Eagleman Quotes & Sayings

Societies would _not_ be better off if everyone were like Mr Spock, all rationality and no emotion. Instead, a balance - a teaming up of the internal rivals - is optimal for brains ... Some balance of the emotional and rational systems is needed, and that balance may already be optimized by natural selection in human brains. — David Eagleman

How does the biological wetware of the brain give rise to our experience: the sight of emerald green, the taste of cinnamon, the smell of wet soil? What if I told you that the world around you, with its rich colors, textures, sounds, and scents is an illusion, a show put on for you by your brain? If you could perceive reality as it really is, you would be shocked by its colorless, odorless, tasteless silence. Outside your brain, there is just energy and matter. Over millions of years of evolution the human brain has become adept at turning this energy and matter into a rich sensory experience of being in the world. — David Eagleman

After all, that's what memory is for: keeping track of important events, so that if you're ever in a similar situation, your brain has more information to try to survive. In other words, when things are life-threateningly scary, it's a good time to take notes. — David Eagleman

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

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

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

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

No one is having an experience of the objective reality that really exists; each creature perceives only what it has evolved to perceive. — David Eagleman

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

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

Change blindness highlights the importance of attention: to see an object change, you must attend — 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

David Eagleman describes how you can take a male stickleback fish and have a female fish trespass on its territory. The male gets confused, because it wants to mate with the female, but it also wants to defend its territory. As a result, the male stickleback fish will simultaneously attack the female while initiating courtship behavior. The male is driven into a frenzy, trying to woo and kill the female at the same time. This works for mice as well. Put an electrode in front of a piece of cheese. If the mouse gets too close, the electrode will shock it. One feedback loop tells the mouse to eat the cheese, but another one tells the mouse to stay away and avoid being shocked. By adjusting the location of the electrode, you can get the mouse to oscillate, torn between two conflicting feedback loops. — Michio Kaku

The first (and so far only) blind person to climb Mount Everest. Today he climbs with a grid of over six hundred tiny electrodes in his mouth, called the BrainPort.30 — David Eagleman

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

is able to resist that temptation. — 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

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

IN Incognito the neuroscientist David Eagleman proposes that we are unknown to ourselves: Most of what we do and think and feel is not under our conscious control. — Nick Flynn

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

In each of us there is another whom we do not know.
Carl Jung
found in David Eagleman's book: Incognito — C. G. Jung

Albert Camus introduced his philosophy of the absurd, in which man searches for meaning in a fundamentally meaningless world. In this context, Camus proposed that the only real question in philosophy is whether or not to commit suicide. (He concluded that one should not commit suicide; instead, one should live to revolt against the absurd life, even though it will always be without hope. — David Eagleman

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

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 ... All life is no more than a match struck in the dark and blown out again. The final result ... is to deprive it completely of meaning. — 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

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

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

You gleefully say, "I just thought of something!", when in fact your brain performed an enormous amount of work before your moment of genius struck. When an idea is served up from behind the scenes, your neural circuitry has been working on it for hours or days or years, consolidating information and trying out new combinations. But you take credit without further wonderment at the vast, hidden machinery behind the scenes. — 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

Once upon a time, I, Chuang Tzu, dreamt I was a butterfly, fluttering hither and thither, to all intents and purposes a butterfly. I was conscious only of following my fancies as a butterfly, and was unconscious of my individuality as a man. Suddenly, I awoke, and there I lay, myself again. Now I do not know whether I was then a man dreaming I was a butterfly, or whether I am now a butterfly dreaming that I am a man." The — David Eagleman

This moment of lucidity does not last long. But it serves as the punishment for your sins, a Promethean entrails-pecking moment, crouching half-horse half-man, with the knowledge that you cannot appreciate the destination without knowing the starting point; you cannot revel in the simplicity unless you remember the alternatives.
And that's not the worst of your revelation. You realize that the next time you return here, with your thick horse brain, you won't have the capacity to ask to become a human again. You won't understand what a human is. Your choice to slide down the intelligence ladder is irreversible. And just before you lose your final human faculties, you painfully ponder what magnificent extraterrestrial creature, enthralled with the idea of finding a simpler life, chose in the last round to become a human. — David Eagleman

Let's zoom in on a particular form of synesthesia as an example. For most of us, February and Wednesday do not have any particular place in space. But some synesthetes experience precise locations in relation to their bodies for numbers, time units, and other concepts involving sequence or ordinality. They can point to the spot where the number 32 is, where December floats, or where the year 1966 lies.8 These objectified three-dimensional sequences are commonly called number forms, although more precisely the phenomenon is called spatial sequence synesthesia.9 The most common types of spatial sequence synesthesia involve days of the week, months of the year, the counting integers, or years grouped by decade. In addition to these common types, researchers have encountered spatial configurations for shoe and clothing sizes, baseball statistics, historical eras, salaries, TV channels, temperature, and more. — David Eagleman

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. — David Eagleman

Finding genetically distant partners is useful. — David Eagleman

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

The three-pound organ in your skull - with its pink consistency of Jell-o - is an alien kind of computational material. It is composed of miniaturized, self-configuring parts, and it vastly outstrips anything we've dreamt of building. — David Eagleman

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

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

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

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. — 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

When we're in a human body, we don't care about universal collapse - instead, we care only about a meeting of the eyes, a glimpse of bare flesh, the caressing tones of a loved voice, joy, love, light, the orientation of a house plant, the shade of a paint stroke, the arrangement of hair. — David Eagleman

All the experiences in your life- from single conversations to your broader culture- shape the microscopic details of your brain. Neurally speaking, who you are depends on where you've been. Your brain is a relentless shape-shifter, constantly rewriting its own circuitry- and because your experiences are unique, so are the vast detailed patterns in your neural networks. Because they continue to change your whole life, your identity is a moving target; it never reaches an endpoint. — David Eagleman

Delaying gratification is difficult. — 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

But the main lesson we can extract from biology is that it's better to cultivate a team of populations that attack the problem in different, overlapping manners. — David Eagleman

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

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

When the men were choosing the most attractive women, they didn't know that the choice was not theirs, really, — David Eagleman

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

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. — David Eagleman

Vision is more than looking. — 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

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

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

The same stimuli in the world can be inducing very different experiences internally and it's probably based on a single change in a gene. What I am doing is pulling the gene forward and imaging and doing behavioural tests to understand what that difference is and how reality can be constructed so differently. — 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

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

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. — 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

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

Odor carries a great deal of information, including information about a potential mate's age, sex, fertility, identity, emotions, and health. — David Eagleman

Although we credit God with designing man, it turns out He's not sufficiently skilled to have done so. In point of fact, He unintentionally knocked over the first domino by creating a palette of atoms with different shapes. Electron clouds bonded, molecules bloomed, proteins embraced, and eventually cells formed and learned how to hang on to one another like lovebirds. He discovered that by simmering the Earth at the proper distance from the Sun, it instinctively sprouted with life. He's not so much a creator as a molecule tinkerer who enjoyed a stroke of luck: He simply set the ball rolling by creating a smorgasbord of matter, and creation ensued. — David Eagleman

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

You were all these ages, they concede, and you were none. — 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

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

Love was not specified in the design of your brain; it is merely an endearing algorithm that freeloads on the leftover processing cycles. — 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 your trillions of new connections continually form and re-form, the distinctive pattern means that no one like you has ever existed, or will ever exist again. The experience of your conscious awareness, right now, is unique to you. And because the physical stuff is constantly changing, we are too. We're not fixed. From cradle to grave, we are works in progress. — 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

What if I told you that the world around you, with its rich colors, textures, sounds, and scents is an illusion, a show put on for you by your brain? If you could perceive reality as it is, you would be shocked by its colorless, odorless, tasteless silence. Outside your brain, there is just energy and matter. — David Eagleman

Evolve solutions; when you find a good one, don't stop. — David Eagleman

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. — David Eagleman

The brain runs its show incognito. — 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

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

Biologist Steven Rose points out that reductionist ideology not only hinders biologists from thinking adequately about the phenomena we wish to understand: it has two important social consequences: it serves to relocate social problems to the individual ... rather than exploring the societal roots and determinants of a phenomenon; and second, it diverts attention and funding from the social to the molecular. — David Eagleman

a virtuous person, — David Eagleman

When you arrive in the afterlife, you find that Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley sits on a throne. She is cared for and protected by a covey of angels.
After some questioning, you find out that God's favorite book is Shelley's Frankenstein. He sits up at night with a worn copy of the book clutched in his mighty hands, alternately reading the book and staring reflectively at the night sky. — 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