Quotes About Neuroscience

Dopamine can be read as the ultimate feminist chemical in the female brain.

hippocampus (Greek for "sea horse," which it resembles)

Math is like going to the gym for your brain. It sharpens your mind.

What we found is that when people [are] excluded, you see activity in…the neural regions [of the brain] that are also involved in the distressing component of pain, or what sometimes people call the 'suffering component' of pain.

What, if anything, is active in the brain when someone is not trying to do a task? "It was an unusual question," notes Lieberman, but we should be glad they asked, because it led to a remarkable discovery: the team found that there's a particular set of regions in the brain that consistently activate when you're not attempting to do a cognitive task, and that just as consistently deactivate once you focus your attention on something specific.

skills, be they intellectual or physical, eventually reduce down to brain circuits.

unconscious thought theory (UTT)—an attempt to understand the different roles conscious and unconscious deliberation play in decision making.

We now know from decades of research in both psychology and neuroscience that the state of mental strain that accompanies deep work is also necessary to improve your abilities.

To be great at something is to be well myelinated.

actual brains, which turn out be much more like sensory processors than logic machines.

the use of electrodes at skull sutures by a newly developed means which enabled contact to be made directly with the gray cells, without even the necessity of shaving a patch of skull.

It turns out that this part of the brain is one of the first areas that's attacked by Alzheimer's disease. So we can now use some of the basic understanding of this part of the brain to ask the simple question, 'What is going wrong with these special cells in the hippocampus at the very earliest stages?'

You can say anything you want about how the brain works and people will believe you. Really, our brains are hard-wired like that.

The human brain long ago evolved a mechanism for rewarding us when we encountered new information: a little shot of dopamine in the brain each time we learned something new. Across evolutionary history, compulsively seeking information was adaptive behavior.

The drug or cult has major if not exclusive sources of brain rewards.

perception of causation has a biological foundation.

A higher concentration of dopamine appears to lower skepticism and result in greater vulnerability to pattern detection;

The implication is that we feel emotions (limbic brain) then find an explanation (neocortex). As

Even from an anatomical perspective, it is impossible for our brain to see anything in raw form without some interpretation. We may not even always be conscious of it.

I'd never want a piece of someone else's brain, Kele had said. I mean, you don't know where it's been.

Personally I blame the Flynn effect—in reverse. They come from a background of sensory deprivation. It's nothing that a course of neural growth enhancers can't fix in a year or two

Neuroscientific studies suggest that the brain responds in much the same anxious way to facts that threaten our preconceptions as it does to wild animals that threaten our lives.

Because of these exaggerated dopamine responses, once they focus on the chance to get a reward, psychopaths are unable to alter their attention until they get what they're after.

The volunteers displaying high levels of psychopathic traits released almost four times as much dopamine in response to the stimulant as did their non-psychopathic counterparts.