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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
Passively
Constructed
Actively
Recorded
Instead
Brain
Reality

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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.
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People wouldn't even go into science unless there was something much bigger to be discovered, something that is transcendent.
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Everybody knows the power of deadlines - and we all hate them. But their effectiveness is undeniable.
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What a life in science really teaches you is the vastness of our ignorance.
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We don't really understand most of what's happening in the cosmos. Is there any afterlife? Who knows.
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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.
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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.
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Who you are depends on the sum total of your neurobiology.
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There is a looming chasm between what your brain knows and what your mind is capable of accessing.
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Who we can be begins with our molecular blueprints - a series of alien codes penned in invisibly small strings of acids - well before we have anything to do with it. We are a product of our inaccessible, microscopic history.
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This is what consciousness does: it sets the goals, and the rest of the system learns how to meet them.
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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.
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Interestingly, 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.
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The main thing known about secrets is that keeping them is unhealthy for the brain.
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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.
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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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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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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.
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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.
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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.
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