Top 136 Quotes & Sayings by David Eagleman
Explore popular quotes and sayings by an American scientist David Eagleman.
Last updated on November 8, 2024.
Neuroscience over the next 50 years is going to introduce things that are mind-blowing.
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.
Part of the scientific temperament is this tolerance for holding multiple hypotheses in mind at the same time.
What we find is that our brains have colossal things happening in them all the time.
I always bounce my legs when I'm sitting.
My dream is to reform the legal system over the next 20 years.
Every week I get letters from people worldwide who feel that the possibilian point of view represents their understanding better than either religion or neo-atheism.
What has always surprised me when I walk into a bookstore is the number of books that you can find that are written with certainty. The authors tell some story as though it's true, but they don't have any evidence that it is true!
We don't really understand most of what's happening in the cosmos. Is there any afterlife? Who knows.
My lab and academic work fill my day from about 9 am to 7 p.m. Then I zoom out the lens to work on my other writing.
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.
I'm using the afterlife as a backdrop against which to explore the joys and complexities of being human - it turns out that it's a great lens with which to understand what matters to us.
People wouldn't even go into science unless there was something much bigger to be discovered, something that is transcendent.
As an undergraduate I majored in British and American literature at Rice University.
The three-pound organ in your skull - with its pink consistency of Jell-o - is an alien kind of computational material. It is composed of miniaturized, self-configuring parts, and it vastly outstrips anything we've dreamt of building.
I think what a life in science really teaches you is the vastness of our ignorance.
I think the first decade of this century is going to be remembered as a time of extremism.
There are always wonderful mysteries to confront.
I know one lab that studies nicotine receptors and all the scientists are smokers, and another lab that studies impulse control and they're all overweight.
I spent my adult life as a scientist, and science is, essentially, the most successful approach we have to try and understand the vast mysteries around.
There are an infinite number of boring things to do in science.
The same stimuli in the world can be inducing very different experiences internally and it's probably based on a single change in a gene. What I am doing is pulling the gene forward and imaging and doing behavioural tests to understand what that difference is and how reality can be constructed so differently.
In the traditionally taught view of perception, data from the sensorium pours into the brain, works its way up the sensory hierarchy, and makes itself seen, heard, smelled, tasted, felt - "perceived." But a closer examination of the data suggests this is incorrect. The brain is properly thought of as a mostly closed system that runs on its own internally generated activity.
It is the most wondrous thing we have discovered in the universe, and it is us.
Constant reminding ourselves that we not see with our eyes but with our synergetic eye-brain system working as a whole will produce constant astonishment as we notice, more and more often, how much of our perceptions emerge from our preconceptions.
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.
Love was not specified in the design of your brain; it is merely an endearing algorithm that freeloads on the leftover processing cycles.
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.
It is only through us that God lives. When we abandon him, he dies.
Even though the outside world has not changed, your brain dynamically presents different interpretations.
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.
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."
We open our eyes and we think we're seeing the whole world out there. But what has become clear—and really just in the last few centuries—is that when you look at the electro-magnetic spectrum we are seeing less than 1/10 Billionth of the information that's riding on there. So we call that visible light. But everything else passing through our bodies is completely invisible to us. Even though we accept the reality that's presented to us, we're really only seeing a little window of what's happening.
You are more likely to believe that a statement is true if you have heard it before - whether or not it is actually true.
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.
We are not the ones driving the boat of our behavior, at least not nearly as much as we believe.
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.
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.
Instead of reality being passively recorded by the brain, it is actively constructed by it.
All life is no more than a match struck in the dark and blown out again.
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."
I call myself a Possibilian: I'm open to...ideas that we don't have any way of testing right now.
We're trapped on this very thin slice of perception ... But even at that slice of reality that we call home, we're not seeing most of what's going on.
Our reality depends on what our biology is up to.
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.
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.
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.
Death... The moment, sometime in the future, when your name is spoken for the last time.
Once you begin deliberating about where your fingers are jumping on the piano keyboard, you can no longer pull off the piece.
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.
Every atom in your body is the same quark in different places at the same moment in time.
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.
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.
We are not conscious of most things until we ask ourselves questions about them.
Nothing is inherently tasty or repulsive - it depends on your needs. Deliciousness is simply an index of usefulness.
The majority of human beings live their whole lives unaware that they are only seeing a limited cone of vision at any moment.
Among all the creatures of creation, the gods favor us: We are the only ones who can empathize with their problems.
You´re not perceiving what's out there. You're perceiving whatever your brain tells you.
Many people prefer a view of human nature that includes a true side and a false side - in other words, humans have a single genuine aim and the rest is decoration, evasion, or cover-up. That's intuitive, but it's incomplete. A study of the brain necessitates a more nuanced view of human nature.
There is a looming chasm between what your brain knows and what your mind is capable of accessing.
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