Quotes About Brain

Your scientists have done studies with people connected to an EEG brain-scanning device while watching TV; they registered activity in the delta wave frequencies, essentially occupying a highly programmable sleep state while viewing TV.

In the brain of a madman only the fuming present exists, with its endless shouting urges, paranoid speculations, and grandiose assumptions.

The universe (he said) is the Great All, and offers a paradox too great for the finite mind to grasp. As the living brain cannot conceive of a nonliving brain – although it may think it can – the finite mind cannot grasp the infinite.

The human brain is finite – no more than a sponge of tissue inside a cage of bone – but the mind within the brain is infinite. Its storage capacity is colossal, its imaginative reach beyond our ability to comprehend. I think when a man or woman dies, a whole world falls to ruin – the world that person knew and believed in. Think of that, kiddo – billions of people on earth, and each one of those billions with a world inside. The earth their minds have conceived.

It would occur to him later that the body knows how to fight when it has to. That it's a secret the body keeps, just as it does the secrets of how to run or jump a creek or throw a fuck or—quite likely—die when there's no other choice. That under conditions of extreme stress it simply takes over and does what needs doing while the brain stands off to one side, unable to do anything but whistle and tap its foot

You can buy a person's hand, but you can't buy his heart. His heart is where his enthusiasm, his loyalty is. You can buy his back, but you can't buy his brain. That's where his creativity is, his ingenuity, his resourcefulness.

writing truly imprints the brain

great deal of research has been conducted for decades on what has come to be called brain dominance theory. The findings basically indicate that each hemisphere of the brain—left and right—tends to specialize in and preside over different functions, process different kinds of information, and deal with different kinds of problems.

Although people use both sides of the brain, one side or the other generally tends to be dominant in each individual. Of course, the ideal would be to cultivate and develop the ability to have good crossover between both sides of the brain so that a person could first sense what the situation called for and then use the appropriate tool to deal with it.

You can buy a person's hand, but you can't buy his heart. His heart is where his enthusiasm, his loyalty is. You can buy his back, but you can't buy his brain. That's where his creativity is, his ingenuity, his resourcefulness.

Results showed that areas of the brain linked with emotion and empathy (the cingulate cortex and the amygdala) were less active during violent video gaming . . . These areas must be suppressed during violent video gaming, just as they would be in real life, in order to act violently without hesitation.

the four areas where stress most significantly affected the brain: attention control, emotion regulation, healthy coping, and empathy.

Change the brain's response to its environment, even without being able to change that environment itself, and you could change behaviors. You did this through repetitive practices, the same way you learned any other skill or trained any other muscle.

One day over lunch at the lab, Turing exclaimed playfully to his colleagues, "Shannon wants to feed not just data to a brain, but cultural things! He wants to play music to it!

Like any other thought, a hunch is simply a network of cells firing inside your brain in an organized pattern. But for that hunch to blossom into something more substantial, it has to connect with other ideas. The hunch requires an environment where surprising new connections can be forged: the neurons and synapses of the brain itself, and the larger cultural environment that the brain occupies.

But how do you get those particular clusters of neurons to fire at the right time? One way is to go for a walk. The history of innovation is replete with stories of good ideas that occurred to people while they were out on a stroll. (A similar phenomenon occurs with long showers or soaks in a tub; in fact, the original "eureka" moment—Archimedes hitting upon a way of measuring the volume of irregular shapes—occurred in a bathtub.)

two key preconditions become clear. First, the sheer size of the network: you can't have an epiphany with only three neurons firing.

The second precondition is that the network be plastic, capable of adopting new configurations. A dense network incapable of forming new patterns is, by definition, incapable of change, incapable of probing at the edges of the adjacent possible. When a new idea pops into your head, the sense of novelty that makes the experience so magical has a direct correlate in the cells of your brain: a brand-new assemblage of neurons has come together to make the thought possible.

It turns out that good ideas have certain signature patterns in the networks that make them. The creating brain behaves differently from the brain that is performing a repetitive task.

Thatcher's study suggests a counterintuitive notion: the more disorganized your brain is, the smarter you are. It's counterintuitive in part because we tend to attribute the growing intelligence of the technology world with increasingly precise electromechanical choreography

Science does not yet have a solid explanation for the brain's chaos states, but Thatcher and other researchers believe that the electric noise of the chaos mode allows the brain to experiment with new links between neurons that would otherwise fail to connect in more orderly settings.

Neurons that fire together wire together.

Ecstatic technology isn't limited to silicon chips and display screens. As John Lilly's early research established, it's the knowledge of how to tweak the knobs and levers in our brain. When we get it right, it produces those invaluable sensations of selflessness, timelessness, effortlessness, and richness.

Scientists call this shutdown7 "transient hypofrontality." Transient means temporary. "Hypo," the opposite of "hyper," means "less than normal." And frontality refers to the prefrontal cortex, the part of our brain that generates our sense of self. During transient hypofrontality, because large swatches of the prefrontal cortex turn off, that inner critic comes offline. Woody goes quiet.