Great old 80′s docu from Carl Sagan. I just love the way he takes so much time over the phrase “100 trillion neuro-connections” (via The Neuro Times)
Carl Sagan on the Brain
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Carl Sagan may have doubted the existence of god, but he is god!
Easily one of the best science series ever made
Sagan was SO far ahead of his time. I’ve been re-watching episodes of Cosmos in recent weeks and it’s amazing how few modern revisions are needed.
You so saw this in related videos after watching ‘We Are All Connected’
What a wonderful story to take to bed!
I love Carl Sagan.
Thanks Derran!
x
It’s all so clever, yet don’t understand why the brainstem is in such a vulnerable place?
Sort of site I could spend hours in. Wonder if they have found what happens to the brain at the white light moment..
Carl Sagan has been a hero of mine ever since “Cosmos” came out. Wish he was still around.
Hi jesus. For me DB is more worthy of that title. He rocks and makes psychology look interesting. Still he has yet to convince my in-laws that derek and co are fake and that would take a miracle.
He talks like Agent Smith from The Matrix
Carl sagan killed god for me.
I was 10 when i read the bit in Cosmos about the abiogenesis experiments by Miller in the 50s.
Pass a spark through some simple chemicals and the building blocks of life assemble and replicate themselves.
Before then i thought gods were a little fanciful – afterwards i realised they were unnecessary.
Thanks. Freed my mind from a lot of clutter.
The wife has just suggested that Sagan’s voice was the inspiration behind Mr Smith in the Matrix.
Hmmm, she has a point.
Phil: Hugo Weaving based Smith’s voice on Sagan. So: well spotted, but you have the cart before the horse
- I heard that but wasn’t sure if it was just urban myth – Phillis
Oh I love it when he says: “Down there in the basement of our brain are the functions that our remote ancestors mainly depended on for survival. Aggression, child rearing, sex, the willingness to follow leaders blindly. Lots of things that we can still recognize in our lives today”. One can’t help but have ‘religion’ spring to mind.
)
Carl, we miss you!
Philis – I don’t have a source, so it may be.
Still, here’s Agent Smith torturing Morpheus with a science lecture: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BlpyGhABXRA
Hugo Weaving DID NOT base the Agent Smith voice n Carl Sagan. This is in fact a persistent urban legend that’s been circulating a couple of years and is rooted in a group of silly YouTube clips synching Sagan’s voice to Matrix clips. Hugo Weaving has always given the same answer about the voice’s origins: that Smith is inspired by 1970s American news readers like Waler Chronkite, in addition to the SciFi perennials Mr Spock and HAL 9000 and the methodical speech patterns of the Wachoski brothers, who directed the Matrix films. In ten years of interviews, Cal Sagan has never been mentioned. And Carl Sagan was an optimist and a humanist in spite of his sometimes-bleak projections… a polar opposite of the Smith character philosophically. So can we please stop disrespecting both men and stop mindlessly repeating this nonsense?