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

— David Eagleman

Evolve solutions; when you find a good one, don't stop.

— David Eagleman

If an epileptic seizure is focused in a particular sweet spot in the temporal lobe, a person won't have motor seizures, but instead something more subtle. The effect is something like a cognitive seizure, marked by changes of personality, hyperreligiosity (an obsession with religion and feelings of religious certainty), hypertrophic (extensive writing on a subject, usually about religion), the false sense of an external presence, and, often, the hearing voices that are attributed to a god. Some fraction of history's prophets, martyrs, and leaders appear to have had temporal lobe epilepsy. When the brain activity is kindled in the right spot, people hear voices. If a physician prescribes an anti-epileptic medication, the seizures go away and the voices disappear. Our reality depends on what our biology is up to.

— David Eagleman

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

— David Eagleman

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.

— David Eagleman

Instead of reality being passively recorded by the brain, it is actively constructed by it.

— David Eagleman

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

— David Eagleman

Many “pathogens” (both chemical and behavioral) can influence how you turn out; these include substance abuse by a mother during pregnancy, maternal stress, and low birth weight. As a child grows, neglect, physical abuse, and head injury can cause problems in mental development. Once the child is grown, substance abuse and exposure to a variety of toxins can damage the brain, modifying intelligence, aggression, and decision-making abilities. The major public health movement to remove lead-based paint grew out of an understanding that even low levels of lead can cause brain damage that makes children less intelligent and, in some cases, more impulsive and aggressive. How you turn out depends on where you've been. So when it comes to thinking about blameworthiness, the first difficulty to consider is that people do not choose their own developmental path.It's problematic to imagine yourself in the shoes of a criminal and conclude, “Well, I wouldn't have done that” – because if you weren't exposed to in utero cocaine, lead poisoning, or physical abuse, and he was, then you and he are not directly comparable.

— David Eagleman

My dream is to reform the legal system over the next 20 years.

— David Eagleman

Since we live in the heads of those who remember us, we lose control of our lives and become who they want us to be.

— David Eagleman