David Eagleman (born April 25, 1971) is an American neuroscientist, bestselling author, and science communicator. He teaches neuroscience at Stanford University and has founded several neurotech startups. He directs the non-profit Center for Science and Law, which seeks to align the legal system with modern neuroscience. He is known for his work on brain plasticity,David Eagleman TED talk, March 18, 2015. time perception,The Possibilian: David Eagleman and the Mysteries of the Brain, The New Yorker, April 25, 2011. synesthesia,Cytowic RE and Eagleman DM (2009). Wednesday is Indigo Blue: Discovering the Brain of Synesthesia. Cambridge: MIT Press. and neurolaw.The Brain on Trial, David Eagleman, The Atlantic, July 2011
He is a Guggenheim Fellow and a New York Times-bestselling author published in 32 languages.Inside the List, New York Times, June 10, 2011Alexander McCall Smith, Eternal Whimsy: Review of David Eagleman's Sum, New York Times Book Review, June 12, 2009. Retrieved on June 14, 2009.Geoff Dyer, Do you really want to come back as a horse?: Geoff Dyer is bowled over by a neuroscientist's exploration of the beyond, The Observer, June 7, 2009. Retrieved on June 12, 2009.David Eagleman's Sum (book review), Los Angeles Times, February 1, 2009. Retrieved on February 8, 2009.International editions of SUM. Retrieved on March 19, 2015. He is the writer and presenter of the international television series The Brain with David Eagleman and the host of the podcast Inner Cosmos with David Eagleman. His podcast has been ranked as the number-one science podcast on Apple several times and in 2024 was nominated for the best science podcast of the year at the iHeart Podcast Awards at SXSW.
Biography Eagleman was born on April 25, 1971, in New Mexico to a physician father and a biology teacher mother. An early experience of falling from a roof raised his interest in understanding the neural basis of time perception.Radiolab: Falling, September 2010.Ripley, Amanda (2008). The Unthinkable: Who Survives When Disaster Strikes – and Why. Crown Books. pp 65–67. He attended the Albuquerque Academy for high school. As an undergraduate at Rice University, he majored in British and American literature and in his junior year studied abroad at Oxford University. He earned his PhD in Neuroscience at Baylor College of Medicine in 1998, followed by a postdoctoral fellowship at the Salk Institute.
Eagleman is an adjunct professor at Stanford University, after directing a neuroscience research laboratory for 10 years at Baylor College of Medicine. He is a Guggenheim Fellow and serves as a member of the board of directors of the Long Now Foundation. Italy's Style fashion magazine named Eagleman one of the "Brainiest, Brightest Idea Guys" and featured him on the cover.David Eagleman, Style, December 2011, Issue 12, pp 75–80. He was awarded the Science Educator Award by the Society for Neuroscience.Science Educator Award, Society for Neuroscience, October 2012. He has spun off several companies from his research, including BrainCheck,BrainCheck which helps medical professionals assess and diagnose cognitive impairment and dementia, and Neosensory,Neosensory which used sound-to-touch sensory substitution to feed data streams into the brain, as described in his TED talk.
Eagleman has been profiled in magazines such as the New Yorker, and has been on television programs such as The Colbert Report.Colbert Report: David Eagleman, Aired July 21, 2011. Stewart Brand wrote that "David Eagleman may be the best combination of scientist and fiction-writer alive".Introduction to Eagleman lecture at the Long Now Foundation, April 1, 2010. In 2025 he was given the Woz Innovation Award from Steve Wozniak.Jewel & Inspiring Children Foundation Celebrate Mental Health Innovators With Inaugural 'Not Alone Awards' In Las Vegas
As opposed to committing to strict atheism or to a particular religious position, Eagleman refers to himself as a possibilian,Beyond god and atheism: Why I am a possibilian, David Eagleman, New Scientist, September 27, 2010.Stray questions for David Eagleman, The New York Times Paper Cuts, July 10, 2009. which distinguishes itself from atheism and agnosticism by studying the structure of the possibility space.
Scientific specializations Sensory substitution Sensory substitution refers to feeding information into the brain via unusual sensory channels, a central topic in Eagleman's book Livewired. In a TED talk, Eagleman unveiled a method for using sound-to-touch sensory substitution to feed data streams into the brain.Novich SD & Eagleman DM (2015). Using space and time to encode vibrotactile information: toward an estimate of the skin's achievable throughput. Experimental Brain Research. 233 (10): 2777-2788. In 2015, together with Dr. Scott Novich, PhD, he co-founded the company Neosensory, headquartered in Palo Alto, California, of which he was the CEO. As of 2023, Neosensory had raised over 20 million dollars in venture funding.Neosensory announces 10 million Series A financing round, Business Insider, January 2019] In 2015, the company presented the Versatile Extra-Sensory Transducer (VEST) wearable device that "translates" speech and other audio signals into series of vibration, that allows deaf people to "feel" sounds on their body. In 2019, Neosensory presented the Buzz wristband, a sensory substitution device that transfers sound into dynamic vibration patterns, aimed for deaf or hard-of-hearing individuals.Perrotta MV, Asgeirsdottir T, Eagleman DM (2021). Deciphering sounds through patterns of vibration on the skin. Neuroscience. 458: 77-86. In 2022, the company released the Neosensory Clarify for high-frequency hearing loss; the wristband used machine learning to detect high-frequency phonemes in real time and indicate their presence to the user through vibrations.Kohler, Perrotta, Ferriera, Eagleman (2024). Cross-Modal Sensory Boosting to Improve High-Frequency Hearing Loss: Device Development and Validation. JMIRx Med 2024;5:e49969 doi: 10.2196/49969 After a decade, Neosensory sold its technology to a larger company and ceased operations
Dreams In Eagleman and Vaughn's Defensive Activation Theory, animals dream to protect the brain’s visual cortex from being encroached upon by other senses during the long hours of nightly darkness. Because the cortex is highly plastic, especially in the young, unused regions are vulnerable to invasion from neighboring functions (as seen, for example, when the visual cortex of blind individuals gets repurposed for touch or hearing). To prevent this kind of takeover, Eagleman and Vaughn proposed that the brain periodically generates bursts of neural activity (as seen during REM sleep) that stimulate the primary visual cortex, producing the imagery we experience as dreams. In this view, dreams are essentially a 'screensaver' to preserve the territory of the visual cortex. Evidence for the hypothesis includes the correlation across species between dependence on vision and amount of REM sleep, and the observation that people who lose their sight later in life begin to dream with other senses, consistent with cortical repurposing.
Time perception Eagleman's scientific work combines psychophysical, behavioral, and computational approaches to address the relationship between the timing of perception and the timing of neural signals.Eagleman DM (2009). Brain Time. In What's Next? Dispatches on the Future of Science. Ed: Max Brockman. Vintage Books.Burdick, A (2006). The mind in overdrive. Discover, 27 (4), 21–22. Areas for which he is known include temporal encoding, time warping, manipulations of the perception of causality, and time perception in high-adrenaline situations.Stetson C, Fiesta MP, Eagleman DM (2007). Does time really slow down during a frightening event? PLoS One. 2(12):e1295. In one experiment, he dropped himself and other volunteers from a 150-foot tower to measure time perception as they fell.Choi, CQ. Time doesn't really freeze when you're freaked, MSNBC, December 11, 2007. He writes that his long-range goal is "to understand how neural signals processed by different brain regions come together for a temporally unified picture of the world".
Synesthesia Synesthesia is an unusual perceptual condition in which stimulation to one sense triggers an involuntary sensation in other senses. Eagleman is the developer of The Synesthesia Battery, a free online test by which people can determine whether they are synesthetic. By this technique he has tested and analyzed thousands of synesthetes, and has written a book on synesthesia with Richard Cytowic, entitled Wednesday is Indigo Blue: Discovering the Brain of Synesthesia. Eagleman has proposed that sensory processing disorder, a common characteristic of autism, may be a form of synesthesia.The blended senses of synesthesia, Los Angeles Times, February 20, 2012.
Visual illusions Eagleman has published extensively on what visual illusions tell us about neurobiology, concentrating especially on the flash lag illusion, luminance illusions, the wagon wheel effect , and geometric illusions.
Neuroscience and the law Neurolaw is an emerging field that determines how modern brain science should affect the way we make laws, punish criminals, and invent new methods for rehabilitation.The Brain and The Law, Lecture at the Royal Society for the Arts, London, England, April 21, 2009.Eagleman DM, Correro MA, Singh J (2009). Eagleman is the founder and director of the Center for Science and Law."You are your brain" – David Eagleman on transforming the criminal justice system, Reason TV, April 2010. Retrieved on February 19, 2012.
Memory Eagleman's BrainCheck tests cognitive abilities, including memory. In 2025 Eagleman and a student launched Memory Plus, leveraging AI to generate trivia cards that are extremely specific to a person's year of birth and where they grew up, with the goal of triggering specific memories to combat dementia.Memory Plus The Eagleman Laboratory operated a website from 2013 to 2017 called mylifememory.info about hyperthymesia, which invited users to take "The Extraordinary Memory Test" for research purposes. The lab was trying to find individuals with the condition so they could "further elucidate the causes and nature of hyperthymesia."
Podcast Eagleman hosts the weekly monologue podcast Inner Cosmos, which has ranked as the number-one science podcast in America on Apple podcasts several times and was nominated for the best science podcast of the year at the 2024 iHeart Podcast Awards at SXSW.
Television Eagleman is a producer with Cognito Film, which he launched with co-producers Matt Tauber and Adam Fratto to make film and television related to science.
Eagleman wrote and hosted The Brain with David Eagleman, an international television documentary series for which he was the writer, host, and executive producer The series debuted on PBS in America in 2015, followed by the BBC in the United Kingdom and the SBS in Australia before worldwide distribution. The New York Times listed it as one of the best television shows of the year. In 2016, the series was nominated for an Emmy Award.
He also made a Netflix documentary, The Creative Brain, based on his book The Runaway Species with Anthony Brandt. In that documentary, he interviews creators such as Tim Robbins, Michael Chabon, Grimes, Dan Weiss, Kelis, Robert Glasper, Nathan Myhrvold, Michelle Khine, Nick Cave, Bjarke Ingels, and others.
Eagleman served as a scientific advisor for the HBO television series Westworld. He previously served as the science advisor for the TNT television drama, Perception, starring Eric McCormack as a schizophrenic neuropsychiatrist.Internet Movie Database, Full Cast & Crew, Perception In that role, Eagleman wrote one of the episodes, "Eternity".Internet Movie Database, Eternity episode of Perception
Books Wednesday Is Indigo Blue: Discovering the Brain of Synesthesia