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David Eagleman Quotes | Quotes said by David Eagleman

  • David Eagleman Quote #1

    .. we are not conscious of most things until we ask ourselves questions about them


  • David Eagleman Quote #2

    All creation necessarily ends in this: Creators, powerless, fleeing from the things they have wrought.

  • David Eagleman Quote #3

    Although we credit God with designing man, it turns out He's not sufficiently skilled to have done so. In point of fact, He unintentionally knocked over the first domino by creating a palette of atoms with different shapes. Electron clouds bonded, molecules bloomed, proteins embraced, and eventually cells formed and learned how to hang on to one another like lovebirds. He discovered that by simmering the Earth at the proper distance from the Sun, it instinctively sprouted with life. He's not so much a creator as a molecule tinkerer who enjoyed a stroke of luck: He simply set the ball rolling by creating a smorgasbord of matter, and creation ensued.

  • David Eagleman Quote #4

    Among all the creatures of creation, the gods favor us: We are the only ones who can empathize with their problems.

  • David Eagleman Quote #5

    As Gazzaniga put it, these findings all suggest that the interpretive mechanism of the left hemisphere is always hard at work, seeking the meaning of events. It is constantly looking for order and reasons, even when there is none - which leads it continually to make mistakes.

  • David Eagleman Quote #6

    Because vision appears so effortless, we are like fish challenged to understand water.

  • David Eagleman Quote #7

    Behavior is the outcome of the battle among internal systems.

  • David Eagleman Quote #8

    Death... The moment, sometime in the future, when your name is spoken for the last time.

  • David Eagleman Quote #9

    Everything that creates itself upon the backs of smaller scales will by those same scales be consumed.

  • David Eagleman Quote #10

    Evolve solutions; when you find a good one, don't stop.

  • David Eagleman Quote #11

    I think what a life in science really teaches you is the vastness of our ignorance.

  • David Eagleman Quote #12

    If an epileptic seizure is focused in a particular sweet spot in the temporal lobe, a person won´t have motor seizures, but instead something more subtle. The effect is something like a cognitive seizure, marked by changes of personality, hyperreligiosity (an obsession with religion and feelings of religious certainity), hypergraphia (extensive writing on a subject, usually about religion), the false sense of an external presence, and, often, the hearing voices that are attributed to a god. Some fraction of history´s prophets, martyrs, and leaders appear to have had temporal lobe epilepsy.

    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.

  • David Eagleman Quote #13

    If you ever feel lazy or dull, take heart: you’re the busiest, brightest thing on the planet.

  • David Eagleman Quote #14

    Imagine for a moment that we are nothing but the product of billions of years of molecules coming together and ratcheting up through natural selection, that we are composed only of highways of fluids and chemicals sliding along roadways within billions of dancing cells, that trillions of synaptic conversations hum in parallel, that this vast egglike fabric of micron-thin circuitry runs algorithms undreamt of in modern science, and that these neural programs give rise to our decision making, loves, desires, fears, and aspirations. To me, that understanding would be a numinous experience, better than anything ever proposed in anyone's holy text.

  • David Eagleman Quote #15

    Instead of reality being passively recorded by the brain, it is actively constructed by it.

  • David Eagleman Quote #16

    It is only through us that God lives. When we abandon him, he dies.

  • David Eagleman Quote #17

    Many „pathogens“ (both chemical and behavioral) can influence how you turn out; these include substance abuse by a mother during pregnancy, maternal stress, and low birth weight. As a child grows, neglect, physical abuse, and head injury can cause problems in mental development. Once the child is grown, substance abuse and exposure to a variety of toxins can damage the brain, modifying intelligence, aggression, and decision-making abilities. The major public health movement to remove lead-based paint grew out of an understanding that even low levels of lead can cause brain damage that makes children less inteligent and, in some cases, more impulsive and aggressive. How you turn out depends on where you´ve been. So when it comes to thinking about blameworthiness, the first difficulty to consider is that people do not choose their own developmental path.
    It´s problematic to imagine yourself in the shoes of a criminal and conclude, „Well, I wouldn´t have done that“ – because if you weren´t exposed to in utero cocaine, lead poisoning, or physical abuse, and he was, then you and he are not directly comparable.

  • David Eagleman Quote #18

    My dream is to reform the legal system over the next 20 years.

  • David Eagleman Quote #19

    People wouldn't even go into science unless there was something much bigger to be discovered, something that is transcendent.

  • David Eagleman Quote #20

    Since we live in the heads of those who remember us, we lose control of our lives and become who they want us to be.

  • David Eagleman Quote #21

    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 Quote #22

    That afternoon She listened to the grievances of the dead from two warring nations. Both sides had suffered, both sides had legitimate grievances, both pled their cases earnestly. She covered Her ears and moaned in misery. She knew Her humans were multidimensional and She could no longer live under the rigid architecture of Her youthful choices.

  • David Eagleman Quote #23

    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. Asleep vision (dreaming) is perception that is not tied down to anything in the real world; waking perception is something like dreaming with a little more commitment to what´s in front of you. Other examples of unanchored perception are found in prisoners in pitch-park solitary confinement, or in people in sensory deprivation chambers. Both of these situations quickly lead to hallucinations.

  • David Eagleman Quote #24

    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.

  • David Eagleman Quote #25

    There is a looming chasm between what your brain knows and what your mind is capable of accessing.

  • David Eagleman Quote #26

    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 Quote #27

    We open our eyes and we think we're seeing the whole world out there. But what has become clear—and really just in the last few centuries—is that when you look at the electro-magnetic spectrum we are seeing less than 1/10 Billionth of the information that's riding on there. So we call that visible light. But everything else passing through our bodies is completely invisible to us.

    Even though we accept the reality that's presented to us, we're really only seeing a little window of what's happening.

  • David Eagleman Quote #28

    When you arrive in the afterlife, you find that Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley sits on a throne. She is cared for and protected by a covey of angels.
    After some questioning, you find out that God's favorite book is Shelley's Frankenstein. He sits up at night with a worn copy of the book clutched in his mighty hands, alternately reading the book and staring reflectively at the night sky.

  • David Eagleman Quote #29

    You gleefully say, “I just thought of something!”, when in fact your brain performed an enormous amount of work before your moment of genius struck. When an idea is served up from behind the scenes, your neural circuitry has been working on it for hours or days or years, consolidating information and trying out new combinations. But you take credit without further wonderment at the vast, hidden machinery behind the scenes.

  • David Eagleman Quote #30

    You´re not perceiving what's out there. You're perceiving whatever your brain tells you.

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