The most complex thing we've discovered
in the universe is the human brain.
For the past 20 years, I've been trying to understand
how what happens in 3 pounds of jell-o-like material
somehow becomes us.
What we feel,
what matters to us,
our beliefs, and our hopes...
Everything we are happens in here...
And, for me, there's one mystery
that's absolutely fundamental...
What is reality?
What if I told you that this world around us,
this richly textured world, were all just an illusion
constructed in your head?
What if I said that the real world
has no smell or taste...
No sound?
What if I said there's no color?
If you could perceive reality as it really is out there,
you wouldn't recognize it at all.
I want to show you how the brain takes in information,
sifts through it to find patterns,
and uses it to build the multisensory,
technicolor show
that is your reality.
When I'm in the world, my senses are flooded
with sights and sounds and smells,
and it seems obvious that reality is just out there.
There's a person. There's a cab.
All I have to do is show up,
and my senses let me experience it all...
But there's a twist to this story.
Let me show you something.
So take a look at this middle square here.
Does that look more similar to the light square or the dark?
Well, it looks like a light square, yeah?
You might be surprised if I move it.
Now it looks like a dark square.
Oh, my god. It is the same.
Oh.
It's surprising, right?
Ha ha ha! It is.
Ah! Oh, my goodness.
Wow. You're ba... ha ha ha!
Seriously?
Yeah. Ha ha ha!
Do you have a guess
as to why there's an illusion here?
Well, it seems like there's a shadow,
so it makes this darker.
That's exactly right.
Your brain is trying to understand
the colors of things
irrespective of the lighting or the shadows,
so somehow it's not about what's hitting your eyes.
It's about your brain's interpretation.
That's really trippy.
You've just messed up my whole day.
Ha ha ha!
Now, this is about more
than just a visual illusion.
It's about a fact that's central to our lives.
Our perception of reality has less to do
with what's happening out there and more to do
with what's happening in here.
To understand what's going on, we first need to know
how information from the world around us gets into the brain.
It feels as if sights and sounds
just stream in through our eyes and our ears,
but imagine if you could climb inside a human skull.
When you step into the skull, you'll find there's no way
for light or sound or smells to get directly in here.
This is a sealed chamber...
So the brain sits in darkness and in silence.
It's in total isolation.
Your brain's never seen the outside world,
but somehow you experience it.
Now, this might seem straightforward
because we have portals to the outside world,
like your eyes and ears,
but these aren't just piping in sights and sounds.
Instead, photons of light or air compression waves,
these are getting converted into the common currency
of the brain... Electrochemical signals.
These signals travel through dense networks
of brain cells called neurons.
There are a hundred billion neurons in the human brain,
and in every second of your life,
each one of these is sending tens or hundreds
of electrical pulses to thousands of other neurons.
And somehow all of this activity produces your sense of reality.
So whether it's the bark of a dog
or the smell of coffee or a view of a beautiful sunset,
it's all made of the same stuff in here.
And this is the stuff of reality...
But how does the brain turn it into something meaningful?
Well, it does it by sifting through the nonstop stream
of incoming data to find patterns
which it then assembles into a reality.
It's an operation which is the product
of millions of years of evolution,
so efficient, so powerful
that its work seems effortless and instantaneous.
Take as an example sight.
The act of seeing feels so natural
that it's hard to appreciate the vast,
sophisticated machinery running under the hood.
For us to see clearly, many different systems
need to be operating in concert.
It's about more than just the eyes.
The best way to understand this is to look
at the extraordinary case of a man who lost his sight...
And then was given the chance to get it back.
I lost my sight when I was 3 1/2 years old
as the result of a chemical explosion.
And, oddly, it didn't seem like it was a big deal.
I guess as a 3 1/2-year-old, my world according to vision
was not as well-established as it would be for somebody
who lost their vision later in life.
Eagleman, voice-over: After over 40 years of blindness,
Mike may had pioneering stem cell treatment
that would repair the physical damage
that the explosion caused to his eyes.
Cameras were there to witness the moment
when, for the first time, the bandages came off.
May, voice-over: Dr. Goodman does the cornea transplant...
And he peels back the bandages.
Sure can.
He gets them all the way off, and there's this whoosh
of light and bombarding of images onto my eye.
Holy smoke.
Eagleman, voice-over: In surgical terms,
the operation was a total success...
What's across the room over here?
Eagleman, voice-over: But to Mike, it wasn't.
There was something wrong.
All of a sudden, you turn on this flood
of visual information, it's overwhelming.
My brain, it's just going, "oh, my gosh"...
So that's how the world proceeded
one image at a time,
seeing cars as they whizzed by,
and then I would see a sign ahead of us,
and it looked like we were gonna smack right into it.
And, in fact, it's a sign over the freeway,
and we're not gonna run into it... we're going under it...
And that was only the first hour.
It was going to get worse when Mike got home.
If you put 4 blond boys together,
all roughly the same height, and I looked at them,
I couldn't tell you which two were mine.
Don't go away. I'm not finished looking at you.
Eagleman, voice-over: Mike's new eyes were functioning perfectly,
and they were sending signals to the brain
just like yours or mine do,
but he couldn't see his sons in any meaningful way.
I had no face recognition whatsoever, none.
Eagleman, voice-over: When he'd been totally blind,
Mike was a paralympic skier,
but his first sighted attempt at skiing was a complete failure.
May, voice-over: When I skied for the first time,
because of my depth perception difficulty,
I had no time to figure out the difference between 4 dark things
on the white snow... a person,
a tree,
shadow,
or a hole.
Eagleman, voice-over: Ten years on,
Mike still needs his guide dog to get around.
He can detect light and motion and identify colors,
but he struggles to Gauge how far away things are.
He still can't read the expressions on his son's faces.
He still can't read words on a page.
What Mike's story gives us is a glimpse of all the elements
that have to be in place for the brain
to construct a visual reality.
Many regions of the brain are involved in vision.
They specialize in different aspects,
such as motion, edges, colors, face recognition.
Somehow the brain weaves all of this together,
unifies it to form what we experience as an image.
In Mike's case, decades of blindness
caused these regions of his brain to be taken over
for other tasks, like hearing and touch.
They just weren't available for him to use,
even when he was given a pair of new eyes.
We often get our best view of how the brain operates
when that operation is disrupted.
Hey, Brian.
Hey.
That's why neuroscientists
sometimes disrupt things deliberately.
Brian is part of an experiment being conducted
by Alyssa Brewer at the university of California.
Nice to meet you.
So good to see you. Welcome.
You ready to try some goggles on today?
Oh, I'm ready...
Volunteers wear these goggles
for weeks at a time.
Their brains are forced to cope with a new view of the world
that's dramatically altered.
What these have inside are two prisms
that take the whole visual world and flip it
so whatever you see normally in the left side of the world
will now be on the right side of the world.
So as you move through the world,
you're going to have a problem figuring out where things are
as you see them in one side
but reach for them on the opposite side.
What the world looks like is this,
but what I'm seeing... Is this.
It's a straightforward change,
but it's also a massive mind mash.
The visual data streaming in through my eyes
no longer makes any intuitive sense,
and I'm struggling.
Ha ha!
So, yeah, because the world is left-right flipped, um,
I... i know cognitively I'm supposed to reach out
in the other direction, but, of course, I've had
a lifetime of training telling me to reach out
in a... in a particular direction.
So I feel like this is gonna take
a little getting used to.
Can you see my hand in your visual field?
Yep, so it looks like if I reach out this way...
And this way. Ha ha ha!
Eagleman, voice-over: Even though I'm consciously
trying to get it right...
Look over here. Ok. Ha ha!
Eagleman, voice-over: I can't help but respond
in a certain way.
And over here. Ha ha ha!
Ha ha! Ha ha ha!
There you go. Very good. Ha ha!
Welcome to the prism world.
Yes.
Eagleman, voice-over: Of course, this is all new to me,
but Brian's been wearing his goggles for a week.
So how well has his brain adapted?
It's very difficult to figure out
which way to go, and so his motor system
and his feeling of touch are sending him
one direction while his visual system
is sending him the other direction.
Eagleman, voice-over: Brian's doing well,
unlike me.
I have to consciously reconstruct my reality.
This morning, my brain could rely on automated interactions,
but now it can't.
Interestingly, I've broken out in a sweat,
and I'm hot, and I'm super dizzy and nauseated.
Oh, you know, I got to take a break.
I'm so sorry.
I got to take these off for a second.
Is that ok? Oh, whew.
Boy, that is really nauseating.
We're going to go down the maze down here
and see how you guys do navigating your way
through a spatial map that's...
David, you're going to start out
going forward this way...
Ok.
And, Brian, you're going to...
Oof. God. Ha ha ha!
I'm just trying to get my head start.
Eagleman, voice-over: So how do I get as good as Brian?
Well, it happens intuitively.
Just look at my hands.
I cross-reference what I see with what I can touch.
In fact, all my senses come into play.
This is what Brian's been doing for the last 7 days...
And the result is that his brain is now starting
to decode that new visual input automatically.
Brian's not simply getting better
at making conscious adjustments.
His whole reality is changing.
Now, if you take those subjects
and put goggles on them for two weeks,
we find that it takes about a week
to start behaving normally.
They start being able to, uh, figure out
how to interact with the world.
They're constructing a new reality around them,
a new way of dealing with these incoming perceptions,
and they say that initially, they can tell
there's a new left, an old left
and a new right and old right.
By about a week in, they even lose the concept
of which right and left were the old ones
and the new ones, so it's like
their whole spatial map of the world is altering,
and by two weeks in, they will write well,
read without a problem, do all of our walking tasks
and reaching tasks, um, and then when they
remove the goggles, it actually takes them
about a day to go back to normal behavior.
What this exposes for me is how much effort
the brain goes through to construct our world
because normally, you're walking
through the world, and it feels like
there's reality out there.
But, in fact,
there's so much work happening
behind the scenes to allow
that reality to happen.
Eagleman, voice-over: Seeing requires
an intensive training program,
but new recruits come on board every day.
We call them babies.
When babies reach out to touch what's in front of them,
they're not just learning what an object feels like.
They're learning how to see.
They're establishing pathways in the brain
that'll be used for the rest of their lives.
Because vision is a whole-body experience...
The data coming in from our eyes
only means something if we can cross-reference it.
If, from birth, you weren't able to interact with the world,
if you couldn't work out through feedback
what the sensory information meant,
in theory, you'd never be able to see.
This cross-referencing doesn't stop when we're fully grown.
It continues throughout our lives.
What we touch influences how we see.
Taste is affected by our sense of smell.
Our sight informs how we hear.
Our senses depend on each other,
and our reality is built by comparing these streams of data.
When they're woven together,
we get our perception of this moment.
It's an astonishing feat to pull off,
but there's one factor which really adds complication...
Timing.
All those streams of sensory data
are processed by the brain at different speeds.
For our reality to be constructed,
they have to be synchronized.
What do I mean by this?
Well, the easiest way for me to show you
is right here at a racetrack.
Get set.
Eagleman, voice-over: When there's a loud sound,
it feels as though you react to it instantly...
But you don't.
Watching sprinters in slow motion,
we can see that there's a gap
between the gun going off and their start.
They may train to make this gap as small as possible,
but their biology imposes limits.
Processing that sound,
then sending out signals to the muscles to move
will take around 2/10 of a second.
And that time really can't be improved on.
In a sport where thousandths of a second can be the difference
between winning and losing, it seems surprisingly slow...
So why do we use a pistol to start sprinters?
Everyone knows that light travels faster than sound,
so why not use a light?
Set.
Eagleman, voice-over: We set up a test to show you.
In the top screen, we're triggered by a light.
In the bottom screen,
we're triggered by the gun.
You can see that when our start is triggered
by a flash of light, we respond more slowly.
It takes 40 milliseconds longer to process.
Why?
Because the visual system is more complex.
It's bigger.
It involves almost a third of the brain,
so while all of the electrical signals inside the brain
travel at the same speed, the ones related to sight
go through more complex processing,
and that takes time...
And this isn't just about hearing and seeing.
Every type of sensory information
takes a different amount of time to process.
You'll react slower to a touch on the foot
than one on the hand.
The astonishing thing is that our brains hide all this.
When I clap my hands, everything seems synchronized.
Why?
Well, your brain is pulling off fancy editing tricks.
What it takes to be reality is actually a delayed version.
It collects up all the information from the senses
before it decides on a story of what happened,
and that means you live in the past.
By the time you think the moment now occurs,
it's already long gone.
To conjure a reality from all that sensory information,
your brain needs around half a second.
That's the unbridgeable gap
between an event occurring
and your conscious experience of it.
In that half a second,
a lot of things need to happen.
Sometimes it's easy to assume that there's a single spot
in the brain that takes care of this or that function,
like an area for memory or generosity or empathy.
But, in fact, the vast networks of the brain
are so much more complex than that.
Think of the brain like a city.
If you were to look out over a city and ask,
"where is the economy located?"
You'd see that there's no single answer to that.
Instead, the economy emerges
as an interaction of all the elements...
And so it is with reality.
The raw materials of perception
are gathered by our sensory receptors.
They're turned into electrical signals
and transported around our brains
along superhighways of neurons.
Processed, they become our reality.
Some parts of brain city specialize in vision.
Other districts care about hearing,
some about touch, and so on...
And even within a sense, like vision,
you have streets that specialize in colors or edges or motion...
But, just like in a city,
no neighborhood operates in isolation.
Instead, the life of a city depends on the interaction
between residents at all different scales.
And somehow out of all of this interaction
emerges your personal reality.
Reality is the brain's ultimate construction.
It's based on all the streams of data from our senses,
but it's not dependent on them.
How do we know?
Because when you take it all away,
reality doesn't stop.
It just gets stranger.
This is Alcatraz...
A jail built on the principle of isolation.
Between its inmates and the rest of society
stood not only stone walls...
But the cold, dangerous waters of the San Francisco bay.
Prisoners were completely and deliberately cut off...
And there was one place inside the prison
where that seclusion went even further.
This is the hole, and prisoners who were sent here
were completely isolated from the outside world.
They had no interactions with people.
There was no sound, and there was no light.
Robert Luke was sent to Alcatraz in 1954 for armed robbery.
He was known by the nickname "cold blue" Luke.
Everybody knew about the dark hole.
The dark hole was a bad place.
Some guys couldn't take that.
I mean, they were in there, and within a couple of days,
they were banging their head on the wall.
As punishment for smashing up his cell,
he was sent to the hole for 29 straight days.
You didn't know how you would act when you got in there.
Didn't want to find out.
When they close that door...
There's just nothing there.
It's pitch black.
But it didn't stay that way for long.
Starved of input, Luke's brain
started to produce its own reality.
I remember I'd go on these trips
one I used to remember was flying a kite...
But it got pretty real,
but it was all in my head.
What Luke felt was something that's also
been reported by other prisoners kept in the same conditions.
Deprived of new sensory information,
they said they went beyond dreaming or daydreaming.
They didn't just imagine pictures.
They saw.
This testimony goes to the heart of the relationship
between the outside world, the brain,
and what we call reality.
To understand it,
we need to look more deeply into the visual system.
This is the thalamus,
one of the brain's major junctions.
Most sensory information connects through here
on its way to the outer surface of the brain... the cortex,
so data collected from the eyes stops here
before going to the visual cortex.
Now, you'd expect a heavy flow of information from the thalamus
to the visual cortex, and there is.
But there's 6 times as much traffic
flowing in the opposite direction,
and that dwarfs the amount coming in from the eyes...
And that suggests that in any one moment,
what we experience as seeing relies less
on the light streaming into our eyes
and more on what's already inside our heads.
Even when brains are unanchored from external data,
they continue to generate their own imagery.
In other words,
remove the world and the show still goes on.
We all have this internally generated reality.
Incredible as it may sound,
this world lives inside your brain.
It's constantly updated by information from our senses,
but moment to moment, what we experience
isn't what's really out there.
Instead, it's a beautifully rendered simulation.
This is a surprising way to understand
how you see the world.
It's called the internal model,
and it's vital to our ability to function.
As I walk down this city street, I seem to automatically know
what things are without having to work out the details.
For example, I don't have to work out the detail
of what this rectangular, metallic thing is
or this giant green fluffy thing behind me
or this huge object with reflective panes on it
or this thing with 4 appendages.
My brain makes assumptions about what I'm seeing
based on my internal model, and that's been built up
from years of experience
of walking city streets
just like this one.
Instead of using my senses to rebuild my reality
from scratch every moment,
I'm comparing sensory information
with a model that I've already constructed...
Updating it,
refining it, correcting it.
Our brains are so good at doing this
that we're normally unaware of it,
but sometimes under certain conditions,
we can see the process at work.
Look at this hollow mask of Einstein's face.
Your brain tells you it's coming out at you.
And even when you know it's an illusion,
you can't help but fall for it.
What you're seeing is the internal model,
not the raw information that's coming in from your eyes.
Your internal model is built on a lifetime of experience
with faces that stick out.
When you're confronted with one that's hollow,
your model simply sees what it expects to see.
The visual cortex sends its internal expectations
to the thalamus, and the thalamus compares those
to what's coming in through the eyes.
The difference between the two is what the thalamus sends back
so the cortex can update its model.
Thanks to the internal model,
the world out there remains stable,
even when I'm moving.
Let me show you what I mean.
So imagine that I really love this scene behind me
and I want to go ahead and capture it
so I can view it later.
So I'm gonna go ahead and videotape the scene.
And I'm checking out all the buildings,
ok, and now I'm gonna play this back.
Not surprisingly, the resulting video is nauseating.
So why does this video look so terrible,
given that when I look at the buildings,
my eyes are making the same jerky movements?
Although you're not generally aware of it,
your eyes move about 4 times a second,
but your internal model operates under the assumption
that the world outside is stable,
so my eyes aren't taking a video.
They're simply gathering bits of data
to update the city that's already inside my head.
Having an internal model helps me make sense of my environment,
and that's its primary function...
To navigate the world.
The brain doesn't bother picking up every detail,
just enough to get us through,
but it plays the trick of making us feel
as though we've seen it all...
As another famous experiment shows.
In the 1960s, the Russian psychologist Alfred yarbus
used this painting called "the unexpected visitor"
in an experiment.
He devised a way to track the eye movements of volunteers
who were seeing it for the first time.
Hi, Jennifer. Hello.
I'm gonna ask you to put these glasses on.
Eagleman, voice-over: We're gonna rerun what he did.
My volunteers have a few seconds to take in the image.
Dina, look at this painting,
and I want you to gather what's going on in the scene.
Eagleman, voice-over: We can watch in real time
exactly where each person's eyes go.
Tell me what you think is going on in this painting.
I think the man in the brown
is the unexpected visitor.
Eagleman, voice-over: One brief look is enough
for the brain to model the picture,
but just how detailed is that model?
How many children were there?
Uh, there were two. Ok.
So go ahead and look back at the painting
and ask that question again.
Oh, quite different.
How many children are there?
I consider it 3.
Eagleman, voice-over: Everyone who'd seen the painting
thought they knew what was in it,
but my specific questions highlighted blanks
that the brain had never filled in
because the details weren't needed.
How many paintings are on the wall in their house?
Maybe two or 3. Ok.
Go ahead and look back at the painting
and answer that question.
Oh, god, there's a million. Yeah, a map
and then another, and then there's... ha ha!...
7 on the other wall and then one small one and the map.
Ok. There's a ton.
Eagleman, voice-over: This is not a failure of the brain.
It doesn't try to produce
a perfect simulation of the world.
The internal model is a hastily drawn approximation,
and more details are added on a need-to-know basis.
When you looked at the painting the first time,
you saw sort of a rough draft
of what was going on, and when I asked you
specific questions, you had to go
and answer those by looking,
by turning your attention
onto specific parts of the painting.
And only then did you actually see it.
Eagleman, voice-over: So placing your eyes on an object
is no guarantee of seeing it...
But there's something else we're unaware of
happening every time we look at any picture
or person or thing...
Any time we look at all.
We might think of color as a fundamental defining quality
of the world around us.
After all, it's everywhere.
But here's the startling thing.
In the outside world,
color doesn't actually exist.
When electro-magnetic radiation hits an object,
some of it bounces off and is captured by our eyes.
We can distinguish between millions
of combinations of wavelengths,
but it's only inside our heads that any of this becomes color.
Add to that the fact that the wavelengths
we can detect are only a small part of what's out there.
You experience reality as it's presented by your senses,
and it doesn't typically strike you
that things could be very different.
What we've been talking about so far
is what we call the visible spectrum of light,
which is a spectrum of wavelengths
that runs from what we call red to Violet...
But it turns out that this only constitutes
a tiny fraction of the electromagnetic spectrum...
In fact, less than 1/10,000,000,000 of it...
So all the rest of the spectrum...
Including radio waves and microwaves
and x-rays and gamma rays, all of this stuff...
Is flowing through our bodies right now,
and we're completely unaware of it
because we don't have any specialized biological receptors
to pick up on it.
So what this means
is that the part of reality that we can see
is totally limited by our biology.
And this isn't just about sight.
All our senses are only picking up
a small part of the information that's out there...
So for a dog, he's tuned into a whole world
of scent molecules that I'm not.
His experience of smell is as rich as my experience of vision.
Eagleman, voice-over: In the blind and deaf world
of the tick, the important signals
are temperature and body odor.
For cave dwelling bats, it's all about
air compression waves that allow them to echolocate...
But no one's having
an experience of objective reality
of the world that really truly exists.
Instead, each creature perceives
only what it has evolved to perceive...
And this isn't just about variation between species.
If we're each experiencing a personal reality
constructed inside our brains,
how do I know that my reality is at all like yours?
Most of the time, it seems as if we operate along the same lines,
as if you and I agree what a blue sky is,
as if the sound of a dog bark
provokes the same sort of response in both of us...
Eagleman, voice-over: But there's a small group of people
whose perception is measurably different from ours.
For me, anytime I see a letter or a number
or think of a word or say someone's name,
there is a lot of color associated with that.
Eagleman, voice-over: Hannah is one of 6,000 people I've studied
who have synesthesia.
I study synesthesia because it's one of the few conditions
in which it's clear that someone else's reality
is different from mine.
And it makes it obvious
that how we perceive the world is not one size fits all.
Hannah, voice-over: In my mind, I associate each letter
with its own color.
So, for example,
the letter "a" is always red,
"b" is always blue,
"c" is always orange every time.
So they never change,
but what's interesting is, when they're formed into words
in different orders, the configuration of the colors
changes, and that can be sort of interesting.
So in the word "Hannah," my name,
it looks like a sunset.
It's yellow fading into red fading into kind of a clear...
Like clouds, almost... and then goes back to red and to yellow.
These experiences come about
because of the simple fact that inside the brain,
all sensory information is made from the same stuff...
Electrochemical signals.
Synesthesia is the result of cross-talk
between sensory areas of the brain.
Think of the blurred borders between city districts.
Synesthesia shows us that even minute changes in brain wiring
can lead to different realities.
There are different kinds of synesthesia.
Some people perceive weekdays to have locations in space.
Some taste words.
Others see music.
And every time I meet someone who has this kind of experience,
it's a reminder that from person to person,
brain to brain,
our experiences of reality can be quite different.
For a small section of the population,
that difference can be extreme and terrifying.
We all know what it's like to have dreams at night,
to have bizarre, unbidden thoughts
that take us on journeys,
sometimes journeys that we suffer through.
But when we wake up, we're lucky enough
to be able to compartmentalize that,
to say, "ok. That was a dream, and this is my waking life"...
But just imagine what it would be like
if these were more and more intertwined
and it was more and more difficult
to tell them apart from one another.
Woman, voice-over: I felt like the houses
were communicating with me...
"you are special." "You are especially bad."
"Repent." "Stop." "Go," you know, kind of...
I did not hear these as words, but I heard them as thoughts
put in my head, but I knew they were
the houses' thoughts, and not my thoughts.
I think that explosions are being set off in my brain,
and I'm afraid that it's gonna hurt other people,
not just me.
I once had a fantasy that, uh, my brains
were gonna leak out of my ears and drown people.
What... what is that, you know, but...
Eagleman, voice-over: Elyn saks is a professor of law
at the university of Southern California.
She's been experiencing schizophrenic episodes
since she was 16 years old.
Saks, voice-over: It's scary. It's unpredictable.
It's sort of interesting because there are different theories
about psychotic symptoms.
For some people, they're just random firings of neurons.
I do think they tell the truth about your psychic reality.
So when I say I've killed hundreds of thousands of people
with my thoughts, that's just an archaic and extreme way
of saying I feel like I'm a bad person.
Schizophrenia is still not fully understood,
but it involves chemical imbalances in the brain
which cause problems in the sending
and receiving of signals.
Thanks to medication and therapy,
elyn has been able to lecture and teach for over 25 years.
So when you were at the bottom in one
of your worst psychotic episodes,
you took that to be reality?
I really believe what's happ... i think is happening
is happening, and it's terrifying.
It's like a waking nightmare...
Confusion, bizarre images, violence, terrors.
I wouldn't wish it on anyone.
That said, um, everybody's reality
is constructed, right?
You filter it through your beliefs
and values, um, and issues, um, and this is true
for people who have mental illness
and for people who don't have mental illness.
It's all a spectrum.
Reality differs from person to person...
And, more than that, it changes from moment to moment.
There are times in all our lives
when it can seem enhanced, intensified.
Even the one great constant which we all think we share
and which should never change
somehow becomes stretched and distorted.
I'm talking about time.
Time is something that we rarely stop to consider,
but our brain's experience of time is often quite strange.
It doesn't always seem in certain situations
that time is running at an even pace.
Sometimes it runs more slowly or more quickly.
When I was 8 years old, I fell off of the roof
of a house about this height,
and the fall seemed to me to take a very long time...
But when I got to high school, I learned physics,
and I calculated how long did the fall actually take.
And it turns out it was only 8/10 of a second,
so that set me off on a quest to understand
why did it seem to take so long
and what did this tell me about our perception of reality.
Many people have reported the sensation
during moments of terror.
Professional wingsuit flier Jeb corliss
experienced it in an extreme way.
How you doing, Jeb? Ok.
Eagleman, voice-over: And because he falls for a living,
the event he describes was captured on multiple cameras.
On this day, I decided to aim for a target,
like a set of balloons, and come in and hit balloons...
And I was flying towards the balloons...
And as I was coming in to hit the black balloon,
I misjudged.
I impacted flat, solid granite
at 120 miles an hour.
Eagleman, voice-over: Six seconds elapsed
between the moment that Jeb hit the rock
and the moment he pulled his rip cord.
He broke his leg and both ankles in the fall.
Uhh...
Eagleman, voice-over: From Jeb's perspective,
those 6 seconds seem to last a long time.
Corliss, voice-over: You've got two options.
One is you can not pull
and, you know, just be dead right now.
Goes, like, really quick, semi-painless,
you know, over fast...
Or you can pull, you know,
get a parachute over your head, impact a second time,
and then bleed to death while you're waiting for rescue.
These two separate thought processes
felt like minutes of time.
It feels like you're operating so fast
that your perception of everything else
seems to slow down.
Everything just gets stretched.
Uhh...
Eagleman, voice-over: But what was really happening
in Jeb's brain?
I designed an experiment to find out.
It depended on inducing extreme fear in people
by dropping them from 150 feet in the air.
They fell with a digital display strapped to their wrist.
Its numbers were changing at a rate faster
than human vision can normally handle.
If perceptual time did slow,
then they would be able to read the numbers,
but no one could,
so why did Jeb recall his accident
as happening in slow motion?
Corliss, voice-over: It was a time distortion on a level
I've never experienced before.
I learned later that the rescue took about 2 1/2 hours,
but at the time, it felt like weeks.
It didn't feel like minutes or hours or even days.
It felt like... It felt like little eternities.
It felt like forever.
The answer seems to lie
with how our memories are made.
In a critical situation, an area of the brain
called the amygdala kicks into high gear.
It commandeers the resources of the rest of the brain,
forcing everything to attend to the situation at hand.
When the amygdala is in play, memories are laid down
with far more detail than under normal circumstances.
These memories are richer and more vivid.
If you're ever in a similar situation,
you have more information at your disposal
to work out how to stay alive,
but there's a fascinating consequence.
When the events are replayed in your memory,
they appear to have taken a longer time.
Ow! Ow, ow, ow!
Eagleman, voice-over: Jeb's time distortion
is something that happened in retrospect...
A trick of the memory that wrote the story of his reality.
The brain is the universe's ultimate storyteller.
We believe whatever our brains serve up to us.
The reality we take for granted
requires intensive training to interpret the world.
It takes time to process sensory information,
so we live in the past.
And because all that information
is ultimately just electrochemical signals
to be sorted, matched, rendered and packaged,
reality is something created inside our head.
Our brain sculpts our reality using the narrow trickle of data
that it can gather through the senses.
And from that trickle, it tells a story about our world.
It's possible that every brain tells a different narrative...
And with 7 billion human brains wandering the planet...
Trillions of animal brains,
no one is tapped into the full picture.
Each brain carries its own unique model
of the world around us.
That is what we experience.
We have no choice.
So what is reality?
It's whatever your brain tells you it is.
Next time on "the brain,"
I'm going explore a fundamental question about our lives...
What makes you you?
I've spent many years of my life
trying to decipher the mysteries of the brain,
and yet, I'm still in awe every time I hold one.
I'll reveal how our personality, emotions, and memories
emerge from our neural activity
and explore how our brain shapes our life.
"The brain with David eagleman"
is available on DVD.
The companion book is
also available.