Top 120 David Eagleman Quotes (2024 Update)

1. “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.”

— David Eagleman

2. “Everybody knows the power of deadlines – and we all hate them. But their effectiveness is undeniable.”

— David Eagleman

3. “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

4. “Instead of reality being passively recorded by the brain, it is actively constructed by it.”

— David Eagleman

5. “We think of color as a fundamental quality of the world around us. But in the outside world, color doesn’t actually exist. When electromagnetic radiation hits an object, some of it bounces off and is captured by our eyes. We can distinguish between millions of combinations of wavelengths – but it is only inside our heads that any of this becomes color. Color is an interpretation of wavelengths, one that only exists internally.”

— David Eagleman

6. “Neuroscience over the next 50 years is going to introduce things that are mind-blowing.”

— David Eagleman

7. “What a life in science really teaches you is the vastness of our ignorance.”

— David Eagleman

8. “Social pain – such as that resulting from exclusion – activates the same brain regions as physical pain.”

— David Eagleman

9. “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.”

— David Eagleman

10. “Our reality depends on what our biology is up to.”

— David Eagleman

11. “You don’t perceive objects as they are. You perceive them as you are. Each.”

— David Eagleman

12. “Genocide is only possible when dehumanization happens on a massive scale, and the perfect tool for this job is propaganda: it keys right into the neural networks that understand other people, and dials down the degree to which we empathize with them.”

— David Eagleman

13. “Love was not specified in the design of your brain; it is merely an endearing algorithm that freeloads on the leftover processing cycles.”

— David Eagleman

14. “Every atom in your body is the same quark in different places at the same moment in time.”

— David Eagleman

15. “There is a looming chasm between what your brain knows and what your mind is capable of accessing.”

— David Eagleman

16. “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

17. “Your consciousness is like a tiny stowaway on a transatlantic steamship, taking credit for the journey without acknowledging the massive engineering underfoot.”

— David Eagleman

18. “The more familiar the world becomes, the less information your brain writes down, and the more quickly time seems to pass.”

— David Eagleman

19. “We don’t really understand most of what’s happening in the cosmos. Is there any afterlife? Who knows.”

— David Eagleman

20. “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

21. “After all, that’s what memory is for: keeping track of important events, so that if you’re ever in a similar situation, your brain has more information to try to survive. In other words, when things are life-threateningly scary, it’s a good time to take notes.”

— David Eagleman

22. “The enemy of memory isn’t time; it’s other memories.”

— David Eagleman

23. “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

24. “Death... The moment, sometime in the future, when your name is spoken for the last time.”

— David Eagleman

25. “Everything that creates itself upon the backs of smaller scales will by those same scales be consumed.”

— David Eagleman

26. “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

27. “It is only through us that God lives. When we abandon him, he dies.”

— David Eagleman

28. “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.”

— David Eagleman

29. “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

30. “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.”

— David Eagleman

31. “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 is, you would be shocked by its colorless, odorless, tasteless silence. Outside your brain, there is just energy and matter.”

— David Eagleman

32. “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

33. “Our internal life and external actions are steered by biological coctails to which we have neither immediate access nor direct acquaintance.”

— David Eagleman

34. “Among all the creatures of creation, the gods favor us: We are the only ones who can empathize with their problems.”

— David Eagleman

35. “Vision is active, not passive. There is more than one way for the visual system to interpret the stimulus, and so it flips back and forth between the possibilities.”

— David Eagleman

36. “What we find is that our brains have colossal things happening in them all the time.”

— David Eagleman

37. “I always bounce my legs when I’m sitting.”

— David Eagleman

38. “Just give the brain the information and it will figure it out.”

— David Eagleman

39. “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

40. “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.”

— David Eagleman

41. “But our brains are always crushing ambiguity into choices.”

— David Eagleman

42. “We can’t help but simulate others, connect with others, care about others, because we’re hardwired to be social creatures.”

— David Eagleman

43. “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.”

— David Eagleman

44. “Many of us like to believe that all adults possess the same capacity to make sound choices. It’s a nice idea, but it’s wrong.”

— David Eagleman

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

— David Eagleman

46. “Because self-control requires energy, which means we have less energy available for the next thing we need to do. And that’s why resisting temptation, making hard decisions, or taking initiative all seem to draw from the same well of energy. So willpower isn’t something that we just exercise – it’s something we deplete.”

— David Eagleman

47. “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.”

— David Eagleman

48. “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

49. “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

50. “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