Quotes About Neuroscience

the human brain is a binary system—synapses either fire or they don't—they are on or off, like a computer switch. The brain has over a hundred trillion switches, which means that building a brain is not so much a question of technology as it is a question of scale.

The left brain was analytical and verbal, while the right brain was intuitive and "preferred" pictures to words.

When we hear a fact, a few isolated areas of our brain light up, translating words and meanings. When we hear a story, however, our brain lights up like Las Vegas, tracing the chains of cause, effect, and meaning. Stories are not just stories; they are the best invention ever created for delivering mental models that drive behavior.

Practice doesn't make perfect. Practice makes myelin, and myelin makes perfect.

Indeed, laughter may be the shortest distance between two brains, an unstoppable infectious spread that builds an instant social bond.

A mais antiga raiz de nossa vida emocional está no sentido do olfato, ou, mais precisamente, no lobo olfativo, células que absorvem e analisam o cheiro.

The fact that the thinking brain grew from the emotional reveals much about the relationship of thought to feeling; there was an emotional brain long before there was a rational one.

O primeiro movimento para um novo território implica o abandono de uma agradável rotina e a luta contra a inércia dos caminhos já trilhados; este pequeno ato de atenção exige aquilo a que a neurociência chama «esforço cognitivo». Essa esforçada componente de domínio executivo liberta a atenção, permitindo-lhe vaguear à vontade e percorrer novos caminhos.

Tania Singer, director of the social neuroscience department at the Max Planck Institute for Human Cognitive and Brain Sciences in Leipzig, Germany, has studied empathy and self-awareness

el neocórtex puede aprender a inhibir el funcionamiento de la amígdala.

Quando os músicos de jazz foram comparados com os músicos clássicos quanto a funções cerebrais, mostraram mais indicadores neuronais de consciência de si mesmos. Conforme disse um músico de jazz, «no jazz, é preciso sintonizarmo-nos quanto ao que o nosso corpo está a sentir, para sabermos quando avançar para um solo».

Situações que não exigem uma constante focagem na tarefa – em particular quanto às tarefas aborrecidas ou rotineiras – deixam a mente livre para vaguear. (…) Dado que o sonhar acordado compete pela energia neuronal com o foco em tarefas e a perceção sensorial, não admira que, quando sonhamos acordados, cometamos mais erros em tudo aquilo que exija mais da nossa atenção focada.

The first three or four years of life are a period when the toddler's brain grows to about two thirds its full size, and evolves in complexity at a greater rate than it ever will again. During this period key kinds of learning take place more readily than later in life—emotional learning foremost among them. During this time severe stress can impair the brain's learning centers.

Neuroscientists have discovered that unproductivity and loss of drive can result from decision overload.

A big part of the problem here is that the human brain often makes up its mind based on emotional considerations, and then seeks to justify them. And the brain is a very powerful self-justifying machine.

The frontal cortex doesn't even fully develop until age 25, which is wild!

The only thing we'll ever really know are those electrical pulses that are sent up by our senses.

Rather than plug a piece of hardware into our gray matter, how much more elegant to extract some brain cells, plop them into a Petri dish, and graft on various sorts of gelatinous computing goo. Slug it all back into the skull and watch it run on blood sugar, the way a human brain's supposed to. Get all the functions and features you want, without that clunky-junky twentieth-century hardware thing.

N-methyl-4-phenyl-1236

Your brain hosts a truly staggering number of loops. The more hooks an idea has, the better it will cling to memory.

Instead, the emerging story from cognitive neuroscience is that aging can be successful, associated with gains and losses. It is not necessarily a unidirectional process but rather a complex phenomenon characterized by reorganization, optimization and enduring functional plasticity that can enable the maintenance of a productive—and happy—life.

She added that despite all the advances in neuroscience, psychology wasn't going anywhere either. I nodded. It would be around for as long as there are people who wanted to babble about their problems. So, forever.

According to Fred Dick, a senior lecturer in psychology at Birkbeck, University of London, all the laboratories that have tried to find a language area have been successful in that they have indeed found dozens, even hundreds, of them.

In particular, judging one's own confidence in having seen or heard something—metacognition, or "knowing about knowing" (recall the four-point confidence scale in chapter 2)—is linked to anterior regions of prefrontal cortex.