Why Do Your 30 Trillion Cells Feel Like a Self? Part 2

Does our sense of self emerge from our brain’s skill at lumping things into unchanging categories? What can we learn watching a caterpillar brain transition to a butterfly brain? Can we think of a memory as a pattern that stays alive and has its own life? Does an ant colony have a sense of self? Join Eagleman and biologist Michael Levin at Tufts – one of the most energetic and original thinkers in the field — to dive into new territories of the self.

Episode Audio

Episode Video

More Information:

Eagleman DM (2020). Livewired: The Inside Story of the Ever-Changing Brain. New York: Pantheon.

Levin M. Self-Improvising Memory: A Perspective on Memories as Agential, Dynamically Reinterpreting Cognitive Glue. Entropy. 2024 May 31;26(6):481.

Bongard J, Levin M. There’s plenty of room right here: Biological systems as evolved, overloaded, multi-scale machines. Biomimetics. 2023 Mar 8;8(1):110.

Levin M. The computational boundary of a “self”: developmental bioelectricity drives multicellularity and scale-free cognition. Frontiers in psychology. 2019 Dec 13;10:2688.

Levin lab: drmichaellevin.org

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

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

"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

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

"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