David Eagleman

David Eagleman (born April 25, 1971) is an American neuroscientist, author, and science communicator.

He teaches neuroscience at Stanford University and is CEO and co-founder of Neosensory, a company that develops devices for sensory substitution.

He also directs the non-profit Center for Science and Law, which seeks to align the legal system with modern neuroscience and is Chief Science Officer and co-founder of BrainCheck, a digital cognitive health platform used in medical practices and health systems.

He is known for his work on brain plasticity, time perception, synesthesia, and neurolaw.

He is a Guggenheim Fellow and a New York Times-bestselling author published in 32 languages.

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".

. As of early 2024, Inner Cosmos was nominated for the best science podcast of the year at the iHeart Podcast Awards at SXSW.

Eagleman was born in New Mexico to Jewish parents Arthur and Cirel Egelman, a physician and a biology teacher, respectively.

Eagleman chose to Americanize the spelling of his surname after discovering several alternative spellings in personal genealogy research.

An early experience of falling from a roof raised his interest in understanding the neural basis of time perception.

He attended the Albuquerque Academy for high school.

As an undergraduate at Rice University, he majored in British and American literature.

He spent his junior year abroad at Oxford University.

He graduated from Rice in 1993.

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 serves as the Chief Science Advisor for the Mind Science Foundation, and is the youngest member of the board of directors of the Long Now Foundation.

Eagleman is a Guggenheim Fellow, a Fellow of the Institute for Ethics and Emerging Technologies, and a council member on the World Economic Forum's Global Agenda Council on Neuroscience & Behavior.

He was voted one of Houston's Most Stylish men, and Italy's Style fashion magazine named Eagleman one of the "Brainiest, Brightest Idea Guys" and featured him on the cover.

He was awarded the Science Educator Award by the Society for Neuroscience.

He has spun off several companies from his research, including BrainCheck, which helps medical professionals assess and diagnose cognitive impairment and dementia, and Neosensory, which uses 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, Texas Monthly, and Texas Observer, on pop-culture television programs such as The Colbert Report and on the scientific program Nova Science Now.

Stewart Brand wrote that "David Eagleman may be the best combination of scientist and fiction-writer alive".

Eagleman founded Deathswitch, an internet based dead man's switch service, in 2007.

He also appeared on MPR News, in a segment called Ask a Neuroscientist, where he answered audience-submitted questions.

As opposed to committing to strict atheism or to a particular religious position, Eagleman who was raised Jewish, refers to himself as a possibilian, which distinguishes itself from atheism and agnosticism by studying the structure of the possibility space.

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.

In 2015, together with Dr. Scott Novich, PhD, he co-founded the company Neosensory, headquartered in Palo Alto, California, of which he is the CEO.

As of 2023, Neosensory has raised over 20 million dollars in venture funding.

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.

This was followed in 2021 by the Neosensory Duo, which uses bimodal stimulation for addressing tinnitus.

In 2022, the company released the Neosensory Clarify for high-frequency hearing loss: the wristband uses machine learning to detect high-frequency phonemes in real time and indicate their presence to the user through vibrations.

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.

Areas for which he is known include temporal encoding, time warping, manipulations of the perception of causality, and time perception in high-adrenaline situations.

In one experiment, he dropped himself and other volunteers from a 150-foot tower to measure time perception as they fell.

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 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.