David Eagleman Quotes

Vision is more than looking.

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

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

Modern neuroimaging is like asking an astronaut in the space shuttle to look out the window and judge how America is doing.

As we develop better technologies for probing the brain, we detect more problems.

Interestingly, 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.

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.

Just like a good drama, the human brain runs on conflict.

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

My lab and academic work fill my day from about 9 am to 7 p.m. Then I zoom out the lens to work on my other writing.

A mere 400 years after our fall from the center of the universe, we have experienced the fall from the center of ourselves.

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

The main thing known about secrets is that keeping them is unhealthy for the brain.

We are not the ones driving the boat of our behavior, at least not nearly as much as we believe.

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.

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

All life is no more than a match struck in the dark and blown out again.

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."

The first thing we learn from studying our own circuitry is a simple lesson: most of what we do and think and feel is not under our conscious control.

Once you begin deliberating about where your fingers are jumping on the piano keyboard, you can no longer pull off the piece.

Nothing is inherently tasty or repulsive - it depends on your needs. Deliciousness is simply an index of usefulness.

Consciousness is the smallest player in the operations of the brain.

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.

Brains are like representative democracies. They are built of multiple, overlapping experts who weigh in and compete over different choices.

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.

We spend our lives on a thin slice between the unimaginably small scales of the atoms that compose us and the infinitely large scales of galaxies.

The brain runs its show incognito.

Just give the brain the information and it will figure it out.

One of the most impressive features of brains - and especially human brains - is the flexibility to learn almost any kind of task that comes its way.

If you are a carrier of a particular set of genes, your probability of committing a violent crime goes up by eight hundred and eighty-two percent.

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

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

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

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.

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

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.

There's someone in my head, but it's not me."Pink FloydDavid Eagleman

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.

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

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.

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