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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.

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
Small
Occupies
Brain
Mansions
Knowing
Constructed
Understanding
Requires
Reality
Conscious
Littles
Room
Little
Rooms
Control
Mansion

More quotes by David Eagleman

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Just give the brain the information and it will figure it out.
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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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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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There are three deaths. The first is when the body ceases to function. The second is when the body is consigned to the grave. The third is that moment, sometime in the future, when your name is spoken for the last time.
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Interestingly, schizophrenics can tickle themselves because of a problem with their timing that does not allow their motor actions and resulting sensations to be correctly sequenced.
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I always bounce my legs when I'm sitting.
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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At least 15 percent of human females possess a genetic mutation that gives them an extra (fourth) type of color photoreceptor - and this allows them to discriminate between colors that look identical to the majority of us with a mere three types of color photoreceptors.
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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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What we find is that our brains have colossal things happening in them all the time.
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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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Neuroscience over the next 50 years is going to introduce things that are mind-blowing.
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Instead of reality being passively recorded by the brain, it is actively constructed by it.
David Eagleman
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We are not conscious of most things until we ask ourselves questions about them.
David Eagleman
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This is what consciousness does: it sets the goals, and the rest of the system learns how to meet them.
David Eagleman
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Everybody knows the power of deadlines - and we all hate them. But their effectiveness is undeniable.
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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
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Our internal life and external actions are steered by biological coctails to which we have neither immediate access nor direct acquaintance.
David Eagleman
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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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Once you begin deliberating about where your fingers are jumping on the piano keyboard, you can no longer pull off the piece.
David Eagleman