David Eagleman Quotes

Much more of the brain is devoted to movement than to language. Language is only a little thing sitting on top of this huge ocean of movement.

What is consciousness? Our brain simulates reality. So, our everyday experiences are a form of dreaming, which is to say, they are mental models, simulations, not the things they appear to be.

We see with the eyes, but we see with the brain as well. And seeing with the brain is often called imagination.

If you dream you do something, it's as if you actually are doing it from your brain's point of view.

the brain works better if the hand works too.

We can only see what our brain’s filter allows through.

Some may be helped by images, some may not. Some require an image outside, others one inside the brain.

Your nervous system cannot tell the difference between an imagined experience and a ‘real’ experience.

We won't really understand the brain until we can make models of it which are analog rather than digital, which nobody seems to be trying very much.

When you understand how the mind-brain functions together, you know that faith, which is believing before seeing, is the natural process of creation.

Indeed, the line between perceiving and hallucinating is not as crisp as we like to think. In a sense, when we look at the world, we are hallucinating all the time. One could almost regard perception as the act of choosing the one hallucination that best fits the incoming data.

You can't *discover* that the brain is a digital computer. You can only *interpret* the brain as a digital computer.

Your nervous system cannot tell the difference between an imagined experience and a 'real' experience. In either case, it reacts automatically to information which you give to it from your forebrain. Your nervous system reacts appropriately to what you THINK or IMAGINE to be 'true.

Your eyes is camera and your brain is a file cabinet.

Color is the place where our brain and the universe meet.

Anythin' wrong leaves a kind of impression on the eye; brain trots along afterwards with the warnin'.

The eye and brain are conspirators, and, like most conspiracies, theirs is negotiated behind closed doors, in the back room, outside of our awareness.

Your hands learn to do things that you could spend a whole day trying to write about and articulate. There's a discomfort associated with trying to put all those different ways the brain works together. I kind of like to avail myself of that discomfort.

The brain is the citadel of sense perception.

But when reflexion begins to play upon these objects... like some trick of magic each object is loosed into a group of impressions - colour, odour, texture... And if we continue to dwell in thought on this world... the whole scope of observation is dwarfed into the narrow chamber of the individual mind.

It is in the brain that the poppy is red, that the apple is odorous, that the skylark sings.

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

The human brain is like a memory system that records every thing that happens to us and makes intelligent predictions based on those experiences.

It was the building from the drawing in my brain. And if you don’t think that’s a weird sentence, maybe you should reread it.

I think that the artificial-intelligence people are making a lot of noise recently, claiming that artificial intelligence is making huge progress and we're going to be outstripped by the machines. But, in my view, this whole field is based on a misconception. I think the brain is analog, whereas the machines are digital. They really are different. So I think that what the machines can do, of course, is wonderful, but it's not the same as what the brain can do.