Brain Quotes

But when the flash flood crosses your path, when the lion leaps at you from the grasses, advanced self-awareness is an unaffordable indulgence. The brain stem does its best.

Peter Watts

Without a response, I just stand there like an idiot. Like she just slapped my brain out of my skull and I can’t think.

Rebecca A. Rogers

The seat of consciousness and intelligence was from the earliest times regarded by the Egyptians as both the heart and the bowels or abdomen. Our surgeon, however, has observed the fact that injuries to the brain affect other parts of the body, especially in his experience the lower limbs. He notes the drag or shuffle of one foot, presumably the partial paralysis resulting from a cranial wound, and the ancient commentator carefully explains the meaning of the obsolete word used for "shuffle.

James Henry Breasted

Most of everything is very little of not very much at all.

Richard Edward Harding

Here we see the word "brain" occurring for the first time in human speech, as far as it is known to us; and in discussing injuries affecting the brain, we note the surgeon's effort to delimit his terms as he selects for specialization a series of common and current words to designate three degrees of injury to the skull indicated in modern surgery by the terms "fracture", "compound fracture," and "compound comminuted fracture," all of which the ancient commentator carefully explains.

James Henry Breasted

I finally chalked it up to the fact that the brain is truly an extraordinary device: more extraordinary than we can even guess.

Eben Alexander

Nobody really enjoys having to pacify their feelings. It's too much like failure; it reminds you of weakness. but feelings don't want to be pacified, either. They want to be fulfilled. You fulfill your positive feelings (love, hope, optimism, appreciation, approval) by connecting with other people, expressing your best self. You fulfill your negative feelings by releasing them. Your whole system recognizes negative feelings as toxic. It's futile to bottle them up, divert them, ignore them, or try to rise above them. Either negativity is leaving or it's hanging on - it has no other alternative. As you fulfill emotions, your brain will change and form new patterns, which is the whole goal.

Deepak Chopra

Exercise has a direct brain connection, when you consider what it actually does. What we tend to overlook are the feedback loops that connect the brain to every cell in the body. Therefore when you throw a ball, run on a treadmill, or jog along the shore, billions of cells are "seeing" the outside world. The chemicals transmitted form the brain are acting the way sense organs do, making contact with the outside world and offering stimulation from that world.This is why the jump from being sedentary to doing a minimal amount of exercise - such as walking, light gardening, and climbing the stairs instead of taking the elevator - is so healthy. Your cells want to be part of the world.

Deepak Chopra

A slight concussion of the brain simplifies matters so beautifully.("Three O'Clock")

Cornell Woolrich

There is no medicine or other intervention that appears to be nearly as effective as exercise in maintaining or even bumping up a person's cognitive abilities.

Gretchen Reynolds

Your brain is like a plant. If you plant a seed in it, it will grow into a big idea.

Jane Kang

Many „pathogens“ (both chemical and behavioral) can influence how you turn out; these include substance abuse by a mother during pregnancy, maternal stress, and low birth weight. As a child grows, neglect, physical abuse, and head injury can cause problems in mental development. Once the child is grown, substance abuse and exposure to a variety of toxins can damage the brain, modifying intelligence, aggression, and decision-making abilities. The major public health movement to remove lead-based paint grew out of an understanding that even low levels of lead can cause brain damage that makes children less inteligent and, in some cases, more impulsive and aggressive. How you turn out depends on where you´ve been. So when it comes to thinking about blameworthiness, the first difficulty to consider is that people do not choose their own developmental path.It´s problematic to imagine yourself in the shoes of a criminal and conclude, „Well, I wouldn´t have done that“ – because if you weren´t exposed to in utero cocaine, lead poisoning, or physical abuse, and he was, then you and he are not directly comparable.

David Eagleman

You are not really free, and that is why you do not know what I am talking about.

Bryant McGill

The deep secret of the brain is that not only the spinal cord but the entire central nervous system works this way: internally generated activity is modulated by sensory input. In this view, the difference between being awake and being asleep is merely that the data coming in from the eyes anchors the perception. Asleep vision (dreaming) is perception that is not tied down to anything in the real world; waking perception is something like dreaming with a little more commitment to what´s in front of you. Other examples of unanchored perception are found in prisoners in pitch-park solitary confinement, or in people in sensory deprivation chambers. Both of these situations quickly lead to hallucinations.

David Eagleman

Idols of the injury,dug in behind the least understoodmotor plan information.The vile abomination temporal lobes andThe four loathsome memory walls andThe four reasoning, arithmetic beastsare found for all behind pain and planes.Portrayed as a house,Go in, function, cause blindness fromThe house's hearing spirit, judgment andThe court's four bronze woes andThe functioning brain lobe wings,Go in, hearing and perception,I dig under door fronts, pain and plans.

Bill Ectric

Humankind made these religions; that our brains are capable of doing that is neither something to take too seriously — because we also make poop, and we learned to flush that the fuck down the toilet — but it's also not something to totally disregard.

Dan Harmon

The brain has only three functions: open, closed, or deprived.

Anthony Liccione

Eat some food.

Jed Hansen

Your own brain ought to have the decency to be on your side!

Terry Pratchett

Instead of reality being passively recorded by the brain, it is actively constructed by it.

David Eagleman

It is a popular fact that nine-tenths of the brain is not used and, like most popular facts, it is wrong. Not even the most stupid Creator would go to the trouble of making the human head carry around several pounds of unnecessary gray goo if its only real purpose was, for example, to serve as a delicacy for certain remote tribesmen in unexplored valleys.

Terry Pratchett

Brains are survival engines, not truth detectors.

Peter Watts

Not all tongues that wag cohabit with a brain.

Donita K. Paul

The most powerful sex organ was the brain, you know what that meansPoor Justin!

Sarah Strohmeyer

Our brains contain one hundred billion nerve cells (neurons). Each neuron makes links with ten thousand other neurons to form an incredible three dimensional grid. This grid therefore contains a thousand trillion connections - that's 1,000,000,000,000,000 (a quadrillion). It's hard to imagine this, so let's visualise each connection as a disc that's 1mm thick. Stack up the quadrillion discs on top of each other and they will reach the sun (which is ninety-three million miles from the earth) and back, three times over.

Nessa Carey

Life is about solving for x

Jane Lescarbeau

If we not only feed that most intelligent computer which is our brain but also compute the data we collect, we cannot go wrong. In a way we all can guess what will happen.

Gisela Hausmann

The fate of the physiology of the brain is independent of the truth and falsity of my assertions relative to the laws of the organization of the nervous system, in general, and of the brain in particular, just as the knowledge of the functions of a sense is independent of the knowledge of the structure of its apparatus.

Franz Joseph Gall

The neocortex is not like a computer, parallel or otherwise. Instead of computing answers to problems the neocortex uses stored memories to solve problems and produce behavior.

Jeff Hawkins

I believe that all people allow the act of victimization to take lead in their lives without realizing or trying to stop it. You hear of another person's problems, automatically feel the need to salve their pain, so you make it your own. After a while, it no longer matters if the problem was yours to begin with. You absorb their pain into your body, your blood stream, your soul. It becomes yours.

Leigh Hershkovich

I think our brain is our soul. I don’t believe in after-life and much less in a sort of buildings-like heaven, where you meet friends, enemies, relatives.

Margherita Hack

Always follow your heart ... But take your brain with you too.... Be smart.

Ziad K. Abdelnour

The communication between the brain and the heart is a two-way dialogue.

Mindie Kniss

The brain is an incredible multitasker. At the same time that it's piercing itself with superheated needles of anguish, it's ruthlessly making plans, contingencies, plotting out a future, giving zero fucks whether it'll ever see it.

Leah Raeder

Psychopathy is like sunlight. Overexposure can hasten one’s demise in grotesque, carcinogenic fashion. But regulated exposure at controlled and optimal levels can have a significant positive impact on well-being and quality of life.

Kevin Dutton

Scientific truth is universal, because it is only discovered by the human brain and not made by it, as art is.

Konrad Lorenz

And since nothing whatever happens to us outside our own brain; since nothing hurt us or gives us pleasure except within the brain, the supreme importance of being able to control what goes on in that mysterious brain is patent.

Arnold Bennett

No one feels your empty stomach, but everyone does your empty brain.

M.F. Moonzajer

Rules of science.” Alessandro shrugged his elegant shoulders. “And what are those? We don’t even know how this works.” He pointed to his head.

Magnus Flyte

- I'm a Neuroscientist.- What's that? What do you study?- I study your brain!

Vardan Hambardzumyan

A fast tongue is a sign of a slow brain

Abu Fennek

The part of the brain most affected by early stress is the prefrontal cortex, which is critical in self-regulatory activities of all kinds, both emotional and cognitive. As a result, children who grow up in stressful environments generally find it harder to concentrate, harder to sit still, harder to rebound from disappointments, and harder to follow directions. And that has a direct effect on their performance in school.

Paul Tough

You´re not perceiving what's out there. You're perceiving whatever your brain tells you.

David Eagleman

My upstairs brain and my downstairs brain engaged in a game of risk and it was downstairs’ turn to roll the dice.

Penny Reid

Good for you, you have a heart, you can be a liberal. Now, couple your heart with your brain, and you can be a conservative.

Glenn Beck

If an epileptic seizure is focused in a particular sweet spot in the temporal lobe, a person won´t have motor seizures, but instead something more subtle. The effect is something like a cognitive seizure, marked by changes of personality, hyperreligiosity (an obsession with religion and feelings of religious certainity), hypergraphia (extensive writing on a subject, usually about religion), the false sense of an external presence, and, often, the hearing voices that are attributed to a god. Some fraction of history´s prophets, martyrs, and leaders appear to have had temporal lobe epilepsy.When the brain activity is kindled in the right spot, people hear voices. If a physician prescribes an anti-epileptic medication, the seizures go away and the voices disappear. Our reality depends on what our biology is up to.

David Eagleman

It has been said that the great events of the world take place in the brain.It is in the brain, and the brain only, that the great sins of the world take place also.

Oscar Wilde

Our brains are obviously capable of astoundingly fast and complex calculations that happen subconsciously. We can't explain them because most of the time we hardly even realize they're happening.

Joshua Foer

Drink your coffee, it clears out the brain in the morning

Sergei Lukyanenko

Our brain is so full of nonsense there is no room for common sense.

Debasish Mridha

All perception is the result of electrical impulses in the brain - the world of the individual is tantamount to a highly advanced computer running and analyzing programs in its working memory.

Kevin Michel

The brain can be a wonderful tool, can be a willing slave, as has been evidenced by some men, but of course it works poorly when it has not the habit of usage. An automobile can become a source of delight, but the first time you drive you are as apt to go up a tree as to go up the road.

Robert Henri

Planning. Short-term memory. Attention. At first glance, these three frontal lobe functions can seem like diverse activities that just happen to be packed into the same brain region. But on closer inspection it turns out that they are facets of the same basic phenomenon of 'restraint'. Planning restrains our brains from wandering from a chosen path of activity. Short-term memory retrains sensory cortex from moving on to different imagery. Attention constrains the kind of sensory data admitted to sensory cortex.

Robert Jourdain

You could harbor a man in your bed or your body, play on his nervous system like Paderewski at the keyboard, and not shift his brain one inch out of the concrete of dogma. (p. 5)

Jonathan Lethem

All the same,' said the Scarecrow,'I shall ask for brains instead of a heart; for a fool would not know what to do with a heart if he had one.''I shall take the heart,' returned the Tin Woodman,'for brains do not make one happy, and happiness is the best thing in the world.

L. Frank Baum

You are where your brain is but not where a front-page headline is.

Santosh Kalwar

Most people don't see half of what's in front of them. Your visual cortex does a shit load of imaging processing before the signal even gets to your brain, whose priorities are still checking the ancestral Savannah for dangerous predators, edible berries and climable trees. That's why a sudden cat in the night can make you jump and some people when distracted, can walk right out in front of a bus. Your brain just isn't interested in those large moving chunks of metal or the static heaps of brightly colored stuff that piles up in drifts around us. Never mind all that, says your brain, it's those silent fur-covered merchants of death you've got to watch out for.

Ben Aaronovitch

Holy freaking crap. A suicide bomber just detonated a bomb in my brain,

Megan Thomason

If your brain is working, you always have no time.

VicDo

When a particular function of the mind does not work well, it shows how effective the brain is when it does.

Joel Levinson

1 2 3 … 11 Next

Brain Quotes

Related Topics