David Eagleman
Neuroscientist, Stanford University
About
David Eagleman is an adjunct professor of neuroscience at Stanford, with a doctorate from Baylor College of Medicine. His research covers time perception, sensory substitution, brain plasticity, synesthesia and neurolaw — a range held together by one question: how much of what you experience is constructed rather than received. In 2015 he co-founded Neosensory with Scott Novich to build wearables that translate sound into patterns of vibration on the skin, letting deaf users hear through touch; the company ran for a decade. He wrote Incognito (2011) on the brain's unconscious machinery and Livewired (2020) on how thoroughly the brain rewires itself, and presented The Brain with David Eagleman for PBS.
Key Contributions
- Built an experimental case that time perception is reconstructed after the fact rather than recorded as it happens
- Co-founded Neosensory and shipped sensory-substitution wearables that route sound to the skin, testing plasticity in the field rather than the lab
- Wrote Livewired, which argues the brain's defining property is not its wiring but its willingness to rewire
- Advanced neurolaw, pressing courts on what culpability means once you take the brain's unconscious machinery seriously
- Wrote Sum, forty short fictions about afterlives — a scientist's book that gets its force from refusing to argue
- His reach across time, touch, law and fiction is also the standing criticism: breadth bought at the cost of depth in any one of them
