Quote

If our brains were simple enough to be understood, we wouldn't be smart enough to understand them.

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
Enough
Brains
Smart
Understood
Wouldn
Brain
Simple
Understand

More quotes by David Eagleman

Image
Among all the creatures of creation, the gods favor us: We are the only ones who can empathize with their problems.
David Eagleman
Image
As we develop better technologies for probing the brain, we detect more problems.
David Eagleman
Image
We don't really understand most of what's happening in the cosmos. Is there any afterlife? Who knows.
David Eagleman
Image
What we find is that our brains have colossal things happening in them all the time.
David Eagleman
Image
The main thing known about secrets is that keeping them is unhealthy for the brain.
David Eagleman
Image
Instead of reality being passively recorded by the brain, it is actively constructed by it.
David Eagleman
Image
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.
David Eagleman
Image
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
Image
It is the most wondrous thing we have discovered in the universe, and it is us.
David Eagleman
Image
As an undergraduate I majored in British and American literature at Rice University.
David Eagleman
Image
Odor carries a great deal of information, including information about a potential mate's age, sex, fertility, identity, emotions, and health.
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
Just give the brain the information and it will figure it out.
David Eagleman
Image
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.
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
Just like a good drama, the human brain runs on conflict.
David Eagleman
Image
...you are battered and bruised in the collisions between reminiscence and reality.
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
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
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