David Eagleman Quotes About Choices

Quotes about: Choices

• When one part of the brain makes a choice, other parts can quickly invent a story to explain why. If you show the command "Walk" to the right hemisphere (the one without language), the patient will get up and start walking. If you stop him and ask why he's leaving, his left hemisphere, cooking up an answer, will say something like "I was going to get a drink of water."

  David Eagleman

  Water, Choices, Leaving

  David Eagleman (2011). “Incognito: The Secret Lives of the Brain”, p.143, Vintage

• If choices and decisions derive from hidden mental processes, then free choice is either an illusion or, at minimum, more tightly constrained than previously considered.

  David Eagleman

  Decision, Choices, Illusion

  David Eagleman (2011). “Incognito: The Secret Lives of the Brain”, p.23, Vintage

• If you cannot always elicit a straight answer from the unconscious brain, how can you access its knowledge? Sometimes the trick is merely to probe what your gut is telling you. So the next time a friend laments that she cannot decide between two options, tell her the easiest way to solve her problem: flip a coin. She should specify which option belongs to heads and which to tails, and then let the coin fly. The important part is to assess her gut feeling after the coin lands. If she feels a subtle sense of relief at being "told" what to do by the coin, that's the right choice for her.

  David Eagleman

  Land, Two, Choices

  Source: www.goodreads.com

• Brains are like representative democracies. They are built of multiple, overlapping experts who weigh in and compete over different choices.

  David Eagleman

  Choices, Brain, Democracy

  Source: www.goodreads.com

• We are made up of an entire parliament of pieces and parts and subsystems. Beyond a collection of local expert systems, we are collections of overlapping, ceaselessly reinvented mechanism, a group of competing factions. The conscious mind fabricates stories to explain the sometimes inexplicable dynamics of the subsystem inside brain. It can be disquieting to consider the extent to which all of our actions are driven by hardwired systems doing what they do best while we overlay stories about choices.

  David Eagleman

  Choices, Mind, Brain

  David Eagleman (2011). “Incognito: The Secret Lives of the Brain”, p.157, Vintage

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