To the extent that consciousness is useful, it is useful in small quantities, and for very particular kinds of tasks. It's easy to understand why you would not want to be consciously aware of the intricacies of your muscle movement, but this can be less intuitive when applied to your perceptions, thoughts, and beliefs, which are also final products of the activity of billions of nerve cells.
From the Blog
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The Neuroscience of Engagement
Why don't we do what we know we should? Here's a talk I gave at Stanford Medical School telling why, and what to do about it.
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Love Italo Calvino? Me too. Listen to a BBC Radio documentary.
I hosted a BBC radio documentary to explore the imagination of one of Italy's foremost writers, Italo Calvino.
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Had a great time at the NYT summit with friend and fellow author Charles Duhigg.
Really good companies are the ones that are constantly reinventing themselves. I spoke with Charles Duhigg about habit, unconscious processing and the workspace at the 2016 New Work Summit. Watch the full interview: http://trib.al/1nwghb1
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Disinformation and "fake news"
Lately we've heard the concern about the ease with which disinformation spreads -- the problem of fake news. But is our era meaningfully different from previous eras?
In other news...
Guggenheim Fellowship
David has been named a John Simon Guggenheim Fellow. He will use the fellowship opportunity to pursue the genetics and neuroimaging of synesthesia.
New Yorker magazine profile
Read a profile of David in The New Yorker: The Possibilian: What a brush with death taught David Eagleman about the mysteries of time and the brain by Burkhard Bilger.
Sum on Radiolab
Listen to David discussing Sum -- and actor Jeffrey Tambor reading stories from the book -- on WNYC's Radiolab.
