David Eagleman Quotes

We cannot study the brain, the instrument for fabricating the realities we inhabit, using the mental constructs of the past.

The world is... the natural setting of, and field for, all my thoughts and all my explicit perceptions. Truth does not inhabit only the inner man, or more accurately, there is no inner man, man is in the world, and only in the world does he know himself.

After all my probing into the human brain, I should still be aware of mysteries and come up with them myself.

I am a man for whom the outside world exists.

The mind, whatever else it is, is a constant of everyone's experience, and, in more ways than we know, the creator of the reality that we live within... Nothing is more essential to us.

Where conscious subjectivity is concerned, there is no distinction between the observation and the thing observed.

Some day... some day, I want to go much deeper into the human mind.

I recognise a distinction between dream life and real life, between appearances and actualities. I confess to an over-powering desire to know whether I am asleep or awake--whether the environment and laws which affect me are external and permanent, or the transitory products of my own brain.

We live within this reality we create, and we're quite unaware of how we create the reality. So the work is often a general koan into how we go about forming this world in which we live, in particular with seeing.

What we think of as reality is a continuous synthesis of elements from a fixed hierarchy of a priori concepts and the ever changing data of the senses.

The world consists of images on a screen, and consciousness is the steady light that emanates from the projector.

Without knowing the Knower, all the knowledge that one gathers cannot be valid.

I find that the sensation of myself as an ego inside a bag of skin is really a hallucination.

Consciousness is either inexplicable illusion, or else revelation.

Consciousness ... is the phenomenon whereby the universe's very existence is made known.

Moment by moment throughout our lifetime, our brains hum with the work of making meaning: weaving together many thousands of threads of information into all manner of thoughts, feelings, memories, and ideas.

You say they create their own reality," said Veronika, "but what is reality?

When you drop the ego, you drop a whole world that you have created around it. For the first time you are able to see things as they are - not as you would like them to be. And when you are capable of knowing the facts of life, you become capable of knowing the truth. The facility of life is the first step towards truth. And ego is the most falsifying agent.

Mind is memory, not intelligence.

Knowing that you are living in a dreamworld is very liberating, because it gives you the option of waking up.

Consciousness is a much smaller part of our mental life than we are conscious of, because we cannot be conscious of what we are not conscious of.

Consciousness in the individual is that area where the totality of life is located.

Does the brain control you or are you controlling the brain? I don't know if I'm in charge of mine.

The brain is a robot-computer perfectly designed to fabricate any reality we program it to construct.

It seems to me that the real problem is the mind itself and not the problem which the mind has created and tries to solve.