Quotes About Neurons

Joy and serenity are not slavishly tied to our physiology. We are not programmed neurons over which we have no control. We are collaborators in the generation of our thoughts and emotions.

We started all this research way back in the early 1990s, developing a technique that allows us to record the electrical signals produced by neurons simultaneously.

Cognitive neuroscience is entering an exciting era in which new technologies and ideas are making it possible to study the neural basis of cognition, perception, memory and emotion at the level of networks of interacting neurons, the level at which we believe many of the important operations of the brain take place.

these slides with the red-grease-pencil marks have areas where the neurons are either missing or in bad shape," said the resident. "The curious thing is that there's very little if any inflammation. I don't have any idea what it is. I'd have to describe it as 'multifocal, discrete neuron death,' etiology unknown.

Microtubules are the key ingredient for human consciousness, and are able to exhibit quantum effects. Even in the warm, wet, and noisy environment of the brain.

How often did people consider the wonder of their own construction? Pause to reflect on the miracle of a DNA blueprint inside a single fertilized egg capable of directing the creation of an entire human being? Not just trillions of cells working in concert, but a hundred billion neurons somehow managing to become a vessel for consciousness.

A number of scientists thought the universe could be conscious, and I had even read a paper that had investigated similarities between the human brain, with its hundred billion neurons, and the cosmos, with its hundred billion or more galaxies.

Ignoring the vast difference in scale, the authors had found the structures were remarkably similar. Neurons and galaxies were both assembled together in a complex web, spread out in long filaments and nodes that linked them up. Additional analysis revealed that the distribution of the neuronal network in the brain and the distribution of matter in the cosmic web were eerily similar.

Por otro lado, cada patrón instantáneo de la actividad total de un cerebro humano vivo, activa la emergencia de un campo neuronal específico. Un conjunto de campos neuronales, modificándose en el tiempo, se asocian a un pensamiento y varios pensamientos, ocurriendo en sucesión y entrelazados con cierta sintaxis, dan lugar a la sensación de individualidad, la cual posee una cualidad específica.

Octopuses have hundreds of suckers, each one equipped with its own ganglion with thousands of neurons. These 'mini-brains' are interconnected, making for a widely distributed nervous system. That is why a severed octopus arm may crawl on its own and even pick up food.

The widespread assumption is that somehow, the brain produces the mind; somehow millions of neurons fire signals at one another create or produce consciousness... but we have no idea how or why this happens. I'm afraid that in many cases, people in the tech world fail to understand that.

Synaptic summation is the technical term used in neurophysiology for those instances in which some neuron C is fired only by a combination of neurons A and B.

In the worms and fish, there was only one area of positive potential, just as there was only one major nerve ganglion, the brain. In humans the entire head and spinal region, with its massive concentration of neurons, was strongly positive. The three specific areas of greatest positive potential were the same as in the salamander: the brain, the brachial plexus between the shoulder blades, and the lumbar enlargement at the base of the spinal cord.

Even after Marsh and Beams proved Weiss wrong in 1946, it took many more years for the scientific community to accept the fact that neuron fibers do orient themselves along a current flow. Today the possible use of electricity to guide nerve growth is one of the most exciting prospects in regeneration research.

When jungles of neurons fire in unison to support a new thought, an additional chemical (a protein) is created within the nerve cell and makes its way to the cell's center, or nucleus, where it lands in the DNA. The protein then switches on several genes. Since the job of the genes is to make proteins that maintain both the structure and function of the body, the nerve cell then quickly makes a new protein to create new branches between nerve cells.

When neurons fire together, they exchange charged elements that then produce electromagnetic fields, and these fields are what are measured during a brain scan (like an electroencephalograph, or EEG). Humans have several measurable brain-wave frequencies, and the slower the brain-wave state we're in, the deeper we go into the inner world of the subconscious mind.

It has long been known that interoceptive signals are largely conveyed to the central nervous system either by neurons whose axons are devoid of myelin, the C fibers, or by neurons whose axons are very lightly myelinated, the A delta fibers.

The identification of a population of olfactory sensory neurons innervating a single glomerulus that mediates robust avoidance to a naturally occurring odorant provides insight in the neural circuitry that underlies this innate behavior.

Could a machine ever be said to have made its own decisions? Could a machine have beliefs? Could a machine make mistakes? Could a machine believe it made its own decisions? Could a machine erroneously attribute free will to itself? Could a machine come up with ideas that had not been programmed into it in advance? Could creativity emerge from a set of fixed rules? Are we – even the most creative among us – but passive slaves to the laws of physics that govern our neurons?

As a bio major, I figured free will meant chemicals in your brain telling you what to do, the molecules bouncing around in a way that felt like choosing but was actually the dance of little gears--neurons and hormones bubbling up into decisions like clockwork. You don't use your body; it uses you.

Human beings are impossibly complex tarballs of muscle, blood, bone, breath, and electrical pulses that travel through nerves and neurons; we are bundles of electrical pulses carrying payloads, pings hitting servers. And our identities are inextricably connected to our environments: No story can be told without a setting.

If sensory recognition worked on the grandmother principle, the number of specific-recognition neurons for all possible combinations of nerve impulses would exceed the number of atoms in the universe.

I once did a radio program with a famous materialist, that is to say a scientist who believed that absolutely everything was physical and that all emotions were reductive to little electrical impulses in your neurons. And I found that I didn't believe that. But what the emotions really are, I don't have an alternative theory.

Because many squid have brain nerve fibres that are hundreds of times thicker than those of humans, neuroscientists have long used them for research. These nerve fibres have led to so many breakthroughs in the study of neurons that many scientists joke that the squid should receive a Nobel Prize.