David Eagleman

David Eagleman

Neuroscientist, Stanford University

A man with light skin, short curly hair, and blue eyes is wearing a black t-shirt. He is resting his head on his finger, with his arm on a table, and has a calm expression, photographed against a dark background.

David Eagleman is a neuroscientist at Stanford University and an internationally bestselling author. He is co-founder of two venture-backed companies, Neosensory and BrainCheck, and he also directs the Center for Science and Law, a national non-profit institute. He is best known for his work on sensory substitution, time perception, brain plasticity, synesthesia, and neurolaw.

He is the writer and presenter of the international PBS series, The Brain with David Eagleman, and the author of the companion book, The Brain: The Story of You. He is also the writer and presenter of The Creative Brain on Netflix.

Beyond his 120+ academic publications, he has published many popular books. His latest book Livewired tells the story of brain plasticity: how your forest of billions of neurons reconfigures every moment over your life. His bestselling book Incognito: The Secret Lives of the Brain, explores the neuroscience “under the hood” of the conscious mind: all the aspects of neural function to which we have no awareness or access. His work of fiction, SUM, is an international bestseller published in 33 languages and turned into two operas. The Safety Net examines what the advent of the internet means on the timescale of civilizations. The award-winning Wednesday is Indigo Blue explores the neurological condition of synesthesia, in which the senses are blended. The Runaway Species, co-authored with music composer Anthony Brandt, explores the neuroscience and behavior behind human creativity.

Eagleman is a TED speaker, a Guggenheim Fellow, and serves on several boards, including the American Brain Foundation and the The Long Now Foundation. He is the Chief Scientific Advisor for the Mind Science Foundation, and the winner of Claude Shannon Luminary Award from Bell Labs and the McGovern Award for Excellence in Biomedical Communication.

He serves as the academic editor for the Journal of Science and Law, was named Science Educator of the Year by the Society for Neuroscience, and was featured as one of the Brightest Idea Guys by Italy’s Style magazine. He has served as the scientific advisor to several television shows (including Westworld and Perception), and has been profiled on the Colbert Report, NOVA Science Now, the New Yorker, CNN’s Next List, and many other venues. He appears regularly on radio and television to discuss literature and science.

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7mins
Expanding your worldview starts with understanding your brain. Stanford neuroscientist David Eagleman explains.
Unlikely Collaborators
3mins
How do companies keep getting you to buy the "latest and greatest" iteration of the product you already own? By testing the boundaries.
7mins
How does humanity arrive at great ideas? Simple: we take already great ideas and just arrive at even greater ideas.
5mins
Some say that great ideas come out of thin air. Neuroscientist David Eagleman posits that perhaps all great ideas are simply built upon old ideas, because thats what fuels the creative brain.
4mins
Everyone thinks they know how to make their brain more creative and have better ideas.
5mins
The only thing between you and your better self is your brain. Programmed to maximize short term reward, we often find ourselves struggling between what we want and what we want to want.
2mins
Many people are quite sure of what's needed after a tragedy, yet there is a lot of disagreement. How can this be? It's all about how the brain can form widely different opinions inside different people.
3mins
Yes, conceivably. And if/when we achieve the levels of technology necessary for simulation, the universe will become our playground.
We will be able to enhance the natural sensory capabilities that humans have, and I think this is where technology and the brain have a very fertile meeting ground.
Consciousness is essentially the company president that has to arbitrate all the different mechanisms. 
1mins
Neuroscientist David Eagleman explains how your brain perceives time (retrospectively).
Your assessment of how long something took has a lot to do with how much energy your brain has to burn during the event. 
Estimates are that a third of the prison population has mental illness. 
Keeping a secret is quite bad for you because it causes a lot of stress. 
How all the parts of the brain come together so that you have a unified perception of the world is one of the unsolved mysteries in neuroscience. 
The idea that there's this massive amount happening under the hood came from Freud. 
Think of consciousness as essentially the company president that has to arbitrate all the different mechanisms. 
As soon as we abandon the first intuitions we have, that we’re the ones in control of everything, then we can start sailing into the inner cosmos and discovering all sorts of new planets and life forms and things like that on the inside of our skulls. 
As we keep pushing forward with technology, we’ll be able to take more and more data from the invisible parts of the world and start feeding them into our brain.