Quotes About Neuroscience

Despite our attachment to notions of free will, most us know that disorders of the brain can trump the best intentions of the mind.

The physiologist Benjamin Libet famously used EEG to show that activity in the brain's motor cortex can be detected some 300 milliseconds before a person feels that he has decided to move.

One fact now seems indisputable: 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.

There's certainly no unchanging self that is carried through from one moment to the next. Its a processes; it's not a thing. You're a verb more than you're a noun (from the point of view of neuroscience).

mere five minutes of practice a day (for five weeks) increased left-sided baseline activity in the frontal cortex—a pattern that, as we saw in the discussion of the split brain, has been associated with positive emotions.

Unconscious neural events determine our thoughts and actions—and are themselves determined by prior causes of which we are subjectively unaware.

Since the neuroscientific definition of mind is the brain in action, you repeatedly reproduce the same level of mind by "re-minding" yourself who you think you are in reference to the outer world.

Does the brain see or do the eyes see? If the brain sees, then we can only perceive reality based on what we have wired into our brain.

self-directed neuroplasticity (or SDN).

Emotions are the chemical consequences (or feedback) of past experiences.

mind is the brain in action),

engaging in brain-healthy habits, such as a proper diet and exercise and certain brain nutrients, is critical to the brain working right.

electroencephalography

I learned that when your brain works right, you work right. When your brain is more coherent, you're more coherent. When your brain is more whole and balanced, you're more whole and balanced. When you can regulate your negative and intrusive thoughts every day, you're less negative and intrusive.

Experienced meditators also showed an increase in theta and lower-range alpha brain-wave ratios, which means that they can spend quite a bit of time in altered states. Of particular significance was the increase in slow-wave regulation; these students, while in a theta brain-wave state, have higher-than-normal coherence, or brain-wave orderliness, between the activity in the front of the brain and the regions in the back of the brain.

It's your frontal lobe that changes your mind—that is, it makes the brain work in different sequences, patterns, and combinations.

Porque los pensamientos son el lenguaje del cerebro, y los sentimientos el lenguaje del cuerpo.

This process, if we do it right, actually repatterns our brains and changes our biology; the new experience will reorganize the old programming, and in so doing, it will remove the neurological evidence of that past experience.

Strong emotional experiences create long-term memories. So this new internal experience creates new long-term memories that override our past long-term memories, thus the choice becomes an experience that we never forget.

the frontal lobe is responsible for the conscious, willful, purposeful, intentional choices and actions that we undertake countless times each day. It is the home of the "true self.

Even the emotional centers are cooled off in the limbic brain. As a result, what we are thinking about or focusing on will become more real to us than the external world. As those neural networks are shut off by the frontal lobe, we no longer process any level of mind or awareness in that part of the brain and we, therefore, are no longer conscious of the body, the environment, and even time.

Your brain and body don't know the difference between having an actual experience in your life and just thinking about the experience—neurochemically, it's the same. So your brain and body begin to believe they're actually living in the new experience in the present moment.

Inside his head, a brain cell used a stepladder to find a high-shelved thought.

neurotransmitters