouldn't be so much the willpower muscle, it would be some indication retrospectively of how hard you have worked.

Look, the fact is you can see changes in brain size with lots of things.

I'll give you an example.

If you are a pianist, if you play piano, then we can actually see physical changes in your motor cortex.

This is the part of the brain essentially underneath where you'd wear headphones.

For those who are looking visually, it's this red part here.

You actually get a bigger loop of tissue here than you do in a normal brain.

Why?

Because you're doing so much fine motor activity with your fingers, with both hands.

Okay.

In contrast, if you're a violinist, you're only really doing that kind of detailed activity with one hand and the other hand's

just bowing.

And so you only get that activity here in one half of the brain for violinists.

So I can look at a brain and tell, hey, is the person a pianist or a violinist or neither?

I can tell just by looking at the visual cortex because you see changes in the brain based on what you do.

For example, jugglers, people who play music, even you can tell this with medical students who study for final exams.

You actually see changes in the distribution of their cortex.

Why would it be getting bigger?

The reason is the brain's devoting more real estate to that.

In this case, let's say we're talking about fingers on a piano or violin, the brain is devoting more— there's more relevance to that, and so it— more real estate.

So that you can do it better in the future?

Exactly.

The key about the cortex, this wrinkly outer part, is that it is a one-trick pony.

This is often overlooked because even this brain that I'm holding here is color-coded so that we think, oh, okay, that's clearly labeled this.

That's clearly labeled that, and so on.

But in fact, it's all the same stuff, and it can change.

So for instance, if you are born blind, then this area that we normally call the visual cortex gets taken over by the rest of the brain.

If you're born deaf, then this part that we call the auditory cortex gets taken over, it gets devoted to other tasks.

And so this whole system is very, very fluid, and this is what fascinates me about brain plasticity.

Is the way that we can be the sculptors of our own brains because we can devote ourselves to particular things and have the brain's real estate get involved in that.

So if I was currently someone that couldn't get out of bed, I didn't have a lot of discipline or motivation, and I wasn't very good at committing myself to hard things—

with everything you know about the brain, is it possible to take a set of actions that will fundamentally change my brain and make me that type of person who runs marathons, who does

hard things, who's motivated and disciplined, and who has high agency and attacks the world.

Yes.

Yeah.

But it's much more than simply resolve because, I mean, just look at New Year's resolutions.

You know, by, by February, most people have dropped most of them.

So it's really a psychology problem about figuring out, okay, what are the things that motivate me?

So let's say you want to become a marathon runner.

You've got that distant dream.

You figure out like, what actually motivates me in the short term?

Who am I trying to impress?

What am I trying trying to accomplish in my life, how can I structure things like this Ulysses contract that I talked about earlier, where I'm actually locking myself into a contract?

Like, you know, I call Bob and I say, I will meet you every morning at 7 and we're gonna run until we drop.

Like, once I've committed to those sorts of things, that's how you set things up so that you do the right thing.

It's a bit of a cycle, right?

Because then my brain will adapt, and then presumably that'll make it easier for me to run.

Yeah.

And then I'll run more and then my brain will adapt.

That's right.

And the cycle continues.

And it's not just your brain, of course.

In this case, it's your body.

You're getting better, you're getting stronger, you don't get as out of breath.

And so all these things help.

Exactly.

But in order to keep the cycle going, you need to figure out what is spinning this flywheel and what are the— all the other things in your life, whether good motivations or bad, it

doesn't matter.

You just figure out what it is that you can do to get there.

Are there some physical exercises that are particularly good for the brain?

From what you've understood?

The general story is exercise is really important for the brain.

I'll give you just one example of that, which is there's still this debate going on about whether we get new neurons in the brain.

The general story has always been you're born with 86 billion neurons and those slowly die with time.

But in rats, for example, there is a little trickle of new cells, new brain cells, and there's been a debate for a long time about whether that little trickle happens in humans or not.

Still unresolved, but in rats what you can see is that exercise causes the trickle to increase.

If you stick the rat on the wheel and it's doing physical exercise, you get more new brain cells.

Now we don't know for sure that this happens in humans, but lots of things about physical fitness and exercise matter a lot to the brain.

This is nothing new.

Exercise, sleep, diet— these are really important things for keeping the health of this organ.

Is there anything else that's important to know for someone that is trying to change and improve and keep their brain in a healthy state as they age that we haven't touched on?

There is something that, that all of us are thinking about, which is about social media and the internet in general.

I do think one of the interesting things about the internet and social media is that if we were growing up in a village 500 years ago, you just know the people in the village and what

they can do and so on.

But let's say no one in the village was an entrepreneur or a neuroscientist And so

we can't even picture that as a thing.

We don't know anything about that.

One thing that the internet has done for kids growing up in the digital age is that you get a lot more exposure to things.

You have so much more exposure.

And I actually think this is one of the positive things that I would say about social media is that you not only get exposure— wow, that kind of thing is possible and that kind of thing

is possible— but you also have people teaching you how to get there.

They say like, hey, I'm a fitness influencer and I'm going to show you exactly how to do the thing.

Or, you know, you say, hey, here's exactly how you start a business, or I say, hey, here's the, the route that you go through undergrad and grad school to become a neuroscientist.

And that's great.

I mean, there's just— there's so much more, uh, of a talent window now that, that everyone gets exposed to.

So I think that makes a better brain.

What are we doing to our children that you think we probably shouldn't be doing as it relates to brain development?

Here's the thing that's really important about this debate is that nobody really knows, and I'll tell you why.

It's because to do anything in science, when you're saying something about a group group, you need to have a control group that you're comparing against.

And when it comes to asking the question of, hey, kids growing up now with social media or the internet, how do they compare to other brains of kids who don't grow up with that?

Well, we don't have a control group unless you look at kids who are incredibly impoverished, or let's say Quakers who don't believe in technology.

And with both those groups, there's 100 other important differences.

So you can't just say, oh look, I'm comparing to this kid who grew up without food, and, and I'm going to say there's this difference.

Who the heck knows why the There's so many differences there.

Even a generation ago, there's so many differences in terms of diet, pollution, and politics and blah, blah, blah, everything that you can't do it.

So I only mention this 'cause I think it's very important.

A lot of people pipe off with things about, oh, the younger generation, their brain, this, that, but we don't actually know.

And I will tell you that I happen to be a cyber optimist on this point about what growing up with the internet does for young people.

I think it's gonna make them much smarter than the generation that came before, and here's why.

The size of the intellectual diet that they can bring in.

So when I was a kid, I grew up pre-internet, you know, I wanted to know stuff.

So my mom would drive me to the library, which was 25 minutes away, and I would pick up the Encyclopedia Britannica and I would flip through it and hope they had an article about the

thing that I wanted to know about.

And that's how I was able to get my little straw of knowledge.

But now kids are growing up with access to anything they're interested in.

And this is so good for the brain.

And from a plasticity point of view, the reason this matters is because change happens in the brain when you are curious about something.

So when a kid asks a question to Alexa or Siri or whatever, and they get the answer, that sticks because they have the right cocktail of chemicals going on in their head.

In contrast, when I grew up, I learned tons of just-in-case knowledge.

I mean, that's all that the teachers could teach us is just in case you ever need to know this fact, here it is.

Is.

But kids are in a really great situation now.

So there are pros and cons to all this stuff, but I think I'm very optimistic about what this means for the, for the warehouse of knowledge that, that kids can build up now.

And by the way, I saw an interview with Isaac Asimov in 1988.

He was the great science fiction writer who wrote Foundation and so many other books.

And he was saying on the show in 1988, he said, look, I envision a day when There will be one central supercomputer and every house will have a cable running to that supercomputer.

And you can ask any question you want and it knows the entirety of humankind's knowledge on that computer.

You know, what he was foreseeing here was the internet.

He got the details wrong, but it doesn't matter.

But the idea is he saw how this would be so incredible for education because he pointed out, look, in any classroom, it's going too fast for half the kids, too slow for the other half

of the kids.

Kids.

And if you could just pursue the sphere of humankind's knowledge, if you could enter in whatever door you wanted to, that's the way to do it, because you'll be motivated.

Now, he wasn't talking about brain plasticity or anything, but this is exactly what I'm saying from a brain plasticity point of view.

Really matters.

I'll just mention something, which is a lot of people are concerned that, oh, with, with AI, we're going to get lazy.

We won't, you know, know how to do anything anymore because we can outsource It just so happens that I, I love doing home improvement.

I'm always fixing my house.

I have 3x'd myself in the last half year because of AI.

'Cause I take a picture of something, I say, hey, I've never seen this kind of thing before.

How does this work?

Whatever.

And ChatGPT says, oh, you do this and you take this out and here's the bolt and blah blah.

It's not me outsourcing it, it's me being curious about something.

And so I remember how to do everything now.

I know how to do much more than I used to because I like it.

What about the— you know, there's been a couple of studies that have come out that say things like your brain's going to atrophy if you don't continue to write, or if you just defer

all of your learning to things like ChatGPT or other AI models.

Um, one, I guess, one of the areas that I think in one of the studies— was it Stanford study that everyone was talking about where the participants used Google and AI and then they'd

learned something themselves?

But one of the things I've wondered is is if I'm going through my business life and I'm encountering hard problems, and every time I can encounter a hard problem, I drop it into an

AI, the AI spits out a text-based answer, I copy and paste that and send it as my response.

Presumably there's some kind of important part of the learning cycle or the, you know, neurological development that I'm like foregoing there and missing that I probably should.

You know, you said earlier about doing hard things.

What I'm doing there is I'm avoiding the hard which is like thinking about it and trying to understand it.

Yeah.

Here's, I think, the really important distinction.

There's vicious friction in our lives and there's virtuous friction.

So vicious friction is all the stupid stuff that you have to do, like, hey, Stephen, for your business, I need you to copy this spreadsheet over here and fill in all these cells and,

and do your taxes and whatever.

Okay.

That if we can push that off to AI is massively important for for improving human lives.

There's really not benefit in vicious friction, but virtuous friction is, hey, Stephen, I really want you to think about what is the optimal way to do this business?

What is the best structure for this?

How do we actually go D2C?

How do we go B2B on this?

What's the, what's the approach here that we're gonna take that you haven't done before?

That would be amazing.

That's virtuous friction because you're really using your brain to learn stuff that way.

Okay, so that's the first distinction that matters is get rid of all the busywork.

There's no honor in that.

I mean, I'll just mention in the 1990s there was this big debate about whether we should have kids use desk calculators or not.

And thank God that finally got resolved and we let kids use calculators so that we can learn, you know, a couple, we can spend a couple days learning long division, but you don't have

to spend 6 months on it cuz who cares?

With the virtuous friction, there's real opportunity to surf the wave of AI so that you are figuring out these tough problems with the aid of somebody who cares about your problem and

is willing to talk with you 24/7 and never gets tired of talking to you about it.

And so you are not just copying and pasting, but you're working with the AI to come up with ideas that were beyond what you would've come up with.

Because I mentioned earlier about internal models, we have pretty narrow fence lines and you can think of all these things, but you don't even know what you don't know.

So if you can have somebody who's willing to talk with you, an expert in all of humankind's knowledge, willing to talk with you about it as much as you want.

There's a real opportunity there to have a synergy where collectively you both come up with a better idea than either of you could have alone.

But is there a way for that relationship to take place that I actually benefit?

Because, you know, in the example I gave, I'm just— I take the question I was asked, I put it into an AI, it gives me an answer, I copy and paste it back to the person that asked me

the question.

That would happen if you really didn't care about the person asking you the question or the question.

I mean, this is what a lot of people are doing.

I get so many emails because we interview a lot of candidates who join the business.

And so I see tens of thousands of emails sometimes a week that, I mean, I don't see all of them, but the ones that I see, I often know that because we've sent them 5 questions or a

task and I look at it and go, this is, I can almost predict the exact model that sent it to me because they all have a different personality.

So I go, oh, this one, the person put into Gemini or this one, the person put it into ChatGPT.

Yeah, exactly.

And it's full of contrastive construction, like, and it's not this, it's that.

Yeah, exactly.

And then the em dashes.

Exactly.

I'm really asking, like, is the person that did that benefiting from that, from it?

No.

Well, no, but for a couple of reasons.

One is that, you know, you— and it triggers your red flag.

And so that does not do anyone any good.

I see so many of my colleagues posting on LinkedIn these very obvious AI things, and it irritates me because I feel like I'm not going to spend my time reading that because of— I call

this the effort phenomenon, which is, um, in, in psychology, we care a lot about things that seem like they took a lot of effort.

And there's something about seeing an AI post that's just irritating because it's so obviously AI.

That's a really interesting idea, the effort phenomenon.

Yeah, I mean, I've been writing about this for a while because, um, it turns out there are psychology studies where if I offer you two pieces of art and one of them looks like, you

know, let's it's a red dot in the middle of a white canvas, and the other one is, you know, bottle caps stacked up and glued in this great shape or whatever, you'll pay— you'll pay

much more for the thing that looks like it took a lot of effort.

People will pay more for a real diamond than a synthetic lab-grown diamond, which is exactly the same thing.

It's just carbon in the matrix.

But they feel like, oh, well, Mother Nature took hundreds of millions of years of effort on this one, but not over here.

It just took a few days in the lab.

So there's a million ways where we care about that a lot.

When it comes to this AI thing, um, yes, anybody who's just popping back something to you, it just feels like, all right, they took the, the path of least resistance, and I'm not so

interested.

I want to know from a neuroscience perspective whether they benefit.

Presumably they don't benefit too much either.

I mean, it's hard to know exactly how many times they went back and forth with it.

They could have said, hey, ChatGPT, thank you for this, but I'm kind of this— more of this person.

What I really think about 'This is the thing that inspires me, not what you suggested.' So somebody could put effort into it.

It's just that we can't know that when we get the AI response.

It seems to be a pretty consistent principle of life generally that, like, when you do something hard or when you put in effort, as you say, you tend to get back, like, an equal and

opposite return, like, relatively.

So I would think that if I fought through, you know, maybe even using AI as a companion, but I fought then to write it out myself, instead of just copying and pasting.

Yeah.

One of the things I've learned from doing this podcast, all these episodes, is everything is a trade-off.

Yeah.

And if you don't know what the trade you're making, then you're often at great risk.

And so like some of my friends will say, oh, I take this pill and it's amazing, it does all these things for me, it's the most amazing thing ever, I can just focus for 24 hours a day

and I'm so productive now.

And I go, what's the downside?

And they go, there's no downside.

I go, hmm.

So that's what I mean.

It's even worse when you don't, you don't know the trade you're making.

And so with AI, I go, okay, if it's making me wildly more efficient or productive, what trade am I making?

I think understanding this, it's probably not two categories, but a spectrum from vicious friction to virtuous friction, but really paying attention to what is virtuous friction, what

would make me a better person if I actually put the effort into this, that matters a lot.

And I will say For us as professors, for you looking for job candidates, we need to change how we're asking the questions.

If we just say, "Hey, write, answer these 5 questions," of course everyone's gonna use it.

For example, in my classes at Stanford, I don't have people turn in a final paper anymore.

That was from previous life before AI.

Now I have them do projects as their final thing where they're, you know, running an experiment on something.

And of course they use AI to help them.

Help them generate some of the issues, but they have to deal with other people and look at the data and figure out what's wrong and that kind of stuff.

I worry that it's getting into the age of, you know, the whole calculator thing you said, where maybe actually it is now you need to assess them on their ability to use the AI, not

to succeed without it.

Yeah, agreed.

This is the whole game for all of us, I think, is figuring out how to surf this wave of AI where it can make us superhuman.

We can just be better, so much better than anything we ever were doing before.

Because we have immediate access to knowledge and facts that either we had forgotten or we never knew existed.

And so we should be surfing that wave.

So I, I totally agree with you on that point.

If you can figure out how to change your interview questions so that you're seeing, hey, can this person really get the speed?

With everything you know about learning and neuroplasticity and expanding one's brain, is there anything else you can say to the audience about how they should use AI so that they become

a superhuman?

Interesting.

I, you know, look, I have been talking to my friends about this issue a lot lately, and I mentioned how I've become so much better at home improvement stuff.

I just know so much more.

Each one of my friends has something like that.

We're like, hey, you know what?

I've actually gotten so much better at this super random thing that I never even thought I, you know, I never thought about it explicitly.

But because I'm always asking AI questions about that and it's giving me the answers, it's not simply that it gives me the answers and I forget it.

He gives me the answers and I remember it.

I become better and better because it's like the way that Alexander the Great had Aristotle as his tutor and could ask him anything and learn great stuff from him.

We've all got Aristotle in our pocket now, and we can become better at the things that we want to do, the things that resonate with us for whatever reason.

If everyone's got Aristotle in their pocket, how does one create an edge?

I think it has to do with we're all just gonna be running faster in the same way that when Steve Jobs introduced Apple computers, he said, "This is like a bicycle for the mind." meant

by that was that for millions of years we've been walking bipedally, and then just in the last nanosecond of evolution, we invented the bicycle, and suddenly humans can move faster

because of the bicycle.

And he said having a personal computer is like a bicycle for the mind.

And I think of AI now as like a motorcycle for the mind.

It's— it allows us to move so much faster.

So now it's a motorcycle race, and there will be people who are much faster than other people because they're really using that optimally.

And that's what I mean, it's like, how do I create an edge versus my— whoever I'm competing with in whatever industry I'm in?

Well, for sure, the people who are just copying and pasting the AI slop, that'll be easy to beat that crowd.

But otherwise, I think it's just a matter of, hey, these are the newest things.

It's like in history when the new sword gets invented or the new gun or the new cannon, you know, you have to keep improving and using that.

And that's what's going on now with AI.

And with— from a neuroscience perspective, if I wanted to use AI to— based on all these things you've told me about novelty and all these other points that expand the connections across

my brain and give me a big cognitive reserve,

what might I install as a practice every week when I'm speaking to my AI?

Oh, ask it questions that you're curious about, about anything.

Just asking questions Here's one thing I do all the time.

I'll say, hey, I've been thinking about this.

You know, I, on my podcast, I do a lot of monologues.

And so I'll start talking to it and I'll say, hey, I've got this idea that I'm thinking about.

What if blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.

And then I'll say, here's my idea.

Give me pros and cons.

You know, tell me why this is wrong.

And I do that pretty much with everything that I ask it.

If I'm proposing some, you know, stupid seed of an idea and it That is the important part, I think.

And by the way, I just wanna say, I think for the next generation that we're teaching this, there are really only two things we can teach because all the details of, you know, hey,

let's teach computer programming or something, that's probably already gone as a useful thing.

So what we can teach is critical thinking and creativity.

That's it.

I think that's such an important point, this point about asking your AI why you might be wrong.

Yeah, I think I've had most of my paradigm-shifting moments when I've come to an AI model that I was using with a very, with very high conviction.

And what the prompt that always, I think, is most sort of expansive in terms of my intellectual knowledge is when I say to it, be brutally honest about your opinion, think for yourself

and be objective, and tell me where my blind spots are.

There's something innate within us all where we don't actually want to be wrong.

We often, I think, as a natural reflex, and this is why people get really sort of trapped in echo chambers of political opinion, and, you know, Leon Festinger talked about this idea

of cognitive dissonance, when something you believe contrasts with new information and how it makes you feel uncomfortable.

There's something— when I type that out, when I love the idea or the thing I've written or the memo I've written, this new idea, and I go, go on, tell me why I'm completely, completely

wrong, and it eviscerates me.

It is both uncomfortable but feels incredibly important because then it's like I've grown.

But these AIs, they're programmed almost to, like, kiss my ass.

Yes.

Although, you know, ChatGPT released a very sycophantic version, I don't know, maybe a year ago, meaning it compliments you.

You give some idea and it says, oh, Stephen, that's the best idea I've ever heard.

You're a genius.

And that didn't last very long.

Model because nobody actually liked it.

So you're exactly right.

And, and I'm sure most listeners know this, but you can tell your AI to be brutally honest with you all the time.

You can tell them to do that all the time and it'll do that.

So you can, you can establish the kind of person that you're talking to.

Here's the thing, you're right, of course, people don't like to be wrong.

It can be socially embarrassing, it can be uncomfortable.

And yet there's something very different when you're talking to your AI.

It's a very private thing.

And you say, hey, tell me where I'm brutally wrong.

And when it tells you, you think, think, oh, thank God it's telling me that instead of like a real human.

So I think a lot of that is alleviated with AI.

We don't feel as bad about being wrong there.

As you were saying that, I just went on ChatGPT and I typed this in.

Is my joke funny?

And the joke I typed in is, knock knock, who's there?

A lettuce.

Lettuce who?

Lettuce in and I'll tell you.

Okay, you didn't laugh.

I didn't laugh.

ChatGPT said yes, it works as a joke.

Solid structure.

Uses the classic pun payoff, which is exactly how most knock-knock jokes land.

And then it's done a laughing emoji.

I then said, be brutally honest and completely objective.

Was that funny?

It said,

it's not very funny.

Interesting.

You know, that's interesting because it depends, right?

A little child actually finds that joke funny.

And for a little child, they then get to repeat that to their classmate and they're learning how to do a joke and so on.

So I'm I'm not sure I think there's a single answer to whether that can be funny or not.

But the interesting thing is it just reinforcing what I already believed.

And therefore, when we think about growth or having a growth mindset, if someone's just always reinforcing what you already believe and know, I don't know if it's ever going to be a

growth mindset.

I mean, I just asked it again.

I said, be really honest.

And it said, it's absolutely not funny.

Yeah, but remember, all it's doing is it's just, it's a statistical parrot.

And so when you say, be really honest, it thinks that's what it should answer.

I said, be even more honest.

It says it's basically not funny at all and you shouldn't say that to people.

Okay.

And it says comedic originality, 1 out of 10, likelihood of real laughter, 1 out of 10.

Well, that's quite good.

That's quite accurate.

Here's the thing.

I've been thinking about this issue a lot about whether AI can be funny.

And at the moment it can't be.

It's great at repeating jokes, but it doesn't understand humor on its own.

What it knows, if you ask it to make up a new joke, what it'll do is it'll have, you know, the first guy walks in the bar, then the second guy walks in the bar and does X, and that

establishes the pattern.

But then the third guy, it'll have break that pattern, which is the structure of a joke, but it doesn't know how to break the pattern in a way that's funny.

It's just the third guy does some random thing.

So AI, as it stands now, the way it's structured with what's called a transformer model, doesn't know how to think of the punchline and then go back and make the joke lead to that punchline.

A lot of people don't either.

I say that not in an offensive way, but just to say that like I don't know, I often hear the claim that AI could never be creative.

It's massively creative.

Here's why.

Creativity in the brain, all creativity is, is you absorb your world, the whole world around you, every experience you've ever had, and then you're bending and breaking and blending

those cognitive concepts into new remixes.

That's all creativity is.

And you're doing that all the time, whether you're just trying to think of what to say next or what recipe to make next or what patent to do or what company to start.

You're just remixing the stuff that you already know.

And that's why, you know, I don't know, take Beethoven.

He could have written any kind of music that was being done anywhere in the world, but of course he didn't.

Like, that's what he grew up with, was the music in his local culture and so on.

What we have now is a much broader diet, as I mentioned before, where we can get everything going in.

But the point I wanna make here is that AI, that's what it does.

It remixes stuff that's come in.

So AI is massively creative.

The part of creativity that AI can't do right now is selection, meaning it can generate 100 pictures, but it doesn't know which one to pick.

It doesn't know which one is gonna be the most appealing to you, but it can remix beautifully.

But neither do humans, right?

So if I asked an intern to make me 100 pictures, I mean, I could get my AI to pick one, but it wouldn't know what— the intern or the AI wouldn't know which one I loved.

The intern would have a much better shot at it.

And as the intern is there for a while, Well, he or she becomes quite good at getting, "Oh, okay, I get Steven's taste.

It would be this one." And AI can't learn that, what my taste is?

I don't think the AI could learn that about visual images because when it generates the pixels, it's doing this, you know, this magical stuff under the hood where it's deciding which

pixels and how they diffuse together and, you know, makes the image.

But it doesn't know how to read that image like, "Oh yeah, the way this is and blah blah, that'll really appeal to Steven." It's not seeing the image except as a bunch of pixels.

Pixels.

Hmm.

You need to be a human for that because I feed them.

So I was doing an experiment recently where I took my behind-the-scenes channel, which is a 30-minute-long video, I dropped it into Gemini, and I'd say things to it like, predict where

people would drop off on the video.

And then we upload the video to YouTube, we get the retention data back, and Gemini, uh, in the last 2 times that I've done it, has 100% record of knowing that at minute 7, where insert

person talked for too and might have been a bit more sell-y, might have tried to sell a hoodie, for example, in that part, it would say, you're going to lose people here.

And it would very accurately say why.

It would say, because you talked for 74 seconds and it was jarring versus the moment that came before it.

And when I feed the AI, I don't know, let's say thumbnails and say, which thumbnail is going to perform the best?

We did a test recently where we put 4 thumbnail test results that we knew the answer to into Gemini and said, which one's going to win?

Win on YouTube A/B testing, and it got 100% accuracy of predicting on data we already had which one would win.

And so now, I, I don't know, I, I keep having these paradigm-shifting moments where I'm gonna— only humans could, could do that.

But increasingly, the, the AIs that we're experimenting with are making better creative decisions than now I can make myself, as if the outcome of that creative decision is which one

is people going to prefer.

Yeah.

I'd say a year ago that wasn't the case.

Okay, so I totally agree with you, but let me just mention one thing which is fascinating, which is that often the way it's doing it is not at all the way that a human would do it,

which might be fine for our purposes, but the data and the way that it's picking up on it, it might be something about, you know, how much— I'm making this up— how much green was in

the YouTube thumbnail image, or how much red, or whatever, whatever the thing is, or just noticing that there's there's big font versus smaller font or whatever, the next time you try

it, it says, oh yeah, this thumbnail is going to be great.

And it's some ridiculous thumbnail that doesn't make any sense to you as a human, nor to your fellow humans.

But it might say, oh yeah, this would be great, because it's judging things on very weird dimensions that we can't always see.

You know, in the example you gave about maybe it's because the text is bigger or the color red, but those are the same factors we think about as a human.

We think if we know that if the font is bigger, It performs better.

We know that red performs better than green.

Quite possibly, but here's the interesting thing.

Human art constantly evolves, and all AI is trained on is what has been done before and what has worked.

And so if I asked it, let's say we composed 5 different songs and said, hey, AI, which song is going to be better?

It's going to say something that's right in the middle of the distribution of popular songs.

But that's not what actually makes it next year and the year after.

It's new things, it's new twists that nobody has seen before.

That's what we love.

That's what we seek as consumers.

And so because AI can only be trained up on what already exists, it's never going to get the new thing at the edge.

But if the AI was asked to— because I think the reason why a new song would break out, let's say, you know, a new Drake song comes out and it's a smash hit.

If we think about that distribution curve, so like if I draw it on the graph, you're saying that this middle section here is what sort of AI will aim at because it's the popular and

the known.

Yeah.

Well, if I tell AI to make a million songs, which is kind of what I guess is what's going on every day around the world, if you scattered them on this graph at like, you know, absolutely.

And then the AI's most unusual song ends up taking off, but it's just because there's so many of them.

Quite right.

But that's the human selection part that we're seeing over there.

If you asked, okay, out of all these dots, which do you think AI is going to be suggest, it's gonna have to tell you the middle of the curve.

But the surprising part is the part that you circled there, which is the one on the edge is the one that humans like.

Why?

Because we're constant novelty seekers.

We care about the things that are new.

I think the, the point I'm getting at is that, um, the creation of it, the creative process, is still the same, which is like, totally, AI or humans just trying a bunch of shit and

then the world going, oh, that Oh, I totally agree.

This is consistent with what I'm saying, which is that AI can be massively creative in terms of the generation of something, but you need humans to do the selection.

I'm only arguing the point that AI is not good at saying, okay, I've generated 100 songs, this is the one humans will choose.

We end up saying, hey, wait, this one is just weird and unique enough that I really like that.

It's interesting because when you, um, when you speak to like record labels about music, what they're often doing is getting a format of a song that they know will work.

So they're like, right, so it's got to be 8 bars here, it's going to be this here, you've got to have a chorus that's like hooky, it's got to come back round, it's got to build up pace.

And there's like a rough format to it.

And it's no surprise that Ed Sheeran— someone like Ed Sheeran has written so many songs for so many fucking people.

Yeah.

When I spent some time working with Sony, they had a brand new boy band in the wake of One Direction.

And when I sat with the boy band and was introducing myself, they said to me, oh yeah, so here are his the boy band's first 3 songs, and, um, Ed Sheeran has written all of them.

And I was like, what?

I thought, I thought like, they're like, no, Ed Sheeran's written all of them, and then what we do is we give them to the boy band and then the boy band sing them and they're pretty

much guaranteed to be hits because Ed Sheeran has like a formula.

The way he writes is really in like vogue right now.

Yeah, people tend to think a lot that the songs that are number 1 in the charts are there because just because someone had creative genius.

And of course, that is the case sometimes.

But there is a lot of this writing going on and then handing the formula over because someone has cracked the code of a hit.

Right.

But here's the thing, and you know that we all know this, which is that the code never lasts.

So humans have this pull where they're always seeking things between novelty and familiarity.

So we like things where we recognize the brand and we recognize what the singer has done before, for, but there has to be novelty or else we're not going to go for it.

We're not going to listen to that boy band for the next 10 years doing the same song over and over.

So you're of course right that we, you know, we want a bit of familiarity, we want to be anchored, but we definitely seek the new.

This is what humans always do.

This is why car companies always release the next model even though the current model is perfectly fine.

This is why haircuts evolve.

This is why fashion evolves through the years, um, because we always care about novelty.

And the other thing in the music industry that I think is, is also creating a hit is— I was reading many years ago about some psychology, which you'll probably know much more about,

that says exactly what you just said, which is we love something when it is familiar but new.

Exactly.

So the way that the record industry and the radio industry makes something familiar is they blast the same song at you on every radio station for a long period of time until it breaks

past being just novel, just new, and it becomes familiar.

And like, I saw this graph which shows that the song that you'll love is right there in the middle of like, it's new enough that you're still into it, but it's, um, familiar now because

you've heard it so many times that you love it.

And you'll— if anyone listening, the first time you hear a song, you might not love it as much as once you've heard it like 20 times, and then at some point you've heard it too much.

Yeah.

And it comes back down the other side of the curve where it's now too familiar.

Yeah, that's exactly right.

And so we're always seeking that tension in the middle.

And yeah, companies run into this all the time.

Like, sometimes they try things that are too novel that just completely fail.

You know, Coca-Cola tried this long time ago with introducing New Coke, and no one liked it, whatever.

Um, and other companies, like, what was that company, BlackBerry, with the, the little thumb things that you can press the physical keyboard on the phone.

They failed because they wouldn't change fast enough.

But anyway, companies that make it are always staying in that sweet spot.

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When you think about the brain and how it's built, and then you think about the exact technology that they've used to create AI, isn't it very, very similar?

And if so, if it is similar, what does that say about humans' role in the future?

It's similar, but it's not the same, which is why with AI you get what we call jagged intelligence, meaning that it can do something so extraordinarily smart and then in the next moment

give an answer that's weird and doesn't make any sense.

AI still is doing this.

It's not, it's not thinking like we think.

Okay, why?

It's because AI, as we think about it now, really started of course decades and decades ago where people said, look, you've got all these billions of cells, neurons in the brain that

are connected to each other.

What if we ignore all that complexity and we just say, look, imagine that you have units that are connected to each other.

We're gonna forget about, you know, a single cell in the brain is as complicated as a it's got the entire human genome, it's trafficking millions of proteins.

Let's put all that aside.

Just imagine it's a circle and it's connected to other cells, and each connection has a certain strength.