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

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You are more likely to believe that a statement is true if you have heard it before - whether or not it is actually true.

David Eagleman
All activity in the brain is driven by other activity in the brain, in a vastly complex, interconnected network.

David Eagleman
Knowing yourself now requires the understanding that the conscious you occupies only a small room in the mansion of the brain, and that it has little control over the reality constructed for you.

David Eagleman
Some men may be genetically inclined to have and hold a single partner, while some may not. In the near future, young women who stay current with the scientific literature may demand genetic tests of their boyfriends to assess how likely they are to make faithful husbands.

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

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 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