Quotes About Neuroscience

Stress hormones can do some truly nasty things to your brain if boatloads of the stuff are given free access to your central nervous system.

WE DO NOT SEE with our eyes. We see with our brains.

Angelo," he said, and felt the bed rock as Angelo shuddered, caught halfway between REM atonia - the inhibition of movement caused by the shutdown of monoamines in the brain - and waking.

Was one head dominant, or did they serve different functions?

Ahora sabemos que el trauma del nacimiento en realidad está codificado y almacenado en el sistema nervioso.

Interestingly enough, not all feelings result from the body's reaction to external stimuli. Sometimes changes are purely simulated in the brain maps.

I've been reading a lot about what the Internet does to our brains.

My left brain has gradually 'eaten' the right-brain capabilities away.

As psychologist Susan Weinschenk explained,[52] 'dopamine causes us to want, desire, seek out, and search'. Yet 'the dopamine system is stronger than the opioid system. We seek more than we are satisfied. ... Seeking is more likely to keep us alive than sitting around in a satisfied stupor.

Sensitisation leads to high spikes of dopamine in response to cues and triggers associated with use. The dopamine spikes occur before ingesting the drug or masturbating to porn, and are experienced as cravings to use. However, on exposure to the same old stimuli less dopamine (and less opioids) are released (desensitisation). This dampening of pleasure occurs during drug use or while masturbating to porn. The activity is experienced as less pleasurable, increasing cravings for more.

It would be more accurate to say that we see with our brain rather than with our eyes. However, the more interesting point is that the brain does not always need to receive information through the eyes in order to "see." It can recall sights, sounds, and feelings from memory and run the whole sequence like a movie, all inside our head, in the mind's eye.

One of the great discoveries of neuroscience is the mirror neuron system.

Concepts are not things that can be changed just by someone telling us a fact. We may be presented with facts, but for us to make sense of them, they have to fit what is already in the synapses of the brain. Otherwise facts go in and then they go right back out.

You might think that the world exists independently of how we understand it. You would be mistaken. Our understanding of the world is part of the world—a physical part of the world. Our conceptual framings exist in physical neural circuitry in our brains, largely below the level of conscious awareness, and they define and limit how we understand the world, and so they affect our actions in the world.

Neuroscientists have discovered a brain overlap, too, between imagining and doing. Many of the same neural regions are activated when we form mental images as when we actually see.

The human brain is a wonderful organ. It starts to work as soon as you are born and doesn't stop until you get up to deliver a speech.

The human brain works in, so far, mysterious and wondrous ways that are completely different than the ways that computers calculate. Things like appetite or emotion, how do those function in the brain?

When the time comes for your brain to process the information, the second word comes up faster than the first one. So when it's in your head, all of a sudden, it comes out backwards and you think of the word backwards.

It turned out that experienced meditators activated the parts of the brain that suppress interruptions and they were able to completely block out the beeps. They protected their own state of fascination.

its adult size by nine months and nearly three-quarters by two years of age, a baby's head must be large and grow rapidly to accommodate the rest of the body's growth. On average, the brain reaches its maximum size in girls at about eleven and a half years of age and fourteen and a half on average for boys—but again it will not be fully mature in terms of its internal development and executive functioning until about twenty-five

Physical exertion, in fact, has thus far been the only thing we've scientifically documented to improve brain health and function.

To sum up: it's time to rewrite the maxim that practice makes perfect. The truth is, practice makes myelin, and myelin makes perfect.

The social brain is in its natural habitat when we're talking with someone face-to-face in real time.

The physicality enshrined by the neuroscientists as the measure of all things is not objectivity but instead a pure artifact of the scale at which and the means by which we and our devices perceive. So to invoke it as the test and standard of reality is quintessentially anthropocentric.