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Because vision appears so effortless, we are like fish challenged to understand water.

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
Challenged
Appears
Fish
Fishes
Vision
Water
Understand
Like
Effortless

More quotes by David Eagleman

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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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It is the most wondrous thing we have discovered in the universe, and it is us.
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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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What a life in science really teaches you is the vastness of our ignorance.
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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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All life is no more than a match struck in the dark and blown out again.
David Eagleman
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I always bounce my legs when I'm sitting.
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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.
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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.
David Eagleman
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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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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.
David Eagleman
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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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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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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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Nothing is inherently tasty or repulsive - it depends on your needs. Deliciousness is simply an index of usefulness.
David Eagleman
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We are not at the center of ourselves, but instead - like the Earth in the Milky Way, and the Milky Way in the universe - far out on a distant edge, hearing little of what is transpiring.
David Eagleman
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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.
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.
David Eagleman
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I spent my adult life as a scientist, and science is, essentially, the most successful approach we have to try and understand the vast mysteries around.
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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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