Quote

I spent my adult life as a scientist, and science is, essentially, the most successful approach we have to try and understand the vast mysteries around.

David Eagleman

Change background

T
T
T

Change font

TAGS & TOPICS

David Eagleman
Age: 53
Born: 1971
Born: April 25
Author
Neuroscientist
Psychologist
Researcher
University Teacher
Albuquerque
New Mexico
David M Eagleman
David Eagleman
Trying
Spent
Life
Adults
Mystery
Approach
Mysteries
Successful
Essentially
Understand
Adult
Science
Vast
Around
Scientist

More quotes by David Eagleman

Image
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
Image
Our internal life and external actions are steered by biological coctails to which we have neither immediate access nor direct acquaintance.
David Eagleman
Image
Modern neuroimaging is like asking an astronaut in the space shuttle to look out the window and judge how America is doing.
David Eagleman
Image
I call myself a Possibilian: I'm open to...ideas that we don't have any way of testing right now.
David Eagleman
Image
It is the most wondrous thing we have discovered in the universe, and it is us.
David Eagleman
Image
It is only through us that God lives. When we abandon him, he dies.
David Eagleman
Image
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
Image
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
Image
We are not the ones driving the boat of our behavior, at least not nearly as much as we believe.
David Eagleman
Image
All life is no more than a match struck in the dark and blown out again.
David Eagleman
Image
Nothing is inherently tasty or repulsive - it depends on your needs. Deliciousness is simply an index of usefulness.
David Eagleman
Image
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.
David Eagleman
Image
This is what consciousness does: it sets the goals, and the rest of the system learns how to meet them.
David Eagleman
Image
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.
David Eagleman
Image
What we find is that our brains have colossal things happening in them all the time.
David Eagleman
Image
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
Image
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.
David Eagleman
Image
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
Image
Because vision appears so effortless, we are like fish challenged to understand water.
David Eagleman
Image
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