Podbit · The School of Greatness
The human brain has 90 billion neurons but 100 trillion synaptic connections — and you can increase those connections through learning. Even Einstein's brain was smaller than average; it was the connections that made him exceptional. Brain size is irrelevant; connectivity is everything.
Where this was said
At 39:40 · chapter starts 36:05
Lewis asks how much the brain influences the mind and vice versa. McLaughlin's answer: the brain has machinery to do whatever the mind asks. That machinery includes habit formation, emotional experience, and unconscious threat detection — including olfactory channels for picking up the pheromones of a threatening individual before conscious awareness kicks in. The limbic system (amygdala, hippocampus) triggers the neuroadrenergic fight-flight-freeze cascade. He then offers the Einstein curveball: the physicist's brain was smaller than average, suggesting that the 100 trillion synaptic connections (against 90 billion neurons) are the real intelligence substrate — and can be grown through deliberate learning. The mind, in short, can generate brain growth. Lewis wonders aloud whether any brain surgeon has ever scanned their own brain every five years to track development. McLaughlin has not. [1] — Dr. Mark McLaughlin "90 billion neurons, 100 trillion connections: The human brain contains approximately 90 billion neurons and 100 trillion connections betwee…" 40:30 [2] — Dr. Mark McLaughlin "Einstein's brain was smaller than average: Einstein's brain was actually smaller than average, suggesting that intelligence is driven by th…" 39:58
Einstein's brain was actually smaller than average, suggesting that intelligence is driven by the density and number of neural connections rather than raw brain size.
The human brain contains approximately 90 billion neurons and 100 trillion connections between them — and those connections can be increased through learning and new skills.
McLaughlin opened a patient's skull only to find the cyst he was looking for had vanished. Four years into his career, alone, no senior partner available. He methodically started over from the scalp — and found the cyst hiding in the upper left field of his microscope. The surgeon who left the OR that day was permanently changed.
Social norms compress behavior so effectively that we assume other minds are similar to ours. They almost never are. After running over 100 psychology studies, Greenberg's biggest finding is that humans are far more different from each other than we intuitively believe.
The widely shared claim that we have a credit card's worth of plastic in our brains may be a massive overestimate. Researchers used nitrile gloves to measure microplastics — and nitrile gloves shed microplastic particles onto the measuring device. A second paper found the original tool used was unreliable, and that we may have far less plastic than reported.
RSD isn't just hurt feelings — it's a dopamine-deficient brain with a hyperactive amygdala and a frayed connection to the prefrontal cortex. Add a surge of norepinephrine and you get chest pain, sweating, and trembling that convinces your body something catastrophic is happening.
In Dan Ariely's door experiment, participants sacrificed the highest-reward door — repeatedly — just to avoid seeing other doors disappear. Even when researchers trained them to use the best door, they kept wasting clicks to maintain options. This is the bias that runs our lives: we'll take a worse outcome to preserve the feeling of optionality.
Dan Gilbert discovered that the brain has a 'psychological immune system' — it misremembers, reframes, and rationalizes to keep you satisfied with whatever you chose. The fear before commitment is all about potential regret. But after committing, your brain quietly starts justifying the choice — and the more irreversible the decision, the stronger the effect.
The psychological immune system can get you through the first few months of any commitment. But durable, long-term well-being requires self-concordance — choosing commitments that are genuinely aligned with your values and what you actually want. Without that alignment, the satisfaction fades fast.
Vision didn't just help animals find food — it ignited the Cambrian explosion of speciation. Half of the human cortex is devoted to visual processing, and that same visual hierarchy directly inspired the neural network architectures powering today's AI.
Peptides come loaded with a powerful narrative: regenerative, subcutaneous, targeted, cutting-edge. That narrative can genuinely move outcomes, especially for pain, energy, and recovery. The RCT's job is to quantify how much additional benefit comes from the molecule itself — above and beyond the compelling story surrounding it.
A pharmaceutical is not an amino acid sequence — it is the successful solution to manufacturing, purification, formulation, and consistency challenges. When clinical trials prove a drug works, they validate a specific product under specific processes, not every preparation that shares the same sequence.
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