Quotes by David Eagleman

As Carl Jung put it, “In each of us there is another whom we do not know.” As Pink Floyd sang, “There’s someone in my head, but it’s not me.

Theres someone in my head, but its not me.Pink FloydDavid Eagleman

So why does the world appear stable to you when you’re looking at it? Why doesn’t it appear as jerky and nauseating as the poorly filmed video? Here’s why: your internal model operates under the assumption that the world outside is stable. Your eyes are not like video cameras – they simply venture out to find more details to feed into the internal model. They’re not like camera lenses that you’re seeing through; they’re gathering bits of data to feed the world inside your skull. The Brain: The Story of You - David Eagleman

As your trillions of new connections continually form and re-form, the distinctive pattern means that no one like you has ever existed, or will ever exist again. The experience of your conscious awareness, right now, is unique to you. And because the physical stuff is constantly changing, we are too. We’re not fixed. From cradle to grave, we are works in progress.

Each of us is on our own trajectory – steered by our genes and our experiences – and as a result every brain has a different internal life. Brains are as unique as snowflakes.

You´re not perceiving whats out there. Youre perceiving whatever your brain tells you.

If an epileptic seizure is focused in a particular sweet spot in the temporal lobe, a person won´t have motor seizures, but instead something more subtle. The effect is something like a cognitive seizure, marked by changes of personality, hyperreligiosity (an obsession with religion and feelings of religious certainity), hypergraphia (extensive writing on a subject, usually about religion), the false sense of an external presence, and, often, the hearing voices that are attributed to a god. Some fraction of history´s prophets, martyrs, and leaders appear to have had temporal lobe epilepsy.When the brain activity is kindled in the right spot, people hear voices. If a physician prescribes an anti-epileptic medication, the seizures go away and the voices disappear. Our reality depends on what our biology is up to.

Many „pathogens“ (both chemical and behavioral) can influence how you turn out; these include substance abuse by a mother during pregnancy, maternal stress, and low birth weight. As a child grows, neglect, physical abuse, and head injury can cause problems in mental development. Once the child is grown, substance abuse and exposure to a variety of toxins can damage the brain, modifying intelligence, aggression, and decision-making abilities. The major public health movement to remove lead-based paint grew out of an understanding that even low levels of lead can cause brain damage that makes children less inteligent and, in some cases, more impulsive and aggressive. How you turn out depends on where you´ve been. So when it comes to thinking about blameworthiness, the first difficulty to consider is that people do not choose their own developmental path.It´s problematic to imagine yourself in the shoes of a criminal and conclude, „Well, I wouldn´t have done that“ – because if you weren´t exposed to in utero cocaine, lead poisoning, or physical abuse, and he was, then you and he are not directly comparable.

The deep secret of the brain is that not only the spinal cord but the entire central nervous system works this way: internally generated activity is modulated by sensory input. In this view, the difference between being awake and being asleep is merely that the data coming in from the eyes anchors the perception. Asleep vision (dreaming) is perception that is not tied down to anything in the real world; waking perception is something like dreaming with a little more commitment to what´s in front of you. Other examples of unanchored perception are found in prisoners in pitch-park solitary confinement, or in people in sensory deprivation chambers. Both of these situations quickly lead to hallucinations.

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

Behavior is the outcome of the battle among internal systems.

That afternoon She listened to the grievances of the dead from two warring nations. Both sides had suffered, both sides had legitimate grievances, both pled their cases earnestly. She covered Her ears and moaned in misery. She knew Her humans were multidimensional and She could no longer live under the rigid architecture of Her youthful choices.

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

“Imagine for a moment that we are nothing but the product of billions of years of molecules coming together and ratcheting up through natural selection, that we are composed only of highways of fluids and chemicals sliding along roadways within billions of dancing cells, that trillions of synaptic conversations hum in parallel, that this vast egglike fabric of micron-thin circuitry runs algorithms undreamt of in modern science, and that these neural programs give rise to our decision making, loves, desires, fears, and aspirations. To me, that understanding would be a numinous experience, better than anything ever proposed in anyones holy text.”

“Although we credit God with designing man, it turns out Hes not sufficiently skilled to have done so. In point of fact, He unintentionally knocked over the first domino by creating a palette of atoms with different shapes. Electron clouds bonded, molecules bloomed, proteins embraced, and eventually cells formed and learned how to hang on to one another like lovebirds. He discovered that by simmering the Earth at the proper distance from the Sun, it instinctively sprouted with life. Hes not so much a creator as a molecule tinkerer who enjoyed a stroke of luck: He simply set the ball rolling by creating a smorgasbord of matter, and creation ensued.”

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

“Dropping into the world with a half-baked brain has proven a winning strategy for humans. We have outcompeted every species on the planet: covering the landmass, conquering the seas, and bounding onto the moon. We have tripled our life spans. We compose symphonies, erect skyscrapers, and measure with ever-increasing precision the details of our own brains. None of those enterprises were genetically encoded. At least they werent encoded directly. Instead, our genetics bring about a simple principle: dont build inflexible hardware; build a system that adapts to the world around it. Our DNA is not a fixed schematic for building an organism; rather, it sets up a dynamic system that continually rewrites its circuitry to reflect the world around it and to optimize its efficacy within it.”

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