Quotes About Neuroscience

Your nervous system cannot tell the difference between an imagined experience and a real experience. In either case, it reacts automatically to information that you give to it from your forebrain. Your nervous system reacts appropriately to what you think or imagine to be true.

In an interview in 1992, Leary stated, "It is a genetic imperative to explore the brain. Because it's there. If you're carrying around in your head 100 billion mainframe computers, you just have to get in there and learn how to operate them.

Your nervous system cannot tell the difference between an imagined experience and a real experience. In either case, it reacts automatically to information that you give to it from your forebrain.

Your nervous system reacts appropriately to what you think or imagine to be true.

Thought is a movement of electrons and consciousness is a merely a chemical action.

Both experimental and clinical psychology have proved beyond a shadow of a doubt that the human nervous system cannot tell the difference between an actual experience and an experience imagined vividly and in detail.

I have a neuroscience background - that's what my doctorate is in - and I was trained to study hormones of attachment, so I definitely feel my parenting is informed by that.

Reading is more of a left-brain process, and listening to music is a right-brain function.

It's important to note that a top-down (or feed-backward) flow of information (from higher to lower layers) also occurs in the visual cortex; in fact, there are about ten times as many feed-backward connections as feed-forward ones. However the role of these backward connections is not well understood by neuroscientists, although it is well established that our prior knowledge and expectations, presumably stored in higher brain layers, strongly influence what we perceive.

It is literally the case that learning languages makes you smarter. The neural networks in the brain strengthen as a result of language learning.

In fact, if you step outside on a sunny day, there's enough light reaching your brain that you could actually read this page inside your skull.

men's brains naturally go into a rest state more than women's brains do. Women's brains don't rest or deactivate the way men's brains do.

Our brains are wired in such a way that we can forget, so we don't all end up eating the barrel of a gun.

Memories must somehow be represented physically in the brain. Brain chemistry and structure is altered by experience and the stability of these physicochemical changes presumably corresponds to the retention duration of memory.

Shitij Kapur, a psychiatrist, neuroscientist, and professor at King's College London, distinguishes for us the difference between hallucinations and delusions: "Hallucinations reflect a direct experience of the aberrant salience of internal representations," whereas delusions (false beliefs) are the result of "a cognitive effort by the patient to make sense of these aberrantly salient experiences.

Time and time again, as we will see, the brilliant forebears of modern neuroscience abandoned their fierce reasoning skills and, deus ex machina, threw in a spook at the end of their analysis.

I am not suggesting that single cells are conscious. I am suggesting that they may have some type of processing that is necessary or similar to the processing that results in conscious experience.

John-Dylan Haynes22 and his colleagues expanded Libet's experiments in 2008 to show that the outcomes of an inclination can be encoded in brain activity up to ten seconds before it enters awareness! The brain has acted before its person is conscious of it. Not only that, from looking at the scan, they can make a prediction about what the person is going to do. The implications of this are rather staggering.

This incessant interplay between cognition and feelings, which is to say between cortical and subcortical modules, produces what we call consciousness.

What exactly is the role of the cerebral cortex in producing consciousness? The cortex expands the number of ways in which we can experience the world, which allows for a vast variety of possible conscious experiences and responses.

chapter, however, the modern perspective is that brains enable minds, and that YOU is your vastly parallel and distributed brain without a central command center. There is no ghost in the machine, no secret stuff that is YOU. That YOU that you are so proud of is a story woven together by your interpreter module to account for as much of your behavior as it can incorporate, and it denies or rationalizes the rest.

As I have mentioned earlier, emotional states appear to transfer between the hemispheres subcortically, and this transfer is not affected by severing the corpus callosum

When you hear a good joke, this is the system that kicks in and produces the giggly face.

We don't learn to talk, as most think. We start to talk when our brain is good and ready to say something.