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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
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Once you begin deliberating about where your fingers are jumping on the piano keyboard, you can no longer pull off the piece.
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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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Modern neuroimaging is like asking an astronaut in the space shuttle to look out the window and judge how America is doing.
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The deep secret of the brain is that not only the spinal cord but the entire central nervous system works this way: internally generated activity is modulated by sensory input. In this view, the difference between being awake and being asleep is merely that the data coming in from the eyes anchors the perception.
David Eagleman
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As we develop better technologies for probing the brain, we detect more problems.
David Eagleman
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All life is no more than a match struck in the dark and blown out again.
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Even though the outside world has not changed, your brain dynamically presents different interpretations.
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As Carl Jung put it, "In each of us there is another whom we do not know." As Pink Floyd sang, "There's someone in my head, but it's not me."
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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.
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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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Just give the brain the information and it will figure it out.
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It is the most wondrous thing we have discovered in the universe, and it is us.
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Behavior is the outcome of the battle among internal systems.
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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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This is what consciousness does: it sets the goals, and the rest of the system learns how to meet them.
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Visual cortex is fundamentally a machine whose job is to generate a model of the world.
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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.
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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.
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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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Everything that creates itself upon the backs of smaller scales will by those same scales be consumed.
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Societies would _not_ be better off if everyone were like Mr Spock, all rationality and no emotion. Instead, a balance - a teaming up of the internal rivals - is optimal for brains.... Some balance of the emotional and rational systems is needed, and that balance may already be optimized by natural selection in human brains.
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There are three deaths. The first is when the body ceases to function. The second is when the body is consigned to the grave. The third is that moment, sometime in the future, when your name is spoken for the last time.
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The brain is a complex system, but that doesn't mean it's incomprehensible. Our neural circuits were carved by natural selection to solve problems that our ancestors faced during our species' evolutionary history. Your brain has been molded by evolutionary pressures just as your spleen and eyes have been. And so has your consciousness. Consciousness developed because it was advantageous, but advantageous only in limited amounts.
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It is problematic to imagine yourself in the shoes of a criminal and conclude, Well, I wouldn't have done that —because if you weren't exposed to in utero cocaine, lead poisoning, or physical abuse, and he was, then you don't fit in his shoes. Even if you would like to imagine what it's like to be him, you won't be very good at it.
David Eagleman
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Quote of the day
Time and trouble will tame an advanced young woman, but an advanced old woman is uncontrollable by any earthly force.
Dorothy L. Sayers
David Eagleman
Born:
April 25, 1971
(age 53)
Bio:
David Eagleman is an American neuroscientist and writer at Baylor College of Medicine, where he directs the Laboratory for Perception and Action and the Initiative on Neuroscience and Law.
Known for:
Incognito: The Secret Lives of the Brain (2011)
Sum: Forty Tales from the Afterlives (2009)
The Brain: The Story of You (2015)
Wednesday Is Indigo Blue (2009)
Most used words:
brain
mind
body
balance
natural
David Eagleman on Wikipedia
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