Quotes About Neuroscience

Investigators from Boston Children's Hospital in Massachusetts recently found that a meal high in refined carbohydrates produced brain effects consistent with those of drug addiction. 1 Every single subject showed intense activation in the nucleus accumbens, the area of the brain related to addiction.

I do two things. I design mobile computers and I study brains.

The brain is not the mind. It is probably impossible to look at a map of brain activity and predict or even understand the emotions, reactions, hopes and desires of the mind.

We forget most of our dreams because we don't have access to those parts of our brain once we are switched to wakefulness. But why we evolved that way is a puzzle to me.

The great thing, then, in all education, is to make our nervous system our ally instead of our enemy.

If you wanted to create an education environment that was directly opposed to what the brain was good at doing, you would probably design something like a classroom.

If I throw you into an MRI machine right now, I can tell you what words you're about to say.

Smell was our first sense, and it was so successful that in time the small lump of olfactory tissue atop the nerve cord grew into a brain. Our cerebral hemispheres were originally buds from our olfactory stalks. We think because we smelled.

Everything that goes on in your whole life is a result of molecules rushing around somewhere in your brain.

I have only a bare working knowledge of the human brain but it's enough to make me proud to be an American.

Is it very different at home, or on the street, or waiting at the gate to board a flight? I maintain myself on the puppet drug of personal technology. Every touch of a button brings the neural rush of finding something I never knew and never needed to know until it appears at my anxious fingertips, where it remains for a shaky second before disappearing forever.

I have only a bare working knowledge of the human brain but it's enough to make be proud to be an American.

What happens to good an evil in this system? Passion, envy and hate? Do they become a tangle of neurons? Are you telling me that a whole tradition of human failings is now at an end, that cowardice, sadism, molestation are meaningless terms? Are we being asked to regard these things nostalgically? What about murderous rage? A murderer used to have a certain fearsome size to him. His crime was large. what happens when we reduce it to calls and molecules?

Herbert Read thought we would need a mystical theory to connect beauty and function. Well, it took one hundred years, but today we have that theory, one based in biology, neuroscience, and psychology, not mysticism.

Most of human behavior is a result of subconscious processes. We are unaware of them. As a result, many of our beliefs about how people behave—including beliefs about ourselves—are wrong. That is why we have the multiple social and behavioral sciences, with a good dash of mathematics, economics, computer science, information science, and neuroscience.

three different levels of the brain: the automatic, prewired layer, called the visceral level; the part that contains the brain processes that control everyday behavior, known as the behavioral level; and the contemplative part of the brain, or the reflective level.

But this poses a problem," Mike continued. "Processing information demands that the brain burn calories. And the burning of too many calories acts against the brain's primary job: to help us survive and thrive.

A human brain is designed to experience pleasure when it understands something and fear or resistance when it doesn't.

neuroscientists claim the average human being spends more than 30 percent of their time daydreaming . . . unless they're reading, listening to, or watching a story unfold.

It is an emotional issue which ultimately revolves around the question of whether other animals affectively experience the world and themselves in a way similar to humans—as subjectively feeling, sentient creatures. The topic of subjectivity is one that modern neuroscience has avoided. It is generally agreed that there are no direct, objective ways to measure the subjectivity of other animals, nor indeed of other humans.

We now know that the placebo effect is real medicine that operates mainly through the activation of brain opioid systems.

Despite its claim to a new view among the psychological sciences, affective neuroscience is deeply rooted within physiological psychology, behavioral biology, and the modernized label for all of these disciplines: behavioral neuroscience. The present coverage will rely heavily on data collected by individuals in these fields, but it will put a new twist on the evidence. It reinterprets many of the brain-behavior findings to try to account for the central neuropsychic states of organisms.

Each emotional system is hierarchically arranged throughout much of the brain, interacting with more evolved cognitive structures in the higher reaches, and specific physiological and motor outputs at lower levels.

I would suggest that subjectively experienced feelings arise, ultimately, from the interactions of various emotional systems with the fundamental brain substrates of "the self," but, as already mentioned, an in-depth discussion of that troublesome issue will be postponed until Chapter 16.