Explore Quotes by David Eagleman

It turns out your conscious mind - the part you think of as you - is really the smallest part of what’s happening in your brain, and usually the last one in line to find out any information.

What we find is that our brains have colossal things happening in them all the time.

Our ignorance of the cosmos is too vast to commit to atheism, and yet we know too much to commit to a particular religion. A third position, agnosticism, is often an uninteresting stance in which a person simply questions whether his traditional religious story (say, a man with a beard on a cloud) is true or not true. But with Possibilianism I’m hoping to define a new position - one that emphasizes the exploration of new, unconsidered possibilities. Possibilianism is comfortable holding multiple ideas in mind; it is not interested in committing to any particular story.

There are always wonderful mysteries to confront.

The conscious mind is not at the center of the action in the brain; instead, it is far out on a distant edge, hearing but whispers of the activity.

Death... The moment, sometime in the future, when your name is spoken for the last time.

You´re not perceiving what's out there. You're perceiving whatever your brain tells you.

Our internal life and external actions are steered by biological coctails to which we have neither immediate access nor direct acquaintance.

When we're in a human body, we don't care about universal collapse - instead, we care only about a meeting of the eyes, a glimpse of bare flesh, the caressing tones of a loved voice, joy, love, light, the orientation of a house plant, the shade of a paint stroke, the arrangement of hair.

Our reality depends on what our biology is up to.

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

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.

Societies would _not_ be better off if everyone were like Mr Spock, all rationality and no emotion. Instead, a balance - a teaming up of the internal rivals - is optimal for brains. ... Some balance of the emotional and rational systems is needed, and that balance may already be optimized by natural selection in human brains.

We believe we're seeing the world just fine until it's called to our attention that we're not.

Evolve solutions; when you find a good one, don't stop.

There is a looming chasm between what your brain knows and what your mind is capable of accessing.

Instead of reality being passively recorded by the brain, it is actively constructed by it.

Love was not specified in the design of your brain; it is merely an endearing algorithm that freeloads on the leftover processing cycles.

A mere 400 years after our fall from the center of the universe, we have experienced the fall from the center of ourselves.

We open our eyes and we think we're seeing the whole world out there. But what has become clear—and really just in the last few centuries—is that when you look at the electro-magnetic spectrum we are seeing less than 1/10 Billionth of the information that's riding on there. So we call that visible light. But everything else passing through our bodies is completely invisible to us. Even though we accept the reality that's presented to us, we're really only seeing a little window of what's happening.

...you are battered and bruised in the collisions between reminiscence and reality.