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The brain runs its show incognito.

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
Incognito
Runs
Brain
Show
Running
Shows

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Death... The moment, sometime in the future, when your name is spoken for the last time.
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All life is no more than a match struck in the dark and blown out again.
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As we develop better technologies for probing the brain, we detect more problems.
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Who you are depends on the sum total of your neurobiology.
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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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Odor carries a great deal of information, including information about a potential mate's age, sex, fertility, identity, emotions, and health.
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If our brains were simple enough to be understood, we wouldn't be smart enough to understand them.
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If you are a carrier of a particular set of genes, your probability of committing a violent crime goes up by eight hundred and eighty-two percent.
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Instead of reality being passively recorded by the brain, it is actively constructed by it.
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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.
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To a space alien or a German Shepherd dog, two humans would be indistinguishable, just as attractive and unattractive space aliens and German Shepherd dogs are difficult for you to tell apart.
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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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Societies would _not_ be better off if everyone were like Mr Spock, all rationality and no emotion. Instead, a balance - a teaming up of the internal rivals - is optimal for brains. ... Some balance of the emotional and rational systems is needed, and that balance may already be optimized by natural selection in human brains.
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Because vision appears so effortless, we are like fish challenged to understand water.
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It is only through us that God lives. When we abandon him, he dies.
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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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Every atom in your body is the same quark in different places at the same moment in time.
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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.
David Eagleman
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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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We are not the ones driving the boat of our behavior, at least not nearly as much as we believe.
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