Quotes by Neuroscientists - Page 5

We will embarrass our descendants, just as our ancestors embarrass us. This is moral progress.
Sam Harris
Morality does not come from a book, it comes from the human mind.
Abhijit Naskar
Morally it may be better to not kill any creature for their flesh, but biologically, meat was one of the greatest factors involved in the rise of the psychology of thinking humanity.
Abhijit Naskar
If our well-being depends upon the interaction between events in our brains and events in the world, and there are better and worse ways to secure it, then some cultures will tend to produce lives that are more worth living than others; some political persuasions will be more enlightened than others; and some world views will be mistaken in ways that cause needless human misery.
Sam Harris
Ideas matter—and philosophy is the art of thinking about them rigorously. In my view, that should be done in as public a forum as possible.
Sam Harris
Luke’s not a bad man, or even an unlikable one,” she went on. “Just a man. You’re all the same, great big hairy moths bashing yourselves to pieces after a silly flame behind a glass so clear your eyes don’t see it. And if you do manage to blunder your way inside the glass to fly into the flame, you fall down burned and dead.While all the time out there in the cool night there’s food, and love, and baby moths to get. But do you see it, do you want it? No! It’s back after the flame again, beating yourselves senseless until you burn yourselves dead!
Colleen McCullough
You can get the man out of stone-age, but not stone-age out of man.
Abhijit Naskar
You are both the worshipper and the worshipped.
Abhijit Naskar
Morality exists in the neurons as a natural sensation. Religion only tries to codify it.
Abhijit Naskar
The God that humanity so keenly seeks, lives within the human biology, yet they wander hitherto searching for it.
Abhijit Naskar
Religion, as it is generally taught all over the world, is said to be based upon faith and belief, and, in most cases, consists only of different sets of theories, and that is the reason why we find all religions quarrelling with one another.
Abhijit Naskar
You may travel the whole world, but you'll not find true religion anywhere. Whatever there is, it is in your own mind.
Abhijit Naskar
There is no such thing as 'God given scripture', 'the messenger of God' or 'the Last Prophet'.
Abhijit Naskar
The real virtue is not to be free from desires but to be content with what you have.
Abhijit Naskar
In the absence of self-control, this primordial nature of the limbic brain often compels the mind to give in to evils of corruption.
Abhijit Naskar
Her ability to use language, that thing that most separates humans from animals, was leaving her, and she was feeling less and less human as it departed. She's said a tearful good-bye to okay some time ago.
Lisa Genova
It would not be too strong to say that I felt sane for the first time in my life. And yet the change in my consciousness seemed entirely straightforward. I was simply talking to my friend—about what, I don’t recall—and realized that I had ceased to be concerned about myself. I was no longer anxious, self-critical, guarded by irony, in competition, avoiding embarrassment, ruminating about the past and future, or making any other gesture of thought or attention that separated me from him. I was no longer watching myself through another person’s eyes.
Sam Harris
There is nothing passive about mindfulness. One might even say that it expresses a specific kind of passion—a passion for discerning what is subjectively real in every moment. It is a mode of cognition that is, above all, undistracted, accepting, and (ultimately) nonconceptual. Being mindful is not a matter of thinking more clearly about experience; it is the act of experiencing more clearly, including the arising of thoughts themselves. Mindfulness is a vivid awareness of whatever is appearing in one’s mind or body—thoughts, sensations, moods—without grasping at the pleasant or recoiling from the unpleasant.
Sam Harris
It is not about whether you have free will, rather it is about whether you have enough experience to make the best possible wilful decision in the current moment of life.
Abhijit Naskar
What we are at this very moment, is determined by the sum total of all our experiences till this moment.
Abhijit Naskar
If there is any kernel of truth in the religions we so deplore,and they are just a carnival of errors,the truth is that it's possible to sink into the present moment in such a way as to find it sacred and to cease to have a problem.
Sam Harris
We are all trying to find a path back to the present moment. And good enough reason to just be happy here... Mindfulness meditation is just a trick for doing that. It's a trick for setting aside your to-do list, if only for a few moments, and actually locate a feeling of fulfilment in the present
Sam Harris
The only differences between a cult and a religion are the numbers of adherents and the degree to which they are marginalized by the rest of society.
Sam Harris
We are not at the center of ourselves, but instead — like the Earth in the Milky Way, and the Milky Way in the universe — far out on a distant edge, hearing little of what is transpiring.
David Eagleman
A scientist first has to presuppose any theory based on available relevant data. In terms of such presupposition, a scientist begins his journey of scientific exploration as a philosopher.
Abhijit Naskar
God is not an Almighty Being watching over life on earth. God is the Event Horizon of Human Consciousness.
Abhijit Naskar
Science and Religion are two vividly different realms of the human mind. They work differently at the molecular level, but the purpose of both is alleviation of the mind from the darkness of ignorance.
Abhijit Naskar
​The human brain creates everything that you are.
Abhijit Naskar
Non-duality has been the root of all religious movements on this planet.
Abhijit Naskar
Everyday conscious awareness of a human being is only the tip of an iceberg, underneath which there is a realm of relatively uncharted apparently mysterious processes, which are likely to be way more complex than the usual waking state.
Abhijit Naskar
Consciousness is simply the brain’s neural response to its surrounding environmental stimuli. Hence when the neural circuits malfunction, Consciousness tends to malfunction as well.
Abhijit Naskar
The Kingdom of God is an earthly experience which manifests in an unearthly manner.
Abhijit Naskar
Humanity has pondered over the meaning of God since its beginning. It is one of those cognitive features that came along with the advent of modern Human Consciousness.
Abhijit Naskar
Regardless of all our pretenses, deep within, we are still unconsciously the same old cave-people.
Abhijit Naskar
Even though it is common knowledge in our field of Neuroscience, I take immense pleasure every time I realize that our perception of the whole universe emerges from the activity of the little specks of jelly inside our skull.
Abhijit Naskar
We can tell a lot about a creature's level of consciousness by understanding their perception of death.
Abhijit Naskar
God is simply a magnificent state of the mind, where the finite turns infinite.
Abhijit Naskar
Each of the sapiens brains generates its own perception of God in uniquely different ways. Ergo, it imposes different qualities of meaning and value on God. You see God the way your brain wants you to see it. There is no right and wrong, or fact and fiction on this matter. It is all personal.
Abhijit Naskar
Say, there is a book written by Tolstoy sitting right there on the table. To our unique human consciousness, the reality of the papers in the book, is infinitely different from the valuable literature that they possess. For the kind of consciousness possessed by the bug which eats those papers, literature is non-existent, yet for the Human Consciousness, literature has a greater value of truth than the papers themselves.
Abhijit Naskar
Every living creature on this planet, has a conscious subjective perspective of the world. The plants may seem to us as standing indifferent to the human sufferings, but even they have their own unique mental universe. They have their own way of interacting with the environment.
Abhijit Naskar
Various fascinating psychological elements are involved in the transcendental state of human consciousness. One may lose the ability to distinguish one’s self from the rest of the world in transcendence, but still it is the human brain that constructs that state of mind. Hence, even in that altered state of consciousness one is not totally devoid of one’s beliefs, conjectures, ideas and fantasies. In fact, these ideas fill up the transcendental experience with all kinds of fanatic stories that happen to be unique, based on the person’s inner urges and drives.
Abhijit Naskar
Meditation brings Nirvana, and Nirvana brings Buddhahood.
Abhijit Naskar
A healthy PFC means a healthy cognitive grip over the world with very little elements of prejudice.
Abhijit Naskar
Our mistakes rewire our brain and open up new gateways of perception.
Abhijit Naskar
Morality does not come to this mortal world from some imaginary paradise. It rises from the neurons of mortal humans.
Abhijit Naskar
Everything we do is for the purpose of altering consciousness. We form friendships so that we can feel love and avoid loneliness…. We read for the pleasure of thinking another person's thoughts. Every waking moment, and even in our dreams, we struggle to direct the flow of sensation, emotion, and cognition towards states of consciousness that we value.
Sam Harris
Perception is like painting a scenery - no matter how beautifully you paint, it will still be a painting of the scenery, not the scenery itself.
Abhijit Naskar
Consciousness is the product of electrochemical signalling in the neurons of your brain. So when the brain stops functioning fully, your consciousness, or to a broader aspect your mind ceases to exist with its unique individualistic qualities. It's like the soothing flow of water. It is only water as long as its internal realm of two atoms of hydrogen and one atom of oxygen, remains intact. If you break that structure which we call H20, it ceases to be water. Likewise a soul remains a soul, as longs as its neural structures remain intact. If you mess with those structure, then the entire personality of the soul may get radically altered. So, to think even further, if those neural structures inside your head stop working, then the soul ceases to exist forever. So, as long as you have a functional brain, you exist, and the moment that brain dies you die.
Abhijit Naskar
It is always now
Sam Harris
If you're constantly ruminating about what you just did- or what you should have done- or what you would have done if you only had the chance, you will miss your life. Ok, you will fail to connect with it. You will fail to connect with other people.
Sam Harris
We can know what we do wrong even before we do it, but self-knowledge can't affect or change the outcome, can it? Everyone singing his own little song, convinced it's the most wonderful song the world has ever heard. Don't you see? We create our own thorns, and never stop to count the cost. All we can do is suffer the pain, and tell ourselves it was well worth it.
Colleen McCullough
No one will give a damn about you and your excellence unless you give a damn about yourself.
Abhijit Naskar
​Let your pretence of arrogance grow big as a Dinosaur, so that the fake intellectuals start to realize their true inferiority in front of you.
Abhijit Naskar
As Gazzaniga put it, "these findings all suggest that the interpretive mechanism of the left hemisphere is always hard at work, seeking the meaning of events. It is constantly looking for order and reasons, even when there is none - which leads it continually to make mistakes.
David Eagleman
A further, albeit more complex, possibility is that our conscious selves might suffer from characteristic uncertainty about our true values, and gather information about them from choices we make (the Jamesian: "How do I know what I like until I see what I pick").
Tali Sharot
It's like we act as a mirror for the environment, or to a broader aspect, the universe.
Abhijit Naskar
There is no God besides the Self. One who knows the Self, knows God.
Abhijit Naskar
One who knows the Self, knows God.
Abhijit Naskar
A newcomer to a city should first look for a suitable room for resting at night. After securing the room and keeping the luggage there, he or she may go out for sightseeing. Otherwise it'll be a lot of suffering to find a place to rest in the darkness of the night. Similarly, upon securing the eternal resting place in Self, one can freely roam around doing his or her daily works.
Abhijit Naskar
The only sin in this world is to lose faith in yourself.
Abhijit Naskar