David Eagleman Quotes

The neurochemistry of the brain is astonishingly busy, the circuitry of a machine more wonderful than any devised by humans. But there is no evidence that its functioning is due to anything more than the 10(14) neural connections that build an elegant architecture of consciousness.

The human brain has 100 billion neurons, each neuron connected to 10 thousand other neurons. Sitting on your shoulders is the most complicated object in the known universe.

When we have any function, whether it's language or vision or cognitive functions like memory, we aren't dealing with a straight line to the brain that says 'This is what I do.' The brain builds a network of connections, a network of neurons that have a particular role in that function.

With its billions of interconnected neurons, whose interactions change from millisecond to millisecond, the human brain is an archetypal complex system.

The human brain is an incredible pattern-matching machine.

Space and time, not proteins and neurons, hold the answer to the problem of consciousness. When we consider the nerve impulses entering the brain, we realize that they are not woven together automatically, any more than the information is inside a computer.

In the brain, you have connections between the neurons called synapses, and they can change. All your knowledge is stored in those synapses.

One day we shall certainly 'reduce' thought experimentally to molecular and chemical motions in the brain; but does that exhaust the essence of thought?

The brain is the key, the brain is the source, the brain is God. Everything that humans do is neuroecology.

The last 100 years of research into the human brain...sees the brain as an organ that works by physical principles just like the other organs in the body...our emotions and higher callings, such as religion, as well as our grubby low-level physical systems like stereo vision and motor control, are products of a machine.

Swiftly the head mass becomes an enchanted loom where millions of flashing shuttles weave a dissolving pattern, always a meaningful pattern though never an abiding one...

There are 100 billion neurons in the adult human brain, and each neuron makes something like 1,000 to 10,000 contacts with other neurons in the brain. Based on this, people have calculated that the number of permutations and combinations of brain activity exceeds the number of elementary particles in the universe.

Thinking is movement confined to the brain

The great events of the world take place in the brain.

In the brain, you have connections between the neurons called synapses, and they can change. All your knowledge is stored in those synapses. You have about 1,000-trillion synapses - 10 to the 15, it's a very big number.

The brain is the citadel of sense perception.

I have only a bare working knowledge of the human brain but it's enough to make me proud to be an American.

A profound intriguing and compelling guide to the intricacies of the human brain.

Each cell sends electrical pulses to other cells, up to hundreds of times per second. If you represented each of these trillions and trillions of pulses in your brain by a single photon of light, the combined output would be blinding.

Even though its common knowledge these days, it never ceases to amaze me that all the richness of our mental life - all our feelings, our emotions, our thoughts, our ambitions, our love life, our religious sentiments and even what each of us regards us his own intimate private self - is simply the activity of these little specks of jelly in your head, in your brain. There is nothing else.

Everything that goes on in your whole life is a result of molecules rushing around somewhere in your brain.

Brain: an apparatus with which we think that we think. Mind, n. A mysterious form of matter secreted by the brain.

- My instructors in science and technology have taught us about how the brain works. It's full of electrical impulses. It's like a computer. If you stimulate one part of the brain with an electrode, it... - They know nothing.

As followers of natural science we know nothing of any relation between thoughts and the brain, except as a gross correlation in time and space.

I would be so curious to wire my brain up and see what's occurring when I act, because a performance is such a heightened state. I've always found that with doing theatre especially. It's so hard to come down.