Quotes About Neuroscience

Because the brain is the body's captive audience, feelings are winners among equals. And

sleep is profoundly intertwined with virtually every aspect of brain health. Lack of sleep over time can lead to an irreversible loss of brain cells—yet another debunking of the myth that sleep debt can be made up.

A study conducted at Harvard Medical School found that people who got more sleep than the bare minimum they needed increased the volume of gray matter in their brains, which is linked to improved psychological health.

Recent research by neuroscientists adds a twist here. Evidence exists that the human brain is "hardwired" (genetically programmed) for belief. Whether, if true, this wiring reflects an Intelligence beyond the universe depends on one's worldview. As Lewis states, what we learn from evidence "depends on the kind of philosophy we bring" to the evidence.

Advertisers are not thinking radically enough - they look for technology to lead instead of trying the neuroscience approach and thinking about what parts of the brain haven't been activated before. These new experiences bring new capabilities to the brain.

There's a lot of neuroscience now raising the question, 'Is all the intelligence in the human body in the brain?', and they're finding out that, no, it's not like that. The body has intelligence itself, and we're much more of an organic creature in that way.

To be sure, ASPM isn't the gene responsible for building big brains - there's no such single gene. But it's critical to the process, and the primate line has almost certainly benefited from distinct changes in ASPM.

There are many ways in which genes influence the brain.

The idea of critical windows extends beyond just vision, of course: almost every system in the brain has a critical window when it needs to experience certain stimuli, or it won't get wired up properly. The most obvious example is language: if you don't learn a language early on, it's nigh impossible to become truly fluent.

It may well be our brains are wired up to be slightly more optimistic than they should be.

Sticking wires into the brain is obviously rather crude. It's hard to do in animals that run around, and there is a physical limit to the number of wires that can be inserted simultaneously.

With any hallucinations, if you can do functional brain imagery while they're going on, you will find that the parts of the brain usually involved in seeing or hearing - in perception - have become super active by themselves. And this is an autonomous activity; this does not happen with imagination.

I want to give people theories, I want to expose them to scientific stories that force them to re-evaluate the way they use these three pounds of meat inside their head.

The theory of isolation of certain tasks in certain hemispheres of the brain suggests I shouldn't even be able to speak, never mind write.

You can't imagine how much detail we know about brains. There were 28,000 people who went to the neuroscience conference this year, and every one of them is doing research in brains. A lot of data. But there's no theory. There's a little, wimpy box on top there.

No amount of therapy will take care of a chemical imbalance of the brain.

Because many squid have brain nerve fibres that are hundreds of times thicker than those of humans, neuroscientists have long used them for research. These nerve fibres have led to so many breakthroughs in the study of neurons that many scientists joke that the squid should receive a Nobel Prize.

We human beings were never born to read; we invented reading and then had to teach it to every new generation. Each new reader comes to reading with a 'fresh' brain - one that is programmed to speak, see, and think, but not to read.

To think is to practice brain chemistry.

Every time I am looking into the depths of somebody's brain, I'm thinking, 'This is what makes a person who they are. That structure contains memories. Everything that they've ever experienced is right in there.'

Everything we do, every thought we've ever had, is produced by the human brain. But exactly how it operates remains one of the biggest unsolved mysteries, and it seems the more we probe its secrets, the more surprises we find.

We've done fMRI scans of people taking the 'Reading the Eyes' test, and what we've found is that the amygdala lights up in trying to figure out people's thoughts and feelings. In people with autism, they show highly reduced amygdala activity.

You have 100,000 times more synapses in your brain than sensory receptors in your body. Therefore, you are roughly 100,000 times better equipped to experience a world that does not exist than a world that does.

It's not completely inconceivable that someday you'll be able to download your own memories.