David Eagleman > Quotes

“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 M. Eagleman, Sum: Forty Tales from the Afterlives

“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 M. Eagleman, Sum: Forty Tales from the Afterlives

“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 anyone's holy text.”
― David Eagleman, Incognito: The Secret Lives of the Brain

“Instead of reality being passively recorded by the brain, it is actively constructed by it.”
― David Eagleman, Incognito: The Secret Lives of the Brain

“It is only through us that God lives. When we abandon him, he dies.”
― David M. Eagleman, Sum: Forty Tales from the Afterlives

“You´re not perceiving what's out there. You're perceiving whatever your brain tells you.”
― David Eagleman, Incognito: The Secret Lives of the Brain

“There is a looming chasm between what your brain knows and what your mind is capable of accessing.”
― David Eagleman, Incognito: The Secret Lives of the Brain

“We believe we're seeing the world just fine until it's called to our attention that we're not.”
― David Eagleman, Incognito: The Secret Lives of the Brain

“...you are battered and bruised in the collisions between reminiscence and reality.”
― David Eagleman, Sum: Forty Tales from the Afterlives

“What if I told you that the world around you, with its rich colors, textures, sounds, and scents is an illusion, a show put on for you by your brain? If you could perceive reality as it is, you would be shocked by its colorless, odorless, tasteless silence. Outside your brain, there is just energy and matter.”
― David Eagleman, The Brain: The Story of You

“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

“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, Sum: Forty Tales from the Afterlives

“All creation necessarily ends in this: Creators, powerless, fleeing from the things they have wrought.”
― David M. Eagleman, Sum: Forty Tales from the Afterlives

“Evolve solutions; when you find a good one, don't stop.”
― David Eagleman, Incognito: The Secret Lives of the Brain

“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.”
― David Eagleman, Incognito: The Secret Lives of the Brain

“You don’t perceive objects as they are. You perceive them as you are. Each”
― David Eagleman, The Brain: The Story of You

“The enemy of memory isn’t time; it’s other memories.”
― David Eagleman, The Brain: The Story of You

“Among all the creatures of creation, the gods favor us: We are the only ones who can empathize with their problems.”
― David M. Eagleman, Sum: Forty Tales from the Afterlives

“Humans have discovered that they cannot stop Death, but at least they can spit in his drink.”
― David Eagleman, Sum: Forty Tales from the Afterlives

“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, Sum: Forty Tales from the Afterlives

“No one is having an experience of the objective reality that really exists; each creature perceives only what it has evolved to perceive.”
― David Eagleman, The Brain: The Story of You

“So the first lesson about trusting your senses is: don’t. Just because you believe something to be true, just because you know it’s true, that doesn’t mean it is true.”
― David Eagleman, Incognito: The Secret Lives of the Brain

“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.”
― David Eagleman, Incognito: The Secret Lives of the Brain

“Although we credit God with designing man, it turns out He's 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. He's 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.”
― David Eagleman, 生命的清单

“Our reality depends on what our biology is up to.”
― David Eagleman, Incognito: The Secret Lives of the Brain

“So poorly did you know yourself that you were always surprised at how you looked in photographs or how you sounded on voice mail. In this way, much of your existence took place in the eyes, ears, and fingertips of others. And now that you’ve left the Earth, you are stored in scattered heads around the globe. Here in this Purgatory, all the people with whom you’ve ever come in contact are gathered. The scattered bits of you are collected, pooled, and unified. The mirrors are held up in front of you. Without the benefit of filtration, you see yourself clearly for the first time. And that is what finally kills you.”
― David Eagleman, Sum: Forty Tales from the Afterlives

“If our brains were simple enough to be understood, we wouldn’t be smart enough to understand them.”
― David Eagleman, Incognito: The Secret Lives of the Brain

“Vision is more than looking.”
― David Eagleman, Incognito: The Secret Lives of the Brain

“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, Sum: Forty Tales from the Afterlives

“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, Incognito: The Secret Lives of the Brain