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David Eagleman

Dr. David Eagleman is a neuroscientist at Stanford University, an internationally bestselling author, and a Guggenheim Fellow. His areas of research include sensory substitution, time perception, vision, and synesthesia; he also studies the intersection of neuroscience with the legal system, and in that capacity he directs the Center for Science and Law.

Dr. Eagleman runs the science podcast Inner Cosmos and is the writer and presenter of The Brain, an Emmy-nominated television series on PBS and BBC. He is the author of many books, including Livewired, The Runaway Species, The Brain, Incognito, and Wednesday is Indigo Blue. He is also the author of a widely adopted textbook on cognitive neuroscience, Brain and Behavior, as well as a bestselling book of literary fiction, Sum, which has been translated into 32 languages, turned into two operas, and named a Best Book of the Year by Barnes and Noble. Dr. Eagleman writes for the Atlantic, New York Times, Discover Magazine, Slate, Wired, and New Scientist, and appears regularly on National Public Radio and BBC to discuss both science and literature. He has been a TED speaker, a guest on the Colbert Report, and profiled in the New Yorker magazine. He has spun several companies out of his lab, including Neosensory, a company which uses haptics for sensory substitution and addition.


Think of consciousness as essentially the company president that has to arbitrate all the different mechanisms. 
As soon as we abandon the first intuitions we have, that we’re the ones in control of everything, then we can start sailing into the inner cosmos and discovering all sorts of new planets and life forms and things like that on the inside of our skulls.