Neuroscience Quotes - Page 2

Now I have to say I'm a complete atheist, I have no religious views myself and no spiritual views, except very watered down humanistic spiritual views, and consciousness is just a fact of life, it's a natural fact of life.

David J. Chalmers

The conscious events that we are aware of are physical events in their own right, just as much as the brain events observed in the lab by researchers. If we allow the mental its own existence as a category disjoint from the physical, we will never be able to get it back in.

William Hirstein

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

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

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

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

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

In truth, there is no such thing as an “intuitive boundary” of a sensory state. That most philosophers take such states as brain-bound is not an intuition, but a prejudice.

István Aranyosi

Most of Jesus’ life is told through the four Gospels of the New Testament, known as the Canonical gospels, written by Matthew, Mark, Luke and John. These are not biographies in the modern sense but accounts with allegorical intent. They are written to engender faith in Jesus as the Messiah and the incarnation of God, and not to provide factual data about Jesus’s life. This left the door of exaggeration open. And through that door all kinds of mystical non-sense crept in and made place right alongside the good philosophical teachings of Jesus.

Abhijit Naskar

...education is the ability to retrieve information at will and analyze it. But you can't have higher-level learning- you can't analyze-without retrieving information.' And you can't retrieve information without putting the information in there in the first place. The dichotomy between "learning" and "memorizing" is false, Matthews contends. You can't learn without memorizing, and if done right, you can't memorize without learning.

Joshua Foer

We are who we are because of what we learn and what we remember.

Abhijit Naskar

The more emotional you are in a situation, the more memories you’ll have of that situation in the long run.

Abhijit Naskar

Everything in your mental life proceeds in proper neurological order. If you could have sufficient insight into all the inner and outer parts of your mental life, along with remembrance and intelligence enough to consider all the circumstances and take them into account, you would be a true prophet and visualize the future in the present as in a mirror.

Abhijit Naskar

Through the sacred verses filled with violence and self-righteousness, the minds of the angry individuals find a way to get rid of all their misery. At that unstable state of consciousness, they are drawn to the description of the Holy War. They visualize a glimmer of hope. They feel absolutely immersed in it. Finally when they emerge as holy warriors, they are no longer humans, from the emotional perspective. They emerge as wild beasts, neurologically almost unable to feel human emotions, like empathy, love, kindness and compassion. Consequently the whole world faces the wrath of the most primitive of all human elements in the name of God’s judgment.

Abhijit Naskar

God is hardwired within the neural circuitry.

Abhijit Naskar

A healthy brain leads to a healthy you.

Abhijit Naskar

Neurons giveth and neurons taketh away.

Abhijit Naskar

It is the finding of neuroscience, in fact, that belief is at least in part a matter of emotion. Whatever we believe to be true lights up areas of our brain responsible for self-identification and the processing of feelings and sentiments. If we believe something, then, the object of our belief becomes an emotionally potent aspect of our own self-image. There is some common sense to this, too: the most passionate of believers and the most strident of New Atheists are palpably, visibly fired up and ready to defend their positions.

Steve Volk

Any thought sequence that minimizes anxiety would get reinforced over time. The sequence would be maintained during the person’s development and would be provoked in contexts where refutation of the belief might occur. So, any kind of refutation of a person’s religious beliefs makes the beliefs only stronger.

Abhijit Naskar

If you could have sufficient insight into all the inner and outer parts of your mental life, along with remembrance and intelligence enough to consider all the circumstances and take them into account, you would be a true prophet and visualize the future in the present as in a mirror.

Abhijit Naskar

Each day I wake up with a naive perspective of life and universe, and walk towards understanding a little more about the true nature of human perception with all its vivacious nuances and behavioral expressions.

Abhijit Naskar

Jumping to conclusions is efficient if the conclusions are likely to be correct and the costs of an occasional mistake acceptable. Jumping to conclusions is risky when the situation is unfamiliar, the stakes are high and there is no time to collect more information.

Daniel Kahneman

It is difficult to overstate the importance of understanding mirror neurons and their function. They may well be central to social learning, imitation, and the cultural transmission of skills and attitudes—perhaps even of the pressed-together sound clusters we call words. By hyperdeveloping the mirror-neuron system, evolution in effect turned culture into the new genome. Armed with culture, humans could adapt to hostile new environments and figure out how to exploit formerly inaccessible or poisonous food sources in just one or two generations—instead of the hundreds or thousands of generations such adaptations would have taken to accomplish through genetic evolution.Thus culture became a significant new source of evolutionary pressure, which helped select brains that had even better mirror-neuron systems and the imitative learning associated with them. The result was one of the many self-amplifying snowball effects that culminated in Homo sapiens, the ape that looked into its own mind and saw the whole cosmos reflected inside.

V.S. Ramachandran

... [O]ne of the most influential approaches to thinking about memory in recent years, known as connectionism, has abandoned the idea that a memory is an activated picture of a past event. Connectionist or neural network models are based on the principle that the brain stores engrams by increasing the strength of connections between different neurons that participate in encoding an experience. When we encode an experience, connections between active neurons become stronger, and this specific pattern of brain activity constitutes the engram. Later, as we try to remember the experience, a retrieval cue will induce another pattern of activity in the brain. If this pattern is similar enough to a previously encoded pattern, remembering will occur. The "memory" in a neural network model is not simply an activated engram, however. It is a unique pattern that emerges from the pooled contributions of the cue and the engram. A neural network combines information in the present environment with patterns that have been stored in the past, and the resulting mixture of the two is what the network remembers... When we remember, we complete a pattern with the best match available in memory; we do not shine a spotlight on a stored picture.

Daniel L. Schacter

Thus, the "memories" that people reported contained little information about the event they were trying to recall (the speaker's tone of voice) but were greatly influenced by the properties of the retrieval cue that we gave them (the positive or negative facial expression).

Daniel L. Schacter

Beneath the surface of the protective parts of trauma survivors there exists an undamaged essence, a Self that is confident, curious, and calm, a Self that has been sheltered from destruction by the various protectors that have emerged in their efforts to ensure survival. Once those protectors trust that it is safe to separate, the Self will spontaneously emerge, and the parts can be enlisted in the healing process

Bessel A. van der Kolk

You know very well what the right choice is, yet you keep making the wrong one.

Richard O'Connor

...we are a narrative, storytelling species. Revealing our own histories, and understanding those of others can really help us appreciate the humanity in all of our fellow individuals.

Stephen P. Hinshaw

It’s better not to hold your feelings inside too much and express them to a dear one freely, than to pay thousands of dollars to a psychiatrist for the same outburst of emotions later. Emotions are a bonding mechanism for humans. So, use ‘em, abuse ‘em and utilize ‘em.

Abhijit Naskar

From a social psychological standpoint, the selfie phenomenon seems to stem from two basic human motives. The first is to attract attention from other people. Because people’s positive social outcomes in life require that others know them, people are motivated to get and maintain social attention. By posting selfies, people can keep themselves in other people’s minds. In addition, like all photographs that are posted on line, selfies are used to convey a particular impression of oneself. Through the clothes one wears, one’s expression, staging of the physical setting, and the style of the photo, people can convey a particular public image of themselves, presumably one that they think will garner social rewards.

Mark R. Leary

A lizard never thinks something is wrong with the world, even as it watches its young get eaten alive. It doesn't tell itself "something is wrong with the world," because it doesn't have enough neurons to imagine the world being other than what it is. It doesn't expect a world in which there is no predators, so it doesn't condemn the world for falling short of expectations. it doesn't condemn itself for failing to keep its offspring alive. Humans expect more, and we do something about it. That's why we end up focused on our disappointments instead of saluting our accomplishments.

Loretta Graziano Breuning

When a monkey loses a banana to a rival, he feels bad, but he doesn't expand the problem by thinking about it over and over. He looks for another banana. He ends up feeling rewarded rather than harmed. Humans use their extra neurons to construct theories about bananas and end up constructing pain.

Loretta Graziano Breuning

When you're anxious, don't immediately trust your automatic thoughts because oftentimes these thoughts are irrational. Thoughts are not facts. They're just thoughts and sometimes don't need to be given so much importance.

John Tsilimparis

For a man, the optimal evolutionary strategy is to disseminate his genes as widely as possible, given his few minutes (or, alas, seconds) of investment in each encounter. It all makes simple evolutionary sense, since a woman invests a good deal of time and effort -a nine month long, risky, strenuous pregnancy, in each offspring. Naturally she has to be very discerning in her choice of sexual partners.

Abhijit Naskar

Humanism is not a single character. It is a magnificent blend of various emotional and behavioral traits that are unique to the human mind.

Abhijit Naskar

Healthy brains create a healthy society.

Abhijit Naskar

Fairytales are healthy for the children. As they grow up, the magical thinking wears off, but the fairytale-induced creative brain circuits stay forever.

Abhijit Naskar

Our entire neurobiology acts as a giant input-output system, that receives information from the outside world, processes that information and makes a person react accordingly.

Abhijit Naskar

Pathology can indeed cause experiences of the Kingdom of God, but not all God experiences are caused by pathology.

Abhijit Naskar

All deities are external manifestation of humanity's internal divinity.

Abhijit Naskar

Even though the world hails Joan of Arc as some sort of hero, which she undoubtedly was, what pains me the most is that her pathological condition ultimately led to her demise at the age of only nineteen.

Abhijit Naskar

The universe perceives itself through us, or to be more specific, through our neurons.

Abhijit Naskar

You are not even seeing most of what's going on in the universe. On top of that, your brain filters out much of what it receives from the environment. So that what you are consciously aware of is only a fractional representation of your universe.

Abhijit Naskar

In every walk of life, you do have the freedom to choose, but that freedom is based on the perception of the world and yourself which you have gained until that moment of life.

Abhijit Naskar

Reality is a construct of chemicals.

Abhijit Naskar

When I am fully immersed in my work of nourishing humanity, it fills my head with all kinds of feel-good chemicals, such as endorphins, serotonin and dopamine. Problems occur during the brief intervals between the finishing of one work and the beginning of another. During these intervals, my biology starts to get filled with stress hormones cortisol and adrenalin, that worsens my OCD. That is why, I can’t sit still even a day after I finish writing a book. Because if I do, my OCD begins to suffocate me inside my head. Hence, as soon as I deliver a work, I have to start working on my next scientific literature.

Abhijit Naskar

The pattern recognition theory of mind that I articulate in this book is based on a different fundamental unit: not the neuron itself, but rather an assembly of neurons, which I estimate to number around a hundred. The wiring and synaptic strengths within each unit are relatively stable and determined genetically—that is the organization within each pattern recognition module is determined by genetic design. Learning takes place in the creation of connections between these units, not within them, and probably in the synaptic strengths of the interunit connections.

Ray Kurzweil

in simple terms, what you perceive as real, is actually a neurological reconstruction or simulation of the actual real thing. It’s not as simple as saying, we see as it is. Actually we do not ever see as it is.

Abhijit Naskar

Memorizing facts and then regurgitating them into carefully crafted words is not science people. It’s intellectual bulimia. Real science happens when we explore what we don’t know. The first law of understanding the human brain and the mind within, is to be an explorer.

Abhijit Naskar

The self is a repeatedly reconstructed biological state.

António R. Damásio

Neuron is to Consciousness, what D.N.A. is to Life. Thus, Biology of Mind is to the twenty-first century, what Biology of Life was to the twentieth century.

Abhijit Naskar

We are but a bunch of neurons.

Abhijit Naskar

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Neuroscience Quotes - Page 2

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