I can explain my body and my brain, but there's something more. I can't explain my own existence - what makes me a unique human being.
John EcclesRead
The last thing that man will understand in nature is the performance of his brain.
Interpretation
The complexity of the human brain's functions is often the hardest to grasp in our understanding of nature.
In this quote, John Eccles suggests that despite our exploration and understanding of the natural world, the intricate workings of our own brains are the final frontier in our comprehension. This highlights the remarkable complexity of human cognition and the ongoing journey to decipher how our minds interpret and interact with the world around us.
In practice
In a neuroscience lecture discussing the intricacies of brain function.
I can explain my body and my brain, but there's something more. I can't explain my own existence - what makes me a unique human being.
A better understanding of the brain is certain to lead man to a richer comprehension both of himself, of his fellow man, and of society, and in fact of the whole world with its problems.
Information overload refers to the notion that we're trying to take in more than the brain can handle.
It is a profound and necessary truth that the deep things in science are not found because they are useful; they are found because it was possible to find them.
A scientist who is also a human being cannot rest while knowledge which might be used to reduce suffering rests on the shelf.
Today, all physicists know from studying Einstein and Bohr that sometimes an idea which looks completely paradoxical at first, if analyzed to completion in all detail and in experimental situations, may, in fact, not be paradoxical.
There's no doubt that scientific training helps many authors to write better science fiction. And yet, several of the very best were English majors who could not parse a differential equation to save their lives.
Well, I'm a bacteriologist, you know. I live in a nine-hundred-diameter microscope. I can hardly claim to take serious notice of anything that I can see with my naked eye.
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