Top 120 David Eagleman Quotes (2024 Update)
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101. “People wouldn’t even go into science unless there was something much bigger to be discovered, something that is transcendent.”

— David Eagleman

102. “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

103. “Vision is more than looking.”

— David Eagleman

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

— David Eagleman

105. “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

106. “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

107. “Creators, powerless, fleeing from the things they have wrought.”

— David Eagleman

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

— David Eagleman

109. “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

110. “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

111. “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

112. “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

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

— David Eagleman

114. “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

115. “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

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

— David Eagleman

117. “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

118. “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

119. “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

120. “And God consoles Himself with the thought that all creation necessarily ends in this: Creators, powerless, fleeing from the things they have wrought.”

— David Eagleman

121. “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

122. “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

123. “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

124. “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

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

— David Eagleman

126. “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

127. “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

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

— David Eagleman

129. “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

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

— David Eagleman

131. “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

132. “Arthur C. Clarke was fond of pointing out that any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.”

— David Eagleman