David Eagleman, writer and scienist, thinks aloud
In this week's New Yorker magazine, Dr. David Eagleman, a novelist, neuroscientist at Baylor College of Medicine and Rice grad, is being profiled for his research and recent works. Dr. Eagleman does much of his current research on synesthesia and "neurolaw," which investigates the intersection of current knowledge of neuroscience and law making, criminal punishment and rehabilitation development, which he teaches a class about each fall (NEUR 525, Neuroscience and Law) at Rice. However, among his notable publications is Sum: Forty Tales from the Afterlives, an internationally best-selling collection of short stories. In light of his feature in the New Yorker, as well as a recent appearance on PBS's NOVA, the Rice Thresher sat down to talk with Eagleman about his perspectives on the connection of art and science as well as his book Sum and the movement, "possibilianism," that sparked from it.Rice Thresher: Can you talk about the relationship between art, in your experience creativity in writing, and your experience with research and science? Specifically, how has your research on the brain affected the content that you write about?
David Eagleman: Sure. Generally, I see art and science as being the same thing; they're both ways of trying to figure out what's going on around us and trying to address the mysteries. They are both fundamentally creative pursuits, where you're making up new narratives. In science, you're trying to put those narratives to the test to see if they match up with mother nature, whereas with art, you can make up stories that illuminate some aspect of the human condition, but not subject them to the same culling where you have to leave things out that might be important in a different way. So, my general view is that the tools of science are essentially the best things we've developed, but they are limited. They run out at some point, so I think that both art and science are important ways of exploring ?the world.
RT: Sum is probably your most popular novel so far. Can you tell us about how this collection relates to the scientific world? How did you get to the topic of the afterlife, and does that relate to your study of the brain?
DE: That's a good question. It doesn't actually relate at all to my research as a topic. I just sort of stumbled on the issue - I've always been really interested in what is going on around us. Like, why are we here? You don't remember getting here, you've just always been here as far as you can tell. And you're told you're going to die someday, but you don't really know what that means, nobody does. Even the smartest people on the planet don't know what any of this is about, right? I found at some point that I just liked thinking about alternate stories. We all inherit just a couple of stories. You can either buy into the Judeo/Christian/Islamic tradition, there are the Eastern traditions which are slightly different or there is the existentialist position, which is that you're just an animal crawling on a pebble floating in space. So those were the only three stories that we're given, and I thought, "Well geez, I can make up more stories than that!" My stories are completely funny and mischievous and improbable, but they are just as likely to be true as any of these others. It just really confused me that no one was talking about alternatives more; everyone was just saying, "Well I'm religious," or "I am an existentialist." There is a lot of room in between; you can move across a different axis than just that little spectrum. So with Sum, it's not that I have any particular opinion, but it is a really great backdrop against which to explore these issues and to think about these questions of what are we doing here? What if we were planted here like Mars rovers? Or what if there is a God, but it's a bickering couple, or the size of a microbe and it doesn't even know that we exist, or 37 others right? So that was the idea behind it. It was a good container in which to explore these funny, alternative approaches.
RT: How did that lead into your movement of possibilianism? What is possibilianism in a nutshell?
DE: Possibilianism is the movement that I started to encompass this line of thought that we don't have to subscribe to a religious position or this strict atheist existentialist position - those are just two positions in a much wider landscape. It was really surprising to me that everybody was spending all of their time arguing back and forth between these two positions, energizing and polarizing each other. I thought there should be a much wider discussion than that. So possibilianism emphasizes an active exploration of new ideas, instead of just buying into what's been handed over. It also encompasses the scientific temperament of creativity, and of tolerance for multiple hypotheses - thinking of new narrative stories and having a wide enough table to allow for multiple stories. The way that science works day-to-day is that we try to gather evidence to weigh in favor of or against our different stories, but there are times when the scientific toolbox runs out or when it's insufficient to address these bigger problems. And in those cases, you work on understanding the structure of this possibility space. You work on understanding what kind of things are possible here, and you can address some of them and make experiments, but it won't be surprising if in our lifetimes we're not able to come up with the killer experiment that determines what happens after we die.
RT: Fundamentally, possibilianism sounds like agnosticism. How is ?it different?
DE: I think there are two big differences. First of all, the majority of the time when people say "I'm agnostic," they mean, "I'm not certain whether God exists or doesn't exist." Which is still saying you've inherited these two stories, God or existentialism, and you're just trying to decide if it's story A or story B. What distinguishes possibilianism is this active exploration of new ideas. It's not just simply open-mindedness; it's going out and trying to figure out the structure of the possibility space. A lot of agnostics mean they are uncertain about the existence of God, and probably would like to be certain about it at one point or another. They're sort of in between and maybe hoping to eventually be able to commit to one side or the other with more data. But possibilianism's end goal is not to decide the right answer. My goal is not to say in 50 years, "I know the truth," because I doubt we'll ever get there, but it's to understand the structure of possible truths.
RT: A lot of people use religion as a way to find answers when they feel lost emotionally or spiritually, and it seems that possibilianism brings up a lot more questions than it does answers.
DE: Those people will not sign up for possibilianism because possibilianism is about finding the truths that are going on around us. Organized religion has a very useful function in that way, among others. Possibilianism is more a way of seeking truth, and it might be totally functionless for a lot of people. A lot of people really need and want certainty, and that's fine. But for people who are willing to concede uncertainty and ignorance, this is the right framework. Just like all religions and all movements, it'll appeal to some and not others.
RT: You mentioned the usefulness of religion. How would possibilianism supplement a lot of the philanthropic and community service issues that organized religion contributes to? What about artistic and architectural contributions?
DE: I think possibilian art would trump religious art. Sum became the number two book in England, I think because it is possibilian art, it's possibilian literature. Every time you turn the page, I'm going to give you a completely different story about what's going on here. And it worked. Something about that appealed to people. Can you imagine if people made spiritual murals, but not about a particular guy with a beard that looks like they do, but instead, a much wider range? I can imagine what a possibilian mural would look like and it would be terrific. So I think as far as art it would be more liberating than saying, "I'm going in a particular tradition." Even the Greeks noted that the Thracian gods had red hair and snub noses, but the African gods were black. If you go to the churches in the Black South, Jesus Christ is black, and if you go to Joel Osteen's church, Jesus is white. I think there's a very real sense in which art and literature are extremely constrained by religion that could be opened up by possibilianism.
The answer to the first part of your question, about community service, is that there are many terrific organizations that do that sort of thing. I'm a member of the Rotary Club, for example. It's a community service organization, it's international and it's not associated with any religion. I appreciate faith-based organizations and the amazing things they do. It would be bad to lose those, but I will point out that it's at least possible to have completely not religiously associated charitable organizations. We could have a possibilian-based community service group. To my mind, possibilianism really makes me care about everybody in a very different sense than religions do, just in the sense that if you belong to religion "X", then you really care for other "Xs" and you don't really care for "Ys." This is part of the studies in my lab, by the way. In a few months, we're going to publish some really amazing results about ingroup outgroup differentiation based on religious labels. We're using neural imaging to look at what's happening in the brain when people differentiate themselves from others. The bottom line from this science is that all you need to do is give somebody a label, and then they really care about their other ingroup members, and they really don't care if other people outside of that group get hurt. Even if you feel like you're the kind of person that cares about everyone equally, it turns out that most people's brains just don't. With possibilianism, there's a hope that people would be more kind to a fellow person, because they think maybe he's right, or maybe some other story is right, or maybe we're all in this boat together.
RT: How do you envision the future for possibilianism? It seems like a very academic philosophy.
DE: I actually don't think it's an academic philosophy. I say this because I've given just a couple of public talks about it, I gave one at TEDxHouston and one called Pop Tech, and people really got it. It resonated with them in a way that academic talks don't. I'm not actually doing much of anything to promote it. I set up a website awhile ago that has links to all the videos. I'm so busy right now with other things that I haven't actually had a lot of time to promote it actively, but what's been nice for me is that it's gotten a life of it's own and is just moving along. I have a friend at Facebook who's been tracking how many people change their religion status to possibilian. And it's in the hundreds, maybe thousands now. So it's living on its own legs at the moment. I'm about 60 percent done with a book called Why I'm a Possibilian, but it's going to be my next-next book because the others are already under contract. I'm glad you asked me this question because I have at various points considered really starting something, like the School of Life in England, because adults, when they're out of college, don't get a chance to think about these philosophical issues. I spoke on possibilianism at The School of Life, and it was really cool. That crowd really dug that. So I was thinking of starting something like that in the States.
RT: What are your other current projects?
DE: I wrote an iPad-only book that came out in December called Why The Net Matters, and that was a new technology: It's a software app that has this whole new design for reading and visuals and 3D interactive graphics. My next book, Incognito, comes out in April. Incognito is about the unconscious brain, about all of the stuff that you think, you do, you act, you believe, that is generated by parts of the brain that you don't have any access to. You're not even acquainted with that part of the operating system. Most of what happens in your brain, you don't have any access to. The part you think of as the conscious "you" is the smallest bit of what's happening. Scientific American just chose it as their book club pick for April. When that comes out I'm going to be so insanely busy: I'm hitting like 30 cities in two months to lecture on it. What I'm doing now is scrambling to finish my next two book deadlines. One is called Livewired, which is about plasticity and how the brain rewires itself, and one is a cognitive neuroscience textbook.
RT: What is your spirit animal?
DE:[No response, removes jacket to show American Eagle logo and points at the eagle] That's an easy one, got any tougher questions?
Want to learn more? Check out www.possibilian.com
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