David Eagleman

In August 2010 Eagleman, then a neuroscientist at Baylor College of Medicine, recounted falling from the roof of a house under construction at age 8 and feeling the world slow down; he later had subjects free-fall backward while wearing a fast-flashing “perceptual chronometer,” finding that they overestimated the fall’s duration but could not read the numbers, and concluded that the slow-motion feeling comes from memory rather than faster perception.⁠[1]

In April 2011 The New Yorker published “The Possibilian,” a profile by Burkhard Bilger describing how a brush with death led him to study time and the brain.⁠[2]

The profile described him as an assistant professor of neuroscience at Baylor College of Medicine who headed a lab and had spent about a decade tracing the neural and psychological circuitry of the brain’s biological clocks.⁠[3]

He published the neurolaw essay “The Brain on Trial” in The Atlantic in July 2011; he is founder and co-director of the Center for Science and Law, which brings together neurobiologists, legal scholars and policymakers to study how new findings in neuroscience should shape lawmaking, punishment and rehabilitation.⁠[4]

In the essay he argued that the legal system should become “forward-looking” rather than dwelling on blameworthiness; that November he said in an interview that this “does not mean we let people off the hook” but means more rational sentencing and more customised rehabilitation.⁠[5]

In November 2011, speaking from his Baylor lab in Houston, he said his laboratory’s decade of findings showed that the sense of time is actively constructed by the brain and tightly linked to memory; he said he deliberately seeks novelty in daily life, such as driving home by a different route each day.⁠[6]

In 2012 his story collection Sum was adapted into an opera at the Royal Opera House, composed by Max Richter and directed by Wayne McGregor.⁠[7]

Commissioned by The Royal Opera, the chamber opera presented 16 of the tales from Sum: Forty Tales from the Afterlives as a series of mini-operas combining music, film and performance, with three singers using song and spoken word.⁠[8]

In a Q&A for a Lafayette College seminar series in fall 2012 he related that after earning an undergraduate degree in British and American literature at Rice University he moved to Los Angeles to try screenwriting, without success, and then applied, months after the deadline, to the neuroscience Ph.D. program at Baylor College of Medicine; he said his days go to lab and lecture work and his nights to writing.⁠[9]

In March 2015 he gave the TED talk “Can we create new senses for humans?”, demonstrating a haptic vest prototype with 32 vibrating motors that turns sound into patterns of vibration on the torso, on the principle that the brain does not care which sensory channel the data arrives through.⁠[10]

He says the vest was first built in his laboratory, quickly attracted venture funding and was spun out as the company Neosensory, whose team later shrank the hardware from a vest to a wristband.⁠[11]

PBS announced that the six-part series The Brain with David Eagleman, which he hosted, would air on Wednesday nights from October 14 to November 18, 2015, produced by Blink Films; the release described him as directing the Laboratory for Perception and Action and the Initiative on Neuroscience and Law at Baylor College of Medicine.⁠[12]

In October 2016 Houston-based BrainCheck raised $3 million; the company uses test games on an iPad or computer to measure reaction time, visual processing, memory and more, for concussion assessment in athletes and increasingly for dementia screening, on a platform developed by founder and chief scientific officer Eagleman in his Baylor lab.⁠[13]

On October 10, 2017, Catapult published The Runaway Species, which he co-wrote with Rice University composer Anthony Brandt, explaining human creativity through three strategies: “bending, breaking and blending.”⁠[14]

The book inspired the documentary The Creative Brain, in which he meets creators including D.B. Weiss, Nathan Myhrvold, Robert Glasper, Nick Cave and Phil Tippett.⁠[15]

In 2018 haptic vests based on Neosensory’s technology appeared in the second season of HBO’s Westworld, with Eagleman saying the military use in the show came from his suggestion; at the time the vest cost about $2,000, while the Buzz wristband was expected to cost a few hundred dollars.⁠[16]

In January 2019 Neosensory, co-founded by him and Scott Novich with him as chief executive, announced a $10 million Series A led by Excel Venture Management and DigiTx Partners, bringing total funding to $16 million, and planned to release its Buzz wristband later that year.⁠[17]

In 2020 he released The Safety Net: Surviving Pandemics and Other Disasters as an e-book and audiobook (slated for July), a revised version of his earlier iPad app-book Why The Net Matters, arguing that the internet helps civilization sidestep dangers that brought down earlier civilizations; the thesis began in a short piece he wrote in Nature in 2006.⁠[18]

On August 26, 2020, he appeared on episode 119 of the Lex FridmanLex FridmanLex Fridman is a Soviet-born, US-raised computer scientist and podcast host who works as an MIT research scientist on human-AI interaction and autonomous driving. His Lex Fridman Podcast is known for hours-long conversations with guests including heads of state and technology leaders.Open the full entry Podcast, discussing Livewired, hardware versus software, brain-computer interfaces, free will, the nature of evil, psychiatry, GPT-3, intelligence in the brain and Neosensory.⁠[19]

In September 2020 a hearing-industry publication reviewed the newly released Neosensory Buzz: four vibration motors inside the wristband create patterns based on a sound’s intensity and pitch, and the companion app adjusts the response from 350 Hz to nearly 8 kHz; Eagleman, then chief executive, said it does not matter by which route information reaches the brain, as the brain will figure it out.⁠[20]

In 2020 Pantheon published his Livewired: The Inside Story of the Ever-Changing Brain, which advances the idea of “livewiring,” the brain continually reshaping itself through interaction with the world; reviewer Elizabeth Svoboda praised its insights but found it “long on enthusiasm” and short on guidance for emulating or augmenting the brain’s adaptability.⁠[21]

On March 27, 2023, Inner Cosmos, his science podcast with iHeartPodcasts, released its first episode, with new episodes each Monday.⁠[22]

iHeartMedia described the show as exploring how modern brain science intersects with people’s lives, passions and behaviors, and noted that he had spun two biotech companies out of his lab.⁠[23]

As of October 2026 he is a neuroscientist at Stanford University, co-founder of neurotech companies including Jojo, BrainCheck and Neosensory, head of the non-profit Center for Science and Law, and author of more than 120 academic publications.⁠[24]

At Stanford he teaches courses on brain plasticity, literature and the brain, communicating science, and the brain and the law; he advises startups including Ampa, NextSense and Neurable, and runs the production company Cognito Film and the Substack This is Your Brain On.⁠[25]

His lab has collected and rigorously verified more than 60,000 synesthetes and built the free standardized test battery synesthete.org; Wednesday Is Indigo Blue, his book on synesthesia co-written with Richard Cytowic, won the Montaigne Medal.⁠[26][27]

He also teaches an eight-hour online course on brain plasticity at Peterson Academy.⁠[28]

Personal website: Public link: https://eagleman.com/ (opens in a new window)⁠[28]

X: Public account: https://x.com/davideagleman (opens in a new window)⁠[28]

LinkedInLinkedInLinkedIn is a social networking platform for professionals. It was founded in 2002 by Reid Hoffman and others, launched in 2003, and listed on the New York Stock Exchange in 2011; after Microsoft acquired it for approximately $26.2 billion in 2016, it became a wholly owned Microsoft subsidiary. Its revenue comes from membership subscriptions, advertising, and recruitment solutions.Open the full entry: Public profile: https://www.linkedin.com/in/davideagleman (opens in a new window)⁠[28]

Stanford University: Official website: https://www.stanford.edu/ (opens in a new window)⁠[25]

Neosensory: Official website: https://neosensory.com/ (opens in a new window)⁠[20]