Quotes About Neuroscience

Neuroscience is by far the most exciting branch of science because the brain is the most fascinating object in the universe. Every human brain is different - the brain makes each human unique and defines who he or she is.

I'm a professor of neuroscience at Stanford University, and I'm kind of half-neurobiologist, half-primatologist.

As modern-day neuroscience tells us, we are never in touch with the present, because neural information-processing itself takes time. Signals take time to travel from your sensory organs along the multiple neuronal pathways in your body to your brain, and they take time to be processed and transformed into objects, scenes, and complex situations. So, strictly speaking, what you are experiencing as the present moment is actually the past.

Converging empirical data show that when we observe other human beings expressing emotions, we simulate them with the help of the same neural networks that are active when we feel or express these emotions ourselves.

Reading is weightlifting for the brain

I've always been fascinated by the brain. I wrote a lot about brain-tech in my first non-fiction book, 'More Than Human.' So when I decided to write science fiction, that was the technology I gravitated towards.

I read a lot of nonfiction - especially books about the brain.

Neuroscientists are novices at deception.

The human brain is probably one of the most complex single objects on the face of the earth; I think it is, quite honestly.

Science fiction has these obsessions with certain sciences - large scale engineering, neuroscience.

I think neuroscience is obviously very esoteric, but I think there are aspects of it that can absolutely be brought down to the level of an interested 11-, 12-, 13-year-old easily.

The experiences in the first years of life are disproportionately powerful in shaping how your brain organizes.

Our life experiences shape the way key systems in our brain organize and function. So each of us sees and understands the world in a unique way.

the way you treat a child, from the time that child is born, is what sets them up to either succeed or struggle…how you were loved informs the way your important neural networks are shaped, especially those core regulatory networks

The arrival of language was like the invasion of a parasitic system. Co-opting those areas of the brain that were the least dedicated. The most susceptible to appropriation.

If psychosis was was just some synapses misfiring why wouldnt you simply get static?

Not sure why. But you have to understand what the advent of language was like. The brain had done pretty well without it for quite a few million years. The arrival of language was like the invasion of a parasitic system. Co-opting those areas of the brain that were the least dedicated. The most susceptible to appropriation.

It was as if something in the animal's body and in its brain had been engineered to work together instantly rather than being learned.

Biology is not going to put us out of business. The new knowledge that geneticists and neuroscientists are providing, conjoined with the kinds of analyses we do best, will enable us to take giant strides in understanding how societies, polities, and economies really function. We are like physicists at the outset of the nineteenth century, who were poised at a moment in history that would produce Ampères and Faradays.

Hormones contribute to intelligence and creativity, critical thinking, abstract analysis.

Brain waves are like personal handwriting.

The brain waves of ordinary people during insight experiences are unique. Their brains are in special states.

The brain consumes 20 percent of the body's energy, far more than any other organ, while making up only 2 percent of an adult's body weight.

We cannot study the brain, the instrument for fabricating the realities we inhabit, using the mental constructs of the past.