Quotes About Neuroscience

To find better means of fixing the brain, we first need to achieve something more fundamental. We must understand how it works.

The relationship between the prefrontal cortex and the amygdala fundamentally changes with meditation.

My favourite book in the world is 'Neuromancer' by William Gibson.

When I got out of the military, I finished up my education at the University of North Carolina at Wilmington, and I had some mentors who said, 'You got what it takes. You should consider going to graduate school, getting a Ph.D. in neuroscience.' I didn't think I had what it took until somebody who had a Ph.D. told me I had what it takes.

Anything that could give rise to smarter-than-human intelligence - in the form of Artificial Intelligence, brain-computer interfaces, or neuroscience-based human intelligence enhancement - wins hands down beyond contest as doing the most to change the world. Nothing else is even in the same league.

The integration of the simpler and the deeper reading processes is not automatic and requires years of learning by the novice reader, as well as extra milliseconds for any expert to read a more sophisticated text.

What happens to us when we get drunk is a function of the particular path the alcohol takes as it seeps into our brain tissue. The effects begin in the frontal lobes, the part of our brain behind our forehead that governs attention, motivation, planning, and learning.

there is a reproducible correlation between the time required to pronounce numbers in a given language and the memory span of its speakers.

The neuroscientist Nancy Andreasen has proposed "that the creative process is similar in artists and scientists, that it is highly intuitive, and that it may arise from unconscious or dreamlike mental states during which new links are created in the association cortices of the brain.

is one thing to say that you are unaware of a vast amount of activity in your brain. It is quite another to say that some of this activity is aware of itself and is watching your every move.

neuroscientists now acknowledge that the human mind tends to wander, engaging in what has been called "stimulus-independent thought.

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

early stress increases the size of the amygdalae. One study found that an eight-week program of mindfulness meditation reduced the volume of the right basolateral amygdala, and these changes were correlated with a subjective decrease in stress.

My definition of happiness is that it's a feeling you get when your body chemistry is producing pleasant sensations in your mind.

what hypnotists have long known, and scientists have in recent years confirmed, is that our decisions are often made without appeal to the rational parts of our brains. We literally make our decisions first and then create elaborate rationalizations for them after the fact.

Our brains are the most complicated objects that we have so far encountered in the Universe. We are far from simple. Indeed, were our brains significantly simpler, we would be too simple to know it.

A model that explains the "itch" at the core of ADD

If there is one takeaway in distilling down the complexity of the DMN and the TPN, it boils down to the fact that the toggle switches between them are off in those with ADHD.

Learning to play a musical instrument even alters the structure of the brain, from subcortical circuits that encode sound patterns to neural fibers that connect the two cerebral hemispheres and patterns of gray matter density in certain regions of the cerebral cortex.

The integrative powers of the brain for the sensations that come from handling objects spills out into all other domains of intelligence.

A great deal remains to be learned about the genetic control of brain development

We never really encounter the world; all we experience is our own nervous system.

For example, Kagan found that babies who later showed this trait also had cooler foreheads on the right side of their head, which indicates greater activity on the right side of the brain. (The blood is drawn away from the surface toward the activity.)

Phineas Gage's case is not the only important historical source in the effort to understand the neural basis of reasoning and decision making;