Quote

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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David Eagleman
Age: 53
Born: 1971
Born: April 25
Author
Neuroscientist
Psychologist
Researcher
University Teacher
Albuquerque
New Mexico
David M Eagleman
David Eagleman
Either
Processes
Decision
Minimum
Hidden
Choices
Considered
Free
Decisions
Constrained
Process
Mental
Tightly
Illusion
Derive
Choice
Previously

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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.
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Because vision appears so effortless, we are like fish challenged to understand water.
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Death... The moment, sometime in the future, when your name is spoken for the last time.
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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.
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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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Just like a good drama, the human brain runs on conflict.
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The main thing known about secrets is that keeping them is unhealthy for the brain.
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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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Just give the brain the information and it will figure it out.
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What we find is that our brains have colossal things happening in them all the time.
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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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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.
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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.
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...you are battered and bruised in the collisions between reminiscence and reality.
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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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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.
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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.
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Who you are depends on the sum total of your neurobiology.
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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.
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I know one lab that studies nicotine receptors and all the scientists are smokers, and another lab that studies impulse control and they're all overweight.
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