Quotes on Brains

Where the despair of loneliness and poverty haunts every hour, the optimism to embark on new projects cannot find a place to alight on the brain's cortex. Poverty itself is an enormous obstacle to an enlightened and enlightening - not to say healthy - old age.

It is astonishing that human brains, which evolved to cope with the everyday world, have been able to grasp the counterintuitive mysteries of the cosmos and the quantum.

Network television has been attempting to lure viewers for years with its low-interest programming only to have those viewers discover later that their brains are bankrupt.

For centuries, magicians have intuitively taken advantage of the inner workings of our brains.

I'll tell you what it is... just why 'Wonder Woman' worked. Or 'Bionic Woman,' or any of those, really. It was because it wasn't about brawn... it was about brains. And yes, she happened to be beautiful, she happened to be kind of extraordinary in some way, but she wasn't a guy.

Positive and engaged brains are a company's greatest assets. More than time and even more than productivity, people must be happy.

The thing I'm most interested in is the nervous system. How do brains grow? How do genes build complicated nervous systems?

The important thing isn't the house. It's the ability to make it. You carry that in your brains and in your hands, wherever you go... It's one thing to carry your life wherever you go. Another thing to always go looking for it somewhere else.

Our brains are very, very good at self-delusion. What happens is, it releases the stress hormone cortisol in the brain, which leads to foggy thinking, so you're not even able to judge well whether you're working well or not.

Brains come in different types and they're all normal.

I routinely interview college students, mostly from top schools, and I notice that their brains are like old maps, with lots of blank spaces for the uncharted terrain. It's not that they lack for motivation or IQ. It's that they can't connect the dots when they don't know where the dots are in the first place.

It's very important for us to see that science is done by people, not just brains but whole human beings, and sometimes at great cost.

To suggest things may be going on in our brains that we aren't fully conscious of, that we unknowingly make classist, sexist and racist presumptions... Well, there just aren't many comfortable ways to take that. And in the face of discomfort comes the mask of defence.

When you get to know a lot of people, you make a great discovery. You find that no one group has a monopoly on looks, brains, goodness or anything else. It takes all the people - black and white, Catholic, Jewish and Protestant, recent immigrants and Mayflower descendants - to make up America.

Just as our brains fill in the details of an image our eyes record only roughly, so, too, do our brains employ tricks we are unaware of to fill in details about people we don't know intimately.

Our online news feeds aggregate all of the world's pain and cruelty, dragging our brains into a kind of learned helplessness. Technology that provides us with near-complete knowledge without a commensurate level of agency isn't humane.

We have to unclutter our brains from worries that maybe people don't like us. Women tend to worry about popularity; it doesn't matter if they like you. They need to respect you. They need to show that respect for you in your pay check. And that needs to be okay.

Perhaps all of our anxiety is not caused by broken brains but by working nonstop, missing out on time with our friends and families because we are all so busy 'hustling' and 'grinding' just to survive in an immoral economic system skewed to favor a very few at the top while leaving the rest of the country to fend for itself.

Before a brain can register a thought, a mind must think it... every step of the way is mind over matter... We override our brains all the time.

What I want to do is encourage women to take on this incredibly exciting and fun challenge to use their brains for the benefit of humanity but through science and technology.

If you hear a statistic, you will make up a story to go with it, because our brains are organized on narrative. And you may very well make up a wrong story because you only have one fact, which is a statistic.