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
David Eagleman quotes about
I'm using the afterlife as a backdrop against which to explore the joys and complexities of being human - it turns out that it's a great lens with which to understand what matters to us.
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.
What has always surprised me when I walk into a bookstore is the number of books that you can find that are written with certainty. The authors tell some story as though it's true, but they don't have any evidence that it is true!
People wouldn't even go into science unless there was something much bigger to be discovered, something that is transcendent.
We believe we're seeing the world just fine until it's called to our attention that we're not.
A mere 400 years after our fall from the center of the universe, we have experienced the fall from the center of ourselves.
The missing crowds make you lonely. You begin to complain about all the people you could be meeting. But no one listens or sympathizes with you, because this is precisely what you chose when you were alive.
Everything that creates itself upon the backs of smaller scales will by those same scales be consumed.
All creation necessarily ends in this: Creators, powerless, fleeing from the things they have wrought.
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.
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.
What a life in science really teaches you is the vastness of our ignorance.
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.
There are an infinite number of boring things to do in science.