Quotes About Neurons

Just as the mind emerges from the actions of individual neurons and their cooperation, the success of an organization emerges not only from its individual participants, but also from the interplay between them.

For me, consciousness is the most interesting unsolved problem of science, and, in fact, we may never know what it is about a particular arrangement of neurons that gives rise to consciousness. Our consciousness, like the air we breathe or like the passage of time, is central to our existence as intelligent beings.

At such rare times you can feel the electrically charged neurons of the prefrontal brain realigning themselves like iron fillings drawn by a magnet.

of the bone even making it into the hippocampus.

In the latest brain image studies, we can see real-time movies of individual interneuronal connections actually creating new synapses (connection points between neurons), so we can see our brain create our thoughts and in turn see our thoughts create our brain.

We have fifty billion neurons in the cerebellum that deal with skill formation, billions in the cortex that perform the transformations for perception and rational planning, but only about eighty thousand spindle cells dealing with high-level emotions.

Each neuron acts in an essentially unpredictable fashion. When an entire network of neurons receives input (from the outside world or from other networks of neurons), the signaling among them appears at first to be frenzied and random. Over time, typically a fraction of a second or so, the chaotic interplay of the neurons dies down and a stable pattern of firing emerges.

Furthermore, neurons are extremely slow; electronic circuits are at least a million times faster. Once a computer achieves a human level of ability in understanding abstract concepts, recognizing patterns, and other attributes of human intelligence, it will be able to apply this ability to a knowledge base of all human-acquired—and machine-acquired—knowledge.

What if a chemical, either found in nature or cooked up in a lab, could tap into the motivational circuit and drive dopamine neurons artificially from within the brain? Intriguingly, this may be exactly how drugs of abuse work. Although different drugs of abuse have distinct molecular targets and very different behavioral effects, they all drive the electrical activity of dopamine neurons or the release of dopamine from these cells (while nonaddictive brain-targeted drugs like Prozac do not).5

Our brains are comprised of around eighty billion neurons interconnected to form an enormous network involving approximately five hundred trillion connections called synapses.

As with any computing device, understanding the brain involves characterizing the properties of its main components (neurons), the nature of their connections (synapses), and the pattern of interconnections (wiring diagram).

It may be, for example, that one key difference between the brains of straight women and lesbians is the function of a particular protein, like a voltage-sensitive potassium channel, that influences the electrical behavior of certain neurons in a brain circuit that influences sexual and gender-typical behavior.

Your brain has more than 100 billion cells, each connected to at least 20,000 other cells. The possible combinations are greater than the number of molecules in the known universe.

As the blood poured from his tattered heart into the open air and his brain suffocated, all those incomplete thoughts of Wittgenstein decayed with the dying neurons. Neural connections in the gray matter storing memories and ideas in their ordered configurations fired across the gaps, last gaps of mental life. Thoughts on Truth and Will were erased as flesh sloshed soft and limp against alabaster, no more than rotting human fruit.

Your brain is a forest, And the nerves are trees. When the branches touch, Snaps jumps between the leaves.

Language is a function not only of neurons, not only of "I," but of the meeting of cell and cosmos: the brash Caw of a disembodied intelligence at large in the universe, perhaps even the "voice" of primordial matter. You can hear it in wild turkeys at dawn.

The neurons in the gut are so innumerable that scientist are now calling the totality of them "the second brain"... In fact, recent research is revaling that our second brain may not be second at all. It can act independently from the main brain and control many functions without the brain's input.

brain-derived neurotrophic factor," or BDNF. BDNF plays a key role in creating new neurons. But beyond its role in neurogenesis, BDNF protects existing neurons, ensuring their survivability

The neurons in the gut are so innumerable that scientist are now calling the totality of them "the second brain"... In fact, recent research is revaling that our second brain may not be second at all. It can act independently from the main brain and control many functions without the brain's input or help.

But a caveat: Once free radicals damage the LDL molecule, it's rendered much less capable of delivering cholesterol to the brain. In addition to oxidation destroying the LDL's function, sugar can also render it dysfunctional by binding to it and accelerating oxidation. And when that happens, LDL is no longer able to enter the astrocyte, a cell charged with nourishing neurons. In

We are connected to our children no matter what. They are interwoven into each cell and inseparable from every neuron. They supersede our consciousness, dwell in our every hollow and cavity and recess with our most primitive instincts, deeper even than our identities, deeper even than our selves.

There is another mechanism which even further selects and distorts incoming sensory information, and which is extremely important to the therapeutic purposes of bodywork. Side-by-side with the ascending dorsal and spinothalamic pathways are descending sensory pathways, outgoing tracts from the brain which are not efferent, which do not contact motor neurons, but which synapse densely with the ascending sensory pathways and exert a centrifugal flow against their incoming sensory information.

However, if one or more of the neurons are in the predictive state, our theory says, only those neurons spike and the other neurons are inhibited. Thus, when an input arrives that is unexpected, multiple neurons fire at once. If the input is predicted, then only the predictive-state neurons become active. This is a common observation about the neocortex: unexpected inputs cause a lot more activity than expected ones.

Feeling awful is physiological you say. God I hate you, I say. Yes you can find the neurons for feeling awful. Do you think you can find the neurons for the fact I hate you?