Quotes by Neuroscientists - Page 4

We humans are the gods of this planet. And we also have created Superior Gods than us, to have a sense of security.
Abhijit Naskar
Lastly I’d say this – true religion, as a part of Neuroscience – a study of the mind – is the greatest and healthiest exercise that the human mind has. In some form or other, it is an evolutionary necessity of the human mind, not a luxury.
Abhijit Naskar
Evolutionarily speaking, love is all about procreation.
Abhijit Naskar
If origin defines race, then we are all Africans – we are all black.
Abhijit Naskar
The entire idea of sin, is based on books of the dead people. It is a sociological invention founded on textual fanaticism.
Abhijit Naskar
We must continually remind ourselves that there is a difference between what is natural and what is actually good for us.
Sam Harris
The hormonal interplay inside a woman’s head creates her reality. Her hormones tell her day to day what’s important. They mold her desires and values.
Abhijit Naskar
Everything that creates itself upon the backs of smaller scales will by those same scales be consumed.
David Eagleman
We have barely emerged from centuries of barbarism. It's not a surprise that there are shocking inequities in this world. It is hard work to climb down out of the trees and walk upright,and build a viable global civilization when you start with technology that is made of rocks and sticks and fur. This is a project, and progress is dificult.
Sam Harris
There is no society in human history that ever suffered because its people became too reasonable.
Sam Harris
What is the meaning of life? What is our purpose on earth? These are some of the great, false questions of religion. We need not answer them, for they are badly posed, but we can live our answers all the same. At a minimum, we can create the conditions for human flourishing in this life--the only life of which any of us can be certain. That means we should not terrify our children with thoughts of hell or poison them with hatred for infidels. We should not teach our sons to consider women their future property or convince our daughters that they are property even now. And we must decline to tell our children that human history began with bloody magic and will end with bloody magic in a glorious war between the righteous and the rest.
Sam Harris
Christians.....expend more “moral” energy opposing abortion than fighting genocide.
Sam Harris
Certainty about the next life is simply incompatible with tolerance in this one.
Sam Harris
By failing to live by the letter of the texts, while tolerating the irrationality of those who do, religious moderates betray faith and reason equally.
Sam Harris
Imagine a world in which generations of human beings come to believe that certain films were made by God or that specific software was coded by him. Imagine a future in which millions of our descendants murder each other over rival interpretations of Star Wars or Windows 98. Could anything—anything—be more ridiculous? And yet, this would be no more ridiculous than the world we are living in.
Sam Harris
Atheism is not a philosophy; it is not even a view of the world; it is simply an admission of the obvious. In fact, "atheism" is a term that should not even exist. No one ever needs to identify himself as a "non-astrologer" or a "non-alchemist.
Sam Harris
People have been murdered over cartoons. End of moral analysis.
Sam Harris
It is time we admitted, from kings and presidents on down, that there is no evidence that any of our books was authored by the Creator of the universe. The Bible, it seems certain, was the work of sand-strewn men and women who thought the earth was flat and for whom a wheelbarrow would have been a breathtaking example of emerging technology. To rely on such a document as the basis for our worldview-however heroic the efforts of redactors- is to repudiate two thousand years of civilizing insights that the human mind has only just begun to inscribe upon itself through secular politics and scientific culture. We will see that the greatest problem confronting civilization is not merely religious extremism: rather, it is the larger set of cultural and intellectual accommodations we have made to faith itself.
Sam Harris
Even though its common knowledge these days, it never ceases to amaze me that all the richness of our mental life - all our feelings, our emotions, our thoughts, our ambitions, our love life, our religious sentiments and even what each of us regards us his own intimate private self - is simply the activity of these little specks of jelly in your head, in your brain. There is nothing else.
V.S. Ramachandran
I do not see emotions and feelings as the intangible and vaporous qualities that many presume them to be. Their subject matter is concrete, and they can be related to specific systems in body and brain, no less so than vision or speech.
António R. Damásio
Feeling had controlling influence over those primitive people, not thinking. It played a crucial part in the evolutionary development of modern humans. That’s why we humans are basically an emotional species alongside being the smartest one.
Abhijit Naskar
Are you a kind of person who likes to keep all your emotions hidden from the people around you! Do you prefer restraining your feelings a little too much! In that case, you must know that too much emotional suppression can have catastrophic impact over your body.
Abhijit Naskar
You know what is the most complicated feature of human nature? It is the term complication itself. We are never satisfied with keeping things simple. We always tend to exaggerate even the simplest phenomenon of this planet.
Abhijit Naskar
It's been long since thinking humanity has learnt that love is a majestic creation of the brain, yet that knowledge hasn't made love be deemed any less glorious. Then why should it threaten the religious believer to learn that divinity as well is a natural creation of the brain?
Abhijit Naskar
Aggression, rage and violence are archetypal foundations of manhood.
Abhijit Naskar
The more fundamentalist a person, the more immoral and inhuman he is.
Abhijit Naskar
Philanderers and swingers can see nothing beyond the needs of their genitals. Sexual craving is a part of our biology, but it is not who we are.
Abhijit Naskar
Sometimes, humanity surprises me with all its lack of control over the primordial urges. These innate urges are the biological traits that make us similar to the rest of the animal kingdom. But the modern qualities that make us superior to all the animals are intellect and self-control.
Abhijit Naskar
No human, no matter how ancient, or how popular, can be above the laws of Nature.
Abhijit Naskar
​On top of the government-hierarchy you need an unpolluted group of scientists to give a nation the best direction.
Abhijit Naskar
Character of any person is the aggregate of his or her conscientious tendencies - the sum total of the knacks of the civilized part of the mind.
Abhijit Naskar
Sentiments that glorify humanity know no racial distinction.
Abhijit Naskar
Call up the ever-pure, the effulgent and the ever-radiant character of true humanism in yourself and in others, and no racism shall have the power to thrive in such society even for a few seconds.
Abhijit Naskar
Tolstoy was a Caucasian, Gandhi was an Asian, and Martin Luther King Jr. was a Negro, yet all of their hearts were inspired by the one idea of nonviolent resistance. King received it from Gandhi, Gandhi received it from Tolstoy, and Tolstoy received it from Christ.
Abhijit Naskar
It is character that should be the sole measure of judgement in the society of thinking humanity, and nothing short of that would do.
Abhijit Naskar
If not as a true human, let me tell you as a Biologist, color of the skin does not define an individual’s intelligence – it does not define an individual’s ambitions - it does not define an individual’s dreams – and above all, it does not define an individual’s character.
Abhijit Naskar
In the biological sense, race does not exist.
Abhijit Naskar
It's the closest place to nowhere that she can think of. And nowhere is exactly where she wants to be today.
Lisa Genova
...our brains are minuscule fragments of the universe, much too small to hold all the facts of the world but not too idle to speculate about them.
Valentino Braitenberg
If you ever feel lazy or dull, take heart: you’re the busiest, brightest thing on the planet.
David Eagleman
It is essential to understand our brains in some detail if we are to assess correctly our place in this vast and complicated universe we see all around us.
Francis Crick
Her mother was Jewish, but her father had insisted that she and Anne be raised Catholic. So she went to mass every Sunday as a child, received communion, went to confession, and was confirmed, but because her mother never participated in any of this, Alice began questioning the validity of these beliefs at a young age. And without a satisfying answer from either her father or the Catholic Church, she never developed a true faith.
Lisa Genova
Once a baby is born, the parents have around one and a half decades to build his or her character and fill the mind with vigour and virtues.
Abhijit Naskar
A philanderer cannot be a parent - a parent cannot be a philanderer.
Abhijit Naskar
Human making is our mission.
Abhijit Naskar
In parenting patience is the greatest virtue.
Abhijit Naskar
In other words, scientists don't concentrate on what they know, which is considerable but also miniscule, but rather on what they don't know. The one big fact is that science traffics in ignorance, cultivates it, and is driven by it.
Stuart Firestein
Ignorance follows knowledge, not the other way around.
Stuart Firestein
Throughout the evolution of mankind our very much primordial ancestors had one thing in common, it was ignorance. This ignorance gave birth to fear. Fear of the unknown became a quintessential element of their daily survival. To ace the intensity of the fear, rituals of worship arose.
Abhijit Naskar
Even a great philosophical idea when mixed with mysticism, turns into a dangerous weapon that becomes an impediment in the path of progress of developing communities.
Abhijit Naskar
I'm the Ted Bundy of string theory.
Sam Harris
Of course, the liar often imagines that he does no harm as long as his lies go undetected. But the one lied to almost never shares this view. The moment we consider our dishonesty from the point of view of those we lie to, we recognize that we would feel betrayed if the roles were reversed.
Sam Harris
If someone doesn't value evidence, what evidence are you going to provide to prove that they should value it? If someone doesn’t value logic, what logical argument could you provide to show the importance of logic?
Sam Harris
The only quality that distinguishes the greats from the masses, is the unwillingness to give up.
Abhijit Naskar
Any ape can reach for a banana, but only humans can reach for the stars.
V.S. Ramachandran
As human being, we live in a perpetual conversation between conversation and violence; what apart from fundamental willingness to be reasonable, can guarantee that we will keep talking to one another?
Sam Harris
Current research in any field of Science has not yet reached the point where we could start exploring the existential question regarding God as a Supreme Entity driving causality in the universe. However, as modern Neuroscience progresses further and gets more advanced, we shall get to dive deeper into the physiological processes underneath the Qualia of God in human mind. What we have seen so far through our studies in Neurotheology, is that it is not God himself/herself/itself, rather it is people’s perception of God that influences the human life. The Qualia of God impact all aspects of human life by altering the body chemistry at a cellular level.
Abhijit Naskar
our moral reasoning is plagued by two illusions. The first illusion can be called the wag-the-dog illusion: We believe that our own moral judgment (the dog) is driven by our own moral reasoning (the tail). The second illusion can be called the wag-theother-dog's-tail illusion: In a moral argument, we expect the successful rebuttal of an opponent's arguments to change the opponent's mind. Such a belief is like thinking that forcing a dog's tail to wag by moving it with your hand will make the dog happy.
Sam Harris
This concept of the afterlife really functions as a substitute for wisdom. It functions as a substitute for really absorbing our predicament, which is that everyone is going to die; there are circumstances that are just catastrophically unfair; evil sometimes wins and injustice sometimes wins, and that the only justice we are going to find in the world is the justice we make.We have an ethical responsibility to absorb this, really down to the soles of our feet. And this notion of an afterlife, of how it's all going to work out and its all part of god's plan, is a way of shirking that responsibility.
Sam Harris
One of the most pernicious effects of religion is that it tends to divorce morality from the reality of human and animal suffering. Religion allows people to imagine that their concerns are moral when they are not--that is, when they have nothing to do with suffering or its alleviation. Indeed, religion allows people to imagine that their concerns are moral when they are highly immoral--that is, when pressing these concerns inflicts unnecessary and appalling suffering on innocent human beings.
Sam Harris