We do a very flexible kind of cognition. It's still one of the most, in my mind,

interesting frontiers because we have yet to be able to do something like

program and artificial intelligence that comes anywhere near the flexibility of human behavior. As hard as the last year

and a half has been, think about the way that worldwide people radically change their behavior, not everybody, but like on the whole right people change their behavior in response to what was effectively a very abstract set of rules

didn't take years of reinforcement learning or practice or evolution, right?

People were just like, okay, I'll start doing this thing now next week.

We learned how to grocery shop differently.

We learned how to eat differently, socialize differently, work differently,

all of this in a moment, and we did it worldwide.

And it's a really amazing function that no other species and no AI yet built can even come close to.

And I think that's what makes it very, it's an exciting area of science because it's such a mystery how we do it.

Welcome to brain science, the podcast that explores how recent discoveries in neuroscience are unraveling the

mystery of how our brain makes us human. This is episode 190 and I'm your host Dr. Ginger Campbell.

Today's episode is brought to you by the American Academy of Neurology.

My guest today is David Better.

David is a professor of cognitive linguistics and psychological sciences at Brown University

and he is the author of On Task, How Our Brain Gets Things done. The ability to plan and carry out a wide

variety of tasks is a truly unique human ability. The emphasis of our conversation will be on the practical

implications of learning exactly how the brain gets things done.

For the sake of new listeners, I want to remind you that you can get

complete show notes at episode transcripts at brain science podcast

dot com and you can send me email at brain science podcast at gmail.com.

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