David Eagleman
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.Collection: Atoms
Behavior is the outcome of the battle among internal systems.Collection: Battle
We are nothing but the product of billions of years of molecules coming together and ratcheting up through natural selection, we are composed only of highways of fluids and chemicals sliding along roadways within billions of dancing cells, trillions of synaptic conversations hum in parallel, this vast egglike fabric of micron-thin circuitry runs algorithms undreamt of in modern science, and these neural programs give rise to our decision making, loves, desires, fears, and aspirations. That understanding would be a numinous experience, better than anything ever proposed in anyone's holy text.Collection: Running
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.Collection: Religious
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.Collection: Husband
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.Collection: Understanding
Everything that creates itself upon the backs of smaller scales will by those same scales be consumed.Collection: Scales
Humans have discovered that they cannot stop Death, but at least they can spit in his drink.Collection: Drink
What a life in science really teaches you is the vastness of our ignorance.Collection: Ignorance
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.Collection: Dream
Visual cortex is fundamentally a machine whose job is to generate a model of the world.Collection: Jobs
This is what consciousness does: it sets the goals, and the rest of the system learns how to meet them.Collection: Goal
Think about the brain as the densest concentration of youness. It's the peak of the mountain, but not the whole mountain.Collection: Thinking
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.Collection: Goal
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.Collection: Two
...you are battered and bruised in the collisions between reminiscence and reality.Collection: Reality
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.Collection: Brain
The brain runs its show incognito.Collection: Running
Just give the brain the information and it will figure it out.Collection: Giving
There is a looming chasm between what your brain knows and what your mind is capable of accessing.Collection: Brain
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.Collection: Lonely
It is the most wondrous thing we have discovered in the universe, and it is us.Collection: Wondrous
We're trapped on this very thin slice of perception ... But even at that slice of reality that we call home, we're not seeing most of what's going on.Collection: Home
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.Collection: Brain
I call myself a Possibilian: I'm open to...ideas that we don't have any way of testing right now.Collection: Faith
Among all the creatures of creation, the gods favor us: We are the only ones who can empathize with their problems.Collection: Empathy
Even though the outside world has not changed, your brain dynamically presents different interpretations.Collection: Brain
It is only through us that God lives. When we abandon him, he dies.Collection: God Life
After all, across the population there are slight differences in brain function, and sometimes these translate directly into different ways of experiencing the world. And each individual believes his way is reality.Collection: Believe
Love was not specified in the design of your brain; it is merely an endearing algorithm that freeloads on the leftover processing cycles.Collection: Design
The majority of human beings live their whole lives unaware that they are only seeing a limited cone of vision at any moment.Collection: Vision
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.Collection: Reality
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.Collection: Decision
In the traditionally taught view of perception, data from the sensorium pours into the brain, works its way up the sensory hierarchy, and makes itself seen, heard, smelled, tasted, felt - "perceived." But a closer examination of the data suggests this is incorrect. The brain is properly thought of as a mostly closed system that runs on its own internally generated activity.Collection: Running
All activity in the brain is driven by other activity in the brain, in a vastly complex, interconnected network.Collection: Brain
All life is no more than a match struck in the dark and blown out again.Collection: Dark
Once you begin deliberating about where your fingers are jumping on the piano keyboard, you can no longer pull off the piece.Collection: Jumping
Consciousness is the smallest player in the operations of the brain.Collection: Player
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.Collection: Acid
If our brains were simple enough to be understood, we wouldn't be smart enough to understand them.Collection: Smart
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.Collection: Mistake
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.Collection: Falling In Love
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.Collection: Light
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.Collection: Home
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.Collection: Ideas
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.Collection: Lying
Even while it's true that we are tied to our molecules and proteins and neurons - as strokes and hormones and drugs and microorganisms indisputably tell us - it does not logically follow that humans are best described only as pieces and parts.Collection: Drug
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.Collection: Past
Modern neuroimaging is like asking an astronaut in the space shuttle to look out the window and judge how America is doing.Collection: Space