David Eagleman
David Eagleman
David Eaglemanis an American writer and neuroscientist, serving as an adjunct associate professor at Stanford University in the department of Psychiatry & Behavioral Sciences. He also independently serves as the director of the Center for Science and Law. He is known for his work on brain plasticity, time perception, synesthesia, and neurolaw. He is a Guggenheim Fellow, a council member in the World Economic Forum, and a New York Times bestselling author published in 28 languages. He is the writer...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionScientist
CountryUnited States of America
When 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.
I 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.
What a life in science really teaches you is the vastness of our ignorance.
Every week I get letters from people worldwide who feel that the possibilian point of view represents their understanding better than either religion or neo-atheism.
The three-pound organ in your skull - with its pink consistency of Jell-o - is an alien kind of computational material. It is composed of miniaturized, self-configuring parts, and it vastly outstrips anything we've dreamt of building.
You´re not perceiving what's out there. You're perceiving whatever your brain tells you.
Death... The moment, sometime in the future, when your name is spoken for the last time.
My lab and academic work fill my day from about 9 am to 7 p.m. Then I zoom out the lens to work on my other writing.
Everything that creates itself upon the backs of smaller scales will by those same scales be consumed.
We open our eyes and we think we're seeing the whole world out there. But what has become clear—and really just in the last few centuries—is that when you look at the electro-magnetic spectrum we are seeing less than 1/10 Billionth of the information that's riding on there. So we call that visible light. But everything else passing through our bodies is completely invisible to us. Even though we accept the reality that's presented to us, we're really only seeing a little window of what's happening.
Societies would _not_ be better off if everyone were like Mr Spock, all rationality and no emotion. Instead, a balance - a teaming up of the internal rivals - is optimal for brains. ... Some balance of the emotional and rational systems is needed, and that balance may already be optimized by natural selection in human brains.
The more familiar the world becomes, the less information your brain writes down, and the more quickly time seems to pass.
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 most of what's going on.
I know one lab that studies nicotine receptors and all the scientists are smokers, and another lab that studies impulse control and they're all overweight.