David Eagleman Quotes
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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.
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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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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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If our brains were simple enough to be understood, we wouldn't be smart enough to understand them.
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When we're in a human body, we don't care about universal collapse - instead, we care only about a meeting of the eyes, a glimpse of bare flesh, the caressing tones of a loved voice, joy, love, light, the orientation of a house plant, the shade of a paint stroke, the arrangement of hair.
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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.
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The continuous networks of neural circuitry accomplish their functions using multiple, independently discovered strategies. The brain lends itself well to the complexity of the world, but poorly to clear-cut cartography.
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Humans have discovered that they cannot stop Death, but at least they can spit in his drink.
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We are not conscious of most things until we ask ourselves questions about them.
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Among all the creatures of creation, the gods favor us: We are the only ones who can empathize with their problems.
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Instead of reality being passively recorded by the brain, it is actively constructed by it.
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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.
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In our current understanding of science, we can't find the physical gap in which to slip free will - the uncaused causer - because there seems to be no part of the machinery that does not follow in a causal relationship from the other parts.
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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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The conscious mind is not at the center of the action in the brain; instead, it is far out on a distant edge, hearing but whispers of the activity.
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...you are battered and bruised in the collisions between reminiscence and reality.
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Because vision appears so effortless, we are like fish challenged to understand water.
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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.
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If you ever feel lazy or dull, take heart: you're the busiest, brightest thing on the planet.
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Visual cortex is fundamentally a machine whose job is to generate a model of the world.
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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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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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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.
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When one part of the brain makes a choice, other parts can quickly invent a story to explain why. If you show the command "Walk" to the right hemisphere (the one without language), the patient will get up and start walking. If you stop him and ask why he's leaving, his left hemisphere, cooking up an answer, will say something like "I was going to get a drink of water."
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Modern neuroimaging is like asking an astronaut in the space shuttle to look out the window and judge how America is doing.
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Some men may be genetically inclined to have and hold a single partner, while some may not. In the near future, young women who stay current with the scientific literature may demand genetic tests of their boyfriends to assess how likely they are to make faithful husbands.
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Death... The moment, sometime in the future, when your name is spoken for the last time.
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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.
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