Quotes About Neuroscience

What are the determinants in how we age? The different systems in our brains age at different rates. Some systems decline as others actually increase in efficiency and effectiveness. The basic message

neuroscientists have recently discovered that parts of the brain can fall asleep for a few moments or longer without our realizing it. At any given moment, some circuits in the brain may be off-line, slumbering, recouping energy, and as long as we're not calling on them to do something for us, we don't notice.

Daniel J. Levitin

We create because we cannot stop ourselves from doing so. Because our brains were made that way.

Contrary to the old, simplistic notion that art and music are processed in the right hemisphere of our brains, with language and mathematics in the left, recent findings from my laboratory and those of my colleagues are showing us that music is distributed throughout the brain.

Similarly with pitch: From a one-dimensional continuum of molecules vibrating at different speeds, our brains construct a rich, multidimensional pitch space with three, four, or even five dimensions (according to some models). If our brain is adding this many dimensions to what is out there in the world, this can help explain the deep reactions we have to sounds that are properly constructed and skillfully combined.

The Greek physicians Herophilus and Erasistratus discovered the nervous system in 322 BC, placing the seat of thought in the brain. It might be fair to say that they were the first neuroscientists. Previously, Aristotle and others thought the brain's function was simply to cool the blood, due to it's many folds and creases.

Understanding how the brain's attentional and memory systems interact can go a long way toward minimizing memory lapses.

We are off-loading a great deal of the processing that our neurons would normally do to an external device that then becomes an extension of our own brains, a neural enhancer.

Neurons are living cells, and they can connect to one another in trillions of different ways. These connections don't just lead to learning—the connections are the learning.

Memory is fallible, of course, but not because of storage limitations so much as retrieval limitations. Some neuroscientists believe that nearly every conscious experience is stored somewhere in your brain;

One of the key practical lessons of modern neuroscience is that the power to direct our attention has within it the power to shape our brain's firing patterns, as well as the power to shape the architecture of the brain itself.

Early experience shapes the structure and function of the brain. This reveals the fundamental way in which gene expression is determined by experience.

Physically and genetically, our brains may not have evolved much in the last forty thousand years—but our minds have. A baby born today would be much the same as a baby born tens of thousands of years ago. But if we were able to compare the intricate neural structure of an adult brain in today's modern society with that of an adult brain from forty thousand years ago, we'd find huge differences.

Everything they see, hear, feel, touch, or even smell impacts their brain and thus influences the way they view and interact with their world—including their family, neighbors, strangers, friends, classmates, and even themselves.

brain imaging studies show that the experience of physical pain and the experience of relational pain, like rejection, look very similar in terms of location of brain activity.

As children develop, their brains "mirror" their parent's brain. In other words, the parent's own growth and development, or lack of those, impact the child's brain. As parents become more aware and emotionally healthy, their children reap the rewards and move toward health as well.

Once she had connected with him right brain to right brain, it was much easier to connect left to left and deal with the issues in a rational manner. By first connecting with his right brain, she could then redirect with the left brain through logical explanation and planning, which required that his left hemisphere join the conversation.

Your anger—along with other strong emotions and bodily functions and instincts—springs from your downstairs brain.

As we join in this moment in the physical realm—making appointments to be in the same space at a given interval of the clock—our nervous systems align their firing patterns as two sets of electrochemical entities phase shift

while the downstairs brain is well developed even at birth, the upstairs brain isn't fully mature until a person reaches his mid-twenties.

The upstairs brain remains under massive construction for the first few years of life, then during the teen years undergoes an extensive remodel that lasts into adulthood.

This is really important information for parents to understand, because it means that all of the abilities on the list above—the behaviors and skills we want and expect our kids to demonstrate, like sound decision making, control of their emotions and bodies, empathy, self-understanding, and morality—are dependent on a part of their brain that hasn't fully developed yet. Since the upstairs brain is still under construction, it isn't capable of fully functioning

The amygdala's job is to quickly process and express emotions, especially anger and fear.