Top 120 David Eagleman Quotes (2024 Update)
Page 2 of 3

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

— David Eagleman

52. “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

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

— David Eagleman

54. “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

55. “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

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

— David Eagleman

57. “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

58. “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

59. “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

60. “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

61. “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

62. “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

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

— David Eagleman

64. “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

65. “Evolution is smarter than you are.”

— David Eagleman

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

— David Eagleman

67. “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

68. “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

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

— David Eagleman

70. “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

71. “The brain runs its show incognito.”

— David Eagleman

72. “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

73. “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.”

— David Eagleman

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

— David Eagleman

75. “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

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

— David Eagleman

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

— David Eagleman

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

— David Eagleman

79. “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

80. “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

81. “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

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

— David Eagleman

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

— David Eagleman

84. “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

85. “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

86. “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

87. “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

88. “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

89. “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

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

— David Eagleman

91. “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

92. “We are astoundingly poor observers. And our introspection is useless on these issues: we believe we’re seeing the world just fine until it’s called to our attention that we’re not.”

— David Eagleman

93. “Remove the world and the show still goes on.”

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

— David Eagleman

96. “Humans have discovered that they cannot stop Death, but at least they can spit in his drink.”

— David Eagleman

97. “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.”

— David Eagleman

98. “Vision is more than looking.”

— David Eagleman

99. “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

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

— David Eagleman