David Eagleman Quotes & Sayings

Remove the world and the show still goes on. — David Eagleman

So modern neuroimaging is like asking an astronaut in the space shuttle to look out the window and judge how America is doing. — David Eagleman

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

Each cell sends electrical pulses to other cells, up to hundreds of times per second. If you represented each of these trillions and trillions of pulses in your brain by a single photon of light, the combined output would be blinding. — David Eagleman

Words, if you have certain problems with your brain but are raised in a good home, you might turn out okay. If your brain is fine and your home is terrible, you might still turn out fine. But if you have mild brain damage and end up with a bad home life, you're tossing the dice for a very unlucky synergy. — David Eagleman

Everybody knows the power of deadlines - and we all hate them. But their effectiveness is undeniable. — David Eagleman

Imbalance of reason and emotion may explain the tenacity of religion in societies: world religions are optimized to tap into the emotional networks, and great arguments of reason amount to little against such magnetic pull. — David Eagleman

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

Behavior is the outcome of the battle among internal systems. — David Eagleman

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. — David Eagleman

The emotional and rational networks battle not only over immediate moral decisions, but in another familiar situation as well: how we behave in time. — David Eagleman

The Roman historian Tacitus claimed that the Germanic peoples always drank alcohol while holding councils to prevent anyone from lying. — David Eagleman

Political persuasion emerges at the intersection of the mental and the corporal. Traveling — David Eagleman

But it turns out your thousand trillion trillion atoms were not an accidental collection: each was labeled as composing you and continues to be so wherever it goes. So you're not gone, you're simply taking on different forms. — David Eagleman

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. — David Eagleman

Part of the scientific temperament is this tolerance for holding multiple hypotheses in mind at the same time. — David Eagleman

unconscious self-love — David Eagleman

Something-now-or-more-later economic decisions while in a brain scanner. — David Eagleman

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. — David Eagleman

Carl Jung put it, "In each of us there is another whom we do not know. — David Eagleman

This is the hallmark of a robust biological system: political parties can perish in a tragic accident and the society will still run, sometimes with little more than a hiccup to the system. It may be that for every strange clinical case in which brain damage leads to a bizarre change in behavior or perception, there are hundreds of cases in which parts of the brain are damaged with no detectable clinical sign. — David Eagleman

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

You don't perceive objects as they are. You perceive them as you are. Each — David Eagleman

If you measure someone's brain and see very little activity during a task, it does not necessarily indicate that they're not trying - it more likely signifies that they have worked hard in the past to burn the programs into the circuitry. Consciousness is called in during the first phase of learning and is excluded from the game playing after it is deep in the system. — David Eagleman

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. Amazingly, when researchers crank up the levels of vasopressin with genetic techniques, they can shift polygamous species to monogamous behavior.38 — David Eagleman

I always bounce my legs when I'm sitting. — David Eagleman

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. — David Eagleman

there is more than one way to lay down memory. We're not talking about a memory of different events, but multiple memories of the same event - as — David Eagleman

tetrachromatic women. — David Eagleman

Just give the brain the information and it will figure it out. — David Eagleman

Those with Anton's syndrome are not pretending they are not blind; they truly believe they are not blind. Their verbal reports, while inaccurate, are not lies. Instead, they are experiencing what they take to be vision, but it is all internally generated. — David Eagleman

In a sense, the process of becoming who you are is defined by carving back the possibilities that were already present. You become who you are not because of what grows in your brain, but because of what is removed. — David Eagleman

The mystery was that no one could explain exactly how it was done.4 It was somehow based on very subtle visual cues, but the professional sexers could not report what those cues were. Instead, they would look at the chick's rear (where the vent is) and simply seem to know the correct bin to throw it in. — David Eagleman

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

In a recent experiment, men were asked to rank how attractive they found photographs of different women's faces. The photos were eight by ten inches, and showed women facing the camera or turned in three-quarter profile. Unbeknownst to the men, in half the photos the eyes of the women were dilated, and in the other half they were not. The men were consistently more attracted to the women with dilated eyes. Remarkably, the men had no insight into their decision making. None of them said, "I noticed her pupils were two millimeters larger in this photo than in this other one." Instead, they simply felt more drawn toward some women than others, for reasons they couldn't quite put a finger on. — David Eagleman

But 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. — David Eagleman

Substances that can give a shot in the arm to the mesolimbic dopamine system have self-reinforcing effects, and users will rob stores and mug elderly people to continue obtaining these specific molecular shapes. These chemicals, working their magic at scales one thousand — David Eagleman

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. — David Eagleman

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. — David Eagleman

If you cannot always elicit a straight answer from the unconscious brain, how can you access its knowledge? Sometimes the trick is merely to probe what your gut is telling you. So the next time a friend laments that she cannot decide between two options, tell her the easiest way to solve her problem: flip a coin. She should specify which option belongs to heads and which to tails, and then let the coin fly. The important part is to assess her gut feeling after the coin lands. If she feels a subtle sense of relief at being "told" what to do by the coin, that's the right choice for her. If, instead, she concludes that it's ludicrous for her to make a decision based on a coin toss, that will cue her to choose the other option. — David Eagleman

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. — David Eagleman

There are always wonderful mysteries to confront. — David Eagleman

So 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. — David Eagleman

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. We already have many examples of this sort of activity: for example, breathing, digestion, and walking are controlled by autonomously running activity generators in your brain stem and spinal cord. During dream sleep the brain is isolated from its normal input, so internal activation is the only source of cortical stimulation. In the awake state, internal activity is the basis for imagination and hallucinations. — David Eagleman

Consciousness is the smallest player in the operations of the brain. — David Eagleman

Would take dozens of the world's fastest supercomputers to match the computational power required to pull off this feat. Yet I have no perception of this lightning storm in my brain. — David Eagleman

As we develop better technologies for probing the brain, we detect more problems. — David Eagleman

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

Conscious you believes it without question. And not merely believes it but experiences it. — David Eagleman

A mere 400 years after our fall from the center of the universe, we have experienced the fall from the center of ourselves. — David Eagleman

If you ever feel lazy or dull, take heart: you're the busiest, brightest thing on the planet. — David Eagleman

alerting the system to contradictions relies critically on particular brain regions - and one in particular, called the anterior cingulate cortex. — David Eagleman

Serotonin - are critical for who you believe yourself to be. If — David Eagleman

the brain doesn't care how it gets the information, as long — David Eagleman

hippocampus. But during frightening situations - such as a car accident or a robbery - another area, the amygdala, also lays down memories along an independent, secondary memory track.30 Amygdala memories have a different quality to them: they are difficult to erase and they can pop back up in "flashbulb" fashion - as — David Eagleman

Parts of the brain were making decisions well before the person consciously experienced the urge.14 Returning — David Eagleman

As the complexity theorist Stuart Kauffman puts it, A couple in love walking along the banks of the Seine are, in real fact, a couple in love walking along the banks of the Seine, not mere particles in motion. — David Eagleman

The brain runs its show incognito. So who, exactly, — David Eagleman

Both scientists and laypeople can find themselves seduced into the easy trap of wanting to assign each function of the brain to a specific location. Perhaps because of pressure for simple sound bites, a steady stream of reports in the media (and even in the scientific literature) has created the false impression that the brain area for such-and-such has just been discovered. Such reports feed popular expectation and hope for easy labeling, but the true situation is much more interesting: the continuous networks of neural circuitry accomplish their functions using multiple, independently discovered strategies. The brain lends itself well to the complexity of the world, but poorly to clear-cut cartography. — David Eagleman

Since you always lived inside your own head, you were much better at seeing the truth about others than you ever were at seeing yourself. So you navigated your life with the help of others who held up mirrors for you. People praised your good qualities and criticized your bad habits, and these perspectives - often surprising to you - helped you to guide your life. So poorly did you know yourself that you were always surprised at how you looked in photographs or how you sounded on voice mail. In this way, much of your existence took place in the eyes, ears, and fingertips of others. And now that you've left the Earth, you are stored in scattered heads around the globe. Here in this Purgatory, all the people with whom you've ever come in contact are gathered. The scattered bits of you are collected, pooled, and unified. The mirrors are held up in front of you. Without the benefit of filtration, you see yourself clearly for the first time. And that is what finally kills you. — David Eagleman

Second, the Tourette's patient cannot not do it: they cannot use free — David Eagleman

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

a virtuous person, — David Eagleman

In 1862, the Scottish mathematician James Clerk Maxwell developed a set of fundamental equations that unified electricity and magnetism. On his deathbed, he coughed up a strange sort of confession, declaring that "something within him" discovered the famous equations, not he. He admitted he had no idea how ideas actually came to him - they simply came to him. William Blake related a similar experience, reporting of his long narrative poem Milton: "I have written this poem from immediate dictation twelve or sometimes twenty lines at a time without premeditation and even against my will." Johann Wolfgang von Goethe claimed to have written his novella The Sorrows of Young Werther with practically no conscious input, as though he were holding a pen that moved on its own. — David Eagleman

Our brains were simple enough to be understood, we wouldn't be smart enough to understand them. — David Eagleman

Even while it's true that we are tied to our molecules and proteins and neurons - as strokes and hormones and drugs and microorganisms indisputably tell us - it does not logically follow that humans are best described only as pieces and parts. — David Eagleman

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. — David Eagleman

The men may also not have known that their notions of beauty and feelings of attraction are deeply hardwired, steered in the right direction by programs carved by millions of years of natural selection. — David Eagleman

We're now getting the first glimpses of the vastness of inner space. This internal, hidden, intimate cosmos commands its own goals, imperatives, and logic. — David Eagleman

Implicit egotism can also influence what you chose to do with your life. By analyzing professional membership directories, Pelham and his colleagues found that people named Denise or Dennis are disproportionately likely to become dentists, while people named Laura or Lawrence are more likely to become lawyers, and people with names like George or Georgina to become geologists. — David Eagleman

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

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. — David Eagleman

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. — David Eagleman

When people consider the trolley problem, here's what brain imaging reveals: In the footbridge scenario, areas involved in motor planning and emotion become active. In contrast, in the track-switch scenario, only lateral areas involved in rational thinking become active. People register emotionally when they have to push someone; when they only have to tip a lever, their brain behaves like Star Trek's Mr. Spock. — David Eagleman

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

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

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

Imagine that your desktop computer began to control its own peripheral devices, removed its own cover, and pointed its webcam at its own circuitry. That's us. — David Eagleman

As Gazzaniga put it, these findings all suggest that the interpretive mechanism of the left hemisphere is always hard at work, seeking the meaning of events. It is constantly looking for order and reasons, even when there is none - which leads it continually to make mistakes. — David Eagleman

To what extent is someone at fault if his brain is damaged in ways about which he has no choice? After all, we are not independent of our biology, right? — David Eagleman

schizophrenics can tickle themselves because of a problem with their timing that does not allow their motor actions and resulting sensations to be correctly sequenced. — David Eagleman

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! — David Eagleman

Despite the feeling that we're directly experiencing the world out there, our reality is ultimately built in the dark, in a foreign language of electrochemical signals. The activity churning across vast neural networks gets turned into your story of this, your private experience of the world: the feeling of this book in your hands, the light in the room, the smell of roses, the sound of others speaking. — David Eagleman

It appears that repeated social rejection perturbs the normal functioning of the dopamine systems. — David Eagleman

Scientist and baseball fan Mike McBeath set out to understand the hidden neural computations behind catching fly balls. — David Eagleman

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

I came here for the same reason doctors wear uniforms of long white coats ... They don't do it for their benefit, but for yours. — David Eagleman

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. — David Eagleman

Is there any reason to believe that it's not possible to have both racist and nonracist parts of the brain? — David Eagleman

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. — David Eagleman

Have a friend hold a handful of colored markers or highlighters out to his side. Keep your gaze fixed on his nose, and now try to name the order of the colors in his hand. The results are surprising: even if you're able to report that there are some colors in your periphery, you won't be able to accurately determine their order. — David Eagleman

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. — David Eagleman

Through practice, repeated signals have been passed along neural networks, strengthening synapses and thereby burning the skill into the circuitry. In — David Eagleman

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. — David Eagleman

That afternoon She listened to the grievances of the dead from two warring nations. Both sides had suffered, both sides had legitimate grievances, both pled their cases earnestly. She covered Her ears and moaned in misery. She knew Her humans were multidimensional and She could no longer live under the rigid architecture of Her youthful choices. — David Eagleman

Our perception of reality has less to do with what's happening out there, and more to do with what's happening inside our brain. Your — David Eagleman

We are not conscious of most things until we ask ourselves questions about them — David Eagleman

Finding genetically distant partners is useful. — David Eagleman

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. — David Eagleman

successfully train new spotters: by trial-and-error feedback. A novice would hazard a guess and the expert would say yes or no. Eventually the novices became, like — David Eagleman