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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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Who we can be begins with our molecular blueprints - a series of alien codes penned in invisibly small strings of acids - well before we have anything to do with it. We are a product of our inaccessible, microscopic history.
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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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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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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.
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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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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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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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.
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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Because vision appears so effortless, we are like fish challenged to understand water.
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.
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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You are part of a complex social network that changes your biology with every interaction, and which your actions can change.
David Eagleman
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What a life in science really teaches you is the vastness of our ignorance.
David Eagleman
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Among all the creatures of creation, the gods favor us: We are the only ones who can empathize with their problems.
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
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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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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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As we develop better technologies for probing the brain, we detect more problems.
David Eagleman