David Eagleman

“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.”

“.. we are not conscious of most things until we ask ourselves questions about them”

“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.”

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

“Your brain is built of cells called neurons and glia - hundreds of billions of them. Each one of these cells is as complicated as a city.”

“As Gazzaniga put it, "these findings all suggest that the interpretive mechanism of the left hemisphere is always hard at work, seeking the meaning of events. It is constantly looking for order and reasons, even when there is none - which leads it continually to make mistakes.”

“I think the first decade of this century is going to be remembered as a time of extremism.”

“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.”

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

“We don't really understand most of what's happening in the cosmos. Is there any afterlife? Who knows.”

“It is only through us that God lives. When we abandon him, he dies.”

“If you ever feel lazy or dull, take heart: you’re the busiest, brightest thing on the planet.”

“As an undergraduate I majored in British and American literature at Rice University.”

“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.”

“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.”

“People wouldn't even go into science unless there was something much bigger to be discovered, something that is transcendent.”

“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.”

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

“Part of the scientific temperament is this tolerance for holding multiple hypotheses in mind at the same time.”

“The same stimuli in the world can be inducing very different experiences internally and it's probably based on a single change in a gene. What I am doing is pulling the gene forward and imaging and doing behavioural tests to understand what that difference is and how reality can be constructed so differently.”