Quotes on Brain

If you're studying from a book and trying to listen in on a conversation at the same time, those are two separate projects, each started and maintained by distinct circuits in the brain. Pay more attention to one for a moment and you're automatically paying less attention to the other.

All our behaviours are a result of neurophysiological activity in the brain.

Brain scans show synchrony between the brains of mother and child; but what they can't show is the internal bond that belongs to neither alone, a fusion in which the self feels so permeable it doesn't matter whose body is whose.

One said of suicide, As long as one has brains one should not blow them out. And another answered, But when one has ceased to have them, too often one cannot.

Many think of memory as rote learning, a linear stuffing of the brain with facts, where understanding is irrelevant. When you teach it properly, with imagination and association, understanding becomes a part of it.

You can't hear a word and just hear it as raw sound; it always evokes an associated meaning and emotion in the brain.

But it was pointless, it was stupid; he thought about thoughtless things. If I were a seabird . . . but how could you be a seabird? If you were a seabird your brain would be tiny and stupid and you would love half-rotted fish guts and tweaking the eyes out of little grazing animals; you would know no poetry and you could never appreciate flying as fully as the human on the ground yearning to be you. If you wanted to be a seabird you deserved to be one.

Money without brains is always dangerous.

Reading fiction is important. It is a vital means of imagining a life other than our own, which in turn makes us more empathetic beings. Following complex story lines stretches our brains beyond the 140 characters of sound-bite thinking, and staying within the world of a novel gives us the ability to be quiet and alone, two skills that are disappearing faster than the polar icecaps.

Lord, grant that my work increase knowledge and help other men. Failing that, Lord, grant that it will not lead to man’s destruction. Failing that, Lord, grant that my article in Brain be published before the destruction takes place.

Suppose you could be hooked up to a hypothetical 'experience machine' that, for the rest of your life, would stimulate your brain and give you any positive feelings you desire. Most people to whom I offer this imaginary choice refuse the machine. It is not just positive feelings we want: we want to be entitled to our positive feelings.

The widespread assumption is that somehow, the brain produces the mind; somehow millions of neurons fire signals at one another create or produce consciousness... but we have no idea how or why this happens. I'm afraid that in many cases, people in the tech world fail to understand that.

Humans have existed only for the last 0.001 percent of cosmic time. All of which says that - unless the Homo sapiens brain is the one-and-only instance of cogitating machinery - nearly all the intelligence that's out there is beyond our level. And that intelligence is more than just a little bit beyond.

The brain is one of the richest green fields of science. There's so much yet to be discovered.

Feminism began to dawn on my brain belatedly in life.

You think you're looking at things all the time, but you're not looking at things, you're looking at what your brain is interpreting through light and color. And who knows what everybody else sees?

The world is a nested space, and so we have our brain as a person, and people are members of teams, and teams are part of business units, and business units are parts of corporations, and corporations are part of industries, which are part of economies.

Even when I wasn't doing much 'science for the public' stuff, I found that four or five hours of intense work in physics was all my brain could take on a given day.

Remember that you are not a damsel in distress, waiting for some prince to rescue you. Forget that prince. With your brain and your resourcefulness, you can rescue yourself.

We are all now connected by the Internet, like neurons in a giant brain.

I enjoyed having a reputation as being wild, but these days I try not to worry about what people think in the privacy of their own brain or what they write in the bizarre publicity of their own newspapers, because all of those things are meaningless.