David Eagleman
1993 BA in English
Neuroscientist at Baylor College of Medicine, and author of Sum: Forty Tales from the Afterlives
When David Eagleman came to Rice in 1989, it seemed everyone was telling him to be an engineer. But literature was his first love, and reading had been a passion since childhood. At first he decided to double major in English and electrical engineering. At one point he switched engineering for space physics, a subject that also fascinated him. Finally, he decided to focus on his English studies, to devote as much time and coursework as possible to writing and to literary critical scholarship before he graduated, so he dropped the double major altogether. In literary studies, he found a keen interest in the modern literature of North and South America.
David's roving and insatiable curiosity nevertheless drew him in his senior year to a course outside his major that made a significant impact on his later studies and career trajectory. Neurolinguistics is cross-listed in Anthropology and Linguistics, and is a component of the Cognitive Science Program. For David, though, it was just another topic that fascinated him. At the same time, and on his own initiative, David was devoting significant time at Fondren Library, "checking out any books they had on the brain, because I thought the brain was perhaps the most fascinating topic I had come across. I was reading all the books and magazine articles I could get my hands on."
Because it was his senior year, David also had to make plans for after graduation. He took a novel approach, applying both to film school at UCLA and to the neuroscience program at Baylor College of Medicine. "I figured I'd see which way things went, because I really wanted to do both." David credits his background in quantitative reasoning in math and physics for making him an attractive candidate at BCM, and he believes that BCM also recognized and appreciated the unique strengths of a Rice education. He also made use of his writing skills to argue the case for his developing interest in the brain. Five years later, he had his PhD in neuroscience.
After a postdoctoral fellowship at the Salk Institute, and a faculty position at the University of Texas Health Science Center at Houston, David now runs a neuroscience research laboratory at BCM trying to figure out how the brain constructs reality, investigating in particular the phenomena of synesthesia, the perception of time, and the relationship between neuroscience and the legal system, "how modern neuroscience affects the way we think about criminal behavior and punishment, and new ideas for rehabilitation." His work raises significant questions that scholars in the humanities are finding more and more relevant, prompting new questions in philosophy, psychology, history, and the arts. For example, people with synesthesia have "conjoined" sensations: sounds have color, words produce tastes, or numbers have locations. Such perceptions, experienced by 1% of the population, challenge any assumptions about how we perceive the world and our place within it: "it turns out that you and everything about you is a product of these neurological processes," which are not necessarily consistent or reliable.
According to David, "good science and good art are the same thing: they invent creative narratives, and then see which ones work. The textbooks seem to tell a story that science proceeds in a linear fashion, but in fact, it never proceeds that way. Science advances when somebody makes up the wackiest, craziest kind of stories they can. One out of a hundred of those stories will end up being right. We have to throw out most of our ideas. But it's all about a constant, creative innovation."
David has never given up his love of creative writing and literature. In 2009, he published a book of literary fiction called Sum: Forty Tales from the Afterlives (Pantheon), which has been translated into seventeen languages and in September became Amazon's #2 bestseller in the United Kingdom. This year he's given hundreds of interviews and traveled around the world to talk about the ideas in his book. A thrilling moment came when he was invited to collaborate with the preeminent ambient music composer Brian Eno, to give a live performance based on Sum at the Sydney Opera House in Australia. The performance was then reprised in November in London, with support from musician Nick Cave, actress Miranda Richardson, and writer Philip Pullman. "When I began my career as a neuroscientist, I promised myself I would never give up on my dream of being a writer. And this has been the year when it all came true."
