Quotes About Neuroscience

Neuroscientists have found that the prospect of making money stimulates the same primitive reward circuits in the brain that cocaine does.

all perception is but a change in the concentration of hydrogen ions on the surface of the brain cells.

An agnostic Buddhist would not regard the Dharma as a source of answers to questions of where we came from, where we are going, what happens after death. He would seek such knowledge in the appropriate domains: astrophysics, evolutionary biology, neuroscience, etc.

a study of patients undergoing awake brain surgery found that by electrically stimulating the appropriate regions of the brain, one could create in the patient the desire to move the hand, arm, or foot, or to move the lips and talk. It is hard to imagine how free will can operate if our behavior is determined by physical law, so it seems that we are no more than biological machines and that free will is just an illusion.

Caenorhabditis elegans—a simple creature made of only 959 cells? It probably never thinks, "That was damn tasty bacteria I got to dine on back there

Biology gives you a brain. Life turns it into a mind.

Zajonc was able to make people like any word or image more just by showing it to them several times.9 The brain tags familiar things as good things. Zajonc called this the "mere exposure effect," and it is a basic principle of advertising.

Damasio's patients made terrible decisions because they were deprived of emotional input into their decision making.

Here's the truth: people, even regular people, are never just any one person with one set of attributes. It's not that simple. We're all at the mercy of the limbic system, clouds of electricity drifting through the brain.

The discovery by Hubel and Wiesel of cells that respond to linear stimuli with specific axes of orientation may partly explain our response to Mondrian's work, but it does not explain the artist's focus on horizontal and vertical lines to the exclusion of oblique lines. Vertical

It is this potential for plasticity of the relatively stereotyped units of the nervous system that endows each of us with our individuality.

Eric R. Kandel

Flavour is not actually in food, any more than redness is in a rose or yellow in the sun. It is a fabrication of our brains and for each taste we create a mental 'flavour image', in the same way that we develop a memory bank of the faces of people we know. The difference is that whereas faces fade when you haven't seen them in a while, flavours and smells have a way of lodging themselves in indelibly.

Neuroscience confirms that chocolate means more to some people than others.

God has given us more than fourteen billion cells and connections in our brain. Why would God give us such a complex organ system unless he expects us to use it?

The mental act of sensation which issues in reflex movement is so simple as to defy analysis.

I have no military application in my research. You know, we are all involved into rehabilitation medicine.

The brain is an immensely complex organ, and many mysteries remain. Exactly how brain and mind or soma and psyche are related is one of them.

Changes in relative ionic concentration across the postsynaptic membrane are readily effected by altering the ionic composition of the external medium.

This is what I do. I look at brains. I'm fascinated by it. I can spend hours doing it. In fact, if I want to relax, that's one way I can relax.

When I look at the human brain I'm still in awe of it.

In terms of the brain, you can in a crude way think of the human brain as a computer.

neuroanatomist

Plaster holo screens against a mountain a full kilometer high, covering it until it glitters with a half million dancing images. Each holo used a quarter of a million pixels to shape its image, so the array musters immense representational power. Now compress those screens on a sheet of aluminum foil a millimeter thick. Crumple it. Stuff it into a grapefruit. That is the brain, a hundred billion neurons firing at varying intensities. Nature had accomplished that miracle