Quotes by Neuroscientists - Page 14

Monogamy is not a choice, it is a responsibility of a genuine human.
Abhijit Naskar
Either one is promiscuous or in a relationship - it cannot be both at the same time.
Abhijit Naskar
Sex is only a tool in love, not love itself.
Abhijit Naskar
Polygamy is about sex, whereas monogamy is about love.
Abhijit Naskar
Promoting promiscuity in this evolved and civilized society is actually like signing the Declaration, that says:“I hereby renounce my membership of humankind, since I am neither human nor kind. I declare that I no longer belong to the modern human species, i.e. the Homo sapiens. From now on I shall be counted among the swingers of the animal kingdom, such as the bonobo or montane vole. I am simply an arrogant philandering savage.
Abhijit Naskar
Cheating is an innate evolutionarily programmed desire, especially in men, but it is not a desire that cannot be controlled.
Abhijit Naskar
A human is the one, who would give up a thousand Cleopatras to be with the person he or she loves.
Abhijit Naskar
Cheating in relationship is a sign of self-regulation failure. When it happens ones, it is a mistake. When it happens twice, it is unfortunate. But when it happens thrice or more, it is a pattern indicating primitive, uncivilized inhuman behavior.
Abhijit Naskar
Try to respond to your partner instead of reacting.
Abhijit Naskar
Marriage is not a competition. Marriage is completion of two souls.
Abhijit Naskar
Two married partners do not just live with each other, they live in each other, neurologically speaking.
Abhijit Naskar
When two people fall in love, they not only give up their genuine authority over their own lives, but also, they become mutual authorities of the collective life that they build together.
Abhijit Naskar
Do not seek for the best partner, but seek for the person who makes you a better version of yourself.
Abhijit Naskar
A healthy world is made of healthy nations. A healthy nation is made of healthy families. And a healthy family can only be raised on the foundation of a monogamous relationship.
Abhijit Naskar
A healthy marriage acts as the vessel of wellbeing and stability for both partners as well as the children.
Abhijit Naskar
Let me tell you a story. There was a student who asked his teacher, what is love? The teacher said go into the field and bring me the most beautiful flower. The student returned with no flower at hand and said, “I found the most beautiful flower in the field but I didn't pick it up for I might find a better one, but when I returned to the place, it was gone.”We always look for the best in life. When we finally see it, we take it for granted and after some time start expecting a better one, not knowing that it's the best for us.
Abhijit Naskar
Be your own Guru.
Abhijit Naskar
It is high time that you break the shackles of separatism and with the glorious flames of love, compassion and humanism in heart, you assimilate the goodness from all around you. Let love and compassion reign over the modern human civilization and hatred be a matter of ancient history.
Abhijit Naskar
Fear and Love are the two emotional pillars of survival.
Abhijit Naskar
Fear or anxiety is a normal part of living. It’s the body’s way of telling us something isn’t right. It keeps us from harm’s way and prepares us to act quickly in the face of danger.
Abhijit Naskar
Inside a jihadi brain, the neuropsychological elements of aggression and rage run rampant, due to socio-political conditions. These overwhelming mental elements of young souls, when attached to the sacred texts of the Quran, by the authoritarian groups of fundamentalists, become weapons of mass destruction in the pursuit of the exclusive supremacy of one religion over the others.
Abhijit Naskar
In today’s society, the animals known as Homo sapiens have become conditioned to elicit the same kind of fearful response whenever the bell of Islam is rung.
Abhijit Naskar
Stop groveling, stop whining and start working!
Abhijit Naskar
By processing information from the environment through the senses, the nervous system continually evaluates risk. I have coined the term neuroception to describe how neural circuitsdistinguish whether situations or people are safe, dangerous, or life-threatening. Because of our heritage as a species, neuroception takes place in primitive parts of the brain, without our conscious awareness.
Stephen W. Porges
A child's (or an adult's) nervous system may detect danger or a threat to life when the child enters a new environment or meets a strange person. Cognitively, there is no reason for them to be frightened. But often, even if they understand this, their bodies betray them. Sometimes this betrayal is private; only they are aware that their hearts are beating fast and contracting with such force that they start to sway. For others, the responses are more overt. They may tremble. Their faces may flush, or perspiration may pour from their hands and forehead. Still others may become pale and dizzy and feel precipitously faint.
Stephen W. Porges
Playing nice" comes naturally when our neuroception detects safety and promotes physiological states that support social behavior. However, pro-social behavior will not occur when our neuroception misreads the environmental cues and triggers physiological states that support defensive strategies. After all, "playing nice" is not appropriate or adaptive behavior in dangerous or life-threatening situations. In these situations, humans - like other mammals - react with more primitive neurobiological defense systems. To create relationships, humans must subdue these defensive reactions to engage, attach, and form lasting social bonds. Humans have adaptive neurobehavioral systems for both pro-social and defensive behaviors.
Stephen W. Porges
In modern neurotheology we examine the physical bases to spiritual, religious and mystical experiences and beliefs, that implicitly appear to reduce this rich phenomenology to only neuronal functions. So, the thing is, there was no divine intervention necessary in the evolution of spirituality and religiosity. “Human Brain is the true God of all beliefs”.
Abhijit Naskar
I am like the H2O in a lake. Some drink it at one place and call it “water”, others at another place and call it “jal”, and some others at a third place and call it “pani”. The Christians call it “water”, the Hindus “jal”, and the Muslims ”pani”. But it is one and the same thing. I am not tied to the doctrines of any church, synagogue, temple or mosque, yet I am the reason of their birth.
Abhijit Naskar
Your spiritual goals can be as numerous as there are stars in the sky. And so can be your religions. But in all your vivid and diverse paths of practicing religion and spirituality, there is one very common and simple element that knows no bounds. That element is the eternal bliss that enables you to attain unimaginable feats of excellence. It is not tied to any scripture of yours, yet it is in every scripture of yours.
Abhijit Naskar
There can never be a conflict between science and religion, once you understand the spiritual knack of the human brain circuits.
Abhijit Naskar
I (God) am only a part of your own human consciousness, but a really bizarre part.
Abhijit Naskar
Faith and hope remove worry, anxiety, and fear. Human life becomes very painful and burdensome if a person has no one to trust and love. Then why should it bother an atheist, if a mother who just has lost her child, takes up a doll of baby Jesus or Krishna and pampers it like her own child, while in the process she actually succeeds in coping with her traumatic situation!
Abhijit Naskar
A true religious person should not think that “my religion alone is the right path and other religions are false.” Other religions are also so many paths leading to the same domain of transcendental bliss. Likewise, no person should think “my perception of the reality is the only absolute reality, and all others’ are false”, because each human brain has its own unique way of perceiving the reality.
Abhijit Naskar
Divinity is born from neural processes, not some Supreme Entity.
Abhijit Naskar
Twenty percent of Americans describe themselves as “spiritual but not religious.” Although the claim seems to annoy believers and atheists equally, separating spirituality from religion is a perfectly reasonable thing to do. It is to assert two important truths simultaneously: Our world is dangerously riven by religious doctrines that all educated people should condemn, and yet there is more to understanding the human condition than science and secular culture generally admit. One purpose of this book is to give both these convictions intellectual and empirical support.Before going any further, I should address the animosity that many readers feel toward the term spiritual. Whenever I use the word, as in referring to meditation as a “spiritual practice,” I hear from fellow skeptics and atheists who think that I have committed a grievous error.The word spirit comes from the Latin spiritus, which is a translation of the Greek pneuma, meaning “breath.” Around the thirteenth century, the term became entangled with beliefs about immaterial souls, supernatural beings, ghosts, and so forth. It acquired other meanings as well: We speak of the spirit of a thing as its most essential principle or of certain volatile substances and liquors as spirits. Nevertheless, many nonbelievers now consider all things “spiritual” to be contaminated by medieval superstition.I do not share their semantic concerns.[1] Yes, to walk the aisles of any “spiritual” bookstore is to confront the yearning and credulity of our species by the yard, but there is no other term—apart from the even more problematic mystical or the more restrictive contemplative—with which to discuss the efforts people make, through meditation, psychedelics, or other means, to fully bring their minds into the present or to induce nonordinary states of consciousness. And no other word links this spectrum of experience to our ethical lives.
Sam Harris
Spirituality is to Religion, what Love is to Marriage. Spirituality is an emotional state of the mind, just like Love, while Religion on the other hand, is a social construct, quite like Marriage.
Abhijit Naskar
Religion doesn’t mean obeying some textual rules from books that were written hundreds or thousands of years ago. Religion means realization of the self.
Abhijit Naskar
A person’s affinity towards his or her own religious beliefs, has the same neurological qualities as of his or her emotional affinity towards the romantic partner. In fact the symptoms that follow the early euphoric phase of romantic love are often seen in religious people when their beloved religious faith is challenged.
Abhijit Naskar
Oneness is God.
Abhijit Naskar
Religion helps humanity to pass through its darkest times.
Abhijit Naskar
If a religion cannot help a human wherever he or she stands, it is not of much use.
Abhijit Naskar
Someone burns your beloved scripture in front of you, yet you are not bothered even the slightest bit. That's when you know, you have achieved divinity.
Abhijit Naskar
Religion is to be realized, not read or taught.
Abhijit Naskar
Spirituality, sexuality and curiosity are the three pillars of Modern Human Consciousness.
Abhijit Naskar
Man’s earliest prereligious fear of the natural forces gradually became religious in nature and got personalized and spiritualized. Eventually he learnt to say 'God works in a mysterious way'.
Abhijit Naskar
The realistic goal to be attained through spiritual practice is not some permanent state of enlightenment that admits of no further efforts, but a capacity to be free in this moment, in the midst of whatever is happening. If you can do that, you have already solved most of the problems you will encounter in life.
Sam Harris
I don’t see doctrines, when I talk about religions. All I see are different experiential realities of the one and the same neuronal Kingdom of God.
Abhijit Naskar
Those who preach bookish religion are the greatest atheists of all, because they don’t have the slightest idea of neither God nor religion. Their beloved religion is their book. And their God is in the doctrines.
Abhijit Naskar
Religions began as realization of the self, but ended up being retaliation against each other.
Abhijit Naskar
If history has shown anything, it is that where there is a God, there is an institution trying to lock up that God in its lifeless structure of orthodoxy, in order to have authority over people and sell tickets to the Kingdom of that God. Thus emerged all the pompous lies about the extraterrestrial Kingdom of God or Heaven.
Abhijit Naskar
We don't have the luxury to say that, there is no hope for reform in Islam, because by saying this, we would be disavowing the entire peace-loving Muslim population of the world. We cannot leave our Muslim sisters and brothers behind to be oppressed by their own priestly tyrants, while the rest of the world keeps progressing with an open mind. The entire civilized society of the world, must put their heart and soul to get Islam liberated from the shackles of fundamentalism. Conscience must triumph over orthodox barbarianism, otherwise there would be no hope for the progress and wellbeing of humanity as a truly wise species.
Abhijit Naskar
The term spirit might have evolved in a mystical fashion, but in today’s civilized and thinking society, it refers to simply your inner self. Spirit is the self, and the self is the soul. Hence, a spiritual person is a person who is more interested in realizing his or her inner self, than giving in to any conformity of the society.
Abhijit Naskar
Somehow creationists keep us naturalists in track to some extent. They are the representation of human stupidity at its extreme. And we need some stupidity in the society for true intellect to be adored.
Abhijit Naskar
There is no secret in attaining God. In the path of Enlightenment, any theoretical mystery-mongering preacher that weakens the mind, should be rejected at once. Science has no secrets. The very purpose of it is to unravel the secrets of Nature and the Universe. That is why it is so beautiful. And so should be the path of Enlightenment.
Abhijit Naskar
Natural Sciences are all about fascinating causality.
Abhijit Naskar
Physiology and Psychology are not at all separate from each other. Rather they are deeply intertwined.
Abhijit Naskar
Experience, derived from scientific investigation, led to all the scientific literature in history. Likewise, experience, derived from religious transcendence, led to all the religious scriptures in history. It's never the other way around.
Abhijit Naskar
I don't believe any scientific field to be superior to another.
Abhijit Naskar
Plato, Socrates, Aristotle and many more great minds laid the groundwork for the development of modern science. Over the foundation of philosophy, history witnessed the daring ventures of human excellence by both philosophical and scientific geniuses, such as Leonardo-da-Vinci, Copernicus, Galileo, Kepler, Bacon, Darwin, Newton and so on. And the chain of reaction they triggered with their extraordinarily abnormal thinking, given their surrounding ignorance and fundamentalism, resulted into the evolution of our modern science.
Abhijit Naskar
Memorizing and regurgitating are not science. Real science is a constant investigation of the unknown.
Abhijit Naskar