Quotes About Neuroscience

Ooh, we're going to think subtly. We won't get suckered into simplistic answers, not like those chicken-crossing-the-road neurochemists and chicken evolutionary biologists and chicken psychoanalysts, all living in their own limited categorical buckets.

when the frontal cortex labors hard on some cognitive task, immediately afterward individuals are more aggressive and less empathic, charitable, and honest.

women with variants of genes that produce higher levels of oxytocin or oxytocin receptors average higher levels of touching their infants and more synchronized gazing with them.

Expose subjects to evidence of someone else in pain. If their heart rate increases a lot (a peripheral indicator of anxious, amygdaloid arousal), they are unlikely to act prosocially in the situation. The prosocial ones are those whose heart rates decrease; they can hear the sound of someone else's need instead of the distressed pounding in their own chests.

The depths of human conformity and obedience are shown by the speed with which they occur—it takes less than 200 milliseconds for your brain to register that the group has picked a different answer from yours, and less than 380 milliseconds for a profile of activation that predicts changing your opinion. Our brains are biased to get along by going along in less than a second.

no se puede empezar a comprender algo como la agresividad, la competencia, la cooperación y la empatía sin la biología;

THE AMYGDALAfn8 IS the archetypal limbic structure, sitting under the cortex in the temporal lobe. It is central to mediating aggression, along with other behaviors that tell us tons about aggression.

Thus, particularly important is a 2011 study that used transcranial magnetic stimulation techniques to temporarily inactivate the vmPFC; subjects became less likely to change their answer to conform.

THE DELAYED MATURATION of the frontal cortex suggests an obvious scenario, namely that early in adolescence the frontal cortex has fewer neurons, dendritic branches, and synapses than in adulthood, and that levels increase into the midtwenties. Instead, levels decrease.

the fetal brain generates far more neurons than are found in the adult.

Robert M. Sapolsky

But in reality the brain is about circuits, about the patterns of functional connectivity among regions. The growing myelination of the adolescent brain shows the importance of increased connectivity.

In other words, dopamine is not about the happiness of reward. It's about the happiness of pursuit of reward that has a decent chance of occurring.*

Schultz's group has shown that the magnitude of an anticipatory dopamine rise reflects two variables. First is the size of the anticipated reward. A monkey has learned that a light

Josh Greene and Jonathan Cohen of Princeton wrote an extremely clearheaded piece on this, "For the Law, Neuroscience Changes Nothing and Everything." Where neuroscience and the rest of biology change nothing is in the continued need to protect the endangered from the dangerous.30

So dopamine is more about anticipation of reward than about reward itself.

This is the essence of learning. The lecturer says something, and it goes in one ear and out the other. The factoid is repeated; same thing. It's repeated enough times and—aha!—the lightbulb goes on and suddenly you get it. At a synaptic level, the axon terminal having to repeatedly release glutamate is the lecturer droning on repetitively; the moment when the postsynaptic threshold is passed and the NMDA receptors first activate is the dendritic spine finally getting it.

The frontal cortex is the last brain region to fully mature, with the most evolutionarily recent subparts the very last. Amazingly, it's not fully online until people are in their midtwenties.

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

It was grace. In those who were always honest, the dlPFC, vlPFC, and ACC were in veritable comas when the chance to cheat arose. There's no conflict. There's no working hard to do the right thing. You simply don't cheat.

There is a time lag between the activation of brain systems that excite our emotions and impulses and the maturation of brain systems that allow us to check these feelings and urgings—it's like driving a car with a sensitive gas pedal and bad brakes.

There is no scientific study more vital to man than the study of his own brain. Our entire view of the universe depends on it.

Ohne Phosphor, Kein Gedanke. Without phosphorus there would be no thoughts.

The brain has not explained the mind fully.