David Eagleman famous quotes

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.
-- David Eagleman

#Eye #Light #Hair

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

#Action #Acquaintance #Internals

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.
-- David Eagleman

#Religious #Ignorance #Men

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

#Brain #Things Happen

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

#Different #Atoms #Body

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.
-- David Eagleman

#Stars #Mean #Brain

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.
-- David Eagleman

#Names #Three #Body

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

#Brain #Mind #Chasms

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

#Reality #Brain

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.
-- David Eagleman

#Want #Remember

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

#Ignorance #Vastness #Teach

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 Eagleman

#Thinking #Brain #Mind

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

#Successful #Trying #Adults

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

#Drink #Spit #Humans

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

#Believe #Attention #World

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

#Evolve #Solutions

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.
-- David Eagleman

#Emotional #Brain #Balance

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

#Design #Brain #Algorithms

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.
-- David Eagleman

#What Matters #Afterlife #Joy

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.
-- David Eagleman

#Writing #Zoom #Lenses

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

#Fleeing #Creation #Ends

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

#God Life #Abandon

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

#Empathy #Humanity #Favors

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

#Scales

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.
-- David Eagleman

#Lonely #People #Missing

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

#Reality #Collision

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

#Fall #Years #Center Of The Universe

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.
-- David Eagleman

#Eye #Thinking #Reality

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!
-- David Eagleman

#Book #Numbers #Stories

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

#Numbers #Boring #Infinite

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

#Afterlife #Cosmos

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.
-- David Eagleman

#Cells #Cities #Brain

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.
-- David Eagleman

#Labs #Study #Scientist

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

#Writing #Brain #World

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.
-- David Eagleman

#Home #Reality #Perception

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.
-- David Eagleman

#Self #Skulls #Consistency

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

#People #Bigger

I always bounce my legs when I'm sitting.
-- David Eagleman

#Sitting #Legs

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

#Literature #British #University

Our reality depends on what our biology is up to.
-- David Eagleman

#Reality #Biology

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

#Names #Lasts #Moments

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

#Brain

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.
-- David Eagleman

#Brain #Mind #Hearing

There are always wonderful mysteries to confront.
-- David Eagleman

#Mystery #Wonderful

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

#Faith #Ideas #Way

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

#Views #People #Understanding

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

#Years #Mind Blowing #Next

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.
-- David Eagleman

#Eye #Brain #Perception