Quotes About Neuroscience

The past does not exist -- except in the brain.

Excessive and persistent levels of fear create changes in brain function that then interfere with decision-making processes.

In Jill Bolte Taylor's book My Stroke of Insight, she points to scientific evidence showing that the life span of any particular emotion is only one and a half minutes. After that we have to revive the emotion and get it going again.

In My Stroke of Insight, the brain scientist Jill Bolte Taylor's book about her recovery from a massive stroke, she explains the physiological mechanism behind emotion: an emotion like anger that's an automatic response lasts just ninety seconds from the moment it's triggered until it runs its course. One and a half minutes, that's all. When it lasts any longer, which it usually does, it's because we've chosen to rekindle it.

Neuroscientist Antonio Damasio describes emotions as the "continuous musical line of our minds, the unstoppable humming."3

Neuroscientist Antonio Damasio describes emotions as the continuous musical line of our minds, the unstoppable humming. This basso continuo thrums along while doctors make a steady stream of conscious medical decisions.

In neuroscience, our textbook showed how the brain scans of people newly in love look a lot like the brain scans of patients with obsessive-compulsive disorder. In each case, your dopamine is suppressing your serotonin.

Pribram has given evidence backing up his suggestion that memories are generally recorded all over the brain in such a way that information concerning a given object or quality is not stored in a particular cell or localized part of the brain but rather that all the information is enfolded over the whole.

In addition, we still do not really know how the brain creates emotions. We do not know why some people are more prone to negative thinking and gloomy moods throughout their lives, whereas others seem to be eternal optimists who always have a positive outlook and a cheerful disposition.

numinous aura)—which balcony means that even the worst latex slip-and-slide off the steeply curved cerebrum's edge would mean a fall of only a few meters to the broad butylene platform, from which a venous-blue emergency ladder can be detached and lowered to extend down past the superior temporal gyrus and Pons and abducent to hook up with the polyurethane basilar-stem artery and allow a safe shimmy down to the good old oblongata just outside the rubberized meatus at ground zero.

even though our brains account for only 2 percent of our body weight, they demand 20 percent of our energy,

THERE MIGHT BE A CONNECTION BETWEEN THE MOON'S ENERGY WHEN IT'S FULL AND THE ELECTRICAL IMPULSES IN THE BRAIN.

Just assume the human brain has unlimited capacity for memory and processing.

We were all too young. Did you know that the parts of the brain involved in decision-making aren't fully developed until you're twenty-five years old?

For moral judgment, I think the most interesting trends in neuroscience are the ways in which judgments vary as a function of how emotionally salient the situation is.

We know what molecules are needed to sense light - what turns that signal that detects light into an electrical signal. We know how smells are detected. But we have a vast number of senses for which we know what the signal is, but we don't know what the receiver is.

I spent 20 years doing research on regular and irregular verbs, not because I'm an obsessive language lover but because it seemed to me that they tapped into a fundamental distinction in language processing, indeed in cognitive processing, between memory lookup and rule-driven computation.

Lies can be verbal or nonverbal, kindhearted or self-serving, devious or bald-faced; they can be lies of omission or lies of commission; they can be lies that undermine national security or lies that make a child feel better. And each type might involve a unique neural pathway.

Cortical grid cells in what columns attach reference frames to objects. Cortical grid cells in where columns attach reference frames to your body.

the cortex uses the same computational tool to accomplish everything it does.

Mountcastle proposed that the reason the regions look similar is that they are all doing the same thing. What makes them different is not their intrinsic function but what they are connected to.

We have learned a tremendous amount of knowledge and facts about the brain, but we have little understanding of how the whole thing works.

Truly random thoughts don't exist.

through the sensory nerves. The nerves only send spikes. And since we do not perceive spikes, everything we do perceive must be fabricated in the brain. Even the most basic feelings of light, sound, and touch are creations of the brain; they only exist in its model of the world.