Like the entomologist in search of colorful butterflies, my attention has chased in the gardens of the grey matter cells with delicate and elegant shapes, the mysterious butterflies of the soul, whose beating of wings may one day reveal to us the secrets of the mind.
Interpretation
This quote compares the pursuit of understanding the mind to an entomologist's search for butterflies, emphasizing the beauty and mystery of the brain's secrets.
Santiago Ramon Y Cajal uses the metaphor of an entomologist searching for colorful butterflies to illustrate the intricate and delicate process of exploring the human mind. Just as butterflies symbolize beauty and transformation, the 'butterflies of the soul' represent the profound insights and mysteries that lie within our cognitive processes, suggesting that through careful study, we may uncover the deeper secrets of human consciousness.
In practice
In a lecture about neuroscience, one could use this quote to illustrate the beauty of studying the brain.
In my own view, some advice about what should be known, about what technical education should be acquired, about the intense motivation needed to succeed, and about the carelessness and inclination toward bias that must be avoided is far more useful than all the rules and warnings of theoretical logic.
The worst part is not in making a mistake but in trying to justify it, instead of using it as a heaven-sent warning of our mindlessness or our ignorance.
As long as our brain is a mystery, the universe, the reflection of the structure of the brain will also be a mystery.
Intellectual beauty is sufficient unto itself, and only for it rather than for the future good of humanity does the scholar condemn himself to arduous and painful labors.
Nowhere in space will we rest our eyes upon the familiar shapes of trees and plants, or any of the animals that share our world. Whatsoever life we meet will be as strange and alien as the nightmare creatures of the ocean abyss, or of the insect empire whose horrors are normally hidden from us by their microscopic scale.
One can say, looking at the papers in this symposium, that the elucidation of the genetic code is indeed a great achievement. It is, in a sense, the key to molecular biology because it shows how the great polymer languages, the nucleic acid language and the protein language, are linked together.
In more than one respect, the exploring of the Solar System and homesteading other worlds constitutes the beginning, much more than the end, of history.
Scientists have become the bearers of the torch of discovery in our quest for knowledge.
As followers of natural science we know nothing of any relation between thoughts and the brain, except as a gross correlation in time and space.
Economics profession, they've been - they've been confident in various formulas, but economics is not physics. The same formula that works in one decade doesn't work in the next. Economics is a difficult subject.
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