Neuroscience Quotes

...what draws us into a story and keeps us there is the firing of our dopamine neurons, signaling that intriguing information is on the way.

Lisa Cron

Freedom of will is born from the neurons. And that freedom allows you to sometimes make even the worst decisions ever in your life. And by making the worst decision, you simply learn what would be the better decision in future.

Abhijit Naskar

In your daily life, you make dozens of chooses between an alternative with higher overall value and a more tempting but ultimately inferior option.

Abhijit Naskar

There is a fine line deep within the mind that makes self-belief and confidence, the defining elements of success and failure in any circumstance. How we learn to activate them without running the risk of lying to ourselves is the key that unlocks the superhuman lying dormant within us.

David Amerland

Psychoanalysis has suffered the accusation of being “unscientific” from its very beginnings (Schwartz, 1999). In recent years, the Berkeley literary critic Frederick Crews has renewed the assault on the talking cure in verbose, unreadable articles in the New York Review of Books (Crews, 1990), inevitably concluding, because nothing else really persuades, that psychoanalysis fails because it is unscientific. The chorus was joined by philosopher of science, Adolf Grunbaum (1985), who played both ends against the middle: to the philosophers he professed specialist knowledge of psychoanalysis; to the psychoanalysts he professed specialist knowledge of science, particularly physics. Neither was true (Schwartz, 1995a,b, 1996a,b, 2000). The problem that mental health clinicians always face is that we deal with human subjectivity in a culture that is deeply invested in denying the importance of human subjectivity. Freud’s great invention of the analytic hour allows us to explore, with our clients, their inner worlds. Can such a subjective instrument be trusted? Not by very many. It is so dangerously close to women’s intuition. Socalled objectivity is the name of the game in our culture. Nevertheless, 100 years of clinical practice have shown psychoanalysis and psychotherapy not only to be effective, but to yield real understandings of the dynamics of human relationships, particularly the reality of transference–countertransference re-enactments now reformulated by our neuroscientists as right brain to right brain communication (Schore, 1999).

Joseph Schwartz

We have minds that are equipped for certainty, linearity and short-term decisions, that must instead make long-term decisions in a non-linear, probabilistic world.

Paul Gibbons

A sociocultural environment is not some cunningly contrived thing only exists in social psychology labs. Don't look now, but you're in one right this moment.

Cordelia Fine

No doubt the female self and the male self can be as useful as any other social identity in the right circumstances. But flexible, context-sensitive, and useful is not the same as “hardwired”.

Cordelia Fine

The cause-effect sequences in our brains are just as determining, just as inescapable, as anywhere else in Nature.

Corliss Lamont

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

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

Vardan Hambardzumyan

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

The more we build these networks and enrich our stores of memory and experience, the easier it is to learn, because what we already know serves as a foundation for forming increasingly complex thoughts.

John J. Ratey

When the brain’s potential is fully unleashed, there can be few if any limitations. Anyone who tells you otherwise isn’t up-to-date with the latest scientific findings on the brain and is exhibiting their ignorance. For the brain’s potential is the human potential…

James Morcan

The latest scientific studies have revealed extraordinary findings. The brain is much more flexible and adaptable than previously thought. It can evolve and creatively work around limitations and nullify them.

James Morcan

What have we learned so far about the human brain? It messes with memories, it jumps at shadows, it's terrified of harmless things, it screws with our diet, our sleeping, our movement, it convinces us we're brilliant when we're not, it makes up half the stuff we perceive, it gets us to do irrational things when emotional, it causes us to make friends incredibly quickly and turn on them in an instant.A worrying list. What's even more worrying, it does all of this when it's working properly.

Dean Burnett

It might weigh little over a kilogram but, taken on its own scale, the brain is unimaginably vast. One cubic millimetre contains between twenty and twenty-five thousand neurons. It has eighty-six billion of these cells, and each one is complex as a city and is in contact with ten thousand other neurons just like it. Within just one cubic centimetre of brain tissue, there is the same number of connections as there are stars in the Milky Way. Your brain contains a hundred trillion of them. Information in the form of electricity and chemicals flows around these paths in great forking trails and in circuits and feedback loops and fantastical storms of activity tat bloom to life speeds of up to a hundred and twenty metres per second. According to the neuroscientist V. S. Ramachandran, 'The number of permutations and combinations of activity that are theoretically possible exceeds the number of elementary particles in the universe.' And yet, he continues, 'We know so little about it that even a child's questions should be seriously entertained.

Will Storr

You are your brain and your brain is you.

Abhijit Naskar

Oftentimes, those special brains, the ones that are capable of focusing more intently than others, do so at the expense of emotional maturity

Dan Brown

Speechlessness, however, affirmed in the diagnosis, is carefully based on the facts of the examination, as we see by rendering the statements concerned, just as they stand in examination and diagnosis: "If thou examinest a man having a wound in the temple, ...; if thou ask of him concerning his malady and he speak not to thee; ...; thou shouldst say concerning him, 'One having a wound in his temple, ... (and) he is speechless'.

James Henry Breasted

The attention given to the side of the head which has received the injury, in connection with a specific reference to the side of the body nervously affected, is in itself evidence that in this case the ancient surgeon was already beginning observations on the localization of functions in the brain.

James Henry Breasted

Our metaphors for the operation of the brain are frequently drawn from the production line. We think of the brain as a glorified sausage machine, taking in information from the senses, processing it and regurgitating it in a different form, as thoughts or actions. The digital computer reinforces this idea because it is quite explicitly a machine that does to information what a sausage machine does to pork. Indeed, the brain was the original inspiration and metaphor for the development of the digital computer, and early computers were often described as 'giant brains'. Unfortunately, neuroscientists have sometimes turned this analogy on its head, and based their models of brain function on the workings of the digital computer (for example by assuming that memory is separate and distinct from processing, as it is in a computer). This makes the whole metaphor dangerously self-reinforcing.

Steve Grand

I am proud to say to you that, I am a scientist and I accept all religions to be biologically true and equal. My pursuit of understanding the human mind has taught me universal tolerance.

Abhijit Naskar

It is necessary for the future scientists interested in the field of Neurotheology, to have a bit naïve approach towards the whole idea of God and religion beyond the conventional labels of religion and atheism.

Abhijit Naskar

The brain works in a holistic, cooperative way that makes our basest desire or most abject fear as expressive of who we are as abstract thinking of the highest order. That means that we are all equal part snakes, monkeys, and spacemen.

David Amerland

Practice creates more connections among the neurons, which push you a little further towards perfection.

Abhijit Naskar

A panic attack is pathological exaggeration of the body’s normal response to fear, stress or excitement.

Abhijit Naskar

Qualia of God refers to the private subjective experience or conception of God in people.

Abhijit Naskar

At first the brain weighs a potential partner, and if the partner fits our ancestral wish list, we get a spike in the release of sex chemicals that makes us dizzy with a rush of unavoidable infatuation. It's the first step down the primeval path of pair-bonding.

Abhijit Naskar

Sexual thoughts float through a man’s brain many times a day, while on the contrary a woman has them only one to four times a day.

Abhijit Naskar

God is created by the brain and can also be destroyed by the brain. But this way ‘Love’ doesn’t exist either, because it also is the result of molecular interaction within the brain. Love is a result of complex and mind-blowing interactions between neurotransmitters like Oxytocin, Dopamine, Serotonin, Endorphins and the reward center of the brain. Does this mean we should downright stop loving our family or friends? Since there is no existence of actual ‘Love’, should we just deny what our heart feels for our beloved ones? Whatever the answer is, the same goes for the faith upon divine existence. Only one thing to remember – Love gives life, so should faith.

Abhijit Naskar

Religion is not a book, it is a neurological sentiment.

Abhijit Naskar

Angelo," he said, and felt the bed rock as Angelo shuddered, caught halfway between REM atonia - the inhibition of movement caused by the shutdown of monoamines in the brain - and waking.

Elizabeth Bear

With regard to sleep and waking, we must consider what they are: whether they are peculiar to soul or to body, or common to both; and if common, to what part of soul or body the appertain: further, from what cause it arises that they are atributes of animals, and whether all animals share in them both, or some partake of the one only, others of the other only, or some partake of neither and some of both.

Aristotle

This hinted at something that no one had ever suspected -- that the brain tracks moving things more easily that still things. We have a built-in bias toward detecting action. Why? Because it's probably more critical for animals to spot moving things (predators, prey, falling trees) than static things, which can wait. In fact, our vision is so biased toward movement that we don't technically see stationary objects at all. To see something stationary, our brains have to scribble our eyes subtly over its surface. Experiments have even proven that if you artificially stabilize an image on the retina with a combination of special contact lenses and microelectronics, the image will vanish.

Sam Kean

Because vision appears so effortless, we are like fish challenged to understand water.

David Eagleman

Educated people, of course, know that perception, cognition, language, and emotion are rooted in the brain. But it is still tempting to think of the brain as it was shown in old educational cartoons, as a control panel with gauges and levers operated by a user — the self, the soul, the ghost, the person, the “me.” But cognitive neuroscience is showing that the self, too, is just another network of brain systems. [C]ognitive neuroscientists have not only exorcised the ghost but have shown that the brain does not even have a part that does exactly what the ghost is supposed to do: review all the facts and make a decision for the rest of the brain to carry out. Each of us feels that there is a single “I” in control. But that is an illusion that the brain works hard to produce, like the impression that our visual fields are rich in detail from edge to edge. The brain does have supervisory systems in the prefrontal lobes and anterior cingulate cortex, which can push the buttons of behavior and override habits and urges. But those systems are gadgets with specific quirks and limitations; they are not implementations of the rational free agent traditionally identified with the soul or the self.

Steven Pinker

Genetics, accidents of birth or events in early childhood have left criminals' brains and bodies with measurable flaws predisposing them to committing assault, murder and other antisocial acts. .... Many offenders also have impairments in their autonomic nervous system, the system responsible for the edgy, nervous feeling that can come with emotional arousal. This leads to a fearless, risk-taking personality, perhaps to compensate for chronic under-arousal. Many convicted criminals, like the Unabomber, have slow heartbeats. It also gives them lower heart rates, which explains why heart rate is such a good predictor of criminal tendencies. The Unabomber, Ted Kaczynski, for example, had a resting heart rate of just 54 beats per minute, which put him in the bottom 3 per cent of the population.

Adrian Raine

An inclusive narrative structure provides the executive brain with the best template and strategy for the oversight and coordination of the functions of mind. A story well told, containing conflicts and resolutions, gestures and expressions, and thoughts flavored with emotion, connects people ad integrates neural networks

Louis Cozolino

The point is not to resist painful experiences or grasp at pleasant ones: that's a kind of craving - and craving leads to suffering. The art is to find a balance in which you remain mindful, accepting, and curious regarding difficult experiences - while also taking in supportive feelings and thoughts.

Rick Hanson

Taking in the good is not about putting a happy shiny face on everything, nor is it about turning away from the hard things in life. It's about nourishing well-being, contentment, and peace inside that are refuges you can always come from and return to.

Rick Hanson

Pathology can indeed evoke experiences of Absolute Godliness, but not all God experiences are caused by pathology. They can also occur due to disturbance in the geomagnetic field of our planet, consumption of psychedelics, excruciatingly extreme level of stress during a near- death situation, or ultimately through a natural and healthy procedure of meditation or/and prayer.

Abhijit Naskar

For in disease the most voluntary or most special movements, faculties, etc., suffer first and most, that is in an order the exact opposite of evolution. Therefore I call this the principle of Dissolution.

John Hughlings Jackson

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

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

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

The human brain is a cultural artifact. We don't load culture into a virgin brain like software loading into a computer; rather, culture helps to wire the brain. Brains then become carriers of culture, helping to create and perpetuate it.

Lisa Feldman Barrett

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

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

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

Morality does not come from a book, it comes from the human mind.

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

Music, uniquely among the arts, is both completely abstract and profoundly emotional. It has no power to represent anything particular or external, but it has a unique power to express inner states or feelings. Music can pierce the heart directly; it needs no mediation.

Oliver Sacks

The illusion of self-awareness. Happy automatons, running on trivial programs. I'll bet you never guess. From the inside, how can you?

Vernor Vinge

Our insecurities drive us. Our fears control us. We try to hide the first and deny the second and it is exhausting us.

David Amerland

As the language areas of the left hemisphere enter their sensitive period during the middle of the second year of life, grammatical language in the left integrates with the interpersonal and prosodic elements of communication already well developed in the right. As the cortical language centers mature, words are joined together to make sentences and can be used to express increasingly complex ideas flavored with emotion. As the frontal cortex continues to expand and connect with more neural networks, memory improves and a sense of time slowly emerges and autobiographical memory begins to connect the self with places and events, within and across time. The emerging narratives begin to organize the nascent sense of self and become the bedrock of our sense of self in interpersonal and physical space

Louis Cozolino

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

Yes, there is an outside world, and yes, there is an objective reality, but in moving through this world, we constantly apply unconscious filter mechanisms, and in doing so, we unknowingly construct our own individual world, which is our "reality tunnel.

Thomas Metzinger

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