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.
David EaglemanRead
You´re not perceiving what's out there. You're perceiving whatever your brain tells you.
Interpretation
Our perceptions are shaped by our brain's interpretation rather than direct observation of reality.
This quote by David Eagleman highlights the idea that our understanding of the world is filtered through our brain's interpretations and beliefs. It suggests that what we see and experience is not purely objective reality, but a subjective construct influenced by our thoughts, emotions, and past experiences. This emphasizes the importance of awareness and critical thinking in navigating our perceptions.
In practice
In a discussion about how biases affect decision making.
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.
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.
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.
The difference between animals and humans is that animals change themselves for the environment, but humans change the environment for themselves.
When we hear a house has fallen do we ask if the ceiling fell with it?
Perhaps it is even a good idea to stir up a rivalry between conceptual and imaginative activity. In any case, one will encounter nothing but disappointments if he intends to make them cooperate. The image can not provide matter for a concept. By giving stability to the image, the concept would stifle its life.
Reason is the life of the law; nay, the common law itself is nothing else but reason - the law which is perfection of reason.
So that it must be only by the imagination that Satan has access to the soul, to tempt and delude it, or suggest anything to it. And this seems to be the reason why persons that are under the disease of melancholy are commonly so visibly and remarkably subject to the suggestions and temptations of Satan... Innumerable are the ways by which the mind may be led on to all kind of evil thoughts, by the exciting of external ideas in the imagination.
I guess he'll have to figure out someday that he is supposed to have this dark side, that it is part of what it means to be human, to have the darkness just as much as the light- that in fact the dark parts make the light visible; without them, the light would disappear. But I guess he has to figure other stuff out first, like how to keep his neck from flopping all over the place and how to sit up.
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