David Eagleman Quotes - Page 3

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

One of the most pervasive mistakes is to believe that our visual system gives a faithful representation of what is "out there" in the same way that a movie camera would.

When a male vole repeatedly mates with a female, a hormone called vasopressin is released in his brain. The vasopressin binds to receptors in a part of the brain called the nucleus accumbens, and the binding mediates a pleasurable feeling that becomes associated with that female. This locks in the monogamy, which is known as pair-bonding. If you block this hormone, the pair-bonding goes away.

You are part of a complex social network that changes your biology with every interaction, and which your actions can change.

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.

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.

The brain runs its show incognito.

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.

Behavior is the outcome of the battle among internal systems.

We are nothing but the product of billions of years of molecules coming together and ratcheting up through natural selection, we are composed only of highways of fluids and chemicals sliding along roadways within billions of dancing cells, trillions of synaptic conversations hum in parallel, this vast egglike fabric of micron-thin circuitry runs algorithms undreamt of in modern science, and these neural programs give rise to our decision making, loves, desires, fears, and aspirations. That understanding would be a numinous experience, better than anything ever proposed in anyone's holy text.

If an epileptic seizure is focused in a particular sweet spot in the temporal lobe, a person won´t have motor seizures, but instead something more subtle. The effect is something like a cognitive seizure, marked by changes of personality, hyperreligiosity (an obsession with religion and feelings of religious certainity), hypergraphia (extensive writing on a subject, usually about religion), the false sense of an external presence, and, often, the hearing voices that are attributed to a god. Some fraction of history´s prophets, martyrs, and leaders appear to have had temporal lobe epilepsy.

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.

Everything that creates itself upon the backs of smaller scales will by those same scales be consumed.

Neuroscience over the next 50 years is going to introduce things that are mind-blowing.

Humans have discovered that they cannot stop Death, but at least they can spit in his drink.

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.

What a life in science really teaches you is the vastness of our ignorance.

We are not at the center of ourselves, but instead - like the Earth in the Milky Way, and the Milky Way in the universe - far out on a distant edge, hearing little of what is transpiring.

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.

Think about the brain as the densest concentration of youness. It's the peak of the mountain, but not the whole mountain.

This is what consciousness does: it sets the goals, and the rest of the system learns how to meet them.

Visual cortex is fundamentally a machine whose job is to generate a model of the world.

...you are battered and bruised in the collisions between reminiscence and reality.

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.

Just give the brain the information and it will figure it out.