Quotes About Neural

Your brain grows and changes based on feedback. What you tell it, changes it. And while it's rewiring itself, your brain then feeds those new programs, those new pictures of yourself, back to you. It's a feedback "loop." What you put in, you get back out, in a continuous "neural activity feedback loop.

what is called the "subconscious mind" is actually a result of the neural activity of the brain itself — your brain's neurons silently firing, without your control or awareness — rather than being a part of the activity of the "mind." In fact, the process can take place without the brain discussing it with the mind at all.

Reading.... is brain protein - it demands concentration and sustained neural energy.

Just as breathing exercises help integrate body and mind, writing is a kind of psycho-neural muscular activity which helps bridge and integrate the conscious and subconscious minds. Writing distills, crystallizes, and clarifies thought and helps break the whole into parts.

writing is a kind of psycho-neural muscular activity which helps bridge and integrate the conscious and subconscious minds.

When you think about ideas in their native state of neural networks, two key preconditions become clear. First, the sheer size of the network: you can't have an epiphany with only three neurons firing. The network needs to be densely populated.

to make your mind more innovative, you have to place it inside environments that share that same network signature: networks of ideas or people that mimic the neural networks of a mind exploring the boundaries of the adjacent possible.

Theodore Berger, for example, a neural engineer at the University of Southern California, is working on an artificial hippocampus, one of the core neuronal structures implicated in this process. Berger's device records the electrical activity that arises whenever we encode short-term memories — for example, learning to play scales — then translates them into digital signals.

The philosophers Liam Clegg and Daniel Dennett have argued that human behavior is inherently unpredictable not just because of random neural noise in the brain but as an adaptation that makes it harder for our rivals to outguess us.

Day-to-day political debates are also contests between metaphors. Citizens are not rational and pay no attention to facts, except as they fit into frames, and the frames are fixed in the neural structures of [their] brains. In George W. Bush's first term, for example, he promised tax relief, which frames taxes as an affliction, the reliever as a hero, and anyone obstructing him as a villain.

The experience of choosing is not a fiction, regardless of how the brain works. It is a real neural process, with the obvious function of selecting behavior according to its foreseeable consequences. It responds to information from the senses, including the exhortations of other people. You cannot step outside it or let it go on without you because it is you.

Our understanding of life has only been enriched by the discovery that living flesh is composed of molecular clockwork rather than quivering protoplasm, or that birds soar by exploiting the laws of physics rather than defying them. In the same way, our understanding of ourselves and our cultures can only be enriched by the discovery that our minds are composed of intricate neural circuits for thinking, feeling, and learning rather than blank slates, amorphous blobs, or inscrutable ghosts.

You simply don't understand how every neural circuit through which you peer at the world has been shaped (and painfully) by the ethical aims of millions of years of human ancestors and all of the life that was lived for the billions of years before that.

Quit drooping and hunching around. Speak your mind. Put your desires forward, as if you had a right to them—at least the same right as others. Walk tall and gaze forthrightly ahead. Dare to be dangerous. Encourage the serotonin to flow plentifully through the neural pathways desperate for its calming influence.

You don't understand how what you want—and, therefore, what you see—is conditioned by the immense, abysmal, profound past. You simply don't understand how every neural circuit through which you peer at the world has been shaped (and painfully) by the ethical aims of millions of years of human ancestors and all of the life that was lived for the billions of years before that.

The essence of who you are is stored as synaptic interactions in and between the various systems of your brain. As we learn more about the synaptic mechanisms of memory, we learn more about the neural basis of the self.

We now think of internal representation as great big vectors, and we do not think of logic as the paradigm for how to get things to work. We just think you can have these great big neural nets that learn, and so, instead of programming, you are just going to get them to learn everything.

The key to artificial intelligence has always been the representation.

I think the brain is essentially a computer and consciousness is like a computer program. It will cease to run when the computer is turned off. Theoretically, it could be re-created on a neural network, but that would be very difficult, as it would require all one's memories.

We should be exploring consciousness at the neural level and higher, where the arrow of causal analysis points up toward such principles as emergence and self-organization.

For example multi-tasking, often a point of pride for modern professionals, has been shown to lower our mental efficiency and result in impaired cognitive function that is worse than from smoking marijuana.46 Likewise the constant deluge of digital information to which we are exposed can result in a debilitating form of neural addiction that gradually narrows our scope of meaningful achievement while creating the illusion that we are actually accomplishing more with our time.

A brain scan may reveal the neural signs of anxiety, but a Kokoschka painting, or a Schiele self-portrait, reveals what an anxiety state really feels like. Both perspectives are necessary if we are to fully grasp the nature of the mind, yet they are rarely brought together.

This healthy dependence is the essence of romantic love. The bodies of lovers are linked in a "neural duet." One person sends out signals that alter the hormone levels, cardiovascular function, body rhythms, and even immune system of the other. In loving connection, the cuddle hormone oxytocin floods lovers' bodies, bringing a calm joy and the sense that everything is right with the world. Our bodies are set up for this kind of connection.

In A.I., the holy grail was how do you generate internal representations.