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Language: en
when I was a kid I wasn't interested in
science I was mostly interested in like
getting on with other kids for me the
hardest thing was to figure out like how
people behaved and you know what they
liked what they didn't like about each
other about me and so I remember paying
a lot of attention to what other people
were doing to try and figure out I
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wondered for a long time about how I
could understand what was actually real
and what was a misunderstanding of
misconception I could see that different
people depending on where they came from
who their friends were had very
different interpretations of what looked
like the same stuff a more concrete
example someone would play baseball and
some people would think this is an
excellent baseball player and you want
them on their team and other people
would choose this for some very very
last and it never made any sense to me
how could everybody look at the same
person you know want to win the same
game but not really converge on the same
opinion and they these weren't like
casual opinions they people would get
into fights over this kind of thing so
that's the kind of thing that that got
me wondering about myself how good are
my perceptions how accurate are they how
do I know it's real I had a really great
high school English set of teachers what
those high school teachers had inspired
me to do is to like figure out how your
world works and they inspired me to read
but more importantly they inspired me
and basically convinced me that you
could have a active life so to speak of
the mind and so I decided when I went to
college that I was going to start
English and Philosophy because it was
exciting and and so I ended up in
college I'm wondering about you know
subjective reality and so on and because
I had been inspired to you know learn
about stuff I was a pretty good science
student and I was interested in you know
the physics of the world the chemistry
and the biology of the world so I took a
bunch of science classes and one day I
went to a biology lecture that totally
changed my head about everything and it
was a description of a classic
experiment called what the frog's eye
tells the frog's brain by Jerry leptin
and the gist of it is the frog's reality
is different than our reality at least
it's visual reality of frogs I is only
designed and its brain only designed to
detect dark dots that move fast like
flying flies but flies a don't move dots
that don't move
don't basically exists because the Frog
doesn't have the biological apparatus to
actually detect that and so that like
blew my mind because you could actually
measure it you didn't have to like argue
it you could actually measure it with an
electrode and a system of understanding
and so I decided neurobiology was the
right way to try and figure out what was
real today I still wonder about what's
real I'm curious to understand how my
brain builds models of the world so that
it can interact with the world and
collect the information in the world not
the way it actually is but the way I am
designed if you will to interpret it in
some sense my reality is fundamentally
subjective and I'm trying to understand
how my reality although subjective must
follow similar rules to other people's
brains because we mostly agree on stuff
even though the details are different
and so how do we make that kind of
judgment about things and what is it
that allows us to agree or disagree on
this these are the kinds of rules that
I'm interested in understanding I'm
doing Nova Wonders because for me it was
a challenge when I was growing up and in
fact most of my adult life there wasn't
a way for me to easily and directly
access the science of the world and it
turns out that the science of the world
is fascinating it's the only interesting
thing as far as I'm concerned
and so Nova wonders was a challenge for
me to see if I could communicate that to
a lot of people and in some sense
provide the kind of thing that I wish I
had had and that I hope my kids get
you