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Brain Quotes by David Eagleman

52 Brain quotes by David Eagleman

All Brain quotes David Eagleman’s page

The three‑pound organ in your skull, with its pink Jell‑o consistency, feels like alien computational material. Eagleman notes the brain actively builds reality, firing predictions and only noticing when expectations are broken. He also highlights the staggering number of neuron connections, as many as stars in our galaxy.

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Just like a good drama, the human brain runs on conflict.

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The brain runs its show incognito.

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Just give the brain the information and it will figure it out.

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All activity in the brain is driven by other activity in the brain, in a vastly complex, interconnected network.

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

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

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Think about the brain as the densest concentration of youness. It's the peak of the mountain, but not the whole mountain.

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The main thing known about secrets is that keeping them is unhealthy for the brain.

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

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

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Even though the outside world has not changed, your brain dynamically presents different interpretations.

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The continuous networks of neural circuitry accomplish their functions using multiple, independently discovered strategies. The brain lends itself well to the complexity…

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The three-pound organ in your skull - with its pink consistency of Jell-o - is an alien kind of computational material. It…

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When the brain activity is kindled in the right spot, people hear voices. If a physician prescribes an anti-epileptic medication, the seizures…

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Knowing yourself now requires the understanding that the conscious you occupies only a small room in the mansion of the brain, and…

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Awareness of your surroundings occurs only when sensory inputs violate expectations. When the world is successfully predicted away, awareness is not needed…

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The conscious mind is not at the center of the action in the brain; instead, it is far out on a distant…

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One of the most impressive features of brains - and especially human brains - is the flexibility to learn almost any kind…

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The brain internally simulates what will happen if you were to perform some action under specific conditions. Internal models not only play…

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As Walt Whitman correctly surmised, we are large and we harbor multitudes within us. And those multitudes are locked in chronic battle.…

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Reductionism is not the right viewpoint for everything, and it certainly won't explain the relationship between the brain and the mind. This…

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It turns out that dopamine is a chemical on double duty in the brain. Along with its role in motor commands, it…

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Societies would _not_ be better off if everyone were like Mr Spock, all rationality and no emotion. Instead, a balance - a…

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If you have certain problems with your brain but are raised in a good home, you might turn out okay. If your…

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“We are made up of an entire parliament of pieces and parts and subsystems. Beyond a collection of local expert systems, we…

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If you measure someone's brain and see very little activity during a task, it does not necessarily indicate that they're not trying…

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Many people prefer a view of human nature that includes a true side and a false side - in other words, humans…

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“The deep secret of the brain is that not only the spinal cord but the entire central nervous system works this way:…

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“If an epileptic seizure is focused in a particular sweet spot in the temporal lobe, a person won´t have motor seizures, but…

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If you cannot always elicit a straight answer from the unconscious brain, how can you access its knowledge? Sometimes the trick is…

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“Many „pathogens“ (both chemical and behavioral) can influence how you turn out; these include substance abuse by a mother during pregnancy, maternal…

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“consciousness is the smallest player in the operations of the brain.”

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“If our brains were simple enough to be understood, we wouldn’t be smart enough to understand them.”

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As we develop better technologies for probing the brain, we detect more problems.

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

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Brains are like representative democracies. They are built of multiple, overlapping experts who weigh in and compete over different choices.

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Love was not specified in the design of your brain; it is merely an endearing algorithm that freeloads on the leftover processing…

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Your brain is built of cells called neurons and glia - hundreds of billions of them. Each one of these cells is…

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Constant reminding ourselves that we not see with our eyes but with our synergetic eye-brain system working as a whole will produce…

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After all, across the population there are slight differences in brain function, and sometimes these translate directly into different ways of experiencing…

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More by David Eagleman

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…

Visual cortex is fundamentally a machine whose job is to generate a model of the world.

If you ever feel lazy or dull, take heart: you're the busiest, brightest thing on the planet.

We are not conscious of most things until we ask ourselves questions about them.

“with the knowledge that you cannot appreciate the destination without knowing the starting point; you cannot revel in the simplicity unless you remember the…

“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…

The deep secret of the brain is that not only the spinal cord but the entire central nervous system works this way: internally generated…

When people fall in love, there´s period of up to three years during which the zeal and infatuation ride at a peak. The internal…

The majority of human beings live their whole lives unaware that they are only seeing a limited cone of vision at any moment.

Our ignorance of the cosmos is too vast to commit to atheism, and yet we know too much to commit to a particular religion.…

“As Gazzaniga put it, "these findings all suggest that the interpretive mechanism of the left hemisphere is always hard at work, seeking the meaning…

I spent my adult life as a scientist, and science is, essentially, the most successful approach we have to try and understand the vast…

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…

“Platoons and plays and stores and congresses do not end - they simply move on to a different dimension.”

Awareness of your surroundings occurs only when sensory inputs violate expectations. When the world is successfully predicted away, awareness is not needed because the…