Top 120 David Eagleman Quotes (2025 Update)
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51. “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.”

— David Eagleman

52. “The problem is that incarceration triggers an expensive and vicious cycle of relapse and re-imprisonment. It breaks people’s existing social circles and employment opportunities, and gives them new social circles and new employment opportunities – ones that typically fuel their addiction.”

— David Eagleman

53. “All creation necessarily ends in this: Creators, powerless, fleeing from the things they have wrought.”

— David Eagleman

54. “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

55. “It may be that what the brain physically is doesn’t matter, but instead what it does.”

— David Eagleman

56. “There are always wonderful mysteries to confront.”

— David Eagleman

57. “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.”

— David Eagleman

58. “So who you are at any given moment depends on the detailed rhythms of your neuronal firing. During the day, the conscious you emerges from that integrated neural complexity. At night, when the interaction of your neurons changes just a bit, you disappear. Your loved ones have to wait until the next morning, when your neurons let the wave die and work themselves back into their complex rhythm. Only then do you return.”

— David Eagleman

59. “You were all these ages, they concede, and you were none.”

— David Eagleman

60. “Brains are in the business of gathering information and steering behavior appropriately. It doesn’t matter whether consciousness is involved in the decision making. And most of the time, it’s not.”

— David Eagleman

61. “Only a couple of decades ago it was thought that brain development was mostly complete by the end of childhood. But we now know that the process of building a human brain takes up to twenty-five years.”

— David Eagleman

62. “Even though the outside world has not changed, your brain dynamically presents different interpretations.”

— David Eagleman

63. “Instead of trying to produce a program to simulate the adult mind, why not rather try to produce one which simulates the child’s?” – Alan Turing, 1950.”

— David Eagleman

64. “What is the position of your tongue in your mouth? Once you are asked the question you can answer it – but presumably you were not aware of the answer until you asked yourself. The brain generally does not need to know most things; it merely knows how to go out and retrieve the data. It computes on a need-to-know basis.”

— David Eagleman

65. “So not only is our perception of the world a construction that does not accurately represent the outside, but we additionally have the false impression of a full, rich picture when in fact we see only what we need to know, and no more.”

— David Eagleman

66. “When you die, you are grieved by all the atoms of which you were composed. They hung together for years, whether in sheets of skin or communities of spleen. With your death they do not die. Instead, they part ways, moving off in their separate directions, mourning the loss of a special time they shared together, haunted by the feeling that they were once playing parts in something larger than themselves.”

— David Eagleman

67. “The part of the light spectrum that is visible to us is less than a ten-trillionth of it. The rest of the spectrum––carrying TV shows, radio signals, microwaves, X-rays, gamma rays, cell phone conversations, and so on––flows through us with no awareness on our part.”

— David Eagleman

68. “No one is having an experience of the objective reality that really exists; each creature perceives only what it has evolved to perceive.”

— David Eagleman

69. “The ancient Greeks suggested that we should think of our lives like chariots. We are charioteers trying to hold two horses: the white horse of reason and the black horse of passion. Each horse pulls off-center, in opposite directions. Your job is to keep control of both horses, navigating down the middle of the road.”

— David Eagleman

70. “Because vision appears so effortless, we are like fish challenged to understand water.”

— David Eagleman

71. “Imagine that your desktop computer began to control its own peripheral devices, removed its own cover, and pointed its webcam at its own circuitry. That’s us.”

— David Eagleman

72. “Evolution is smarter than you are.”

— David Eagleman

73. “We believe we’re seeing the world just fine until it’s called to our attention that we’re not.”

— David Eagleman

74. “Specifically, cognitive exercise – that is, activity that keeps the brain active, like crosswords, reading, driving, learning new skills, and having responsibilities – was protective.”

— David Eagleman

75. “We’re now getting the first glimpses of the vastness of inner space. This internal, hidden, intimate cosmos commands its own goals, imperatives, and logic.”

— David Eagleman

76. “Through practice, repeated signals have been passed along neural networks, strengthening synapses and thereby burning the skill into the circuitry. In.”

— David Eagleman

77. “But it turns out your thousand trillion trillion atoms were not an accidental collection: each was labeled as composing you and continues to be so wherever it goes. So you’re not gone, you’re simply taking on different forms.”

— David Eagleman

78. “The brain runs its show incognito.”

— David Eagleman

79. “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.”

— David Eagleman

80. “So God sits on the edge of Her bed and weeps at night, because the only thing everyone can agree upon is that they’re all in Hell.”

— David Eagleman

81. “There are an infinite number of boring things to do in science.”

— David Eagleman

82. “As an undergraduate I majored in British and American literature at Rice University.”

— David Eagleman

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

— David Eagleman

84. “Evolve solutions; when you find a good one, don’t stop.”

— David Eagleman

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

— David Eagleman

86. “So modern neuroimaging is like asking an astronaut in the space shuttle to look out the window and judge how America is doing.”

— David Eagleman

87. “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.”

— David Eagleman

88. “And just before you lose your final human faculties, you painfully ponder what magnificent extraterrestrial creature, enthralled with the idea of finding a simpler life, chose in the last round to become a human.”

— David Eagleman

89. “Political persuasion emerges at the intersection of the mental and the corporal. Traveling.”

— David Eagleman

90. “But 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.”

— David Eagleman

91. “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!”

— David Eagleman

92. “As the neuroscientist Wolf Singer recently suggested: even when we cannot measure what is wrong with a criminal’s brain, we can fairly safely assume that something is wrong.”

— David Eagleman

93. “Despite the feeling that we’re directly experiencing the world out there, our reality is ultimately built in the dark, in a foreign language of electrochemical signals. The activity churning across vast neural networks gets turned into your story of this, your private experience of the world: the feeling of this book in your hands, the light in the room, the smell of roses, the sound of others speaking.”

— David Eagleman

94. “What does this research tell us? It tells us that fiscally concerned strippers should eschew contraception and double up their shifts just before ovulation.”

— David Eagleman

95. “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.”

— David Eagleman

96. “Once upon a time, I, Chuang Tzu, dreamt I was a butterfly, fluttering hither and thither, to all intents and purposes a butterfly. I was conscious only of following my fancies as a butterfly, and was unconscious of my individuality as a man. Suddenly, I awoke, and there I lay, myself again. Now I do not know whether I was then a man dreaming I was a butterfly, or whether I am now a butterfly dreaming that I am a man.” The.”

— David Eagleman

97. “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.”

— David Eagleman

98. “God realized that He had no concept of the skills required to run an organization of this magnitude.”

— David Eagleman

99. “People wouldn’t even go into science unless there was something much bigger to be discovered, something that is transcendent.”

— David Eagleman

100. “The human brain doesn’t passively take in experience like a recorder; instead, it constantly works over the sensory data it receives – and the fruit of that mental labor is new versions of the world.”

— David Eagleman