The Brain Quotes

“What if I told you that the world around you, with its rich colors, textures, sounds, and scents is an illusion, a show put on for you by your brain? If you could perceive reality as it is, you would be shocked by its colorless, odorless, tasteless silence. Outside your brain, there is just energy and matter.”
― David Eagleman, The Brain: The Story of You

“You don’t perceive objects as they are. You perceive them as you are. Each”
― David Eagleman, The Brain: The Story of You

“The enemy of memory isn’t time; it’s other memories.”
― David Eagleman, The Brain: The Story of You

“No one is having an experience of the objective reality that really exists; each creature perceives only what it has evolved to perceive.”
― David Eagleman, The Brain: The Story of You

“All the experiences in your life- from single conversations to your broader culture- shape the microscopic details of your brain. Neurally speaking, who you are depends on where you've been. Your brain is a relentless shape-shifter, constantly rewriting its own circuitry- and because your experiences are unique, so are the vast detailed patterns in your neural networks. Because they continue to change your whole life, your identity is a moving target; it never reaches an endpoint.”
― David Eagleman, The Brain: The Story of You

“You don’t perceive objects as they are. You perceive them as you are.”
― David Eagleman, The Brain: The Story of You

“Each of us is on our own trajectory – steered by our genes and our experiences – and as a result every brain has a different internal life. Brains are as unique as snowflakes.”
― David Eagleman, The Brain: The Story of You

“So not only was it possible to implant false new memories in the brain, but people embraced and embellished them, unknowingly weaving fantasy into the fabric of their identity.”
― David Eagleman, The Brain: The Story of You

“Because self-control requires energy, which means we have less energy available for the next thing we need to do. And that’s why resisting temptation, making hard decisions, or taking initiative all seem to draw from the same well of energy. So willpower isn’t something that we just exercise – it’s something we deplete.”
― David Eagleman, The Brain: The Story of You

“We think of color as a fundamental quality of the world around us. But in the outside world, color doesn’t actually exist. When electromagnetic radiation hits an object, some of it bounces off and is captured by our eyes. We can distinguish between millions of combinations of wavelengths – but it is only inside our heads that any of this becomes color. Color is an interpretation of wavelengths, one that only exists internally.”
― David Eagleman, The Brain: The Story of You

“So why does the world appear stable to you when you’re looking at it? Why doesn’t it appear as jerky and nauseating as the poorly filmed video? Here’s why: your internal model operates under the assumption that the world outside is stable. Your eyes are not like video cameras – they simply venture out to find more details to feed into the internal model. They’re not like camera lenses that you’re seeing through; they’re gathering bits of data to feed the world inside your skull." The Brain: The Story of You - David Eagleman”
― David Eagleman, The Brain: The Story of You

“In a sense, the process of becoming who you are is defined by carving back the possibilities that were already present. You become who you are not because of what grows in your brain, but because of what is removed.”
― David Eagleman, The Brain: The Story of You

“Once upon a time, I, Chuang Tzu, dreamt I was a butterfly, fluttering hither and thither, to all intents and purposes a butterfly. I was conscious only of following my fancies as a butterfly, and was unconscious of my individuality as a man. Suddenly, I awoke, and there I lay, myself again. Now I do not know whether I was then a man dreaming I was a butterfly, or whether I am now a butterfly dreaming that I am a man.” The”
― David Eagleman, The Brain: The Story of You

“So who you are at any given moment depends on the detailed rhythms of your neuronal firing. During the day, the conscious you emerges from that integrated neural complexity. At night, when the interaction of your neurons changes just a bit, you disappear. Your loved ones have to wait until the next morning, when your neurons let the wave die and work themselves back into their complex rhythm. Only then do you return.”
― David Eagleman, The Brain: The Story of You

“Our perception of reality has less to do with what’s happening out there, and more to do with what’s happening inside our brain. Your”
― David Eagleman, The Brain: The Story of You

“Despite the feeling that we’re directly experiencing the world out there, our reality is ultimately built in the dark, in a foreign language of electrochemical signals. The activity churning across vast neural networks gets turned into your story of this, your private experience of the world: the feeling of this book in your hands, the light in the room, the smell of roses, the sound of others speaking. Even more strangely, it’s likely that every brain tells a slightly different narrative. For every situation with multiple witnesses, different brains are having different private subjective experiences. With seven billion human brains wandering the planet (and trillions of animal brains), there’s no single version of reality. Each brain carries its own truth. So what is reality? It’s like a television show that only you can see, and you can’t turn it off. The good news is that it happens to be broadcasting the most interesting show you could ask for: edited, personalized, and presented just for you.”
― David Eagleman, The Brain: The Story of You

“Decision making lies at the heart of everything: who we are, what we do, how we perceive the world around us. Without the ability to weigh alternatives, we would be hostages to our most basic drives. We wouldn’t be able to wisely navigate the now, or plan our future lives. Although you have a single identity, you’re not of a single mind: instead, you are a collection of many competing drives. By understanding how choices battle it out in the brain, we can learn to make better decisions for ourselves, and for our society.”
― David Eagleman, The Brain: The Story of You

“The ancient Greeks suggested that we should think of our lives like chariots. We are charioteers trying to hold two horses: the white horse of reason and the black horse of passion. Each horse pulls off-center, in opposite directions. Your job is to keep control of both horses, navigating down the middle of the road.”
― David Eagleman, The Brain: The Story of You

“Specifically, cognitive exercise – that is, activity that keeps the brain active, like crosswords, reading, driving, learning new skills, and having responsibilities – was protective.”
― David Eagleman, The Brain: The Story of You

“Genocide is only possible when dehumanization happens on a massive scale, and the perfect tool for this job is propaganda: it keys right into the neural networks that understand other people, and dials down the degree to which we empathize with them.”
― David Eagleman, The Brain: The Story of You

“Despite the feeling that we’re directly experiencing the world out there, our reality is ultimately built in the dark, in a foreign language of electrochemical signals. The activity churning across vast neural networks gets turned into your story of this, your private experience of the world: the feeling of this book in your hands, the light in the room, the smell of roses, the sound of others speaking.”
― David Eagleman, The Brain: The Story of You

“We can’t help but simulate others, connect with others, care about others, because we’re hardwired to be social creatures.”
― David Eagleman, The Brain: The Story of You

“It may be that what the brain physically is doesn’t matter, but instead what it does.”
― David Eagleman, The Brain: The Story of You

“The problem is that incarceration triggers an expensive and vicious cycle of relapse and re-imprisonment. It breaks people’s existing social circles and employment opportunities, and gives them new social circles and new employment opportunities – ones that typically fuel their addiction.”
― David Eagleman, The Brain: The Story of You

“If biological algorithms are the important part of what makes us who we are, rather than the physical stuff, then it’s a possibility that we will someday be able to copy our brains, upload them, and live forever in silica. But there’s an important question here: is it really you? Not exactly. The uploaded copy has all your memories and believes it was you, just there, standing outside the computer, in your body. Here’s the strange part: if you die and we turn on the simulation one second later, it would be a transfer. It would be no different to beaming up in Star Trek, when a person is disintegrated, and then a new version is reconstituted a moment later. Uploading may not be all that different from what happens to you each night when you go to sleep: you experience a little death of your consciousness, and the person who wakes up on your pillow the next morning inherits all your memories, and believes him or herself to be you. Are”
― David Eagleman, The Brain: The Story of You

“Instead of trying to produce a program to simulate the adult mind, why not rather try to produce one which simulates the child’s?” – Alan Turing, 1950.”
― David Eagleman, The Brain: The Story of You

“Through practice, repeated signals have been passed along neural networks, strengthening synapses and thereby burning the skill into the circuitry. In”
― David Eagleman, The Brain: The Story of You

“How does the biological wetware of the brain give rise to our experience: the sight of emerald green, the taste of cinnamon, the smell of wet soil? What if I told you that the world around you, with its rich colors, textures, sounds, and scents is an illusion, a show put on for you by your brain? If you could perceive reality as it really is, you would be shocked by its colorless, odorless, tasteless silence. Outside your brain, there is just energy and matter. Over millions of years of evolution the human brain has become adept at turning this energy and matter into a rich sensory experience of being in the world.”
― David Eagleman, The Brain: The Story of You

“Perhaps memory can serve as the thread that makes you who you are. It sits at the core of your identity, providing a single, continuous sense of self.”
― David Eagleman, The Brain: The Story of You

“Instead, the key business of brains is to predict. And to do this reasonably well, we need to continually learn about the world from our every experience.”
― David Eagleman, The Brain: The Story of You