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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
Brain
Reality
Passively
Constructed
Actively
Recorded
Instead

More quotes by David Eagleman

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The deep secret of the brain is that not only the spinal cord but the entire central nervous system works this way: internally generated activity is modulated by sensory input. In this view, the difference between being awake and being asleep is merely that the data coming in from the eyes anchors the perception.
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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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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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Death... The moment, sometime in the future, when your name is spoken for the last time.
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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.
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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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As Carl Jung put it, In each of us there is another whom we do not know. As Pink Floyd sang, There's someone in my head, but it's not me.
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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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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.
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I always bounce my legs when I'm sitting.
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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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The main thing known about secrets is that keeping them is unhealthy for the brain.
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Once you begin deliberating about where your fingers are jumping on the piano keyboard, you can no longer pull off the piece.
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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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Many people prefer a view of human nature that includes a true side and a false side - in other words, humans have a single genuine aim and the rest is decoration, evasion, or cover-up. That's intuitive, but it's incomplete. A study of the brain necessitates a more nuanced view of human nature.
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All life is no more than a match struck in the dark and blown out again.
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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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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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Just like a good drama, the human brain runs on conflict.
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Vision is more than looking.
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