Top 120 David Eagleman Quotes (2026 Update)
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101. “Just like a good drama, the human brain runs on conflict.”

— David Eagleman

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

— David Eagleman

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

— David Eagleman

104. “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

105. “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

106. “The Babylonian Talmud contains a passage in the same spirit: “In came wine, out went a secret.” It later advises, “In three things is a man revealed: in his wine goblet, in his purse, and in his wrath.”

— David Eagleman

107. “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

108. “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

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

— David Eagleman

110. “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

111. “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

Featured in: Quotes About Stories

112. “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

113. “Vision is more than looking.”

— David Eagleman

114. “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

115. “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

116. “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

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

— David Eagleman

118. “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

119. “Every week I get letters from people worldwide who feel that the possibilian point of view represents their understanding better than either religion or neo-atheism.”

— David Eagleman

120. “This is the hallmark of a robust biological system: political parties can perish in a tragic accident and the society will still run, sometimes with little more than a hiccup to the system. It may be that for every strange clinical case in which brain damage leads to a bizarre change in behavior or perception, there are hundreds of cases in which parts of the brain are damaged with no detectable clinical sign.”

— David Eagleman

121. “You might assume that you end at the border of your skin, but there’s a sense in which there’s no way to mark the end of you and the beginning of all those around you.”

— David Eagleman

122. “Computational devices don’t have to be made out of silicon – they can also be made of moving water droplets or of Lego. What matters is not what a computer is made of, but how its parts interact.”

— David Eagleman

123. “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.”

— David Eagleman

124. “Why do we play our parts so earnestly? Why don’t we go on strike and blow the cover of the truth? One factor is the sincerity in the face of your lover: her life of unexpected reactive emotion, her heartfelt belief in chance and spontaneity. You’re slave to that gorgeous earnestness in her eyes, her engagement with a world of possibility.”

— David Eagleman

125. “So in our current understanding of science, we can’t find the physical gap in which to slip free will – the uncaused causer – because there seems to be no part of the machinery that does not follow in a causal relationship from the other parts.”

— David Eagleman

126. “And once again the Rewarder and the Punisher stalk off, struggling to understand why knowing the code behind the wine does not diminish its pleasure on your tongue, why knowing the inescapability of heartache does not reduce its sting, why glimpsing the mechanics of love does not alter its intoxicating appeal.”

— David Eagleman

127. “Or that babies will mimic an adult sticking out her tongue, a feat requiring a sophisticated ability to translate vision into motor action.”

— David Eagleman

128. “Every four months your red blood cells are entirely replaced, for instance, and your skin cells are replaced every few weeks. Within about seven years every atom in your body will be replaced by other atoms. Physically, you are constantly a new you.”

— David Eagleman

129. “It’s not simply that you are attracted to humans over frogs or that you like apples more than fecal matter – these same principles of hardwired thought guidance apply to all of your deeply held beliefs about logic, economics, ethics, emotions, beauty, social interactions, love, and the rest of your vast mental landscape.”

— David Eagleman

130. “While many animals are properly called intelligent, humans distinguish themselves in that they are so flexibly intelligent, fashioning their neural circuits to match the tasks at hand.”

— David Eagleman

131. “In 2001, families and caretakers of Parkinson’s patients began to notice something strange. When patients were given a drug called pramipexole, some of them turned into gamblers.8 And not just casual gamblers – pathological gamblers. These.”

— David Eagleman

132. “So how does the massively complicated brain, with its eighty-six billion neurons, get built from such a small recipe book? The answer pivots on a clever strategy implemented by the genome: build incompletely and let world experience refine. Thus, for humans at birth, the brain is remarkably unfinished, and interaction with the world is necessary to complete it.”

— David Eagleman

133. “On the flip side, they found that negative psychological factors like loneliness, anxiety, depression, and proneness to psychological distress were related to more rapid cognitive decline. Positive traits like conscientiousness, purpose in life, and keeping busy were protective.”

— David Eagleman