Quotes About Neuroscience

It's painful to recall, but I'm not ashamed, because all those thoughts—which I thankfully don't have anymore, thanks to medical science and therapy—were not my fault any more than the allergies that clog my sinuses when the trees in my neighborhood start doin' it every spring are my fault. It's just part of who I am. It's part of how my brain is wired, and because I know that, I can medically treat it, instead of being a victim of it.

It is very likely that intrinsic variability in the functioning of the brain also affects the quality of our judgments in ways that we cannot possibly hope to control.

Restoring the level of available sugar in the brain had prevented the deterioration of performance.

The nervous system consumes more glucose than most other parts of the body

Damasio and his colleagues have observed that people who do not display the appropriate emotions before they decide, sometimes because of brain damage, also have an impaired ability to make good decisions.

effortful mental activity appears to be especially expensive in the currency of glucose.

As you become skilled in a task, its demand for energy diminishes. Studies of the brain have shown that the pattern of activity associated with an action changes as skill increases, with fewer brain regions involved.

The human brain is like a memory system that records every thing that happens to us and makes intelligent predictions based on those experiences.

The amygdala doesn't use language. It learns by association, and that's how it remembers

of the bone even making it into the hippocampus.

exercise triggers a whole host of beneficial processes for your brain. One of the most important is the release of brain-derived neurotrophic factor (BDNF), which acts as a kind of "fertiliser" for the brain, triggering repair and neuronal growth.

persistence is likely linked to high dopamine, so the higher the dopamine levels, the more you are likely to soldier on through adversity to achieve a particular goal.

Jason once told me that eye contact is the most intimacy two people can have -- forget sex -- because the optic nerve is technically an extension of the brain, and when two people look into each other's eyes, it's brain-to-brain.

Studies have shown that an endorphin-like peptide in chocolate works like morphine on the brain. You can even argue that chocolate

We are not interested in the fact that the brain has the consistency of cold porridge.

Our goal is to continue to build the pipeline to fight all aspects of disease for all forms of dementia.

We've learned that musical ability is actually not one ability but a set of abilities, a dozen or more. Through brain damage, you can lose one component and not necessarily lose the others. You can lose rhythm and retain pitch, for example, that kind of thing.

The brain is suspended in a kind of thick jelly inside the skull, and a helmet can't keep it from sloshing around. If you hit your head hard enough, the brain goes bashing against the walls of the skull.

It did something to the temporal lobe, one of the circuits involved in religious experience. It was supposed to put people closer to God. It did that. It also made them slaves.

Well, that was a huge step. We had an instruction set. We could move data around. We could do conditionals. We could do most of the things a simple chip can do. We had the visual cortex for our display. The auditory cortex for our speakers. The motor cortex for our input. On top of that, we could write any damn software we wanted.

That would've been way too hard. We wanted to do neuroscience, not operating system development. So

The reason we remember song lyrics more easily than poetry is that music is stored in the cleaner, mathematical side of our brains. Poetry is shoveled into the cluttered, creative side.