Top 120 David Eagleman Quotes (2026 Update)
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51. “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

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

— David Eagleman

53. “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

54. “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

55. “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

56. “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

57. “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

58. “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

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

— David Eagleman

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

— David Eagleman

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

— David Eagleman

62. “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

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

— David Eagleman

64. “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

65. “Interestingly, schizophrenics can tickle themselves because of a problem with their timing that does not allow their motor actions and resulting sensations to be correctly sequenced.”

— David Eagleman

66. “There is never a time zero when you decide to do something, because every neuron in the brain is driven by other neurons; there seems to be no part of the system that acts independently rather than reacts dependably.”

— David Eagleman

67. “Positive traits like conscientiousness, purpose in life, and keeping busy were protective.”

— David Eagleman

68. “Behavior is the outcome of the battle among internal systems.”

— David Eagleman

69. “As we develop better technologies for probing the brain, we detect more problems.”

— David Eagleman

70. “This is what consciousness does: it sets the goals, and the rest of the system learns how to meet them.”

— David Eagleman

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

— David Eagleman

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

— David Eagleman

73. “You become who you are not because of what grows in your brain, but because of what is removed.”

— David Eagleman

74. “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

75. “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

76. “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

77. “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

78. “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

79. “People tend to love reflections of themselves in others.”

— David Eagleman

80. “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

81. “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

82. “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

83. “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

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

— David Eagleman

85. “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

86. “Evolution is smarter than you are.”

— David Eagleman

87. “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

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

— David Eagleman

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

— David Eagleman

90. “The brain runs its show incognito.”

— David Eagleman

91. “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

92. “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

93. “The enemy of memory isn’t time; it’s other memories. Each new event needs to establish new relationships among a finite number of neurons. The surprise is that a faded memory doesn’t seem faded to you. You feel, or at least assume, that the full picture is there.”

— David Eagleman

94. “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

95. “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

96. “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

97. “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

98. “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

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

— David Eagleman

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

— David Eagleman