Eagleman Quotes

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

Visual cortex is fundamentally a machine whose job is to generate a model of the world. ~ David Eagleman

To a space alien or a German Shepherd dog, the two humans would be indistinguishable, just as attractive and unattractive space aliens and German Shepherd dogs are difficult for you to tell apart. ~ David Eagleman

The enemy of memory isn't time; it's other memories. ~ David Eagleman

This is what consciousness does: it sets the goals, and the rest of the system learns how to meet them. ~ David Eagleman

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

A typical neuron makes about ten thousand connections to neighboring neurons. Given the billions of neurons, this means there are as many connections in a single cubic centimeter of brain tissue as there are stars in the Milky Way galaxy. ~ David Eagleman

Implicit egotism can also influence what you chose to do with your life. By analyzing professional membership directories, Pelham and his colleagues found that people named Denise or Dennis are disproportionately likely to become dentists, while people named Laura or Lawrence are more likely to become lawyers, and people with names like George or Georgina to become geologists. ~ David Eagleman

In a sense, the process of becoming who you are is defined by carving back the possibilities that were already present. You become who you are not because of what grows in your brain, but because of what is removed. ~ David Eagleman

Would take dozens of the world's fastest supercomputers to match the computational power required to pull off this feat. Yet I have no perception of this lightning storm in my brain. ~ David Eagleman

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

We are not the ones driving the boat of our behavior, at least not nearly as much as we believe. Who we are runs well below the surface of our conscious access, and the details reach back in time before our birth, when the meeting of a sperm and egg granted us with certain attributes and not others. 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. ~ David Eagleman

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. ~ David Eagleman

So not only was it possible to implant false new memories in the brain, but people embraced and embellished them, unknowingly weaving fantasy into the fabric of their identity. ~ David Eagleman

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

If you cannot always elicit a straight answer from the unconscious brain, how can you access its knowledge? Sometimes the trick is merely to probe what your gut is telling you. So the next time a friend laments that she cannot decide between two options, tell her the easiest way to solve her problem: flip a coin. She should specify which option belongs to heads and which to tails, and then let the coin fly. The important part is to assess her gut feeling after the coin lands. If she feels a subtle sense of relief at being "told" what to do by the coin, that's the right choice for her. If, instead, she concludes that it's ludicrous for her to make a decision based on a coin toss, that will cue her to choose the other option. ~ David Eagleman

The three-pound organ in your skull - with its pink consistency of Jell-o - is an alien kind of computational material. It is composed of miniaturized, self-configuring parts, and it vastly outstrips anything we've dreamt of building. ~ David Eagleman

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

The brain runs its show incognito. ~ David Eagleman

Let's zoom in on a particular form of synesthesia as an example. For most of us, February and Wednesday do not have any particular place in space. But some synesthetes experience precise locations in relation to their bodies for numbers, time units, and other concepts involving sequence or ordinality. They can point to the spot where the number 32 is, where December floats, or where the year 1966 lies.8 These objectified three-dimensional sequences are commonly called number forms, although more precisely the phenomenon is called spatial sequence synesthesia.9 The most common types of spatial sequence synesthesia involve days of the week, months of the year, the counting integers, or years grouped by decade. In addition to these common types, researchers have encountered spatial configurations for shoe and clothing sizes, baseball statistics, historical eras, salaries, TV channels, temperature, and more. ~ David Eagleman

Our perception of reality has less to do with what's happening out there, and more to do with what's happening inside our brain. Your ~ David Eagleman

When people consider the trolley problem, here's what brain imaging reveals: In the footbridge scenario, areas involved in motor planning and emotion become active. In contrast, in the track-switch scenario, only lateral areas involved in rational thinking become active. People register emotionally when they have to push someone; when they only have to tip a lever, their brain behaves like Star Trek's Mr. Spock. ~ David Eagleman

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. ~ David Eagleman

Platoons and plays and stores and congresses do not end - they simply move on to a different dimension. ~ David Eagleman

This is the hallmark of a robust biological system: political parties can perish in a tragic accident and the society will still run, sometimes with little more than a hiccup to the system. It may be that for every strange clinical case in which brain damage leads to a bizarre change in behavior or perception, there are hundreds of cases in which parts of the brain are damaged with no detectable clinical sign. ~ David Eagleman

You can't ever know the difference between a temporal dilation and a temporal contraction. All you can ask is a relative question: which felt longer? We don't ever know which is the 'normal' one. ~David Eagleman ~ Alan Burdick

People with a condition called prosopagnosia cannot distinguish between familiar and unfamiliar faces. They rely entirely on cues such as hairlines, gait, and voices to recognize people they know. Pondering this condition led researchers Daniel Tranel and Antonio Damasio to try something clever: even though prosopagnosics cannot consciously recognize faces, would they have a measurable skin conductance response to faces that were familiar? Indeed, they did. Even though the prosopagnosic truly insists on being unable to recognize faces, some part of his brain can (and does) distinguish familiar faces from unfamiliar ones. ~ David Eagleman

They come to understand, with awe, the complexity of the compound identity that existed on the Earth. They conclude with a shudder that the Earthly you is utterly lost, unpreserved in the afterlife. You were all these ages, and you were none. ~ David Eagleman

Through practice, repeated signals have been passed along neural networks, strengthening synapses and thereby burning the skill into the circuitry. In ~ David Eagleman

We are astoundingly poor observers. And our introspection is useless on these issues: we believe we´re seeing the world just fine until it´s called to our attention that we are not. We will go through a process of learning to observe our experience, just as Mach carefully observed the shading of the strips. ~ David Eagleman

As the biologist Leslie Orgel´s second law states: „Evolution is smarter than you are. ~ David Eagleman

The drives you take for granted ("I'm a hetero/homosexual," "I'm attracted to children/adults," "I'm aggressive/not aggressive," and so on) depend on the intricate details of your neural machinery. ~ David Eagleman

Consciousness is the smallest player in the operations of the brain. ~ David Eagleman

Imagine that your desktop computer began to control its own peripheral devices, removed its own cover, and pointed its webcam at its own circuitry. That's us. ~ David Eagleman

What we find is that our brains have colossal things happening in them all the time. ~ David Eagleman

I think the first decade of this century is going to be remembered as a time of extremism. ~ David Eagleman

The majority of human beings live their whole lives unaware that they are only seeing a limited cone of vision at any moment. ~ David Eagleman

Your brain is built of cells called neurons and glia - hundreds of billions of them. Each one of these cells is as complicated as a city. ~ David Eagleman

No one is having an experience of the objective reality that really exists; each creature perceives only what it has evolved to perceive. ~ David Eagleman

Since you always lived inside your own head, you were much better at seeing the truth about others than you ever were at seeing yourself. So you navigated your life with the help of others who held up mirrors for you. People praised your good qualities and criticized your bad habits, and these perspectives - often surprising to you - helped you to guide your life. So poorly did you know yourself that you were always surprised at how you looked in photographs or how you sounded on voice mail. In this way, much of your existence took place in the eyes, ears, and fingertips of others. And now that you've left the Earth, you are stored in scattered heads around the globe. Here in this Purgatory, all the people with whom you've ever come in contact are gathered. The scattered bits of you are collected, pooled, and unified. The mirrors are held up in front of you. Without the benefit of filtration, you see yourself clearly for the first time. And that is what finally kills you. ~ David Eagleman

Substances that can give a shot in the arm to the mesolimbic dopamine system have self-reinforcing effects, and users will rob stores and mug elderly people to continue obtaining these specific molecular shapes. These chemicals, working their magic at scales one thousand ~ David Eagleman

But all this doesn´t happen effortlessly, as demonstrated by patients who surgically recover their eyesight after decades of blindless: they do not suddenly see the world, but instead must learn to see again. At first the world is buzzing, jangling barrage of shapes and colors, and even when the optics of their eyes are perfectly functional, their brain must learn how to interpret the data coming in. ~ David Eagleman

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

alerting the system to contradictions relies critically on particular brain regions - and one in particular, called the anterior cingulate cortex. ~ David Eagleman

Even though the outside world has not changed, your brain dynamically presents different interpretations. ~ David Eagleman

How does the biological wetware of the brain give rise to our experience: the sight of emerald green, the taste of cinnamon, the smell of wet soil? What if I told you that the world around you, with its rich colors, textures, sounds, and scents is an illusion, a show put on for you by your brain? If you could perceive reality as it really is, you would be shocked by its colorless, odorless, tasteless silence. Outside your brain, there is just energy and matter. Over millions of years of evolution the human brain has become adept at turning this energy and matter into a rich sensory experience of being in the world. ~ David Eagleman

So the first lesson about trusting your senses is: don't. Just because you believe something to be true, just because you know it's true, that doesn't mean it is true. ~ David Eagleman

The brain internally simulates what will happen if you were to perform some action under specific conditions. Internal models not only play a role in motor acts (such as catching or dodging) but also underlie conscious perception. ~ David Eagleman

Everybody knows the power of deadlines - and we all hate them. But their effectiveness is undeniable. ~ David Eagleman

At least 15 percent of human females possess a genetic mutation that gives them an extra (fourth) type of color photoreceptor - and this allows them to discriminate between colors that look identical to the majority of us with a mere three types of color photoreceptors. ~ David Eagleman

Biologist Steven Rose points out that reductionist ideology not only hinders biologists from thinking adequately about the phenomena we wish to understand: it has two important social consequences: it serves to relocate social problems to the individual ... rather than exploring the societal roots and determinants of a phenomenon; and second, it diverts attention and funding from the social to the molecular. ~ David Eagleman

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

Behavior is the outcome of the battle among internal systems. ~ David Eagleman

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

All the experiences in your life- from single conversations to your broader culture- shape the microscopic details of your brain. Neurally speaking, who you are depends on where you've been. Your brain is a relentless shape-shifter, constantly rewriting its own circuitry- and because your experiences are unique, so are the vast detailed patterns in your neural networks. Because they continue to change your whole life, your identity is a moving target; it never reaches an endpoint. ~ David Eagleman

Keep in mind that every single generation before us has worked under the assumption that they possessed all the major tools for understanding the universe, and they were all wrong, without exception. ~ David Eagleman

Once upon a time, I, Chuang Tzu, dreamt I was a butterfly, fluttering hither and thither, to all intents and purposes a butterfly. I was conscious only of following my fancies as a butterfly, and was unconscious of my individuality as a man. Suddenly, I awoke, and there I lay, myself again. Now I do not know whether I was then a man dreaming I was a butterfly, or whether I am now a butterfly dreaming that I am a man." The ~ David Eagleman

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

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 ... All life is no more than a match struck in the dark and blown out again. The final result ... is to deprive it completely of meaning. ~ David Eagleman

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

But our brains are always crushing ambiguity into choices. ~ David Eagleman

What does this research tell us? It tells us that fiscally concerned strippers should eschew contraception and double up their shifts just before ovulation. ~ David Eagleman

Constant reminding ourselves that we not see with our eyes but with our synergetic eye-brain system working as a whole will produce constant astonishment as we notice, more and more often, how much of our perceptions emerge from our preconceptions. ~ David Eagleman

Another real-world manifestation of implicit memory is known as the illusion-of-truth effect: you are more likely to believe that a statement is true if you have heard it before – whether or not it is actually true. In one study, subjects rated the validity of plausible sentences every two weeks. Without letting on, the experimenters snuck in some repeat sentences (both true and false ones) across the testing sessions. And they found a clear result: if subjects had heard a sentence in previous weeks, they were more likely to now rate it as true, even if they swore they had never heard it before. This is the case even when the experimenter tells the subjects that the sentences they are about to hear are false: despite this, mere exposure to an idea is enough to boost its believability upon later contact. The illusion-of-truth effect highlights the potential danger for people who are repeatedly exposed to the same religious edicts or political slogans. ~ David Eagleman

Have a friend hold a handful of colored markers or highlighters out to his side. Keep your gaze fixed on his nose, and now try to name the order of the colors in his hand. The results are surprising: even if you're able to report that there are some colors in your periphery, you won't be able to accurately determine their order. ~ David Eagleman

Parts of the brain were making decisions well before the person consciously experienced the urge.14 Returning ~ David Eagleman

He reasoned that 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

Words, 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. ~ David Eagleman

You are part of a complex social network that changes your biology with every interaction, and which your actions can change ~ David Eagleman

But it turns out your thousand trillion trillion atoms were not an accidental collection: each was labeled as composing you and continues to be so wherever it goes. So you're not gone, you're simply taking on different forms. ~ David Eagleman

Part of the scientific temperament is this tolerance for holding multiple hypotheses in mind at the same time. ~ David Eagleman

This moment of lucidity does not last long. But it serves as the punishment for your sins, a Promethean entrails-pecking moment, crouching half-horse half-man, with the knowledge that you cannot appreciate the destination without knowing the starting point; you cannot revel in the simplicity unless you remember the alternatives.
And that's not the worst of your revelation. You realize that the next time you return here, with your thick horse brain, you won't have the capacity to ask to become a human again. You won't understand what a human is. Your choice to slide down the intelligence ladder is irreversible. And just before you lose your final human faculties, you painfully ponder what magnificent extraterrestrial creature, enthralled with the idea of finding a simpler life, chose in the last round to become a human. ~ David Eagleman

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

Remove the world and the show still goes on. ~ David Eagleman

Who you are depends on the sum total of your neurobiology. ~ David Eagleman

The mystery was that no one could explain exactly how it was done.4 It was somehow based on very subtle visual cues, but the professional sexers could not report what those cues were. Instead, they would look at the chick's rear (where the vent is) and simply seem to know the correct bin to throw it in. ~ David Eagleman

Think about the brain as the densest concentration of youness. It's the peak of the mountain, but not the whole mountain. ~ David Eagleman

Each of us is on our own trajectory – steered by our genes and our experiences – and as a result every brain has a different internal life. Brains are as unique as snowflakes. ~ David Eagleman

the brain doesn't care how it gets the information, as long ~ David Eagleman

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

But it turns out that dopamine is a chemical on double duty in the brain. Along with its role in motor commands, it also serves as the main messenger in the reward systems, guiding a person toward food, drink, mates, and all things useful for survival. Because of its role in the reward system, imbalances in dopamine can trigger gambling, overeating, and drug addiction - behaviors that result from a reward system gone awry. ~ David Eagleman

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

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

schizophrenics can tickle themselves because of a problem with their timing that does not allow their motor actions and resulting sensations to be correctly sequenced. ~ David Eagleman

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. ~ David Eagleman

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. For example, 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. In my view, the argument from parsimony is really no argument at all – it typically functions only to shut down more interesting discussion. If history is any guide, it's never a good idea to assume that a scientific problem is cornered. ~ David Eagleman

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

When the men were choosing the most attractive women, they didn't know that the choice was not theirs, really, ~ David Eagleman

I always bounce my legs when I'm sitting. ~ David Eagleman

Recently, evolutionary psychologist have turned their sights on love and divorce. It didn´t take long to notice that when people fall in love, there´s period of up to three years during which the zeal and infatuation ride at a peak. The internal signals in the body and breain are literally a love drug. And then it beginds to decline. From this perspective, we are preprogramed to lose interest in a sexual partner after the time required to raise a child has passed – which is, on average, about 4 years. In psychologist Helen Fisher´s view, the internally generated love drug love drug is simply an efficient mechanism to get men and women to stick together long enough to increase the survival likehood of their young. ~ David Eagleman

We are made up of an entire parliament of pieces and parts and subsystems. Beyond a collection of local expert systems, we are collections of overlapping, ceaselessly reinvented mechanism, a group of competing factions. The conscious mind fabricates stories to explain the sometimes inexplicable dynamics of the subsystem inside brain. It can be disquieting to consider the extent to which all of our actions are driven by hardwired systems doing what they do best while we overlay stories about choices. ~ David Eagleman

The Roman historian Tacitus claimed that the Germanic peoples always drank alcohol while holding councils to prevent anyone from lying. ~ David Eagleman

seeing has very little to do with your eyes. ~ David Eagleman

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

The brain runs its show incognito. So who, exactly, ~ David Eagleman

Despite the feeling that we're directly experiencing the world out there, our reality is ultimately built in the dark, in a foreign language of electrochemical signals. The activity churning across vast neural networks gets turned into your story of this, your private experience of the world: the feeling of this book in your hands, the light in the room, the smell of roses, the sound of others speaking. ~ David Eagleman

Scientist and baseball fan Mike McBeath set out to understand the hidden neural computations behind catching fly balls. ~ David Eagleman

Man is equally incapable of seeing the nothingness from which he emerges and the infinity in which he is engulfed.1 Pascal ~ David Eagleman

a virtuous person, ~ David Eagleman

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. ~ David Eagleman