The Brain with David Eagleman

The Iowa Gambling Task is a way to witness a "gut" decision or a "hunch" as it forms unconsciously before a conscious decision is made.

Explore how the brain navigates the myriad of conscious and unconscious decisions we make daily.

In this experiment men were asked to look at photographs of women’s faces and make judgments about them. They had no conscious awareness of what was influencing their answers.

Austin Naber is a world-record holder in cup stacking. He practices 3-4 hours every day. How will David fare against him? EEG helmets capture the differences in their brain activity, and reveal a deeper truth about why so much of what the brain does is unconscious.

Explore the great deception that greets us each morning when we awake: it feels as though we are in conscious control of our lives but the truth is that we are not.

Why are there differences between us? Why is it that we behave differently when faced with the same choices? A confluence of our genes and the environment we are born into send each of us off on very different life trajectories.

David describes some situations where the unconscious brain is making decisions on our behalf. So why are we conscious? David enlists the help of a man dressed as a bee to point out one of its important roles.

Ian Waterman has lost the ability to control his body without exerting extraordinary conscious effort. Ian’s condition reminds us of the amazing reach of the unconscious brain.

What if we have no free will? What if we are just systems that move from one state to another in a predictable fashion? Using a tank of ping pong balls, David demonstrates why we don’t need to worry.

An experiment in a shop window demonstrates why teens feel far more self-conscious than adults in the same situation. The activity in the teenager’s medial prefrontal cortex plays an important role in how young adults perceive themselves.

A typical 2-year-old is building 2 million new connections every second, but after the age of two this growth is halted, and a process of pruning begins. The process of becoming someone is about pruning back the brain’s connections.

The brains of London taxi drivers were tracked before, during and after their training, and results showed that a part of their brain had grown. The adult brain isn’t fixed. Its networks can reconfigure themselves according to our experiences and our environment.