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Unlocking the mysteries of our brain | David Eagleman
The TED Interview
The Potato Head Model
The brain is a all purpose compute device. And whatever spikes its getting it says, oh, that's relevant for my behaviour. I can do something with and so the potato head model is simply that you can switch the things around,. You can even build completely new senses and plug em in anywhere, and it doesn't matter. So i will come into that pot a bit more but let's stop festival thinking about someone with all five senses - if it is five, a basic working cind of quite as normal. A talk a bit about this miracle of how this, this brain in the dark of a baby, stood of developing.
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Speaker 3
And so the part that got me interested is, how does the system create the colors and the the light and the smells and the touch and all that stuff,
Speaker 1
a given that its really zeros and one's going on in there. So anyway, i got interested in the senses. And the model anded posing is thi potato head model, which is that it doesn't matter how you get information in there, the brain will figure out what to do with it, because that's what's really good at doing. Essentially, it's a all purpose compute device. And whatever spikes its getting it says, oh, that's relevant for my behaviour. I can do something with and so the potato head model is simply that you can switch the things around, and maybe even build completely new senses and plug em in anywhere, and
Speaker 3
it doesn't matter. So
Speaker 2
i will come into that pot a bit more, but let's stop festival thinking about someone with all five senses, if it is five, a basic working cind of quite as normal.
Speaker 4
A talk
Speaker 2
a bit about this miracle of how this, this brain in the dark of a baby, stood of developing.
Speaker 4
You got this blizzard of incoming just electrical signals, and yet somehow, after a
Speaker 2
year or two, they are interpreted as there isa face that i love and light up to. And if i say, mamma,
Speaker 4
something smiles. And if i say, wha, water
Speaker 2
comes, or milk comes, or like
Speaker 4
how
Speaker 2
how are those pieces possibly put together? Yes?
Speaker 1
Well, ok. So as far as you know, this debate about nature and nurture totally dead questiond nowadays, because it's always both. So a baby drops into the world knowing a lot of things already, like how to mimic a facial expression. Yet you can stick out your tongue at a baby and the baby'll do the same stiff i got so, which is actuallya very complex visual motor task to do. So there's some amount of preprogramming. But the interesting part
Speaker 3
is
Speaker 1
all the stuff that we absorb from there. And so the trick that mother nature discovered is to drop us into the world with a half baked brain, and then we, you know, absorb the world around us, such that, you know, an alligator born to day is just same as an aligater more a hundred thousand years ago. But we droped in the world, by the time weere, you know, five, six years old, we've absorbed essentially everything humans have done before us, our language, our culture, our family tradition, our nations traditions and so on. And we get to springboard off the top of that.
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