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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
Simple
Understand
Enough
Brains
Smart
Understood
Wouldn
Brain

More quotes by David Eagleman

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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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We don't really understand most of what's happening in the cosmos. Is there any afterlife? Who knows.
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As we develop better technologies for probing the brain, we detect more problems.
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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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Just like a good drama, the human brain runs on conflict.
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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.
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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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We are not the ones driving the boat of our behavior, at least not nearly as much as we believe.
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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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What we find is that our brains have colossal things happening in them all the time.
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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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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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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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Vision is more than looking.
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Modern neuroimaging is like asking an astronaut in the space shuttle to look out the window and judge how America is doing.
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Who you are depends on the sum total of your neurobiology.
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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.
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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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It is the most wondrous thing we have discovered in the universe, and it is us.
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