Top 100 Eagleman's Quotes
#1. In each of us there is another whom we do not know.
Carl Jung
found in David Eagleman's book: Incognito
C. G. Jung
#3. Everything that creates itself upon the backs of smaller scales will by those same scales be consumed.
David Eagleman
#4. Your brain is built of cells called neurons and glia - hundreds of billions of them. Each one of these cells is as complicated as a city.
David Eagleman
#5. Something-now-or-more-later economic decisions while in a brain scanner.
David Eagleman
#6. So the first lesson about trusting your senses is: don't. Just because you believe something to be true, just because you know it's true, that doesn't mean it is true.
David Eagleman
#7. Constant reminding ourselves that we not see with our eyes but with our synergetic eye-brain system working as a whole will produce constant astonishment as we notice, more and more often, how much of our perceptions emerge from our preconceptions.
David Eagleman
#8. All creation necessarily ends in this: Creators, powerless, fleeing from the things they have wrought.
David Eagleman
#9. 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
#10. Our brains were simple enough to be understood, we wouldn't be smart enough to understand them.
David Eagleman
#11. 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
#12. This is what consciousness does: it sets the goals, and the rest of the system learns how to meet them.
David Eagleman
#13. 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
#14. There is a looming chasm between what your brain knows and what your mind is capable of accessing.
David Eagleman
#15. successfully train new spotters: by trial-and-error feedback. A novice would hazard a guess and the expert would say yes or no. Eventually the novices became, like
David Eagleman
#16. No one is having an experience of the objective reality that really exists; each creature perceives only what it has evolved to perceive.
David Eagleman
#17. I spent my adult life as a scientist, and science is, essentially, the most successful approach we have to try and understand the vast mysteries around.
David Eagleman
#18. Humans have discovered that they cannot stop Death, but at least they can spit in his drink.
David Eagleman
#19. Every atom in your body is the same quark in different places at the same moment in time.
David Eagleman
#20. I think what a life in science really teaches you is the vastness of our ignorance.
David Eagleman
#21. alerting the system to contradictions relies critically on particular brain regions - and one in particular, called the anterior cingulate cortex.
David Eagleman
#22. Is there any reason to believe that it's not possible to have both racist and nonracist parts of the brain?
David Eagleman
#23. 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
#24. Just like a good drama, the human brain runs on conflict.
David Eagleman
#25. Nothing is inherently tasty or repulsive - it depends on your needs. Deliciousness is simply an index of usefulness.
David Eagleman
#26. 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
#27. When we're in a human body, we don't care about universal collapse - instead, we care only about a meeting of the eyes, a glimpse of bare flesh, the caressing tones of a loved voice, joy, love, light, the orientation of a house plant, the shade of a paint stroke, the arrangement of hair.
David Eagleman
#28. 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
#29. 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
#30. We believe we're seeing the world just fine until it's called to our attention that we're not.
David Eagleman
#31. 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
#32. What has always surprised me when I walk into a bookstore is the number of books that you can find that are written with certainty. The authors tell some story as though it's true, but they don't have any evidence that it is true!
David Eagleman
#33. 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
#34. 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
#35. Second, the Tourette's patient cannot not do it: they cannot use free
David Eagleman
#36. 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
#37. We don't really understand most of what's happening in the cosmos. Is there any afterlife? Who knows.
David Eagleman
#38. The brain runs its show incognito. So who, exactly,
David Eagleman
#39. Platoons and plays and stores and congresses do not end - they simply move on to a different dimension.
David Eagleman
#40. The enemy of memory isn't time; it's other memories.
David Eagleman
#41. We are not conscious of most things until we ask ourselves questions about them
David Eagleman
#42. The majority of human beings live their whole lives unaware that they are only seeing a limited cone of vision at any moment.
David Eagleman
#43. Behavior is the outcome of the battle among internal systems.
David Eagleman
#44. The conscious mind is not at the center of the action in the brain; instead, it is far out on a distant edge, hearing but whispers of the activity.
David Eagleman
#46. 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
#47. Because vision appears so effortless, we are like fish challenged to understand water.
David Eagleman
#48. At least 15 percent of human females possess a genetic mutation that gives them an extra (fourth) type of color photoreceptor - and this allows them to discriminate between colors that look identical to the majority of us with a mere three types of color photoreceptors.
David Eagleman
#49. It turns out your conscious mind - the part you think of as you - is really the smallest part of what's happening in your brain, and usually the last one in line to find out any information.
David Eagleman
#50. The main thing known about secrets is that keeping them is unhealthy for the brain.46 Psychologist James Pennebaker and his colleagues studied what
David Eagleman
#51. To a space alien or a German Shepherd dog, the two humans would be indistinguishable, just as attractive and unattractive space aliens and German Shepherd dogs are difficult for you to tell apart.
David Eagleman
#54. Among all the creatures of creation, the gods favor us: We are the only ones who can empathize with their problems.
David Eagleman
#55. 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
#57. People wouldn't even go into science unless there was something much bigger to be discovered, something that is transcendent.
David Eagleman
#58. Man is equally incapable of seeing the nothingness from which he emerges and the infinity in which he is engulfed.1 Pascal
David Eagleman
#59. Instead of reality being passively recorded by the brain, it is actively constructed by it.
David Eagleman
#60. 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
#61. Neuroscience over the next 50 years is going to introduce things that are mind-blowing.
David Eagleman
#62. 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
#63. I'm using the afterlife as a backdrop against which to explore the joys and complexities of being human - it turns out that it's a great lens with which to understand what matters to us.
David Eagleman
#64. I call myself a Possibilian: I'm open to ... ideas that we don't have any way of testing right now.
David Eagleman
#65. 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
#66. 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
#67. He reasoned that if choices and decisions derive from hidden mental processes, then free choice is either an illusion or, at minimum, more tightly constrained than previously considered.
David Eagleman
#68. 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
#69. There are an infinite number of boring things to do in science.
David Eagleman
#70. 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
#71. 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
#72. 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
#73. To what extent is someone at fault if his brain is damaged in ways about which he has no choice? After all, we are not independent of our biology, right?
David Eagleman
#74. My dream is to reform the legal system over the next 20 years.
David Eagleman
#75. Odor carries a great deal of information, including information about a potential mate's age, sex, fertility, identity, emotions, and health.
David Eagleman
#76. 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
#77. For some, the new addiction reached beyond gambling to compulsive eating, alcohol consumption, and hypersexuality.
David Eagleman
#81. But the main lesson we can extract from biology is that it's better to cultivate a team of populations that attack the problem in different, overlapping manners.
David Eagleman
#82. As we develop better technologies for probing the brain, we detect more problems.
David Eagleman
#83. Our perception of reality has less to do with what's happening out there, and more to do with what's happening inside our brain. Your
David Eagleman
#84. 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
#85. IN Incognito the neuroscientist David Eagleman proposes that we are unknown to ourselves: Most of what we do and think and feel is not under our conscious control.
Nick Flynn
#86. the brain doesn't care how it gets the information, as long
David Eagleman
#87. As an undergraduate I majored in British and American literature at Rice University.
David Eagleman
#88. 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
#89. Everybody knows the power of deadlines - and we all hate them. But their effectiveness is undeniable.
David Eagleman
#90. Think about the brain as the densest concentration of youness. It's the peak of the mountain, but not the whole mountain.
David Eagleman
#92. Scientist and baseball fan Mike McBeath set out to understand the hidden neural computations behind catching fly balls.
David Eagleman
#93. You were all these ages, they concede, and you were none.
David Eagleman
#94. 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
#95. 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
#96. The Roman historian Tacitus claimed that the Germanic peoples always drank alcohol while holding councils to prevent anyone from lying.
David Eagleman
#97. 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
#98. It appears that repeated social rejection perturbs the normal functioning of the dopamine systems.
David Eagleman
#99. there is more than one way to lay down memory. We're not talking about a memory of different events, but multiple memories of the same event - as
David Eagleman
Famous Authors
Popular Topics
Scroll to Top
