Quotes About Brain

White-hot needles stabbed through his eyes into his head, into his brain: a new environment for the information viruses, where they replicated, forming snarls of complex logic that entangled him, clanking mechanisms that pursued him from one thought to another, down corridors of memory and forgotten rooms of days.

The Moon's magnetic gravitational power, combined with the movement of the Earth influences the flow of sap in trees and plants and of body fluids, including the rhythm of the blood, the female menstrual cycle and gestation cycles, and the brain itself.

Why waste energy with wasted movements?] Very commonly, tightening and furrowing the brow while concentrating... Is the brain a muscle that works better by tensing the skull?

Sometimes I feel silly introducing methods "just" to satisfy an "aesthetic" urge like symmetry. Aesthetics go deeper than that. Aesthetics engage more of your brain than strictly linear logical thought. Once you have cultivated your sense of the aesthetics of code, the aesthetic impressions you receive of your code is valuable feedback about the quality of the code.

The study of thinking machines teaches us more about the brain than we can learn by introspective methods. Western man is externalizing himself in the form of gadgets.

violence is an ugly thing and in the calmer moments I racked my brains for other ways to get what I wanted. Better a brain than a fist. A brain can hold anything, from giant things like distant stars and planets, to tiny things we can't see, like germs. ... A brain can hold a whole universe, a fist just holds what little it can grab. Or hits what it can't.

The collective unconscious contains the whole spiritual heritage of mankind's evolution born anew in the brain structure.

The psychic is a phenomenal world in itself, which can be reduced neither to the brain nor to metaphysics.

Decades of work from multiple different subfields within psychology all point toward the conclusion that regularly resting your brain improves the quality of your deep work. When you work, work hard. When you're done, be done. Your average e-mail response time might suffer some, but you'll more than make up for this with the sheer volume of truly important work produced during the day by your refreshed ability to dive deeper than your exhausted peers.

In this second part, I introduce a framework I call attention capital theory that argues for creating workflows built around processes specifically designed to help us get the most out of our human brains while minimizing unnecessary miseries. This

solitude is about what's happening in your brain, not the environment around you. Accordingly, they define it to be a subjective state in which your mind is free from input from other minds.

As Kethledge and Erwin explain, however, solitude is about what's happening in your brain, not the environment around you. Accordingly, they define it to be a subjective state in which your mind is free from input from other minds.

As long as we remain committed to a workflow based on constant, ad hoc messaging, our Paleolithic brain will remain in a state of low-grade anxiety.

What, if anything, is active in the brain when someone is not trying to do a task? "It was an unusual question," notes Lieberman, but we should be glad they asked, because it led to a remarkable discovery: the team found that there's a particular set of regions in the brain that consistently activate when you're not attempting to do a cognitive task, and that just as consistently deactivate once you focus your attention on something specific.

skills, be they intellectual or physical, eventually reduce down to brain circuits.

How you'll support your work. Your ritual needs to ensure your brain gets the support it needs to keep operating at a high level of depth.

So we have scales that allow us to divide up people into people who multitask all the time and people who rarely do, and the differences are remarkable. People who multitask all the time can't filter out irrelevancy. They can't manage a working memory. They're chronically distracted. They initiate much larger parts of their brain that are irrelevant to the task at hand… they're pretty much mental wrecks.

To put this more concretely: If every moment of potential boredom in your life—say, having to wait five minutes in line or sit alone in a restaurant until a friend arrives—is relieved with a quick glance at your smartphone, then your brain has likely been rewired to a point where, like the "mental wrecks" in Nass's research, it's not ready for deep work—even if you regularly schedule time to practice this concentration.

People who multitask all the time can't filter out irrelevancy. They can't manage a working memory. They're chronically distracted. They initiate much larger parts of their brain that are irrelevant to the task at hand… they're pretty much mental wrecks.

If every moment of potential boredom in your life—say, having to wait five minutes in line or sit alone in a restaurant until a friend arrives—is relieved with a quick glance at your smartphone, then your brain has likely been rewired to a point where, like the "mental wrecks" in Nass's research, it's not ready for deep work—even if you regularly schedule time to practice this concentration.

A little self-reflection, however, makes clear that our brains are hardly ever actually thinking about nothing. Even without a specific task, they tend to remain highly active, with thoughts and ideas flitting by in an ongoing noisy chatter. On further self-reflection, Lieberman realized that this background hum of activity tends to focus on a small number of targets: thoughts about "other people, yourself, or both.

Your ritual needs to ensure your brain gets the support it needs to keep operating at a high level of depth. For example, the ritual might specify that you start with a cup of good coffee,

The purpose of the deep work chamber is to allow for total focus and uninterrupted work flow," Dewane explains. He imagines a process in which you spend ninety minutes inside, take a ninety-minute break, and repeat two or three times—at which point your brain will have achieved its limit of concentration for the day.

To summarize, to succeed with deep work you must rewire your brain to be comfortable resisting distracting stimuli.