Best 121 quotes of David Eagleman on MyQuotes

David Eagleman

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    David Eagleman

    After all, across the population there are slight differences in brain function, and sometimes these translate directly into different ways of experiencing the world. And each individual believes his way is reality.

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    David Eagleman

    All activity in the brain is driven by other activity in the brain, in a vastly complex, interconnected network.

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    David Eagleman

    All creation necessarily ends in this: Creators, powerless, fleeing from the things they have wrought.

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    David Eagleman

    All life will die, all mind will cease, and it will all be as if it had never happened. That, to be honest, is the goal to which evolution is traveling, that is the "benevolent" end of the furious living and furious dying.

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    David Eagleman

    A mere 400 years after our fall from the center of the universe, we have experienced the fall from the center of ourselves.

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    David Eagleman

    Among all the creatures of creation, the gods favor us: We are the only ones who can empathize with their problems.

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    David Eagleman

    As an undergraduate I majored in British and American literature at Rice University.

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    David Eagleman

    As Walt Whitman correctly surmised, we are large and we harbor multitudes within us. And those multitudes are locked in chronic battle. There is an ongoing conversation among the different factions in your brain, each competing to control the single output channel of your behavior. As a result, you can accomplish the strange feats of arguing with yourself, cursing at yourself, and cajoling yourself to do something - feats that modern computers simply do not do.

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    David Eagleman

    As we develop better technologies for probing the brain, we detect more problems.

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    David Eagleman

    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.

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    David Eagleman

    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.

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    David Eagleman

    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.

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    David Eagleman

    Because vision appears so effortless, we are like fish challenged to understand water.

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    David Eagleman

    Behavior is the outcome of the battle among internal systems.

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    David Eagleman

    Brains are like representative democracies. They are built of multiple, overlapping experts who weigh in and compete over different choices.

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    David Eagleman

    Consciousness is the smallest player in the operations of the brain.

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    David Eagleman

    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.

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    David Eagleman

    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.

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    David Eagleman

    Evolve solutions; when you find a good one, don't stop.

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    David Eagleman

    Even though the outside world has not changed, your brain dynamically presents different interpretations.

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    David Eagleman

    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.

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    David Eagleman

    Every atom in your body is the same quark in different places at the same moment in time.

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    David Eagleman

    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.

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    David Eagleman

    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.

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    David Eagleman

    Humans have discovered that they cannot stop Death, but at least they can spit in his drink.

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    David Eagleman

    I always bounce my legs when I'm sitting.

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    David Eagleman

    I call myself a Possibilian: I'm open to...ideas that we don't have any way of testing right now.

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    David Eagleman

    If an epileptic seizure is focused in a particular sweet spot in the temporal lobe, a person won´t have motor seizures, but instead something more subtle. The effect is something like a cognitive seizure, marked by changes of personality, hyperreligiosity (an obsession with religion and feelings of religious certainity), hypergraphia (extensive writing on a subject, usually about religion), the false sense of an external presence, and, often, the hearing voices that are attributed to a god. Some fraction of history´s prophets, martyrs, and leaders appear to have had temporal lobe epilepsy.

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    David Eagleman

    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.

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    David Eagleman

    If our brains were simple enough to be understood, we wouldn't be smart enough to understand them.

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    David Eagleman

    If you are a carrier of a particular set of genes, your probability of committing a violent crime goes up by eight hundred and eighty-two percent.

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    David Eagleman

    If you cannot always elicit a straight answer from the unconscious brain, how can you access its knowledge? Sometimes the trick is merely to probe what your gut is telling you. So the next time a friend laments that she cannot decide between two options, tell her the easiest way to solve her problem: flip a coin. She should specify which option belongs to heads and which to tails, and then let the coin fly. The important part is to assess her gut feeling after the coin lands. If she feels a subtle sense of relief at being "told" what to do by the coin, that's the right choice for her.

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    David Eagleman

    If you ever feel lazy or dull, take heart: you're the busiest, brightest thing on the planet.

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    David Eagleman

    If you have certain problems with your brain but are raised in a good home, you might turn out okay. If your brain is fine and your home is terrible, you might still turn out fine. But if you have mild brain damage and end up with a bad home life, you're tossing the dice for a very unlucky synergy.

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    David Eagleman

    If you measure someone's brain and see very little activity during a task, it does not necessarily indicate that they're not trying - it more likely signifies that they have worked hard in the past to burn the programs into the circuitry. Consciousness is called in during the first phase of learning and is excluded from the game playing after it is deep in the system.

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    David Eagleman

    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.

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    David Eagleman

    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.

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    David Eagleman

    In our current understanding of science, we can't find the physical gap in which to slip free will - the uncaused causer - because there seems to be no part of the machinery that does not follow in a causal relationship from the other parts.

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    David Eagleman

    Interestingly, 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.

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    David Eagleman

    In the traditionally taught view of perception, data from the sensorium pours into the brain, works its way up the sensory hierarchy, and makes itself seen, heard, smelled, tasted, felt - "perceived." But a closer examination of the data suggests this is incorrect. The brain is properly thought of as a mostly closed system that runs on its own internally generated activity.

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    David Eagleman

    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.

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    David Eagleman

    It is more parsimonious to assume that the sun goes around the Earth, that atoms at the smallest scale operate in accordance with the same rules that objects at larger scales follow, and that we perceive what is really out there. All of these positions were long defended by argument from parsimony, and they were all wrong.

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    David Eagleman

    It is the most wondrous thing we have discovered in the universe, and it is us.

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    David Eagleman

    It turns out that dopamine is a chemical on double duty in the brain. Along with its role in motor commands, it also serves as the main messenger in the reward systems, guiding a person toward food, drink, mates, and all things useful for survival. Because of its role in the reward system, imbalances in dopamine can trigger gambling, overeating, and drug addiction - behaviors that result from a reward system gone awry.

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    David Eagleman

    Just like a good drama, the human brain runs on conflict.

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    David Eagleman

    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.

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    David Eagleman

    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.

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    David Eagleman

    Love was not specified in the design of your brain; it is merely an endearing algorithm that freeloads on the leftover processing cycles.

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    David Eagleman

    Many people prefer a view of human nature that includes a true side and a false side - in other words, humans have a single genuine aim and the rest is decoration, evasion, or cover-up. That's intuitive, but it's incomplete. A study of the brain necessitates a more nuanced view of human nature.

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    David Eagleman

    Modern neuroimaging is like asking an astronaut in the space shuttle to look out the window and judge how America is doing.