David Eagleman
My dream is to reform the legal system over the next 20 years.Collection: Legal
I think what a life in science really teaches you is the vastness of our ignorance.Collection: Science
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.
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.
What has always surprised me when I walk into a bookstore is the number of books that you can find that are written with certainty. The authors tell some story as though it's true, but they don't have any evidence that it is true!
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.
Every week I get letters from people worldwide who feel that the possibilian point of view represents their understanding better than either religion or neo-atheism.
There are an infinite number of boring things to do in science.
I think the first decade of this century is going to be remembered as a time of extremism.
Neuroscience over the next 50 years is going to introduce things that are mind-blowing.
Part of the scientific temperament is this tolerance for holding multiple hypotheses in mind at the same time.
People wouldn't even go into science unless there was something much bigger to be discovered, something that is transcendent.
We don't really understand most of what's happening in the cosmos. Is there any afterlife? Who knows.
As an undergraduate I majored in British and American literature at Rice University.
I always bounce my legs when I'm sitting.
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.
What we find is that our brains have colossal things happening in them all the time.
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.
I'm using the afterlife as a backdrop against which to explore the joys and complexities of being human - it turns out that it's a great lens with which to understand what matters to us.
The same stimuli in the world can be inducing very different experiences internally and it's probably based on a single change in a gene. What I am doing is pulling the gene forward and imaging and doing behavioural tests to understand what that difference is and how reality can be constructed so differently.
I spent my adult life as a scientist, and science is, essentially, the most successful approach we have to try and understand the vast mysteries around.
There are always wonderful mysteries to confront.
You´re not perceiving what's out there. You're perceiving whatever your brain tells you.Collection: Brain
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.Collection: Names
Instead of reality being passively recorded by the brain, it is actively constructed by it.Collection: Reality
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."Collection: Jung
We are not conscious of most things until we ask ourselves questions about them.Collection: Conscious
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.Collection: Believe
Every atom in your body is the same quark in different places at the same moment in time.Collection: Different
It turns out your conscious mind - the part you think of as you - is really the smallest part of what’s happening in your brain, and usually the last one in line to find out any information.Collection: Thinking
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.Collection: Eye
We are not the ones driving the boat of our behavior, at least not nearly as much as we believe.Collection: Believe
Our ignorance of the cosmos is too vast to commit to atheism, and yet we know too much to commit to a particular religion. A third position, agnosticism, is often an uninteresting stance in which a person simply questions whether his traditional religious story (say, a man with a beard on a cloud) is true or not true. But with Possibilianism I’m hoping to define a new position - one that emphasizes the exploration of new, unconsidered possibilities. Possibilianism is comfortable holding multiple ideas in mind; it is not interested in committing to any particular story.Collection: Religious
You are more likely to believe that a statement is true if you have heard it before - whether or not it is actually true.Collection: Believe
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.Collection: Want
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.Collection: Views
Nothing is inherently tasty or repulsive - it depends on your needs. Deliciousness is simply an index of usefulness.Collection: Needs
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."Collection: Water
The brain "fills in" the missing information from the blind spot. Notice what you see in the location of the dot when it's in your blind spot. When the dot disappears, you do not perceive a hole of whiteness or blackness in its place; instead your brain invents a patch of the background pattern. Your brain, with no information from that particular spot in visual space, fills in with the patterns around it. You're not perceiving what's out there. You're perceiving whatever your brain tells you.Collection: Blind Spots
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.Collection: Simple
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.Collection: Eye
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.Collection: Gambling
Our reality depends on what our biology is up to.Collection: Reality
Death... The moment, sometime in the future, when your name is spoken for the last time.Collection: Names
Evolve solutions; when you find a good one, don't stop.Collection: Evolve
All creation necessarily ends in this: Creators, powerless, fleeing from the things they have wrought.Collection: Fleeing
Everybody knows the power of deadlines - and we all hate them. But their effectiveness is undeniable.Collection: Hate
When a male vole repeatedly mates with a female, a hormone called vasopressin is released in his brain. The vasopressin binds to receptors in a part of the brain called the nucleus accumbens, and the binding mediates a pleasurable feeling that becomes associated with that female. This locks in the monogamy, which is known as pair-bonding. If you block this hormone, the pair-bonding goes away.Collection: Block
Brains are like representative democracies. They are built of multiple, overlapping experts who weigh in and compete over different choices.Collection: Choices
You are part of a complex social network that changes your biology with every interaction, and which your actions can change.Collection: Action