All our behaviours are a result of neurophysiological activity in the brain.
Interpretation
Our actions stem from brain activity.
This quote suggests that everything we do, from simple tasks to complex decisions, is fundamentally driven by the physiological processes occurring in our brains. Steven Pinker emphasizes the connection between neuroscience and behavior, highlighting how our neurological functions shape our actions, thoughts, and personalities.
In practice
In a neurosciences lecture discussing the origins of human behavior.
The foundation of individual rights is the assumption that people have wants and needs and are authorities on what those wants and needs are. If people's stated desires were just some kind of erasable inscription or reprogrammable brainwashing, any atrocity could be justified.
The linguistic clumsiness of tourists and students might be the price we pay for the linguistic genius we displayed as babies, just as the decrepitude of age in the price we pay for the vigor of youth.
If we are not to abandon values such as peace and equality, or our commitments to science and truth, then we must pry these values away from claims about our psychological makeup that are vulnerable to being proven false.
We adults protect ourselves with laws, police, workplace regulations and social norms and there is no conceivable reason why children should be left more vulnerable, other that laziness or callousness in considering what life is like from their point of view.
The idea that children are passive repositories to be shaped by their parents has been massively overstated. A child's peer group is a far greater determinant of its development and achievements than parental aspiration.
Reason is non-negotiable. Try to argue against it, or to exclude it from some realm of knowledge, and you've already lost the argument, because you're using reason to make your case. ... We don't "believe" in reason.
The aim of scientific thought, then, is to apply past experience to new circumstances; the instrument is an observed uniformity in the course of events. By the use of this instrument it gives us information transcending our experience, it enables us to infer things that we have not seen from things that we have seen; and the evidence for the truth of that information depends on our supposing that the uniformity holds good beyond our experience.
Talk to people... everything good I've done has come from conversations with people. Science is a very social phenomenon.
The real reason why general relativity is widely accepted is because it made predictions that were borne out by experimental observations.
Science is nothing, but trained and organized common sense.
In just one year, the expenditure of of the U.S.'s military budget is equivalent to the entire 50-year running budget of NASA combined.
Based on the science, you can make somewhat clear statements: The number of people who can survive on six hours of sleep without impairment is zero.
Subscribe for the occasional hand-picked quote. No noise.