Quotes About Neuroscience

Jordan Grafman, head of the cognitive neuroscience unit at the National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke, explains that the constant shifting of our attention when we're online may make our brains more nimble when it comes to multitasking, but improving our ability to multitask actually hampers our ability to think deeply and creatively.

We feel our heart beat, our lungs expand, our stomach churn—but our brain, lacking motility and having no sensory nerve endings, remains imperceptible to us. The source of consciousness lies beyond the grasp of consciousness.

All this sensory input, which begins in the brain, has its effect throughout the body.

We see with our brains, not with our eyes,

He also discovered that when he touched certain parts of the brain, he triggered long-lost childhood memories or dreamlike scenes—which implied that higher mental activities were also mapped in the brain.

Merzenich mapped a monkey's entire hand map. He began by touching the monkey's first finger and seeing which brain area started to fire. Once he found its brain map and defined its borders, he went on to the next finger. He found five finger areas, side by side for each of the five digits. Then

Psychotherapy works by going deep into the brain and its neurons and changing their structure by turning on the right genes. Psychiatrist Dr. Susan Vaughan has argued that the talking cure works by 'talking to neurons,' and that an effective psychotherapist or psychoanalyst is a 'microsurgeon of the mind' who helps patients make needed alterations in neuronal networks.

Sharpen Perception and Memory, Increase Speed of Thought, and Heal Learning Problems

The human brain is by far the most complex physical object known to us in the entire cosmos.

Moral deliberation has to be somewhere in the brain, after all. It's not going to be in the foot or the stomach, and it's certainly not going to reside in some mysterious immaterial realm. So who cares about precisely where?

Regardless of their sex, good-looking faces light up the brain

From a neuroscience perspective we are all divided and discontinuous. The mental processes underlying our sense of self-- feelings, thoughts, memories-- are scattered through different zones of the brain. There is no special point of convergence. No cockpit of the soul. No soul-pilot. They come together in a work of fiction. A human being is a story-telling machine. The self is a story.

This is the left hemisphere confabulating. It does this for all of us, every waking moment. It edits our conscious experiences, makes them comprehensible and palatable. It's the brain's spin-doctor.

Research by Stanford neuroscientist Andrew Huberman upends the idea that beliefs determine what we do or what we can do. It is the opposite. Beliefs do not change our actions. Actions change our beliefs.

Oxytocin connects us to other people; oxytocin makes us feel what other people feel. And it's easy to cause people's brains to release oxytocin. Let me show you. Come here. Give me a hug.

How does the brain wire words? Why do the Swiss manage three languages, while most Americans have trouble with one?

In retrospect I can clearly see that as my self-compassion increased, my toxic shame decreased. Modern advances in neuroscience [see: A General Theory of Love] suggest that we are intrinsically limited in our ability to emotionally regulate and soothe ourselves. More and more research suggests that our ability to metabolize painful emotional states is enhanced by communicating with a safe enough other person.

Depression, in its insidious way, acts as a degenerative disease, harming nerve cells. Like

In conclusion, the neuroscientific accounts of LeDoux and Damasio deepen the Spinozistic insight that we are embodied minds.

In all living creatures, fear and curiosity are closely related in the brain.