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We are not the ones driving the boat of our behavior, at least not nearly as much as we believe.

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
Ones
Least
Much
Believe
Nearly
Boat
Driving
Behavior

More quotes by David Eagleman

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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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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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All activity in the brain is driven by other activity in the brain, in a vastly complex, interconnected network.
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As we develop better technologies for probing the brain, we detect more problems.
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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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What a life in science really teaches you is the vastness of our ignorance.
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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Who you are depends on the sum total of your neurobiology.
David Eagleman
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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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What we find is that our brains have colossal things happening in them all the time.
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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One of the most pervasive mistakes is to believe that our visual system gives a faithful representation of what is out there in the same way that a movie camera would.
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.
David Eagleman
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Vision is more than looking.
David Eagleman
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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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Just give the brain the information and it will figure it out.
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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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.
David Eagleman
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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
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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.
David Eagleman