David Eagleman Quotes

90 Sourced Quotes

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

David Eagleman
All life is no more than a match struck in the dark and blown out again.

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

David Eagleman
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."

David Eagleman
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
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.

David Eagleman
Just give the brain the information and it will figure it out.

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

David Eagleman
Behavior is the outcome of the battle among internal systems.

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.

David Eagleman
This is what consciousness does: it sets the goals, and the rest of the system learns how to meet them.

David Eagleman
Visual cortex is fundamentally a machine whose job is to generate a model of the world.

David Eagleman
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
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
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.

David Eagleman
Everything that creates itself upon the backs of smaller scales will by those same scales be consumed.

David Eagleman
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.

David Eagleman
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.

David Eagleman
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.

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

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.

David Eagleman
There is a looming chasm between what your brain knows and what your mind is capable of accessing.

David Eagleman
You're not perceiving what's out there. You're perceiving whatever your brain tells you.

David Eagleman
Our ignorance of the cosmos is too vast to commit to atheism, and yet we know too much to commit to a particular religion. A third position, agnosticism, is often an uninteresting stance in which a person simply questions whether his traditional religious story (say, a man with a beard on a cloud) is true or not true. But with Possibilianism I'm hoping to define a new position — one that emphasizes the exploration of new, unconsidered possibilities. Possibilianism is comfortable holding multiple ideas in mind; it is not interested in committing to any particular story.

David Eagleman
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
Our internal life and external actions are steered by biological coctails to which we have neither immediate access nor direct acquaintance.

David Eagleman
You are battered and bruised in the collisions between reminiscence and reality.

David Eagleman
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