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

David Eagleman

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David Eagleman
Age: 53
Born: 1971
Born: April 25
Author
Neuroscientist
Psychologist
Researcher
University Teacher
Albuquerque
New Mexico
David M Eagleman
David Eagleman
Recorded
Instead
Brain
Reality
Passively
Constructed
Actively

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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.
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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.
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...you are battered and bruised in the collisions between reminiscence and reality.
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Every atom in your body is the same quark in different places at the same moment in time.
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You are part of a complex social network that changes your biology with every interaction, and which your actions can change.
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A mere 400 years after our fall from the center of the universe, we have experienced the fall from the center of ourselves.
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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.
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It is more parsimonious to assume that the sun goes around the Earth, that atoms at the smallest scale operate in accordance with the same rules that objects at larger scales follow, and that we perceive what is really out there. All of these positions were long defended by argument from parsimony, and they were all wrong.
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You are more likely to believe that a statement is true if you have heard it before - whether or not it is actually true.
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Nothing is inherently tasty or repulsive - it depends on your needs. Deliciousness is simply an index of usefulness.
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Love was not specified in the design of your brain it is merely an endearing algorithm that freeloads on the leftover processing cycles.
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I always bounce my legs when I'm sitting.
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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.
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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.
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We are not the ones driving the boat of our behavior, at least not nearly as much as we believe.
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It is the most wondrous thing we have discovered in the universe, and it is us.
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All activity in the brain is driven by other activity in the brain, in a vastly complex, interconnected network.
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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.
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Among all the creatures of creation, the gods favor us: We are the only ones who can empathize with their problems.
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The majority of human beings live their whole lives unaware that they are only seeing a limited cone of vision at any moment.
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