Quotes About Brain

The striatum, and especially the caudate, can thus be thought of as a neuronal mosaic of reason and passion.

Since the striosomes receive projections primarily from the emotional centers of the limbic system and the matrisomes receive projections from the higher cognitive centers of the prefrontal cortex, together they provide the perfect mechanism of integrating the messages of the heart with those of the mind.

Attending to one sense, such as vision, does not simply kick up the activity in the region of the brain in charge of that sense. It also reduces activity in regions responsible for other senses. If you are really concentrating on the little black lines and curves on this white page, you are less likely to feel someone brush against you, or to hear someone speaking in the background.

Mindfulness and mental effort would then be understood as a way of using attention to control brain state by means of the Quantum Zeno Effect.

TANs could be crucial to the acquisition of new behavioral skills in cognitive-behavioral therapy. In neurological terms, we could say that cognitive-behavioral therapy teaches people purposefully to alter the response contingencies of their own TANs. This is a crucial point. Such therapy teaches people to alter, by force of will, the response habits wired into their brains through TANs.

This statement was tremendously gratifying because it stated, from a physicist's perspective, what seemed to me the essential core of all my OCD work: that effort itself is the key to altering one's brain function. Stapp's insight was that quantum theory naturally allows for the direct influence of mental effort on the function of the brain. It thus makes mental effort and its effect on attention a primary causal agent.

T]he power of willful activity to shape the brain remains the working principle not only of early brain development, but also of brain function as an ongoing, living process.

I tried to point out that it's not a gimmick to teach patients suffering with OCD that their intrusive thoughts and urges are caused by brain imbalances, and that we now know they can physically alter those imbalances through mindfulness and self-directed behavioral therapy techniques.

this kind of increased synaptic strength is a key to the formation of enduring neuronal circuits and has become known by the maxim "Cells that fire together, wire together.

The more often you act in these unhealthy ways, the more you teach your brain that what is simply a habit (a learned behavior) is essential to your survival.

The molecular basis of memory and learning, the discovery of which earned Kandel a share of the 2000 Nobel Prize in physiology or medicine, stands as one of the best understood of the changes the brain undergoes. It is one of the mechanisms that underlie the plasticity of the developing brain. Changes in how an organism interacts with its environment result in changes in connectivity.

If there is to be a resolution to the mystery of how mind relates to matter, it will emerge from explaining the data of the human brain in terms of these laws-laws capable of giving rise to a very different view of the causal efficacy of human consciousness. Quantum mechanics makes it feasible to describe a mind capable of exerting effects that neurons alone cannot.

M]aterialism clearly poses a bit of a problem for a central tenet of the justice system - namely, that people exert free will in their actions, including their criminal actions. If actions are merely the inevitable consequences of hard-wired brain circuitry - or, pushing the chain of causation back a step, of the genes we inherit from our parents - then the concept of genuine moral culpability becomes untenable.

Acquiring navigational skills causes a redistribution of gray matter in the hippocampus as a driver's mental map of London grows larger and more detailed with experience.

This statement was tremendously gratifying because it stated, from a physicist's perspective, what seemed to me the essential core of all my OCD work: that effort itself is the key to altering one's brain function. Stapp's insight was that quantum theory naturally allows for the direct influence of mental effort on the function of the brain. It thus makes mental effort and its effect on attention a primary causal agent.

You create your brain from the input you get, says Paula Tallal.

It turns out that the key predictor of whether the Four Steps will help an OCD patient is whether he learns to recognize that a pathological urge to perform a compulsive behavior reflects a faulty brain message—in other words, to Revalue it.

The area of the brain devoted to the reading finger of expert Braille readers was much larger than that of the nonreading finger, or of either index finger in nonreaders, Pascual-Leone found. It was a clear case of sensory input increase, with the person paying close attention, leading to an expansion of the brain region devoted to processing that input.

If kittens do not receive visual input between thirty and eighty days after birth (a window of time now known as the critical period), it is too late: the unused eye is blind forever.

Compared to the brains of normal controls, the brains of our OCD volunteers showed hypermetabolic activity in the orbital frontal cortex, which is tucked into the underside of the front of the brain above and behind the eyes (hence its name) as shown in Figure 1 on page 63. The scans showed, too, a trend toward hyperactivity in the caudate nucleus.

Intention governs attention, and attention exerts real, physical effects on the dynamics of the brain.

In other words, what Libet was saying is that you really can't decide or determine what will initially grab your attention—your brain does. However, his research also indicated that once your initial attention is grabbed, you can determine whether you keep your attention focused on that object (and act on it) or veto it based on the principle of Free Won't.

We now know beyond a reasonable doubt that it doesn't go away because it's due to a medical condition, a biochemical imbalance in the brain. By Reattributing the pain to this medical condition, you strengthen your certainty that it is not your will, not you, and that it won't take over your spirit. You are still intact and able to make conscious, considered decisions in response to your pain.

the harmful strategies used to avoid and escape those uncomfortable sensations vary depending on the content of the deceptive brain messages and the patterns you have developed to attempt to deal with distress. The range of possible responses is endless and includes feeding an addiction, getting into an argument, avoiding a situation, shutting out the world, or endlessly checking something.