Progress in neuroscience continues to accelerate, and one of the principal catalysts of this progress is neuroscientist David Eagleman. We excerpt a recent article about Eagleman’s research, into amongst other things, synaesthesia, sensory substitution, time perception, neurochemical basis for attraction, and consciousness.
[div class=attrib]From the Telegraph:[end-div]
It ought to be quite intimidating, talking to David Eagleman. He is one of the world’s leading neuroscientists, after all, known for his work on time perception, synaesthesia and the use of neurology in criminal justice. But as anyone who has read his best-selling books or listened to his TED talks online will know, he has a gift for communicating complicated ideas in an accessible and friendly way — Brian Cox with an American accent.
He lives in Houston, Texas, with his wife and their two-month-old baby. When we Skype each other, he is sitting in a book-lined study and he doesn’t look as if his nights are being too disturbed by mewling. No bags under his eyes. In fact, with his sideburns and black polo shirt he looks much younger than his 41 years, positively boyish. His enthusiasm for his subject is boyish, too, as he warns me, he “speaks fast”.
He sure does. And he waves his arms around. We are talking about the minute calibrations and almost instantaneous assessments the brain makes when members of the opposite sex meet, one of many brain-related subjects covered in his book Incognito: The Secret Lives of the Brain, which is about to be published in paperback.
“Men are consistently more attracted to women with dilated eyes,” he says. “Because that corresponds with sexual excitement.”
Still, I say, not exactly a romantic discovery, is it? How does this theory go down with his wife? “Well she’s a neuroscientist like me so we joke about it all the time, like when I grow a beard. Women will always say they don’t like beards, but when you do the study it turns out they do, and the reason is it’s a secondary sex characteristic that indicates sexual development, the thing that separates the men from the boys.”
Indeed, according to Eagleman, we mostly run on unconscious autopilot. Our neural systems have been carved by natural selection to solve problems that were faced by our ancestors. Which brings me to another of his books, Why The Net Matters. As the father of children who spend a great deal of their time on the internet, I want to know if he thinks it is changing their brains.
“It certainly is,” he says, “especially in the way we seek information. When we were growing up it was all about ‘just in case’ information, the Battle of Hastings and so on. Now it is ‘just in time’ learning, where a kid looks something up online if he needs to know about it. This means kids today are becoming less good at memorising, but in other ways their method of learning is superior to ours because it targets neurotransmitters in the brain, ones that are related to curiosity, emotional salience and interactivity. So I think there might be some real advantages to where this is going. Kids are becoming faster at searching for information. When you or I read, our eyes scan down the page, but for a Generation-Y kid, their eyes will have a different set of movements, top, then side, then bottom and that is the layout of webpages.”
In many ways Eagleman’s current status as “the poster boy of science’s most fashionable field” (as the neuroscientist was described in a recent New Yorker profile) seems entirely apt given his own upbringing. His mother was a biology teacher, his father a psychiatrist who was often called upon to evaluate insanity pleas. Yet Eagleman says he wasn’t drawn to any of this. “Growing up, I didn’t see my career path coming at all, because in tenth grade I always found biology gross, dissecting rats and frogs. But in college I started reading about the brain and then I found myself consuming anything I could on the subject. I became hooked.”
Eagleman’s mother has described him as an “unusual child”. He wrote his first words at two, and at 12 he was explaining Einstein’s theory of relativity to her. He also liked to ask for a list of 400 random objects then repeat them back from memory, in reverse order. At Rice University, Houston, he majored in electrical engineering, but then took a sabbatical, joined the Israeli army as a volunteer, spent a semester at Oxford studying political science and literature and finally moved to LA to try and become a stand-up comedian. It didn’t work out and so he returned to Rice, this time to study neurolinguistics. After this came his doctorate and his day job as a professor running a laboratory at Baylor College of Medicine, Houston (he does his book writing at night, doesn’t have hobbies and has never owned a television).
I ask if he has encountered any snobbery within the scientific community for being an academic who has “dumbed down” by writing popular science books that spend months on the New York Times bestseller list? “I have to tell you, that was one of my concerns, and I can definitely find evidence of that. Online, people will sometimes say terrible things about me, but they are the exceptions that illustrate a more benevolent rule. I give talks on university campuses and the students there tell me they read my books because they synthesise large swathes of data in a readable way.”
He actually thinks there is an advantage for scientists in making their work accessible to non-scientists. “I have many tens of thousands of neuroscience details in my head and the process of writing about them and trying to explain them to an eighth grader makes them become clearer in my own mind. It crystallises them.”
I tell him that my copy of Incognito is heavily annotated and there is one passage where I have simply written a large exclamation mark. It concerns Eric Weihenmayer who, in 2001, became the first blind person to climb Mount Everest. Today he climbs with a grid of more than six hundred tiny electrodes in his mouth. This device allows him to see with his tongue. Although the tongue is normally a taste organ, its moisture and chemical environment make it a good brain-machine interface when a tingly electrode grid is laid on its surface. The grid translates a video input into patterns of electrical pulses, allowing the tongue to discern qualities usually ascribed to vision such as distance, shape, direction of movement and size.
[div class=attrib]Read the entire article after the jump.[end-div]
[div class=attrib]Image courtesy of ALAMY / Telegraph.[end-div]