Quotes by David Eagleman

There are three deaths. The first is when the body ceases to function. The second is when the body is consigned to the grave. The third is that moment, sometime in the future, when your name is spoken for the last time.

Among all the creatures of creation, the gods favor us: We are the only ones who can empathize with their problems.

All creation necessarily ends in this: Creators, powerless, fleeing from the things they have wrought.

Imagine for a moment that we are nothing but the product of billions of years of molecules coming together and ratcheting up through natural selection, that we are composed only of highways of fluids and chemicals sliding along roadways within billions of dancing cells, that trillions of synaptic conversations hum in parallel, that this vast egglike fabric of micron-thin circuitry runs algorithms undreamt of in modern science, and that these neural programs give rise to our decision making, loves, desires, fears, and aspirations. To me, that understanding would be a numinous experience, better than anything ever proposed in anyone's holy text.

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

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.

We are not at the center of ourselves, but instead — like the Earth in the Milky Way, and the Milky Way in the universe — far out on a distant edge, hearing little of what is transpiring.

Everything that creates itself upon the backs of smaller scales will by those same scales be consumed.

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.

When you arrive in the afterlife, you find that Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley sits on a throne. She is cared for and protected by a covey of angels. After some questioning, you find out that God's favorite book is Shelley's Frankenstein. He sits up at night with a worn copy of the book clutched in his mighty hands, alternately reading the book and staring reflectively at the night sky.

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.

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

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.