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You´re not perceiving what's out there. You're perceiving whatever your brain tells you.

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
Whatever
Perceiving
Tells
Brain

More quotes by David Eagleman

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Our internal life and external actions are steered by biological coctails to which we have neither immediate access nor direct acquaintance.
David Eagleman
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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.
David Eagleman
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When the brain activity is kindled in the right spot, people hear voices. If a physician prescribes an anti-epileptic medication, the seizures go away and the voices disappear. Our reality depends on what our biology is up to.
David Eagleman
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We are not the ones driving the boat of our behavior, at least not nearly as much as we believe.
David Eagleman
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If our brains were simple enough to be understood, we wouldn't be smart enough to understand them.
David Eagleman
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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.
David Eagleman
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Scientists often talk of parsimony (as in the simplest explanation is probably correct, also known as Occam's razor), but we should not get seduced by the apparent elegance of argument from parsimony this line of reasoning has failed in the past at least as many times as it has succeeded.
David Eagleman
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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.
David Eagleman
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Because vision appears so effortless, we are like fish challenged to understand water.
David Eagleman
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The brain runs its show incognito.
David Eagleman
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...you are battered and bruised in the collisions between reminiscence and reality.
David Eagleman
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At least 15 percent of human females possess a genetic mutation that gives them an extra (fourth) type of color photoreceptor - and this allows them to discriminate between colors that look identical to the majority of us with a mere three types of color photoreceptors.
David Eagleman
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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.
David Eagleman
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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.
David Eagleman
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What we find is that our brains have colossal things happening in them all the time.
David Eagleman
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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.
David Eagleman
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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.
David Eagleman
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All life is no more than a match struck in the dark and blown out again.
David Eagleman
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The main thing known about secrets is that keeping them is unhealthy for the brain.
David Eagleman
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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