David Eagleman Quotations

A typical neuron makes about ten thousand connections to neighboring neurons. Given the billions of neurons, this means there are as many connections in a single cubic centimeter of brain tissue as there are stars in the Milky Way galaxy.

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.

Your brain is built of cells called neurons and glia - hundreds of billions of them. Each one of these cells is as complicated as a city.

I think what a life in science really teaches you is the vastness of our ignorance.

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

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.

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.

We don't really understand most of what's happening in the cosmos. Is there any afterlife? Who knows.

I think the first decade of this century is going to be remembered as a time of extremism.

Neuroscience over the next 50 years is going to introduce things that are mind-blowing.

Part of the scientific temperament is this tolerance for holding multiple hypotheses in mind at the same time.

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

My dream is to reform the legal system over the next 20 years.

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

The same stimuli in the world can be inducing very different experiences internally and it's probably based on a single change in a gene. What I am doing is pulling the gene forward and imaging and doing behavioural tests to understand what that difference is and how reality can be constructed so differently.

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!

I always bounce my legs when I'm sitting.

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.

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

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.

My lab and academic work fill my day from about 9 am to 7 p.m. Then I zoom out the lens to work on my other writing.

Everybody knows the power of deadlines - and we all hate them. But their effectiveness is undeniable.

I call myself a Possibilian: I'm open to...ideas that we don't have any way of testing right now.

The more familiar the world becomes, the less information your brain writes down, and the more quickly time seems to pass.

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

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

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

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

There are always wonderful mysteries to confront.

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

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

The missing crowds make you lonely. You begin to complain about all the people you could be meeting. But no one listens or sympathizes with you, because this is precisely what you chose when you were alive.

Everything that creates itself upon the backs of smaller scales will by those same scales be consumed.

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

My lab and academic work fill my day from about 9 am to 7 p.m. Then I zoom out the lens to work on my other writing.

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.

What a life in science really teaches you is the vastness of our ignorance.

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.

Since we live in the heads of those who remember us, we lose control of our lives and become who they want us to be.

It is only through us that God lives. When we abandon him, he dies.

Our reality depends on what our biology is up to.

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

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.

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

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

Among all the creatures of creation, the gods favor us: We are the only ones who can empathize with their problems.

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.

We're trapped on this very thin slice of perception ... But even at that slice of reality that we call home, we're not seeing most of what's going on.

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.

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.

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

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.

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

There are three deaths. The first is when the body ceases to function. The second is when the body is consigned to the grave. The third is that moment, sometime in the future, when your name is spoken for the last time.

Every atom in your body is the same quark in different places at the same moment in time.