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

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Many people prefer a view of human nature that includes a true side and a false side - in other words, humans have a single genuine aim and the rest is decoration, evasion, or cover-up. That's intuitive, but it's incomplete. A study of the brain necessitates a more nuanced view of human nature.
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When the brain activity is kindled in the right spot, people hear voices. If a physician prescribes an anti-epileptic medication, the seizures go away and the voices disappear. Our reality depends on what our biology is up to.
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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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Nothing is inherently tasty or repulsive - it depends on your needs. Deliciousness is simply an index of usefulness.
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You are more likely to believe that a statement is true if you have heard it before - whether or not it is actually true.
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It is only through us that God lives. When we abandon him, he dies.
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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.
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Just give the brain the information and it will figure it out.
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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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A mere 400 years after our fall from the center of the universe, we have experienced the fall from the center of ourselves.
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As we develop better technologies for probing the brain, we detect more problems.
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As Carl Jung put it, In each of us there is another whom we do not know. As Pink Floyd sang, There's someone in my head, but it's not me.
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The brain runs its show incognito.
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Neuroscience over the next 50 years is going to introduce things that are mind-blowing.
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Vision is more than looking.
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Each cell sends electrical pulses to other cells, up to hundreds of times per second. If you represented each of these trillions and trillions of pulses in your brain by a single photon of light, the combined output would be blinding.
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Instead of reality being passively recorded by the brain, it is actively constructed by it.
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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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All life is no more than a match struck in the dark and blown out again.
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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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