Meet the revered scientist creating ‘superhumans’ in his laboratory
Dr David Eagleman is one of the world’s leading neuroscientists – having recently unlocked how to create new senses for humans such as ‘seeing’ heat. As his new book shakes up the world of science, he talks to The Herald on Sunday on the coming biological revolution will change humanity forever ...
DR David Eagleman has just finished his morning “dad chores”, getting his kids ready for their day. He sits down over a coffee and starts to explain how he’s developed superpowers.
Eagleman can walk into a library, run his hand along a shelf and tell you which books were most recently touched just from their heat signature alone.
He can walk through a parking lot and work out the order in which the cars arrived from the level of warmth pulsing off their engines.
He can “see” heat. “It’s pretty cool,” he says, with a knowing smile. He’s not the monster from the Predator films, though – he wasn’t bitten by a radioactive spider, nor did he drop to Earth from the planet Krypton.
Eagleman is a witty and very youthful 50-year-old neuroscientist – probably the greatest scientist in his field today – who just happens to be the father of the coming “Biological Revolution”.
He has a genius for the workings of the brain – and how we can harness the power of the mind in previously unimaginable ways – just as Einstein had a genius for physics or Shakespeare the sonnet.
Eagleman is able to create new senses for humans. His investigations into the “plasticity” of the brain – his discoveries that the lump of jelly in our heads can be trained to do just about anything – have led him to create, among many science fiction-style inventions, the Neosensory Wristband.
The size of a large FitBit, the wristband allows the wearer to “feel” senses humans don’t have – ultrasonic, infrared, electromagnetic.
The wristband is simply a first step into the foothills of a scientific Everest. Eagleman is taking the world on the path towards “transhumanity” – where the melding of biology, robotics and computers redefines what it means to be Homo Sapiens.
He has just written Livewired. It is already being hailed as a book which will change the planet.
It is not hyperbole to imagine it one day taking its place beside Darwin’s On The Origin Of Species and Stephen Hawking’s A Brief History Of Time, as one of the most important popular scientific books ever written. It has already been nominated for a Pulitzer Prize.
Eagleman, who lives in the heart of California’s Silicon Valley, is a professor at Stanford University where he teaches neuroscience. He also directs the Centre for Science and Law. Talking to Eagleman is a dizzying experience – in an instant, he can move from discussing the coming science of mind control, to how we could soon be reading the mummified brains of the long dead.
When The Herald on Sunday sat down with Eagleman the conversation was often interrupted with the question “are you serious?” to which Eagelman always replied with a deadpan: “Yes, absolutely serious.”
Superpowered brain
AT the heart of Eagleman’s work lies the “plasticity” of the brain. Our brains – unlike the brains of all other animals – are endlessly malleable. Human brains are “livewired” – not hardwired. The human brain isn’t static, it constantly adapts.
A chick can walk almost as soon as it’s hatched, and it’ll basically remain the same kind of chicken, with the same kind of brain, until it dies. Humans are born relatively useless, but our brains are blank slates and are continually altering and learning new skills until the moment we die.
“As far as being human, one of the illusions that we live with is that we’re the same person through time. In fact, we’re changing every moment of our lives,” Eagleman says.