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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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David Eagleman
Age: 53
Born: 1971
Born: April 25
Author
Neuroscientist
Psychologist
Researcher
University Teacher
Albuquerque
New Mexico
David M Eagleman
David Eagleman
Enough
Brains
Smart
Understood
Wouldn
Brain
Simple
Understand

More quotes by David Eagleman

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All life is no more than a match struck in the dark and blown out again.
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Just give the brain the information and it will figure it out.
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I call myself a Possibilian: I'm open to...ideas that we don't have any way of testing right now.
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Instead of reality being passively recorded by the brain, it is actively constructed by it.
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Neuroscience over the next 50 years is going to introduce things that are mind-blowing.
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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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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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We are not conscious of most things until we ask ourselves questions about them.
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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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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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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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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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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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Death... The moment, sometime in the future, when your name is spoken for the last time.
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As an undergraduate I majored in British and American literature at Rice University.
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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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Every atom in your body is the same quark in different places at the same moment in time.
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A typical neuron makes about ten thousand connections to neighboring neurons. Given the billions of neurons, this means there are as many connections in a single cubic centimeter of brain tissue as there are stars in the Milky Way galaxy.
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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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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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