Quotes About Neuroscience

Brain cells fire in patterns.

Do people literally think in English, Cherokee, Kivunjo, or, by 2050, Newspeak? Or are our thoughts couched in some silent medium of the brain—a language of thought, or "mentalese"—and merely clothed in words whenever we need to communicate them to a listener?

Language is not a cultural artifact that we learn the way we learn to tell time or how the federal government works. Instead, it is a distinct piece of the biological makeup of our brains.

Love was not specified in the design of your brain; it is merely an endearing algorithm that freeloads on the leftover processing cycles.

The fact is important enough to bear repeating: people organize their brains with conversation.

Hace unos 300 millones de años, los cerebros y los sistemas nerviosos eran comparativamente simples. No obstante, ya poseían la estructura y la neuroquímica necesarias para procesar información sobre el estatus y la sociedad.

Así que presta atención a tu postura. Deja de arquearte, enderézate. Di lo que piensas. Deja claro lo que quieres, como si tuvieras derecho a conseguirlo (al menos el mismo que los demás). Anda con la cabeza bien alta y mira al frente con franqueza. Atrévete a ser un peligro. Haz que la serotonina fluya a raudales a través de las vías neuronales que arden a la espera de su efecto tranquilizante. La

Una vez escuché en un documental dedicado al funcionamiento del cerebro que en ocasiones recordamos para olvidar. Pasamos una y otra vez sobre los surcos del mismo disco para borrarlos. Como si la repetición eliminara la memoria en lugar de preservarla.

You are your synapses

Fear and other emotions are based on assumptions, presuppositions, and expectations; they are constructed in the brain from nonemotional ingredients.

When split-brain patients fabricate verbal (left hemisphere based) explanations for behaviors that were produced by the right hemisphere, the left hemisphere is generating explanations of behaviors produced by nonconscious systems and does so in the maintenance of a sense of self. That is, our behavior is an important way we come to know who we are. This is the essence of Gazzaniga's interpreter theory of consciousness (see Chapter 6).

If you are standing still and decide to take a step, the movement of your leg on the basis of your decision involves axons that originate in cell bodies located in the movement control regions in the frontal cortex (just behind your forehead) and that travel uninterrupted to the base of the spinal column (in the region of your lower back).

Language is not just a system for talking and reading. Talking and reading reflect the cognitive elaborations brought into the brain by language.

My notion of personality is pretty simple: it's that your "self," the essence of who you are, reflects patterns of interconnectivity between neurons in your brain.

Neuromancer.

I've always had this fascination with the brain. I'm not really much of a religious person, but like anybody, you are at least fascinated by what some call a soul - what I would call the brain - and who we are and how we work.

We're told that when we remember, the same parts of our brain light up as when we experienced the event we're remembering. Your brain lives through it again.

It's important to say that depression has biological underpinnings, and that while medications do not seem to create irreversible changes in the brain, repeated depressive episodes do.

The process of repeating a rhythm while it gently evolves has an incredible effect on the brain, or on mine anyway.

When you think of things like medicine, people who have lost limbs now have a chance to have a limb replaced that is connected to the brain that they can actually control with their mind. That's amazing.

I can tell you what images are in your head. I can tell what music you're thinking of. I can tell if you're listening to me or not. That's possible with an MRI now.

After we become literate, we literally 'think differently' about language: images of brain activation between literate and nonliterate humans bear this out.

I think that I cannot immediately see the route by which we should really understand memory and the workings of the brain.

The human brain is an incredible pattern-matching machine.