Quotes by Neuroscientists - Page 18

Religion is an experience, not a bunch of doctrines.
Abhijit Naskar
There is no force in the universe that can harm you, unless you allow it to.
Abhijit Naskar
Humans are born with a hodge-podge of various brain circuits, that possess the seeds of peace, fear, love, hate, rage, pain, love, stress and faith. All these elements compose the emotional domain of our mental life. All these characters are ingrained in our limbic system, that keep our head straight in the path of survival. We humans can survive, only if, all these elements of our brain circuits function properly. Failure of any one element would mean extinction of the whole species.
Abhijit Naskar
From the tiniest experience of your daily life to your grand perception of the universe, in various situations, the human brain tends to create its own myth and stories.
Abhijit Naskar
A Christian must worship the Self as Christ, not Christ as Christ. A Muslim must worship the Self as Mohammed, not Mohammed as Mohammed. A Hindu must worship the Self as Krishna, not Krishna as Krishna.
Abhijit Naskar
My experience of that liberation, what Buddha had called Nirvana, set me off in the path of scientific investigation of that Oneness, the thing people call, meeting with God. And that meeting triggered an unquenchable thirst in me to develop a proper scientific method to understand and further explore that apparently bizarre domain of Universal Consciousness.
Abhijit Naskar
Science works through replication, rectification and modification. But when it comes to religion, people simply tend to accept the theoretical preachers and their claims of historical God experiences without a single question. If there has been one experience in this world in any branch of knowledge, it absolutely follows that that experience will be repeated eternally. If they are not repeated through natural processes, the thinking humanity would have no way but to disprove that such an experience ever occurred in the history.
Abhijit Naskar
There has been more bloodshed in the name of God than for any other cause. And it is all because people never attempt to reach the fountain-head. They are content only to comply with the customs of their forefathers, and want others to do the same.
Abhijit Naskar
Most of the modern human society has nearly lost the faculty of observing the internal mechanism.
Abhijit Naskar
True religion must raise to work at the bar and the bench, on the couch and on the streets, in the cottage of the poor man and in the penthouse of the entrepreneur, with the fisherman that is catching fish and with the students that are studying.
Abhijit Naskar
Time spent in assessing one's self, is the time spent best.
Abhijit Naskar
Never waste your precious time in discussing the good and bad qualities of others.
Abhijit Naskar
The Self, when finite, is Human and when infinite, is God.
Abhijit Naskar
Infinite and finite are both mental constructs.
Abhijit Naskar
Nature of Human is neither good nor bad, it is simply a fusion of primitive instinctual urges and modern humane conscience.
Abhijit Naskar
There are pearls in the deepest fathoms of the Self, but to get them you will have to go through unimaginable perils.
Abhijit Naskar
Dare to contradict the scientist, not because of your scripture, but because of your own rational thinking.
Abhijit Naskar
Human brain is structured to avoid any kind of refutation of one's religious beliefs.
Abhijit Naskar
Stop nourishing other people’s ideas and beliefs in your life. Take up your own idea and endeavor to accomplish it.
Abhijit Naskar
I am merely an insignificant creature on a microscopic blue dot in the vastness of space.
Abhijit Naskar
The concern of your brain is not to see the actual nature of reality, but to represent the reality to you in such a way that suits your needs.
Abhijit Naskar
All the repressed emotions and subconscious desires in time lead to some kind of psychological or physiological breakdown, if kept unchecked.
Abhijit Naskar
Misery teaches you more than joy.
Abhijit Naskar
Pleasure and Pain participate equally in moulding character.
Abhijit Naskar
Denial of the Self accomplishes nothing.
Abhijit Naskar
The Bible is not religion, nor are the Vedas. The Torah is not religion, nor is the Quran, or any other scripture on earth.
Abhijit Naskar
Once you reach the brink of your will power, you have two options - either give up, or keep going. That decision decides whether you'll reach your goal.
Abhijit Naskar
Sex becomes less and less pleasurable in a relationship over time. Your brain gets habituated to the sensual stimulation from your specific partner as you are exposed to it repeatedly. It doesn’t mean that the love is gone from the relationship. Love still exists beyond the barriers of time, in the form of attachment, which becomes independent of sexual intimacy after the euphoric stage of mad love.
Abhijit Naskar
Most religious individuals do not conceive God in an anthropomorphic or angry way. Rather, in their personal psychological domain of religious or spiritual beliefs, they conceive God in more abstract, spiritual and merciful way.
Abhijit Naskar
I am not an advocate for religion. I only advocate for sweet general harmony.
Abhijit Naskar
A man woke up at midnight and wanted to smoke. Therefore he looked for some fire, for which he went to a neighbor’s house and knocked at the door. The neighbor opened the door and asked him what he wanted. The man said, I wish to smoke. Can you give me a little fire? The neighbor replied, O.M.G.! What the heck is wrong with you? You have taken so much trouble to come and wake us up at the middle of the night, while in your own hand you have a lantern! The God that human beings so keenly seek, lives within the human biology, yet they wander hitherto searching for it.
Abhijit Naskar
The scriptures are just books. It all depends on you, whether you are going to learn goodness and compassion from them, or use them to destroy your environment.
Abhijit Naskar
We the humans are too tiny to know something so grand as an Eternal Driving Force behind the Universe. Ultimately what would really matter in the development of our species as a whole is, we the humans serving humanity.
Abhijit Naskar
When you move to a new environment with cultural and social characteristics different from your own, it is only logical, that you loosen some of the knots of your religious doctrines, to embrace the new and vivid environment as much as you wish to be embraced by the environment.
Abhijit Naskar
Know yourself as you are – particles of start-dust moving through the eternal ocean of time, trying to make whatever little difference you can.
Abhijit Naskar
Any human action that goes against what is ordinary, is deemed as an anomaly.
Abhijit Naskar
Ten minutes of meditation a day, keeps the psychiatrist away.
Abhijit Naskar
Any idea of separation is bondage. True liberation of the mind is in non-differentiation.
Abhijit Naskar
Any idea of separation is bondage. True liberation of the mind is in non-differentiation. And in the pursuit of breaking free from all the shackles of such man-made bondages, science is the most effective tool we have till this date. But in order to bring out all its effectiveness into the human society, it must be sweetened first with the touch of philosophy. Science without Philosophy leads to chaos. Philosophy without Science leads to nowhere. Only together they can construct a better world.
Abhijit Naskar
Every word that comes out of my neurons is to make humanity see that there are more things in our biology that make us one, than there are to set us apart. My goal is simple. It is to take the human civilization with me on the path of sweet general harmony.
Abhijit Naskar
From the perspective of a general human being – a non-scientist, the most valuable element of the human mental life, is Emotion – a tiny portion of our conscious mental world. We humans as a species crave for emotional stimulation. And in many cases, as it happens, we are actually slaves to our emotions.
Abhijit Naskar
In most cases, people argue over the term God, without having the perception of another person’s own idea of the word. Hence, often people with an atheistic perspective of the world attribute the God of many religious individuals to be an angry, authoritarian and vengeful God who acts like a human being and lives in the clouds or in heaven. But the irony is, most religious individuals do not conceive God in an anthropomorphic or angry way. Rather, in their personal psychological domain of religious or spiritual beliefs, they conceive God in more abstract, spiritual and merciful way.
Abhijit Naskar
Truth, by all means is the ultimate reward for all the sufferings of the human mind that often compel even the strongest of characters to get down on his or her knees.
Abhijit Naskar
Don't judge people by their religious, cultural, or professional background. Judge if you must, by their behavior with other people.
Abhijit Naskar
Misery teaches you the value of joy. It reveals to you the gravitas of human life.
Abhijit Naskar
The best lessons of life are learnt in silence and solitude.
Abhijit Naskar
Better life begins the moment you learn to be content with what you already have.
Abhijit Naskar
Every single creature on earth manages to survive one way or another, but not every creature truly lives.
Abhijit Naskar
There is no religion better than love, no color better than the color of happiness and no language better than the language of compassion.
Abhijit Naskar
Quantum Mechanics can indeed be extremely complex to grasp, but when we talk about Consciousness, with decades of rigorous studies on the human brain we have realized that actually, there is no other phenomenon in the entire universe that is simpler than the majestic phenomenon of Consciousness.'If you think you have a solution to the problem of consciousness, you haven’t understood the problem.' This age-old metaphysical and philosophical argument is strictly not true. If you are sufficiently clear-sighted enough, you can realize the problem itself was a matter of the past when we didn’t have insight into the neurological basis of consciousness. And today it is common knowledge in Neuroscience that, all mesmerizing features of the Human Mind, including the glorious Human Consciousness, are born from the tiny specks of jelly inside your head.
Abhijit Naskar
At a cellular level of the human mind, Islamophobia is not really a matter of social stigma, rather it is a natural biological fear response of the general human mind, conditioned through countless pairings between terrorist attacks (unconditioned stimulus) and their apparent association with Islam (conditioned stimulus). Hence, Islamophobia cannot be eradicated completely, unless that pairing is severed and thereafter the conditioned stimulus of Islam is paired with something optimistic such as the heartwarming works of the 13th century Persian Muslim poet Jalal ad-Din Muhammad Rumi.
Abhijit Naskar
Harmony doesn’t come merely through tolerance. You don’t need to tolerate people from other cultural backgrounds. It is time you start loving them. Toleration may make you a decent person, but it is love that makes you a true human being.
Abhijit Naskar
​Everything that makes you, you, is a biologically existential expression of your entire brain.
Abhijit Naskar
There are more things in our biology that make us one, than there are to set us apart.
Abhijit Naskar
Imagine yourself having a fight with your romantic partner. The tension of the situation makes your limbic system run at full throttle and you become flooded with stress hormones like cortisol and adrenalin. The high levels of these chemicals suddenly make you so damn angry, that you burst out in front of your partner saying, “I wish you die, so that I can have some peace in my life”. Given the stress of the situation through highly active limbic system, your PFC loses its freedom to take the right decision and you burst out with foul language in front of your partner, that may ruin your relationship. In simple terms due to your mental instability, you lost your free will to make the right decision.But when the conversation is over, and you relax for a while, your stress hormone levels come down to normal, and you regain your usual cheerful state of mind. Immediately, your PFC starts analyzing the explosive conversation you had with your partner. Healthy activity of the entire frontal lobes, especially the PFC suddenly overwhelms you with a feeling of guilt. Your brain makes you realize, that you have done something devilish. As a result, now you find yourself making the willful decision of apologizing to your partner and making up to him or her, no matter how much effort it takes, because your PFC comes up the solution that it is the healthiest thing to do for your personal life.From this you can see, that what you call free will is something that is not consistent. It changes based on your mental health. Mental instability or illness, truly cripples your free will. And the healthier your frontal lobes are, the better you can take good decisions. And the most effective way to keep your frontal lobes healthy is to practice some kind of meditation.
Abhijit Naskar
During my school years, I was never a brilliant student, but just an average one, with only above average level of curiosity.
Abhijit Naskar
Historical experiences of this absolute godliness gave rise to all the scriptures in the world. Hence, the scriptures themselves don’t account for the actual globally prevalent psychological element of faith or divinity in the human society. Faith is a crucial evolutionary trait of the human mind, selected by Mother Nature as an internal coping- mechanism.
Abhijit Naskar
The important thing is not to survive, but to live.
Abhijit Naskar
Don't waste your energy in fighting the old. Use it to build the new.
Abhijit Naskar
Everybody wishes to have something that somebody else has. And that's the root of all sorrows.
Abhijit Naskar