Even though the outside world has not changed, your brain dynamically presents different interpretations.
David EaglemanInstead of reality being passively recorded by the brain, it is actively constructed by it.
David EaglemanNone of the individual metal hunks of an airplane have the property of ๏ฌight, but when they are attached together in the right way, the result takes to the air. A thin metal bar won't do you much good if you're trying to control a jaguar, but several of them in parallel have the property of containment. The concept of emergent properties means that something new can be introduced that is not inherent in any of the parts.
David EaglemanAs 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 EaglemanIf you are a carrier of a particular set of genes, your probability of committing a violent crime goes up by eight hundred and eighty-two percent.
David EaglemanIf you measure someone's brain and see very little activity during a task, it does not necessarily indicate that they're not trying - it more likely signifies that they have worked hard in the past to burn the programs into the circuitry. Consciousness is called in during the first phase of learning and is excluded from the game playing after it is deep in the system.
David EaglemanAfter all, across the population there are slight differences in brain function, and sometimes these translate directly into different ways of experiencing the world. And each individual believes his way is reality.
David EaglemanThose with Anton's syndrome are not pretending they are not blind; they truly believe they are not blind. Their verbal reports, while inaccurate, are not lies. Instead, they are experiencing what they take to be vision, but it is all internally generated.
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 EaglemanNothing is inherently tasty or repulsive - it depends on your needs. Deliciousness is simply an index of usefulness.
David EaglemanThis is what consciousness does: it sets the goals, and the rest of the system learns how to meet them.
David EaglemanWe don't really understand most of what's happening in the cosmos. Is there any afterlife? Who knows.
David EaglemanVisual cortex is fundamentally a machine whose job is to generate a model of the world.
David EaglemanWhat 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 EaglemanKnowing yourself now requires the understanding that the conscious you occupies only a small room in the mansion of the brain, and that it has little control over the reality constructed for you.
David EaglemanScientists often talk of parsimony (as in "the simplest explanation is probably correct," also known as Occam's razor), but we should not get seduced by the apparent elegance of argument from parsimony; this line of reasoning has failed in the past at least as many times as it has succeeded.
David EaglemanI call myself a Possibilian: I'm open to...ideas that we don't have any way of testing right now.
David EaglemanEven while it's true that we are tied to our molecules and proteins and neurons - as strokes and hormones and drugs and microorganisms indisputably tell us - it does not logically follow that humans are best described only as pieces and parts.
David EaglemanThe 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.
David EaglemanIn our current understanding of science, we can't find the physical gap in which to slip free will - the uncaused causer - because there seems to be no part of the machinery that does not follow in a causal relationship from the other parts.
David EaglemanYou are more likely to believe that a statement is true if you have heard it before - whether or not it is actually true.
David EaglemanYouยดre not perceiving what's out there. You're perceiving whatever your brain tells you.
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 EaglemanOdor carries a great deal of information, including information about a potential mate's age, sex, fertility, identity, emotions, and health.
David EaglemanHumans have discovered that they cannot stop Death, but at least they can spit in his drink.
David EaglemanReductionism is not the right viewpoint for everything, and it certainly won't explain the relationship between the brain and the mind. This is because of a feature known as emergence. When you put together large numbers of pieces and parts, the whole can become something greater than the sum.
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 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 EaglemanThe 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 EaglemanMany people prefer a view of human nature that includes a true side and a false side - in other words, humans have a single genuine aim and the rest is decoration, evasion, or cover-up. That's intuitive, but it's incomplete. A study of the brain necessitates a more nuanced view of human nature.
David EaglemanLove was not specified in the design of your brain; it is merely an endearing algorithm that freeloads on the leftover processing cycles.
David EaglemanEverything that creates itself upon the backs of smaller scales will by those same scales be consumed.
David EaglemanAs Walt Whitman correctly surmised, we are large and we harbor multitudes within us. And those multitudes are locked in chronic battle. There is an ongoing conversation among the different factions in your brain, each competing to control the single output channel of your behavior. As a result, you can accomplish the strange feats of arguing with yourself, cursing at yourself, and cajoling yourself to do something - feats that modern computers simply do not do.
David EaglemanIf you cannot always elicit a straight answer from the unconscious brain, how can you access its knowledge? Sometimes the trick is merely to probe what your gut is telling you. So the next time a friend laments that she cannot decide between two options, tell her the easiest way to solve her problem: flip a coin. She should specify which option belongs to heads and which to tails, and then let the coin fly. The important part is to assess her gut feeling after the coin lands. If she feels a subtle sense of relief at being "told" what to do by the coin, that's the right choice for her.
David EaglemanIt turns out your conscious mind - the part you think of as you - is really the smallest part of whatโs happening in your brain, and usually the last one in line to find out any information.
David EaglemanOur internal life and external actions are steered by biological coctails to which we have neither immediate access nor direct acquaintance.
David EaglemanWhen 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