David Eagleman Quotes - Page 2

Our reality depends on what our biology is up to.

The brain "fills in" the missing information from the blind spot. Notice what you see in the location of the dot when it's in your blind spot. When the dot disappears, you do not perceive a hole of whiteness or blackness in its place; instead your brain invents a patch of the background pattern. Your brain, with no information from that particular spot in visual space, fills in with the patterns around it. You're not perceiving what's out there. You're perceiving whatever your brain tells you.

It is the most wondrous thing we have discovered in the universe, and it is us.

Death... The moment, sometime in the future, when your name is spoken for the last time.

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.

There is a looming chasm between what your brain knows and what your mind is capable of accessing.

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.

I call myself a Possibilian: I'm open to...ideas that we don't have any way of testing right now.

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.

Love was not specified in the design of your brain; it is merely an endearing algorithm that freeloads on the leftover processing cycles.

Among all the creatures of creation, the gods favor us: We are the only ones who can empathize with their problems.

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.

Even though the outside world has not changed, your brain dynamically presents different interpretations.

The majority of human beings live their whole lives unaware that they are only seeing a limited cone of vision at any moment.

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.

If choices and decisions derive from hidden mental processes, then free choice is either an illusion or, at minimum, more tightly constrained than previously considered.

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

All life is no more than a match struck in the dark and blown out again.

Once you begin deliberating about where your fingers are jumping on the piano keyboard, you can no longer pull off the piece.

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

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.

If our brains were simple enough to be understood, we wouldn't be smart enough to understand them.

There are always wonderful mysteries to confront.

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.

When people fall in love, there´s period of up to three years during which the zeal and infatuation ride at a peak. The internal signals in the body and breain are literally a love drug. And then it beginds to decline. From this perspective, we are preprogramed to lose interest in a sexual partner after the time required to raise a child has passed - which is, on average, about 4 years.