David Eagleman Quotes

What we find is that our brains have colossal things happening in them all the time.

You´re not perceiving what's out there. You're perceiving whatever your brain tells you.

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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."

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.

Every atom in your body is the same quark in different places at the same moment in time.

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.

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.

We are not the ones driving the boat of our behavior, at least not nearly as much as we believe.

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.

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

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.

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.

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 don't really understand most of what's happening in the cosmos. Is there any afterlife? Who knows.

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."

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.

Nothing is inherently tasty or repulsive - it depends on your needs. Deliciousness is simply an index of usefulness.

It is only through us that God lives. When we abandon him, he dies.

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.

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.