The Brain’s Amazing Ability to Change — David Eagleman Breaks It Down

You know, you can't tear half the circuitry out of my cell phone and expect it to still work. But you can do that with the brain. Hey everyone, it's Rosie here. Welcome back to "Radio Headspace." So, like many of you, after I had COVID, I didn't feel like myself. I felt foggy, my memory was bad, and I was just off. But a friend of mine reassured me that my brain is elastic and that everything would be fine. And of course, everything is back to normal now. But that left a big question. What exactly is brain elasticity? And to answer that, I called up Stanford neuroscientist, Dr. David Eagleman. Much like me, David is obsessed with understanding how the brain works. And the conclusion he's come to is that our brain is basically the most advanced piece of software in the world. I always find it so fascinated to hear people's stories of why they decided to study the brain because it is such a complex structure. So I'm curious for you, and you don't have to take long to respond, but I'm just curious. Yeah. Well, for me, I was in college and I was taking a lot of philosophy classes, and I really enjoyed these philosophical conundrums that you spin yourself down into and so on. But in the end, many of them, that's where it ends. There's never an answer. And I thought, "Gosh, if we could understand the perceptual machinery by which we're viewing the world, maybe there would be an answer here. Maybe we don't have to leave it with question marks." So I started studying neuroscience. As it turns out, my father was a psychiatrist and my mother was a biology teacher. So it was sort of natural. I ended up there, but I certainly did not think that until I was maybe 20 years old. I never thought I'd be going down that path. And once you were there, you were just fascinated? I was hooked, yeah. I actually majored in British and American literature as an undergraduate because that was actually my first love. And that has helped me out a lot because I write books also. So I've been able to, you know, build a lab and study the brain and do hundreds of experiments on things and write books about it, which has been really fun for me In Livewired, you discuss the brain's incredible adaptability, and it's a topic for me, like I said, that's really fascinating. I'm curious if you can share a personal experience or case study that highlights this concept in action. Yeah, when I was growing up, there was a kid in Albuquerque in my hometown who was starting to have epileptic seizures more and more often, and his parents were taking him around trying to figure out what was going on. And he started having seizures really, in the end, by multiple times an hour. Which, you can't live life...