Quotes About Neuroscience

What we find is that our brains have colossal things happening in them all the time.

Among the millions of nerve cells that clothe parts of the brain there runs a thread. It is the thread of time, the thread that has run through each succeeding wakeful hour of the individual.

(The mind's) dynamics transcend the time and space of brain physiology.

Can we think more than one thought at the same time? Most of us know we can't do that. Both hemispheres are always working all of the time. But one of them is always dominant.

Ninety-nine percent of humanity had had something done to their brains, and only a few people in the world knew exactly what. •

Why is it that a common, safe, and important task is so feared by so many people? In Iconoclast, Gregory Berns uses his experience running a neuroscience research lab to explain the biological underpinnings of the resistance. In fact, public speaking is the perfect petri dish for exposing what makes us tick. It turns out that the three biological factors that drive job performance and innovation are social intelligence, fear response, and perception.

His words made me wonder what else might be prewired in my brain. Did we have multiple personalities all wired up and ready to use, just as "emotional vision" was always latent in my mind, waiting for activation?

Like synaptic plasticity, "neurogenesis is clearly involved in our interactions with our environment, both emotionally and cognitively," says neuroscientist Fred Gage, of the Salk Institute in La Jolla, California.

Exercise is not an instant cure, but you need to get your brain working again, and if you move your body your brain won't have any choice.

Humans cannot be born with fully formed brains simply because the resulting head would not fit through the birth canal. Rather, our brains are built and formed after we are born, like a ship in a bottle, a process that takes fifteen, maybe twenty years.

in a 2007 study of humans, German researchers found that people learn vocabulary words 20 percent faster following exercise than they did before exercise, and that the rate of learning correlated directly with levels of BDNF.

A notable experiment in 2007 showed that cognitive flexibility improves after just one thirty-five-minute treadmill session at either 60 percent or 70 percent of maximum heart rate.

study shows that exercise—or at least the resulting fitness levels—can have a powerful impact on that fundamental skill.

This is because even the simplest of motions—a flick of a finger or a turn of the hand to pick up a pencil—is maddeningly complex and requires coordination and computational power beyond electronic abilities. For this you need a brain. One of our favorite quotes on this matter comes from the neuroscientist Rodolfo Llinás: "That which we call thinking is the evolutionary internalization of movement.

Edward M. Hallowell, MD, author of Shine

Evolution has hard-wired health to happiness

The body was designed to be pushed, and in pushing our bodies we push our brains too. Learning and memory evolved in concert with the motor functions that allowed our ancestors to track down food, so as far as our brains are concerned, if we're not moving, there's no real need to learn anything.

Unlike humans, rodents seem to inherently enjoy physical activity, and Cotman's mice ran several kilometers a night. They were divided into four groups: mice running for two, four, or seven nights, and one control group with no running wheel. When their brains were injected with a molecule that binds to BDNF and scanned, not only did the scans of the running rodents show an increase in BDNF over controls, but the farther each mouse ran, the higher the levels were.

It turns out that moving our muscles produces proteins that travel through the bloodstream and into the brain, where they play pivotal roles in the mechanisms of our highest thought processes.

like every other aspect of our psychology, motivation is biological.

By showing that exercise sparks the master molecule of the learning process, Cotman nailed down a direct biological connection between movement and cognitive function.

the message I want to leave you with is that even as your body changes, exercise will keep your mind firm and taught.

To put it bluntly, research shows that we can't multitask. We are biologically incapable of processing attention-rich inputs simultaneously.

As always, there are exceptions. Adults with training can still learn to distinguish speech sounds in other languages. But in general, the brain appears to have a limited window of opportunity in an astonishingly early time frame. The cognitive door begins swinging shut at 6 months old, and then, unless something pushes against it, the door closes. By 12 months, your baby's brain has made decisions that affect her the rest of her life.