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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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David Eagleman
Age: 53
Born: 1971
Born: April 25
Author
Neuroscientist
Psychologist
Researcher
University Teacher
Albuquerque
New Mexico
David M Eagleman
David Eagleman
Blown
Struck
Match
Dark
Life

More quotes by David Eagleman

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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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Our reality depends on what our biology is up to.
David Eagleman
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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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A mere 400 years after our fall from the center of the universe, we have experienced the fall from the center of ourselves.
David Eagleman
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I'm using the afterlife as a backdrop against which to explore the joys and complexities of being human - it turns out that it's a great lens with which to understand what matters to us.
David Eagleman
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Everybody knows the power of deadlines - and we all hate them. But their effectiveness is undeniable.
David Eagleman
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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.
David Eagleman
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Reductionism is not the right viewpoint for everything, and it certainly won't explain the relationship between the brain and the mind. This is because of a feature known as emergence. When you put together large numbers of pieces and parts, the whole can become something greater than the sum.
David Eagleman
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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.
David Eagleman
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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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What we find is that our brains have colossal things happening in them all the time.
David Eagleman
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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.
David Eagleman
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The continuous networks of neural circuitry accomplish their functions using multiple, independently discovered strategies. The brain lends itself well to the complexity of the world, but poorly to clear-cut cartography.
David Eagleman
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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.
David Eagleman
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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.
David Eagleman
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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.
David Eagleman
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Just give the brain the information and it will figure it out.
David Eagleman
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It is the most wondrous thing we have discovered in the universe, and it is us.
David Eagleman
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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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You´re not perceiving what's out there. You're perceiving whatever your brain tells you.
David Eagleman