We are made up of an entire parliament of pieces and parts and subsystems. Beyond a collection of local expert systems, we are collections of overlapping, ceaselessly reinvented mechanism, a group of competing factions. The conscious mind fabricates stories to explain the sometimes inexplicable dynamics of the subsystem inside brain. It can be disquieting to consider the extent to which all of our actions are driven by hardwired systems doing what they do best while we overlay stories about choices.
David EaglemanYour 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 EaglemanI call myself a Possibilian: I'm open to...ideas that we don't have any way of testing right now.
David EaglemanI 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 EaglemanImbalance of reason and emotion may explain the tenacity of religion in societies: world religions are optimized to tap into the emotional networks, and great arguments of reason amount to little against such magnetic pull.
David EaglemanIt is more parsimonious to assume that the sun goes around the Earth, that atoms at the smallest scale operate in accordance with the same rules that objects at larger scales follow, and that we perceive what is really out there. All of these positions were long defended by argument from parsimony, and they were all wrong.
David Eagleman