There is a looming chasm between what your brain knows and what your mind is capable of accessing.
David EaglemanIf you ever feel lazy or dull, take heart: you're the busiest, brightest thing on the planet.
David EaglemanKeep in mind that every single generation before us has worked under the assumption that they possessed all the major tools for understanding the universe, and they were all wrong, without exception.
David EaglemanAsleep 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.
David EaglemanIf an epileptic seizure is focused in a particular sweet spot in the temporal lobe, a person wonยดt 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 historyยดs prophets, martyrs, and leaders appear to have had temporal lobe epilepsy.
David Eagleman