Quotes About Neuroscience

Reading is more of a left-brain process, and listening to music is a right-brain function.

People often ask how I got interested in the brain; my rhetorical answer is: 'How can anyone NOT be interested in it?' Everything you call 'human nature' and consciousness arises from it.

Of course you cannot free yourself from the laws of nature; but the laws of nervous systems are not the same as the physical laws.

Someone should do a study of the human brain and how quickly it can adjust to luxury.

We categorize as we do because we have the brains and bodies we have and because we interact in the world as we do.

When I read philosophy or neuroscience papers about consciousness, I don't get the sense we're any closer to understanding it than we were 50 years ago.

The music is a vibration in the brain rather than the ear.

It may sound lovey-dovey, but there's research showing the positive effect of meditation on parts of the brain that control emotion.

Knowing that the brain is predisposed to religion and spirituality, then might it be that God is a creation of the brain?

The emotional brain existed long before the rational brain.

In the words of Libet, "The initiation of the freely voluntary act appears to begin in the brain unconsciously, well before the person consciously knows he wants to act!

The Private Life of the Brain (New York: John Wiley, 2000); John McCrone's Going Inside: A Tour Round a Single Moment of Consciousness (London: Faber and Faber, 1999) is a more easygoing, detailed exploration. David Hubel's Eye, Brain and Vision (San Francisco: Scientific American Library, 1988) is a fine vision of what seeing entails, presented by the scientist who did much to reveal

Music resonates in so many parts of the brain that we can't conceive of it being an isolated thing. It's whom you were with, how old you were, and what was happening that day.

Actually, I think my view is compatible with much of the work going on now in neuroscience and psychology, where people are studying the relationship of consciousness to neural and cognitive processes without really trying to reduce it to those processes.

Experiments show that when you move your wrist at will, you consciously experience the decision to move it about 0.2 seconds before the actual movement (Libet, 1985, 2004).But your brain waves jump about 0.35 seconds before you consciously perceive your decision to move (FIGURE 3.4)! The startling conclusion: Consciousness sometimes arrives late to the decision-making party.

Experiements that have been devised to inflict even mild social pain (like exclusion form a group task or betrayal by a partner in a gambling game) have demonstrated significant activation of the sinula and the anterior cingulate cortex. Emotional pain isn't just a metaphor: In terms of brain activation, it partially overlaps with physical pain.

On average, dopamine receptor density is reduced in the VTA target regions of obese subjects as compared with those lean subjects (a characteristic that can be measured in a brain scanner). But the key question remains: Do obese individuals show reduced dopaminergic activation of VTA target areas in response to food? Is a blunted pleasure response to food involved in obesity?

The dorsomedial striatum, a subregion of the basal ganglia, seems to be critical to goal-directed behavior. If it is damaged, the rat's behavior will quickly become habitual even after limited exposure to a new task. Conversely, damage to the neighboring dorsolateral striatum will lead the rat to be more goal-directed and it will never lapse into habit, even after prolonged training.

What differences can we observe in the brains of men and women? Can we use those differences to test the hypothesis that the brains of gay men are more likely to be partly feminized and the brains of lesbians are more likely to be partly masculinized? In

These include a portion of the hypothalamus called INAH3, which is larger in straight men, and a bundle of fibers that connects one side of the brain to the other, called the anterior commissure, which is larger in straight women. While there have been some well-publicized reports suggesting that the size of the anterior commissure and INAH3 are more femalelike in gay men,17 there have yet to be clear, independent replications of these findings.18

When it comes to food, we are, in essence, following an eating script that has been written into the circuits of our brains.

The brain is the key, the brain is the source, the brain is God. Everything that humans do is neuroecology.

A lot of people don't know the brain is 85% water, so anything that dehydrates you like caffeine or alcohol is bad for the brain.

More may have been learned about the brain and the mind in the 1990s - the so-called decade of the brain - than during the entire previous history of psychology and neuroscience.