Quotes by Neuroscientists - Page 23

If education were the same as information, the encyclopedias would be the greatest sages in the world.
Abhijit Naskar
The system that aims at educating our boys and girls in the same manner as in the circus where the trainer teaches the lion to sit on a stool, has not understood the true meaning of education itself. Instead of being like a circus where the trainer uses his stick to make animals do stunts to serve the interest of the audience, the system of education should be like an Orchestra where the conductor waves his stick to orchestrate the music already within the musicians’ heart in the most beautiful manner. The teacher should be like the conductor in the orchestra, not the trainer in the circus.
Abhijit Naskar
A healthy and ideal system of education would be where a teacher would patiently impart knowledge, instead of curriculum, upon the students, only after assessing their acceptability – where a student would acquire knowledge in order to learn, not to earn – where the parents would be willing to make necessary sacrifices in order to adorn their child with curiosity and thereafter nourish that curiosity, regardless of how absurdly impractical it becomes to the eyes of the society.
Abhijit Naskar
Now the common human perception about the purpose of academic institutions, is that, they are meant to put a stamp of approval on the students, so that later on the students can show off their stamp in order to make a living. The parents invest money to get the stamp, and the child uses that stamp to make more money. Where is the element of education in this whole process!
Abhijit Naskar
All knowledge is born in the mind, and circumstances make them manifest.
Abhijit Naskar
After all, what is education, if not the unparalleled means to transcend the self- imposed physical limits of the mind and the body.
Abhijit Naskar
All the calculus, quantum mechanics and languages in the world are worthless pieces of information, if they are not brought to the service of the society.
Abhijit Naskar
If we are to rise as real Sapiens, we must work towards spreading education among the masses.
Abhijit Naskar
The only service to be done for our downtrodden sisters and brother, is to give them education to develop their individuality. We must give them ideas, alongside cultivating their living conditions.
Abhijit Naskar
The methodical implementation of modern human faculties that allow us human beings to transcend the physical limits of biological evolution is Education. However, today, the term education has become somehow synonymous with economic benefits and due to the primeval craving for security, it has disgracefully lost its very core of transcendence into the unknown. Thus, the very evolutionary seeds that gave birth to the method known as education have gone almost extinct in the modern industrialized system of soulless competition and regurgitation. Hence emerged the reason for me to get to the root of its quite unofficially accepted problems, and to concoct the thought processes that would make necessary amendments to the perceptual errors of what I call the three major nodes of education system, which are the teachers, the students and the parents.
Abhijit Naskar
Education is not the amount of information that is pushed into the brain and causes havoc there, undigested all through a lifetime. Education must be a symposium of life-building, character- making and assimilation of ideas in the pursuit of building a more harmonious, peaceful and truly civilized world.
Abhijit Naskar
Psychologically speaking, far from being worthless, a system is indeed necessary, for any kind of human endeavor. A structure aids in the mind’s endeavor of learning. But the moment the mind becomes dependent on the system and starts trusting the system more than the internal faculties of the mind, the very element of education fades away from the system.
Abhijit Naskar
There is only one ideal in the world, which is, the light of knowledge – the light of truth.
Abhijit Naskar
Science is the human endeavor to elevate the self and the society from the darkness of ignorance into the light of wisdom.
Abhijit Naskar
Know thy self, and the world will be thy oyster!
Abhijit Naskar
Truth in the human world, is constructed, defined and then reconstructed by the human self.
Abhijit Naskar
Knowledge shall set the mind free.
Abhijit Naskar
...I sense that stepping into the light is also a powerful metaphor for consciousness, for the birth of the knowing mind, for the simple and yet momentous coming of the sense of self into the world of the mental.
António R. Damásio
Are you really surprised by the endurance of religion? What ideology is likely to be more durable than one that conforms, at every turn, to our powers of wishful thinking? Hope is easy; knowledge is hard. Science is the one domain in which we human beings make a truly heroic effort to counter our innate biases and wishful thinking. Science is the one endeavor in which we have developed a refined methodology for separating what a person hopes is true from what he has good reason to believe. The methodology isn't perfect, and the history of science is riddled with abject failures of scientific objectivity. But that is just the point-these have been failures of science, discovered and corrected by-what, religion? No, by good science.
Sam Harris
The only measure of judging a human being is through that person’s character, because character is not determined by race, religion, gender or social status. And one who recognizes this simple fact of human life behaves the same with the scientist, the janitor and the sex-worker.
Abhijit Naskar
They say, love God, for it is the greatest virtue. I say, love humans, for there is no greater virtue, no greater religion, than the love of humanity.
Abhijit Naskar
Liberty is my religion and Humans are my God.
Abhijit Naskar
God is nature’s anti-dote to misery.
Abhijit Naskar
The conflicts between science and religion still remain in this day and age, because though most people understand what science means, they do not have a clue what religion means – and they do not even have a clue that they do not have a clue.
Abhijit Naskar
The 330 million gods and goddesses of the Hindu culture act as placebo for the masses, just like other gods of other cultures do.
Abhijit Naskar
All I’m arguing for really is that we should have a conversation where the best ideas really thrive, where there’s no taboo against criticizing bad ideas, and where everyone who shows up, in order to get their ideas entertained, has to meet some obvious burdens of intellectual rigor and self-criticism and honesty—and when people fail to do that, we are free to stop listening to them. What religion has had up until this moment is a different set of rules that apply only to it, which is you have to respect my religious certainty even though I’m telling you I arrived at it irrationally.
Sam Harris
Imagine for a moment that we are nothing but the product of billions of years of molecules coming together and ratcheting up through natural selection, that we are composed only of highways of fluids and chemicals sliding along roadways within billions of dancing cells, that trillions of synaptic conversations hum in parallel, that this vast egglike fabric of micron-thin circuitry runs algorithms undreamt of in modern science, and that these neural programs give rise to our decision making, loves, desires, fears, and aspirations. To me, that understanding would be a numinous experience, better than anything ever proposed in anyone's holy text.
David Eagleman
120 million of us place the big bang 2,500 years after the Babylonians and Sumerians learned to brew beer.
Sam Harris
There is a sense in which all cognition can be said to be motivated. One is motivated to understand the world, to be in touch with reality, to remove doubt, etc. Alternately one might say that motivation is an aspect of cognition itself. Nevertheless, motives like wanting to find the truth, not wanting to be mistaken, etc., tend to align with epistemic goals in a way that many other commitments do not. As we have begun to see, all reasoning may be inextricable from emotion. But if a person's primary motivation in holding a belief is to hue to a positive state of mind, to mitigate feelings of anxiety, embarrassment, or guilt for instance. This is precisely what we mean by phrases like "wishful thinking", and "self-deception". Such a person will of necessity be less responsive to valid chains of evidence and argument that run counter to the beliefs he is seeking to maintain. To point out non-epistemic motives in an others view of the world, therefore, is always a criticism, as it serves to cast doubt on a persons connection to the world as it is.
Sam Harris
Faith does not offer a strong link between our beliefs and actual states of the world.
Sam Harris
When the stakes are this high- when calling God by the right name can make the difference between eternal happiness and eternal suffering, it is impossible to respect the beliefs of others who don't believe as you do.
Sam Harris
The problem I want to talk to you about tonight is the problem of belief. What does it mean to believe? We use this word all the time, and I think behind it lurk some really extraordinary taboos and confusions. What I want to argue tonight is that how we talk about belief- how we fail to criticize or criticize the beliefs of others, has more importance to us personally, more consequence to us personally and to civilization than perhaps anything else that is in our power to influence.
Sam Harris
We rely on faith only in the context of claims for which there is no sufficient sensory or logical evidence.
Sam Harris
The faith of religion is belief on insufficient evidence.
Sam Harris
If faith is what you have to go on, if faith is the link between your beliefs and the world at large, your beliefs are very likely to be wrong. Beliefs can be right or wrong. If you believe you can fly, that belief is only true if indeed you can fly. Somebody who thinks he can fly, and is wrong about it, will eventually discover there's a problem with his view of the world.
Sam Harris
It is also worth noting that one can obtain a Ph.D. in any branch of science for no other purpose than to make cynical use of scientific language in an effort to rationalize the glaring inadequacies of tbe Bible. A handful of Christians appear to have done this; some have even obtained their degrees from reputable universities. No doubt, others will follow in their footsteps. While such people are technically "scientists," they are not behaving like scientists. They simply are not engaged in an honest inquiry into the nature of the universe. And their proclamations about God and the failures of Darwinism do not in the least signify that there is a legitimate scientific controversy about evolution.
Sam Harris
Let me assure you that my intent is not to offend or merely be provocative. I'm simply worried.
Sam Harris
What I'm asking you to entertain is that there is nothing we need to believe on insufficient evidence in order to have deeply ethical and spiritual lives.
Sam Harris
Every one of the world's "great" religions utterly trivializes the immensity and beauty of the cosmos. Books like the Bible and the Koran get almost every significant fact about us and our world wrong. Every scientific domain -- from cosmology to psychology to economics -- has superseded and surpassed the wisdom of Scripture.Everything of value that people get from religion can be had more honestly, without presuming anything on insufficient evidence. The rest is self-deception, set to music.
Sam Harris
What we do in every other area of our lives (other than religion), is, rather than respect somebody's beliefs, we evaluate their reasons.
Sam Harris
The fact that my continuous and public rejection of Christianity does not worry me in the least should suggest to you just how inadequate I think your reasons for being a Christian are.
Sam Harris
Theology is ignorance with wings.
Sam Harris
Religious moderation is the product of secular knowledge and scriptural ignorance.
Sam Harris
It is taboo in our society to criticize a persons religious faith... these taboos are offensive, deeply unreasonable, but worse than that, they are getting people killed. This is really my concern. My concern is that our religions, the diversity of our religious doctrines, is going to get us killed. I'm worried that our religious discourse- our religious beliefs are ultimately incompatible with civilization.
Sam Harris
Become loving and become courageous. Become the inspiration which you seek outside. Bring the metaphorical heart of your limbic system in sync with the analytical powerhouse of the prefrontal cortex. From your mind shall rise the inspiration. From your mind shall rise the love. From your mind shall rise the greatest education of all.
Abhijit Naskar
In general, if we leave out the atheistic fraction of world population that possesses no notable optimistic or positive Qualia of God, the majority of the human species possesses a beneficial Qualia of God enriched with blissful sentiments.
Abhijit Naskar
Other than the substantial physiological impact of prayer/meditation, there is another much simpler mind-body intervention that helps all religious and spiritual individuals in all walks of life, regardless of whether they pray regularly or not. It is commonly known as faith.
Abhijit Naskar
The term “musalman” refers to someone with “musallam iman”, that means, a pure conscience. Thus, any individual whose conscience is pure and clear, who can think for himself or herself, is a musalman or muslim, regardless of socio-religious background. Likewise, any human being who loves the neighbor as much as his or her own family is a Christian.
Abhijit Naskar
A person may hold his own beliefs and creeds to be dearest, and nourish them with all his might, but the moment he starts preaching the exclusive greatness and dominance over all other systems of beliefs and creeds, the world begins to plunge into a death trap.
Abhijit Naskar
The one ultimate rule of the Quranic fundamentalists is “there is one God and Mohammed is his prophet”. Everything beyond that not only is bad, but must be destroyed forthwith. At moment’s notice, every man or woman, who does not exactly believe in that, must be killed.... This is not religion my friend. This is primitiveness at its worst.
Abhijit Naskar
Why should a religion claim that it is not bound to abide by the standpoint of reason! If one does not take the standard of reason, there cannot be any true judgment, even in the case of religion.
Abhijit Naskar
Fundamentalism not only fuels devastating acts of violence, but also all kinds of primitive prejudicial behaviors, such as Misogyny, Polygamy, Homophobia, and Islamophobia.
Abhijit Naskar
God lives in and through the human mind, and not in any church, synagogue, temple or mosque.
Abhijit Naskar
If I had been born in the medieval times, my subjective union with God and the Universe would have evoked the rise of another Gnostic religion. But, by the grace of Mother Nature, I am born in an era of Science and Reasoning. Hence, I have dissected my own experience of Absolute Divinity as well as the experiences of all the religious giants in my works, in order to discover the physical truth underneath these apparently supernatural experiences.
Abhijit Naskar
It is in the nature of the human mind to give in, and hold on, to the source of solace with all the might it can muster. Life is hard and any figure that tends to ease the subjective perception of that hardship, attains a high pedestal of utmost reverence in the realm of the individual mind. It all takes place at a molecular level in the human brain with the purpose of self-preservation.
Abhijit Naskar
India was and to some extent, still is, a nation where its citizens care more about their religious freedom than any other earthly possession. Give them food or not, it doesn’t matter to them, as long as they are allowed to practice their religion. But, take away their religion, they will fight till the last breath of their life.
Abhijit Naskar
Without the Mind, there is no God. Without you, there is no God.
Abhijit Naskar
Forget the Bible, the Quran, the Vedas, the Granth Sahib, and all the scriptures in the world. None of them will show you the Great Eternal Truth. None of them will show you the Kingdom of God, for the real Kingdom of the Ultimate Truth is inside your mind. It was born in you when you were born. And it will cease to exist when you die. Your mind is not merely the vehicle of God, rather it is the life-force that keeps God alive. Without the Mind, there is no God. Without you, there is no God.
Abhijit Naskar
Your mind is not merely the vehicle of God, rather it is the life-force that keeps God alive. Without the Mind, there is no God. Without you, there is no God.
Abhijit Naskar
In India, it is religion that forms the very core of the national heart. It is the backbone - the bed-rock - the foundation upon which the national edifice has been built.
Abhijit Naskar