David Eagleman grew up in New Mexico to a physician father and biology teacher mother. An early experience of falling from a roof raised his interest in understanding the neural basis of time perception. As an undergraduate he majored in British and American Literature at Rice University, with his junior year abroad at Oxford University, graduating in 1993. He earned his PhD in Neuroscience at Baylor College of Medicine in 1998, followed by a postdoctoral fellowship at the Salk Institute. He serves on the editorial boards of the scientific journals PLoS One and Journal of Vision. He directs a neuroscience research laboratory at Baylor College of Medicine.

Time perception

Eagleman's scientific work combines psychophysical, behavioral, and computational approaches to address the relationship between the timing of perception and the timing of neural signals. Areas for which he is known include temporal encoding, time warping, manipulations of the perception of causality, and time perception in high-adrenaline situations. In one experiment, he dropped volunteers from a 150 foot tower to measure time perception as they fell. He writes that his end goal is "to understand how neural signals processed by different brain regions come together for a temporally unified picture of the world."

Synesthesia

Synesthesia is an unusual perceptual condition in which stimulation to one sense triggers an involuntary sensation in other senses. Eagleman is the developer of The Synesthesia Battery, a free online test by which people can determine whether they are synesthetic. By this technique he has tested and analyzed thousands of synesthetes, and has written a book on synesthesia with Richard Cytowic, entitled Discovering the Brain of Synesthesia.

Visual illusions

Eagleman has published extensively on what visual illusions tell us about neurobiology, concentrating especially on the flash lag illusion and wagon wheel effect.

Neuroscience and the Law

Neurolaw is an emerging field that determines how modern brain science should affect the way we make laws, punish criminals, and invent new methods for rehabilitation. Eagleman is the founder and director of Baylor College of Medicine's Initiative on Neuroscience and Law.

Eagleman's work of literary fiction, Forty Tales from the Afterlives, was released in February 2009 and quickly hit bestseller status. It has been translated into 21 languages. The Observer wrote that "Sum has the unaccountable, jaw-dropping quality of genius," the Wall Street Journal called Sum "inventive and imaginative" and the Los Angeles Times hailed the book as "teeming, writhing with imagination". In the New York Times Book Review, Alexander McCall Smith described Sum as a "delightful, thought-provoking little collection belonging to that category of strange, unclassifiable books that will haunt the reader long after the last page has been turned. It is full of tangential insights into the human condition and poetic thought experiments... It is also full of touching moments and glorious wit of the sort one only hopes will be in copious supply on the other side." Sum was chosen by Time Magazine for their 2009 Summer Reading list, and selected as Book of the Week by both The Guardian and The Week. On September 10, 2009, Sum was ranked by Amazon as the #2 bestselling book in the United Kingdom. In December 2009, Sum was chosen as a Book of the Year by Barnes and Noble, The Chicago Tribune, The Guardian, and The Scotsman.

Eagleman has written for the New York Times, Discover Magazine, Slate Magazine, and New Scientist. Discussing both science and literature, Eagleman appears regularly on National Public Radio in America, England and Australia . As opposed to committing to strict atheism or to a particular religious position, Eagleman refers to himself as a Possibilian. He has also been profiled in The Texas Observer.