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

“We believe we're seeing the world just fine until it's called to our attention that we're not.”

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

“You´re not perceiving what's out there. You're perceiving whatever your brain tells you.”

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

“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), hypergraphia (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.” “A mere 400 years after our fall from the center of the universe, we have experienced the fall from the center of ourselves.”

“A mere 400 years after our fall from the center of the universe, we have experienced the fall from the center of ourselves.”

“So the first lesson about trusting your senses is: don’t. Just because you believe something to be true, just because you know it’s true, that doesn’t mean it is true.”

“Our reality depends on what our biology is up to.”

“Who you are depends on the sum total of your neurobiology.”

“If our brains were simple enough to be understood, we wouldn’t be smart enough to understand them.”

“Societies would not be better off if everyone were like Mr Spock, all rationality and no emotion. Instead, a balance - a teaming up of the internal rivals - is optimal for brains. ... Some balance of the emotional and rational systems is needed, and that balance may already be optimized by natural selection in human brains.”

“One of the most pervasive mistakes is to believe that our visual system gives a faithful representation of what is “out there” in the same way that a movie camera would.”

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

“Brains are like representative democracies. They are built of multiple, overlapping experts who weigh in and compete over different choices. As Walt Whitman correctly surmised, we are large and we harbor multitudes within us. And those multitudes are locked in chronic battle. There is an ongoing conversation among the different factions in your brain, each competing to control the single output channel of your behavior. As a result, you can accomplish the strange feats of arguing with yourself, cursing at yourself, and cajoling yourself to do something – feats that modern computers simply do not do.”

“Seeing has very little to do with your eyes.”

“As Carl Jung put it, “In each of us there is another whom we do not know.” As Pink Floyd sang, “There’s someone in my head, but it’s not me.”

“Keep in mind that every single generation before us has worked under the assumption that they possessed all the major tools for understanding the universe, and they were all wrong, without exception.”

“Knowing yourself now requires the understanding that the conscious you occupies only a small room in the mansion of the brain, and that it has little control over the reality constructed for you.”

“It is the most wondrous thing we have discovered in the universe, and it is us.”

“Behavior is the outcome of the battle among internal systems.”

“Just like a good drama, the human brain runs on conflict.”

“Nothing is inherently tasty or repulsive—it depends on your needs. Deliciousness is simply an index of usefulness.”

“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.”

“But all this doesn´t happen effortlessly, as demonstrated by patients who surgically recover their eyesight after decades of blindness: they do not suddenly see the world, but instead must learn to see again. At first the world is buzzing, jangling barrage of shapes and colors, and even when the optics of their eyes are perfectly functional, their brain must learn how to interpret the data coming in.”

“Brains are in the business of gathering information and steering behavior appropriately. It doesn't matter whether consciousness is involved in the decision making. And most of the time it's not.”

“When the brain finds a task it needs to solve, it rewires its own circuitry until it can accomplish the task with maximum efficiency. The task becomes burned into the machinery.”

“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.”

“Vision is more than looking.”

“The first thing we learn from studying our own circuitry is a simple lesson: most of what we do and think and feel is not under our conscious control.”

“The conscious mind is not at the center of the action in the brain; instead, it is far out on a distant edge, hearing but whispers of the activity.”

“Because vision appears so effortless, we are like fish challenged to understand water.”