Quotes About Neuroscience

Artificial intelligence is growing up fast, as are robots whose facial expressions can elicit empathy and make your mirror neurons quiver.

Our understanding of the human brain can be dramatically accelerated if we collect and share research data on an exponentially wider scale.

The amygdala is one of those brain structures that a lot of people know a little bit about, and there's a definite tendency to conflate the amygdala and the fear response itself - as if the amygdala, and the amygdala alone, 'causes' fear.

I think it's a natural human tendency, when you read something, you tend to read a lot of your prejudices into it. And neuroscience is like a lot of disciplines - it has fashions; things change.

If you have a lesion in the hippocampus in both sides, you have short term memory, but you can convert that short term memory into long term memory.

deactivating this area (right parietal lobe) of the brain that controls self, time and space enhances virtues such as forgiveness, and allows us to take a "higher" view of life.

Prior to treatment, patients diagnosed with schizophrenia, depression, and other psychiatric disorders do not suffer from any known "chemical imbalance." However, once a person is put on a psychiatric medication, which, in one manner or another, throws a wrench into the usual mechanics of a neuronal pathway, his or her brain begins to function, as Hyman observed, abnormally.

Rather than fix chemical imbalances in the brain, the drugs creat them.

And what science had revealed was this: Prior to treatment, patients diagnosed with schizophrenia, depression, and other psychiatric disorders do not suffer from any known "chemical imbalance". However, once a person is put on a psychiatric medication, which, in one manner or another, throws a wrench into the usual mechanics of a neuronal pathway, his or her brain begins to function, as Hyman observed, abnormally.

Certainly the prefrontal cortex is an important thing; I'm as proud of mine as the next guy.

Brain scans are showing that a curious state of mind involves activity in the dopamine system.

was beginning to observe the workings of what psychologists call the "default mode network." This is a network in the brain that, according to brain- scan studies, is active when we're doing nothing in particular—not talking to people, not focusing on our work or any other task, not playing a sport or reading a book or watching a movie. It is the network along which our mind wanders when it's wandering.

But when the image of the word fell on her retina, something strange happened in Kristin's brain.

A better reason why we, and other intelligent species, are born with such poorly developed brains is so that we can learn.

Therefore, reading and reacting to other people's behaviors, emotions, and attitudes have been hardwired into our brains. We are not only wired to connect, but we are also wired to attune to, resonate with, and learn from others.

Sensitive periods are triggered via the interaction of genetic timing and experience. Sensitive periods are times of rapid learning when thousands of synaptic connections are made each second (Greenough, 1987; ten Cate, 1989). The timing of sensitive periods varies

Like neurons, we send and receive messages from one another across a synapse—the social synapse.

It is the power of being with others that shapes our brains.

Conversely, we humans are born premature and highly dependent newborns whose brains are shaped through years of interactions with our caretakers and the environment.

How can we be "free" as conscious agents if everything that we consciously intend is caused by events in our brain that we do not intend and of which we are entirely unaware?

How can we be "free" as conscious agents if everything that we consciously intend is caused by events in our brain that we do not intend and of which we are entirely unaware? We can't.

Some moments before you are aware of what you will do next—a time in which you subjectively appear to have complete freedom to behave however you please—your brain has already determined what you will do. You then become conscious of this "decision" and believe that you are in the process of making it.

There will always be some delay between the first neuropsychological events that kindle my next conscious thought and the thought itself. And even if they weren't — even if all mental states were truly coincident with their underlying brain states — I cannot decide what I will next think or intend until a thought or intention arises. What will my next mental state be? I do not know — it just happens. Where is the freedom in that?

There's something it's like for me to see the green leaves outside my window right now, so that's a conscious state to me. But there may be some unconscious language-processing going on in my head that doesn't feel like anything to me, or some motor processes in the cerebellum. Those might be states of me, but they're not conscious states of me, because there's nothing it's like for me to undergo those states.