Mar 11, 2019 By Harry Funk staff Writer hfunk@thealmanac.Net 5 min read

With spring on the horizon and outdoor tennis courts opening soon, David Eagleman has a surefire way to win matches.

“All you need to do is, you compliment your opponent on his serve,” he advised. “You say, ‘Wow! You serve so well. How exactly do you do that?’ And as soon as he starts trying to explain it, he’s dead.”

As a neuroscientist – someone who studies the nervous system, including the brain – Eagleman has plenty of insight to the workings of the mind, which he shared March 5 during the Town Hall South lecture series’ 2018-19 season finale.

He provided healthy doses of humor for his audience at Upper St. Clair High School to balance the often-baffling science behind the brain, which for humans contains some 86 billion neurons, or nerve cells.

“Every single one of these is as complicated as the city of Pittsburgh. Every one of these has the entire human genome in it that’s trafficking millions of proteins around in very complicated cascades, and each one of these is connected to about 10,000 of its neighbors,” Eagleman explained. “So that means that we have something like 500 trillion connections going on in your brain.”

Mathematics aside, the three pounds or so of gray matter within our skulls defies adequate comprehension on other levels.

“One of the things that got me completely intrigued about this many years ago was understanding that so much of operation of this, about who we are, is happening under the hood. It’s happening at a level that we don’t have any access to,” Eagleman said.

“Think about when you have an idea, and you say, ‘Oh, I just thought of something.’ But it wasn’t exactly you, right? Your brain has been working on that for days or weeks behind the scenes, consolidating information, cooking up hypotheses, evaluating them.”

One of the many books he has written, “Incognito: The Secret Lives of the Brain,” quotes the late Swiss psychoanalyst Carl Jung on his observations about what transpires behind the scenes:

“In each of us, there is another whom we do not know.”

Or, as he quotes Roger Waters from his Pink Floyd song “Brain Damage”:

“There’s someone in my head, but it’s not me.'”

As an example, Eagleman cited a study in which men were asked to rate the attractiveness of women in photographs showing their faces. The subjects of half the photos had their eyes dilated, and they received better ratings.

The men weren’t consciously aware that dilated eyes represent a biological sign of sexual attraction.

“But their brains knew it,” Eagleman said. “And it turns out this sort of thing is extremely common, that your unconscious brain is making whole decisions for you without you being aware.”

Once awareness sets in, that’s the type of situation that can spell trouble for tennis players.

“The unconscious mind can take care of lots of stuff on its own, and the conscious mind only ends up interfering with what’s going on there,” Eagleman explained, presenting another sports-related instance:

“When I was younger, I used to play baseball, and my coach would say, ‘I want you guys to think out there.’ And I’d say, ‘Actually, you don’t want us to think out there. You want us to train a sufficient number of hours that we automatize the behaviors, and then we just go out there and perform them.’ But he never believed me, so I had to write books to be on television.”

That’s right. If you missed him at “Town Hall South,” you can catch him on the PBS miniseries ”The Brain With David Eagleman.”

One area of concentration for neuroscientists is studying what can go wrong with the brain, such as developing Alzheimer’s disease. Eagleman spoke about a project involving nuns who bequeathed their brains for study after death.

“What the researchers found, to everybody’s surprise, was that some fraction of the nuns had Alzheimer’s disease, and yet nobody knew that while they were alive,” he said. “It’s because these nuns lived in convents until the day they died, and they were constantly busy. They had chores. They had tasks. They were playing games. They were doing social interaction with everybody. And as a result, even if their brains were physically degenerating, they were making new roadways between A and B. They were making new pathways so that their brains were staying active and connected.”

He recommended some simple activities for audience members to keep their brains on their toes, so to speak.

“When you go home tonight, brush your teeth with your other hand,” he suggested. “It’s really, really good for your brain, because what you’re doing is just breaking yourself out of this path and getting to try something new there.”

Or do what Eagleman does and take different routes around town whenever possible.

“The very first time you go to work, it seems to take a long time. And then on successive days, it takes less and less time, until it takes zero time, because you’re an unconscious, automated zombie at that point,” he said. “So if you drive a different route home from work every day, you notice new things.”

And there just might be another upside:

“I’m not telling you how to live longer. I’m telling you how to make it seem as though you live longer.”

Visit www.pbs.org/show/brain-david-eagleman.