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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
Understand
Enough
Brains
Smart
Understood
Wouldn
Brain
Simple

More quotes by David Eagleman

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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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The more familiar the world becomes, the less information your brain writes down, and the more quickly time seems to pass.
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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.
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You are part of a complex social network that changes your biology with every interaction, and which your actions can change.
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The main thing known about secrets is that keeping them is unhealthy for the brain.
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It is only through us that God lives. When we abandon him, he dies.
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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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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.
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The missing crowds make you lonely. You begin to complain about all the people you could be meeting. But no one listens or sympathizes with you, because this is precisely what you chose when you were alive.
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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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What we find is that our brains have colossal things happening in them all the time.
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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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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.
David Eagleman
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Just give the brain the information and it will figure it out.
David Eagleman
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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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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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There are always wonderful mysteries to confront.
David Eagleman
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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.
David Eagleman
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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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Who you are depends on the sum total of your neurobiology.
David Eagleman