How to develop superpowers

Neil Mackay’s Big Read: The dawn of transhumanism – conversations with Dr David Eagleman, the scientist creating a world of real superhumans in his laboratory

Dr David Eagleman is the world’s leading neuroscientist. He’s unlocked how to create new senses for humans – from bat-like echolocation and ‘seeing’ heat to electromagnetism. As his new book shakes up the world of science, he talks to Neil Mackay about how the coming biological revolution will change the nature of 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. Eagleman 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.

Read more of the article on the Herald Scotland website.

"[A] neuroscientist and polymath."
- Wall Street Journal

"David Eagleman is the kind of guy who really does make being a neuroscientist look like fun."
- New York Times

"What Eagleman seems to be calling for is a new Enlightenment."
- Sunday Herald

"A popularizer of impressive gusto...[Eagleman] aims, grandly, to do for the study of the mind what Copernicus did for the study of the stars."
- New York Observer

"David Eagleman offers startling lessons.... His method is to ask us to cast off our lazy commonplace assumptions.
- The Guardian

"Eagleman has a talent for testing the untestable, for taking seemingly sophomoric notions and using them to nail down the slippery stuff of consciousness."
- The New Yorker