Quotes About Brain

There was only so much calamitous change you could hear about, events that rewrote what you thought was general knowledge, before your brain stopped digesting and you clung on to older realities.

A stupid despot may constrain his slaves with iron chains; but a true politician binds them even more strongly by the chain of their own ideas… on the soft fibers of the brain is founded the unshakable base of the soundest of Empires.

The real bottleneck is software. Creating software can be done only the old-fashioned way. A human -sitting quietly in a chair with a pencil, paper and laptop- is going to have to write the codes... One can mass-produce hardware and increase it's power by piling on more and more chips, but you cannot mass-produce the brain.

Indeed, brain scans done by scientists at Washington University in St. Louis indicate that areas used to recall memories are the same as those involved in simulating the future. In particular, the link between the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex and the hippocampus lights up when a person is engaged in planning for the future and remembering the past.

My fundamental premise about the brain is that its workings—what we sometimes call "mind"—are a consequence of its anatomy and physiology, and nothing more. —CARL SAGAN

It is remarkable that a gigantic, city-size computer is required to simulate a piece of human tissue that weighs three pounds, fits inside your skull, raises your body temperature by only a few degrees, uses twenty watts of power, and needs only a few hamburgers to keep it going.

However, animals apparently dream differently than we do. In the dolphin, for example, only one hemisphere at a time sleeps in order to prevent drowning, because they are air-breathing mammals, not fish. So if they dream, it is probably in only one hemisphere at a time.)

Studies have shown that retaining memories can be improved by getting sufficient sleep between the time of activity and a test. Neuroimaging shows that the areas of the brain that are activated during sleep are the same as those involved in learning a new task. Dreaming is perhaps useful in consolidating this new information.

As in the movie The Matrix, we might one day be able to download memories and skills using computers.

You might one day be able to send the experience of dancing the tango, bungee jumping, or skydiving to the people on your e-mail list. Not just physical activity, but emotions and feelings as well might be sent via brain-to-brain communication.

Some scientists have gone further and have speculated that there is a "God gene" that predisposes the brain to be religious. Since most societies have created a religion of some sort, it seems plausible that our ability to respond to religious feelings might be genetically programmed into our genome.

Our eyes also fool us into thinking we can see depth. The retinas of our eyes are two-dimensional, but because we have two eyes separated by a few inches, the left and right brain merge these two images, giving us the false sense of a third dimension.

Historically, with each new scientific discovery, a new model of the brain has emerged. One of the earliest models of the brain was the "homunculus," a little man who lived inside the brain and made all the decisions. This picture was not very helpful, since it did not explain what was happening in the brain of the homunculus.

Using MRI scans, scientists can now read thoughts circulating in our brains. Scientists can also insert a chip into the brain of a patient who is totally paralyzed and connect it to a computer, so that through thought alone that patient can surf the web, read and write e-mails, play video games, control their wheelchair, operate household appliances, and manipulate mechanical arms. In fact, such patients can do anything a normal person can do via a computer.

Telling a lie causes more centres of the brain to light up than telling the truth. Telling a lie implies that you know the truth but are thinking of the lie and its myriad consequences, which requires more energy than telling the truth.

The brain, like it or not, is a machine. Scientists have come to that conclusion, not because they are mechanistic killjoys, but because they have amassed evidence that every aspect of consciousness can be tied to the brain. —STEVEN PINKER

The right hemisphere controls sensory attention and body image; the left hemisphere controls skilled movements and some aspects of language.

When we force a smile, we activate facial muscles with our prefrontal cortex. But when we smile because we are in a good mood, our nerves are controlled by our limbic system, which activates a slightly different set of muscles. Our brains can tell the subtle difference between the two, which was beneficial for our evolution.)

More recently, these electrodes have targeted a new area of the brain (called Brodmann's area number 25) that is often overactive in depressed patients who do not respond to psychotherapy or drugs. Deep brain stimulation has given almost miraculous relief after decades of torment and agony for these long-suffering patients.

Consciousness turns out to consist of a maelstrom of events distributed across the brain. These events compete for attention, and as one process outshouts the others, the brain rationalizes the outcome after the fact and concocts the impression that a single self was in charge all along.

There are an estimated 100 billion neurons residing inside the skull with an exponential amount of neural connections

We are now entering a new golden age of neuroscience.

Social animals, on the other hand, are more intelligent than those with just a reptilian brain.

Brain Research Through Advancing Innovative Neurotechnologies (or BRAIN) project announced by President Obama, and the Human Brain Project of the European Union, which will potentially allocate billions of dollars to decode the pathways of the brain, all the way down to the neural level.