David Eagleman - Brain Quotes

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

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
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
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
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