What do charlatans have to understand about human perception? Why are you so bad at recognizing a real penny among fakes? What did Eagleman have to do with the redesign of the Euro, and why did he campaign to the European Central Bank that all their bills should be blank with a single hologram in the middle? In this episode, explore the crossroads of perception and deception. Brief appearance from special guest Adam Savage. 

Episode Audio

Episode Video

More Information:
Quito A (2017). Neuroscientists helped design Europe’s new €50 so that anyone can spot a fake. Quartz Magazine.

Inattentional Blindness:


"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
"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 may be the best combination of scientist and fiction-writer alive."
- Stewart Brand
"David Eagleman is the kind of guy who really does make being a neuroscientist look like fun."
- New York Times
"[A] neuroscientist and polymath."
- Wall Street Journal
"David Eagleman offers startling lessons.... His method is to ask us to cast off our lazy commonplace assumptions.
- The Guardian