Quotes About Neuroscience

It's likely that taboo words are stored in the right hemisphere of the brain. Massive left hemisphere strokes or the entire surgical removal of the left hemisphere can leave people with no articulate speech other than the ability to swear, spout cliches and song lyrics.

Mark Zuckerberg talks about telepathy, and Elon Musk has invested in trying to create a brain-machine interface.

When we can communicate from the inside out, we're talking directly to the part of the brain that controls behavior, and then we allow people to rationalize it with the tangible things we say and do. This is where gut decisions come from.

But the scientists had the other half of their group of volunteers only imagine playing the notes; they did not actually touch the ivories. Then the researchers measured whether the motor cortex had noticed. It had. The region that controls the fingers of the right hand had expanded in the virtual pianists just as it had in the volunteers who had actually played the piano. Thinking, and thinking alone, had increased the amount of space the motor cortex devoted to a specific function.

recent research has shown that when we empathize, the brain activates many of the same networks as when we ourselves experience pain, physical or otherwise.

Neuroscientists know now that bad habits have a physical existence in the structure of the brain; they become the default circuits when we are faced with temptation.

Pleasure and desire are altogether different things in the brain.

A study of the brain using new technology showed that the thinking areas practically shut down when people were made to listen to information that contradicted their political beliefs. Conversely, when they heard information that tended to confirm their beliefs, the happiness centers of the brain lit up.

A related study showed that men who'd had their amygdala, the fear center of the brain, removed (because of accident or illness) were unable to respond in this way.

60 percent of your brain is made from fat, specifically DHA.

2) Any meaningful scientific or existential or phenomenological statement reports on how our nervous systems or other instruments have recorded some event or events in space-time.

Quantum Mechanics says an electron has a different essence every time we measure it (or, more clearly, it has no essence at all). Neuroscience reveals, similarly, that the Mary we meet on Tuesday may have a different self than the Mary we met Monday (or, as the Buddhists said long before neuroscience, Mary has no essence at all).

Neuroscience has shown that the child's brain is biologically primed to learn from experience, so that early environments powerfully affect the architecture of the developing brain. The most fundamental feature of that experience is interaction with responsive adults—typically, but not only, parents.

Intuitively, we know that neglect is not good for a child, and abundant evidence from neuroscience helps explain why: neglect during early childhood reduces the frequency of serve-and-return interactions and produces deficits in brain development that are hard to repair. A landmark randomized study of Romanian orphans who were institutionalized at an early age found that extreme neglect produced severe deficits in IQ, mental health, social adjustment, and even brain architecture.

The brain is a funny animal," he muttered

All people have religions. It's like we have religion receptors built into our brain cells, or something, and we'll latch onto anything that'll fill that niche for us.

In school, I studied psychology, linguistics, neuroscience. I understand that there is a real lack of respect for the brain.

It turned out that our choices of everything from food to mates result not from some mysterious free will, but rather from billions of neurons calculating probabilities within a split second. Vaunted 'human intuition' is in reality 'pattern recognition'.3

Ironically, the better we map this process, the harder it becomes to explain conscious feelings. The better we understand the brain, the more redundant the mind seems. If the entire system works by electric signals passing from here to there, why the hell do we also need to feel fear?

The bitter truth is that the world has simply become too complicated for our hunter-gatherer brains.

most up-to-date theories also maintain that sensations and emotions are biochemical data-processing algorithms.

Relatively small changes in genes, hormones and neurons were enough to transform Homo erectus – who could produce nothing more impressive than flint knives – into Homo sapiens, who produce spaceships and computers.

The Human Brain Project,

En Homo sapiens, el cerebro supone el 2-3 por ciento del peso corporal total, pero consume el 25 por ciento de la energía corporal cuando el cuerpo está en reposo.