Just give the brain the information and it will figure it out. David Eagleman More Quotes by David Eagleman More Quotes From David Eagleman You gleefully say, "I just thought of something!", when in fact your brain performed an enormous amount of work before your moment of genius struck. When an idea is served up from behind the scenes, your neural circuitry has been working on it for hours or days or years, consolidating information and trying out new combinations. But you take credit without further wonderment at the vast, hidden machinery behind the scenes. David Eagleman brainyearsideas Scientists 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 Eagleman razorslinespast It 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 earthsunlong In my view, the argument from parsimony is really no argument at all - it typically functions only to shut down more interesting discussion. If history is any guide, it's never a good idea to assume that a scientific problem is cornered. David Eagleman viewsideasinteresting Even 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 Eagleman neuronsmoleculesdrug As we develop better technologies for probing the brain, we detect more problems. David Eagleman technologyproblembrain The brain runs its show incognito. David Eagleman showsbrainrunning Because vision appears so effortless, we are like fish challenged to understand water. David Eagleman fishesvisionwater If you ever feel lazy or dull, take heart: you're the busiest, brightest thing on the planet. David Eagleman lazyheartdull One of the most pervasive mistakes is to believe that our visual system gives a faithful representation of what is "out there" in the same way that a movie camera would. David Eagleman mistakegivingbelieve 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. David Eagleman religiouswritingsweet 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 voicerealitypeople As 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 Eagleman battledifferentbrain If our brains were simple enough to be understood, we wouldn't be smart enough to understand them. David Eagleman smartsimplebrain Each cell sends electrical pulses to other cells, up to hundreds of times per second. If you represented each of these trillions and trillions of pulses in your brain by a single photon of light, the combined output would be blinding. David Eagleman cellslightbrain 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 jungknows The first thing we learn from studying our own circuitry is a simple lesson: most of what we do and think and feel is not under our conscious control. David Eagleman lessonssimplethinking Interestingly, schizophrenics can tickle themselves because of a problem with their timing that does not allow their motor actions and resulting sensations to be correctly sequenced. David Eagleman timingactiondoe We are nothing but the product of billions of years of molecules coming together and ratcheting up through natural selection, we are composed only of highways of fluids and chemicals sliding along roadways within billions of dancing cells, trillions of synaptic conversations hum in parallel, this vast egglike fabric of micron-thin circuitry runs algorithms undreamt of in modern science, and these neural programs give rise to our decision making, loves, desires, fears, and aspirations. That understanding would be a numinous experience, better than anything ever proposed in anyone's holy text. David Eagleman cellsrunningyears Just like a good drama, the human brain runs on conflict. David Eagleman brainrunningdrama
