David Eagleman Quotes

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

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

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

As an undergraduate I majored in British and American literature at Rice University.

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.

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.

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

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

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

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

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.

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

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

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.

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

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

To a space alien or a German Shepherd dog, two humans would be indistinguishable, just as attractive and unattractive space aliens and German Shepherd dogs are difficult for you to tell apart.

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.

Our internal life and external actions are steered by biological coctails to which we have neither immediate access nor direct acquaintance.

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.

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.

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.

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

I always bounce my legs when I'm sitting.

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.

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.

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

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

People wouldn't even go into science unless there was something much bigger to be discovered, something that is transcendent.

There are an infinite number of boring things to do in science.

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

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

There are always wonderful mysteries to confront.

Who you are depends on the sum total of your neurobiology.

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.

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

We believe we're seeing the world just fine until it's called to our attention that we're not.

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

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

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

All creation necessarily ends in this: Creators, powerless, fleeing from the things they have wrought.

Behavior is the outcome of the battle among internal systems.

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

Because vision appears so effortless, we are like fish challenged to understand water.

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

The more familiar the world becomes, the less information your brain writes down, and the more quickly time seems to pass.

The drives you take for granted ("I'm a hetero/homosexual," "I'm attracted to children/adults," "I'm aggressive/not aggressive," and so on) depend on the intricate details of your neural machinery.

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.

Awareness of your surroundings occurs only when sensory inputs violate expectations. When the world is successfully predicted away, awareness is not needed because the brain is doing its job well.