David Eagleman Quotes

90 Sourced Quotes

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

David Eagleman
Many great civilisations have fallen, leaving nothing but cracked ruins and scattered genetics. Usually this results from: natural disasters, resource depletion, economic meltdown, disease, poor information flow and corruption. But we're luckier than our predecessors because we command a technology that no one else possessed: a rapid communication network that finds its highest expression in the internet. I propose that there are six ways in which the net has vastly reduced the threat of societal collapse.

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

David Eagleman
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
We believe we're seeing the world just fine until it's called to our attention that we're not.

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

David Eagleman
Instead of reality being passively recorded by the brain, it is actively constructed by it.

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.

David Eagleman
When one part of the brain makes a choice, other parts can quickly invent a story to explain why. If you show the command "Walk" to the right hemisphere (the one without language), the patient will get up and start walking. If you stop him and ask why he's leaving, his left hemisphere, cooking up an answer, will say something like "I was going to get a drink of water."

David Eagleman
In my view, the argument from parsimony is really no argument at all - it typically functions only to shut down more interesting discussion. If history is any guide, it's never a good idea to assume that a scientific problem is cornered.

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.

David Eagleman
The first thing we learn from studying our own circuitry is a simple lesson: most of what we do and think and feel is not under our conscious control.

David Eagleman
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
Who we can be begins with our molecular blueprints - a series of alien codes penned in invisibly small strings of acids - well before we have anything to do with it. We are a product of our inaccessible, microscopic history.

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.

David Eagleman
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
The continuous networks of neural circuitry accomplish their functions using multiple, independently discovered strategies. The brain lends itself well to the complexity of the world, but poorly to clear-cut cartography.

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

David Eagleman
Reductionism is not the right viewpoint for everything, and it certainly won't explain the relationship between the brain and the mind. This is because of a feature known as emergence. When you put together large numbers of pieces and parts, the whole can become something greater than the sum.

David Eagleman
We are not conscious of most things until we ask ourselves questions about them.

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.

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

David Eagleman
Scientists often talk of parsimony (as in "the simplest explanation is probably correct," also known as Occam's razor), but we should not get seduced by the apparent elegance of argument from parsimony; this line of reasoning has failed in the past at least as many times as it has succeeded.

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.

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.

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.

David Eagleman
Odor carries a great deal of information, including information about a potential mate's age, sex, fertility, identity, emotions, and health.

David Eagleman