Quotes About Brain

When something cement does not fit into the current context of activated ideas, the system detects an abnormality, as you just experienced. You had no particular idea of what was coming after something, but you knew when the word cement came that it was abnormal in that sentence. Studies of brain responses have shown that violations of normality are detected with astonishing speed and subtlety.

Damasio and his colleagues have observed that people who do not display the appropriate emotions before they decide, sometimes because of brain damage, also have an impaired ability to make good decisions. An inability to be guided by a "healthy fear" of bad consequences is a disastrous flaw.

He had noticed that the pupils are sensitive indicators of mental effort—they dilate substantially when people multiply two-digit numbers, and they dilate more if the problems are hard than if they are easy. His observations indicated that the response to mental effort is distinct from emotional arousal.

It is very likely that intrinsic variability in the functioning of the brain also affects the quality of our judgments in ways that we cannot possibly hope to control.

the effects of ego depletion could be undone by ingesting glucose

As you become skilled in a task, its demand for energy diminishes. Studies of the brain have shown that the pattern of activity associated with an action changes as skill increases, with fewer brain regions involved. Talent has similar effects. Highly intelligent individuals need less effort to solve the same problems, as indicated by both pupil size and brain activity.

Restoring the level of available sugar in the brain had prevented the deterioration of performance.

The nervous system consumes more glucose than most other parts of the body

Studies of the brain have shown that the pattern of activity associated with an action changes as skill increases, with fewer brain regions involved. Talent has similar effects. Highly intelligent individuals need less effort to solve the same problems, as indicated by both pupil size and brain activity. A

Damasio and his colleagues have observed that people who do not display the appropriate emotions before they decide, sometimes because of brain damage, also have an impaired ability to make good decisions.

effortful mental activity appears to be especially expensive in the currency of glucose.

Other classic studies showed that electrical stimulation of specific areas in the rat brain (and of corresponding areas in the human brain) produce a sensation of intense pleasure, so intense in some cases that rats who can stimulate their brain by pressing a lever will die of starvation without taking a break to feed themselves

As you become skilled in a task, its demand for energy diminishes. Studies of the brain have shown that the pattern of activity associated with an action changes as skill increases, with fewer brain regions involved.

The nervous system consumes more glucose than most other parts of the body, and effortful mental activity appears to be especially expensive in the currency of glucose. When you are actively involved in difficult cognitive reasoning or engaged in a task that requires self-control, your blood glucose level drops. The effect is analogous to a runner who draws down glucose stored in her muscles during a sprint. The

Intuitive errors are normally much more frequent among ego-depleted people, and the drinkers of Splenda showed the expected depletion effect. On the other hand, the glucose drinkers were not depleted. Restoring the level of available sugar in the brain had prevented the deterioration of performance.

An odd feature of what happened is that your System 1 treated the mere conjunction of two words as representations of reality. Your body acted in an attenuated replica of reaction to the real thing, and the emotional response and physical recoil were part of the interpretation of the event. As cognitive scientists have emphasised in recent years, cognition is embodied; you think with your body, not only with your brain.

Some experimenters have reported that an angry face "pops out" of a crowd of happy faces, but a single happy face does not stand out in an angry crowd. The brains of humans and other animals contain a mechanism that is designed to give priority to bad news.

Materialism: The philosophical position that there is only one thing in the universe: stuff, matter. Anything other than matter is either reducible to matter, as thoughts are reducible to the matter of a brain doing its thing, or doesn't exist, like the Tooth Fairy.

The damaged frontal regions normally play an important role in assessing or monitoring signals provided by other neural systems.

emotional information attracts attention quickly and automatically

To see is to experience the world as it is, to remember is to experience the world as it was, but to imagine-ah, to imagine is to experience the world as it isn't and has never been, but as it might be. The greatest achievement of the human brain is its ability to imagine objects and episodes that do not exist in the realm of the real, and it is this ability that allows us to think about the future.

Choline, an amino acid often prescribed for poor memory, absent-mindedness, and other cerebral inneficiencies associated with senility, is therapeutically impotent unless taken in conjunction with a large dose of vitamin B5. Choline is the basic building block the brain uses to produce the neurotransmitter acetylcholine, deficiencies of which are associated with symptoms of senility, but without the synergistic presence of vitamin B5, the brain cannot convert choline into acetylcholine.

The body concentrates vitamin C around brain and nerve cells specifically to protect them from oxidation and free-radical damage, because vitamin C is one of nature's most powerful antioxidants.

The human brain is like a memory system that records every thing that happens to us and makes intelligent predictions based on those experiences.