Top 100 David Eagleman Quotes
#1. Awareness of your surroundings occurs only when sensory inputs violate expectations. When the world is successfully predicted away, awareness is not needed because the brain is doing its job well.
David Eagleman
#2. Odor carries a great deal of information, including information about a potential mate's age, sex, fertility, identity, emotions, and health.
David Eagleman
#3. The men may also not have known that their notions of beauty and feelings of attraction are deeply hardwired, steered in the right direction by programs carved by millions of years of natural selection.
David Eagleman
#4. We're trapped on this very thin slice of perception ... But even at that slice of reality that we call home, we're not seeing most of what's going on.
David Eagleman
#5. The missing crowds make you lonely. You begin to complain about all the people you could be meeting. But no one listens or sympathizes with you, because this is precisely what you chose when you were alive.
David Eagleman
#6. As Gazzaniga put it, these findings all suggest that the interpretive mechanism of the left hemisphere is always hard at work, seeking the meaning of events. It is constantly looking for order and reasons, even when there is none - which leads it continually to make mistakes.
David Eagleman
#7. The brain internally simulates what will happen if you were to perform some action under specific conditions. Internal models not only play a role in motor acts (such as catching or dodging) but also underlie conscious perception.
David Eagleman
#8. I call myself a Possibilian: I'm open to ... ideas that we don't have any way of testing right now.
David Eagleman
#9. We are not at the center of ourselves, but instead - like the Earth in the Milky Way, and the Milky Way in the universe - far out on a distant edge, hearing little of what is transpiring.
David Eagleman
#10. Neuroscience over the next 50 years is going to introduce things that are mind-blowing.
David Eagleman
#11. The drives you take for granted ("I'm a hetero/homosexual," "I'm attracted to children/adults," "I'm aggressive/not aggressive," and so on) depend on the intricate details of your neural machinery.
David Eagleman
#12. Man is equally incapable of seeing the nothingness from which he emerges and the infinity in which he is engulfed.1 Pascal
David Eagleman
#13. People wouldn't even go into science unless there was something much bigger to be discovered, something that is transcendent.
David Eagleman
#15. Would take dozens of the world's fastest supercomputers to match the computational power required to pull off this feat. Yet I have no perception of this lightning storm in my brain.
David Eagleman
#17. So not only was it possible to implant false new memories in the brain, but people embraced and embellished them, unknowingly weaving fantasy into the fabric of their identity.
David Eagleman
#19. It appears that repeated social rejection perturbs the normal functioning of the dopamine systems.
David Eagleman
#20. One of the most impressive features of brains - and especially human brains - is the flexibility to learn almost any kind of task that comes its way.
David Eagleman
#21. The Roman historian Tacitus claimed that the Germanic peoples always drank alcohol while holding councils to prevent anyone from lying.
David Eagleman
#22. Some men may be genetically inclined to have and hold a single partner, while some may not. In the near future, young women who stay current with the scientific literature may demand genetic tests of their boyfriends to assess how likely they are to make faithful husbands.
David Eagleman
#23. How you turn out depends on where you've been. So when it comes to thinking about blameworthiness, the first difficulty to consider is that people do not choose their own developmental path.
David Eagleman
#24. Scientist and baseball fan Mike McBeath set out to understand the hidden neural computations behind catching fly balls.
David Eagleman
#26. Think about the brain as the densest concentration of youness. It's the peak of the mountain, but not the whole mountain.
David Eagleman
#27. So modern neuroimaging is like asking an astronaut in the space shuttle to look out the window and judge how America is doing.
David Eagleman
#28. the brain doesn't care how it gets the information, as long
David Eagleman
#29. The emotional and rational networks battle not only over immediate moral decisions, but in another familiar situation as well: how we behave in time.
David Eagleman
#32. The enemy of memory isn't time; it's other memories.
David Eagleman
#33. schizophrenics can tickle themselves because of a problem with their timing that does not allow their motor actions and resulting sensations to be correctly sequenced.
David Eagleman
#34. Nothing is inherently tasty or repulsive - it depends on your needs. Deliciousness is simply an index of usefulness.
David Eagleman
#35. Just like a good drama, the human brain runs on conflict.
David Eagleman
#36. We spend our lives on a thin slice between the unimaginably small scales of the atoms that compose us and the infinitely large scales of galaxies.
David Eagleman
#37. Is there any reason to believe that it's not possible to have both racist and nonracist parts of the brain?
David Eagleman
#38. I think what a life in science really teaches you is the vastness of our ignorance.
David Eagleman
#39. Humans have discovered that they cannot stop Death, but at least they can spit in his drink.
David Eagleman
#40. There is a looming chasm between what your brain knows and what your mind is capable of accessing.
David Eagleman
#41. One of the most pervasive mistakes is to believe that our visual system gives a faithful representation of what is "out there" in the same way that a movie camera would.
David Eagleman
#42. This is what consciousness does: it sets the goals, and the rest of the system learns how to meet them.
David Eagleman
#43. What does this research tell us? It tells us that fiscally concerned strippers should eschew contraception and double up their shifts just before ovulation.
David Eagleman
#44. Our brains were simple enough to be understood, we wouldn't be smart enough to understand them.
David Eagleman
#45. A typical neuron makes about ten thousand connections to neighboring neurons. Given the billions of neurons, this means there are as many connections in a single cubic centimeter of brain tissue as there are stars in the Milky Way galaxy.
David Eagleman
#46. All creation necessarily ends in this: Creators, powerless, fleeing from the things they have wrought.
David Eagleman
#47. Something-now-or-more-later economic decisions while in a brain scanner.
David Eagleman
#49. Everything that creates itself upon the backs of smaller scales will by those same scales be consumed.
David Eagleman
#50. Because vision appears so effortless, we are like fish challenged to understand water.
David Eagleman
#51. Each cell sends electrical pulses to other cells, up to hundreds of times per second. If you represented each of these trillions and trillions of pulses in your brain by a single photon of light, the combined output would be blinding.
David Eagleman
#53. Behavior is the outcome of the battle among internal systems.
David Eagleman
#54. We are not conscious of most things until we ask ourselves questions about them
David Eagleman
#55. Platoons and plays and stores and congresses do not end - they simply move on to a different dimension.
David Eagleman
#56. The brain runs its show incognito. So who, exactly,
David Eagleman
#57. All activity in the brain is driven by other activity in the brain, in a vastly complex, interconnected network.
David Eagleman
#58. The three-pound organ in your skull - with its pink consistency of Jell-o - is an alien kind of computational material. It is composed of miniaturized, self-configuring parts, and it vastly outstrips anything we've dreamt of building.
David Eagleman
#59. And in this form, they find themselves longing to ascend mountains, wander the seas, and conquer the air, seeking to recapture the limitlessness they once knew.
David Eagleman
#60. Political persuasion emerges at the intersection of the mental and the corporal. Traveling
David Eagleman
#61. Evolve solutions; when you find a good one, don't stop.
David Eagleman
#62. The first (and so far only) blind person to climb Mount Everest. Today he climbs with a grid of over six hundred tiny electrodes in his mouth, called the BrainPort.30
David Eagleman
#63. I came here for the same reason doctors wear uniforms of long white coats ... They don't do it for their benefit, but for yours.
David Eagleman
#64. It is only through us that God lives. When we abandon him, he dies.
David Eagleman
#65. They come to understand, with awe, the complexity of the compound identity that existed on the Earth. They conclude with a shudder that the Earthly you is utterly lost, unpreserved in the afterlife. You were all these ages, and you were none.
David Eagleman
#66. We're now getting the first glimpses of the vastness of inner space. This internal, hidden, intimate cosmos commands its own goals, imperatives, and logic.
David Eagleman
#67. It is the most wondrous thing we have discovered in the universe, and it is us.
David Eagleman
#68. Part of the scientific temperament is this tolerance for holding multiple hypotheses in mind at the same time.
David Eagleman
#69. Asleep vision (dreaming) is perception that is not tied down to anything in the real world; waking perception is something like dreaming with a little more commitment to what's in front of you.
David Eagleman
#70. Second, the Tourette's patient cannot not do it: they cannot use free
David Eagleman
#71. Even though the outside world has not changed, your brain dynamically presents different interpretations.
David Eagleman
#72. Knowing yourself now requires the understanding that the conscious you occupies only a small room in the mansion of the brain, and that it has little control over the reality constructed for you.
David Eagleman
#73. Visual cortex is fundamentally a machine whose job is to generate a model of the world.
David Eagleman
#74. Serotonin - are critical for who you believe yourself to be. If
David Eagleman
#76. A mere 400 years after our fall from the center of the universe, we have experienced the fall from the center of ourselves.
David Eagleman
#77. Change blindness highlights the importance of attention: to see an object change, you must attend
David Eagleman
#78. Imbalance of reason and emotion may explain the tenacity of religion in societies: world religions are optimized to tap into the emotional networks, and great arguments of reason amount to little against such magnetic pull.
David Eagleman
#79. Since we live in the heads of those who remember us, we lose control of our lives and become who they want us to be.
David Eagleman
#80. Just give the brain the information and it will figure it out.
David Eagleman
#81. After all, that's what memory is for: keeping track of important events, so that if you're ever in a similar situation, your brain has more information to try to survive. In other words, when things are life-threateningly scary, it's a good time to take notes.
David Eagleman
#82. Keep in mind that every single generation before us has worked under the assumption that they possessed all the major tools for understanding the universe, and they were all wrong, without exception.
David Eagleman
#83. Imagine that your desktop computer began to control its own peripheral devices, removed its own cover, and pointed its webcam at its own circuitry. That's us.
David Eagleman
#84. Carl Jung put it, "In each of us there is another whom we do not know.
David Eagleman
#85. Of all the Programmers' planets, ours is the supercomputing golden child, the world that inexplicably provides enough power to light up the galaxy.
David Eagleman
#86. My lab and academic work fill my day from about 9 am to 7 p.m. Then I zoom out the lens to work on my other writing.
David Eagleman
#87. Every week I get letters from people worldwide who feel that the possibilian point of view represents their understanding better than either religion or neo-atheism.
David Eagleman
#88. But it turns out your thousand trillion trillion atoms were not an accidental collection: each was labeled as composing you and continues to be so wherever it goes. So you're not gone, you're simply taking on different forms.
David Eagleman
#89. Who you are depends on the sum total of your neurobiology.
David Eagleman
#90. To my mind, that's a bigger and brighter idea than sitting at a lonely center surrounded by cold and distant astral lamps.
David Eagleman
#91. Consciousness is the smallest player in the operations of the brain.
David Eagleman
#92. We believe we're seeing the world just fine until it's called to our attention that we're not.
David Eagleman
#93. Even while it's true that we are tied to our molecules and proteins and neurons - as strokes and hormones and drugs and microorganisms indisputably tell us - it does not logically follow that humans are best described only as pieces and parts.
David Eagleman
#94. Those with Anton's syndrome are not pretending they are not blind; they truly believe they are not blind. Their verbal reports, while inaccurate, are not lies. Instead, they are experiencing what they take to be vision, but it is all internally generated.
David Eagleman
#95. I think the first decade of this century is going to be remembered as a time of extremism.
David Eagleman
#96. I know one lab that studies nicotine receptors and all the scientists are smokers, and another lab that studies impulse control and they're all overweight.
David Eagleman
#97. You are battered and bruised in the collisions between reminiscence and reality.
David Eagleman
#98. Parts of the brain were making decisions well before the person consciously experienced the urge.14 Returning
David Eagleman
#100. Once you begin deliberating about where your fingers are jumping on the piano keyboard, you can no longer pull off the piece.
David Eagleman
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