David Eagleman - Incognito: The Secret Lives of the Brain (2011)

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We spend our lives on a thin slice between the unimaginably small scales of the atoms that compose us and the infinitely large scales of galaxies.

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

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

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

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
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.

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

David Eagleman