Quotes About Neuroscience

dopamine is not about the happiness of reward. It's about the happiness of pursuit of reward that has a decent chance of occurring.

Brain-imaging studies of drug users at that stage show that viewing a film of actors pretending to use drugs activates dopamine pathways in the brain more than does watching porn films. This

I was once at a conference of neuroscientists and all-star Buddhist monk meditators, the former studying what the brains of the latter did during meditation. One scientist asked one of the monks whether he ever stops meditating because his knees hurt from all that cross-leggedness. He answered, "Sometimes I'll stop sooner than I planned, but not because it hurts; it's not something I notice. It's as an act of kindness to my knees.

Did destruction of the human amygdala lessen aggression? Pretty clearly so, when violence was a reflexive, inchoate outburst preceding a seizure.

these capacities evolved so recently that our brains are, if you will, winging it and improvising on the fly when dealing with metaphor. As a result, we are actually pretty lousy at distinguishing between the metaphorical and literal, at remembering that "it's only a figure of speech"—with enormous consequences for our best and worst behaviors.

acute stress strengthens connectivity between the frontal cortex and motoric areas, while weakening frontal-hippocampal connections; the result is decision making that is habitual, rather than incorporating new information.

Feeling someone else's pain can be more effective for learning than just knowing that they're in pain. At its core the ACC is about self-interest, with caring about that other person in pain as an add-on.

Crucially, the brain region most involved in feeling afraid and anxious is most involved in generating aggression.

Perhaps fifty years since we learned that reading problems of a type that we now call dyslexia aren't due to laziness but instead involve microscopic cortical malformations.

Parts of the book describe work carried out in my own laboratory, and these studies have been made possible by funding from the National Institutes of Health, the National Institute of Mental Health, the National Science Foundation, the Sloan Foundation, the Klingenstein Fund, the Alzheimer's Association, and the Adler Foundation.

glucocorticoids in

The candidate gene approaches show that the effect of a single gene on a behavior is typically tiny. In other words, having the "warrior gene" variant of MAO probably has less effect on your behavior than does believing that you have it.

What does the frontal cortex do? Its list of expertise includes working memory, executive function (organizing knowledge strategically, and then initiating an action based on an executive decision), gratification postponement, long-term planning, regulation of emotions, and reining in impulsivity.35

The biologies of strong love and strong hate are similar in many ways, as we'll see.

When deontologism and consequentialism contemplate trolleys, the former is about moral intuitions rooted in the vmPFC, amygdala, and insula, while the latter is the domain of the dlPFC and moral reasoning. Why is it that our automatic, intuitive moral judgments tend to be nonutilitarian? Because, as Greene states in his book, "Our moral brains evolved to help us spread our genes, not to maximize our collective happiness.

The evolutionarily ancient central amygdala plays a key role in innate fears. Surrounding it is the basolateral amygdala (BLA), which is more recently evolved and somewhat resembles the fancy, modern cortex. It's the BLA that learns fear and then sends the news to the central amygdala.

The most convincing data concern rare humans with damage restricted to the amygdala, either due to a type of encephalitis or a congenital disorder called Urbach-Wiethe disease, or where the amygdala was surgically destroyed to control severe, drug-resistant seizures originating there.5 Such individuals are impaired in detecting angry facial expressions (while being fine at recognizing other emotional states—stay tuned).

The sensory cortex and visual cortex are far away from each other. How do those tactile neurons "know" (a) that there's vacant property in the visual cortex; (b) that hooking up with those unoccupied neurons helps turn fingertip information into "reading"; and (c) how to send axonal projections to this new cortical continent? All are matters of ongoing research.

I can't really imagine how to live your life as if there is no free will. It may never be possible to view ourselves as the sum of our biology. Perhaps we'll have to settle for making sure our homuncular myths are benign, and save the heavy lifting of truly thinking rationally for where it matters—when we judge others harshly.

willpower takes metabolic power, thanks to the glucose demands of the frontal cortex. This was the finding that when people are hungry, they become less generous in economic games.

Various studies, predominantly by Roy Baumeister of Florida State University, show that when the frontal cortex labors hard on some cognitive task, immediately afterward individuals are more aggressive and less empathic, charitable, and honest. Metaphorically, the frontal cortex says, "Screw it. I'm tired and don't feel like thinking about my fellow human.

We don't passively forget that something is scary. We actively learn that it isn't anymore.

The human olfactory system is atrophied; roughly 40 percent of a rat's brain is devoted to olfactory processing, versus 3 percent in us.

It's not until the non-NMDA has been stimulated over and over by a long train of glutamate release, allowing enough sodium to flow in, that this activates the NMDA receptor. It suddenly responds to all that glutamate, opening its channels, allowing an explosion of excitation. This is the essence of learning.