Quotes About Brain

A thousand "tells" were broadcast every minute: a tic, a wince, a smell, a shadow, a draft, a flick of the hand, a door ajar. The human senses experienced them all. The human brain registered them. The human monkey mind, clamoring with the shouting littles of life, was lucky if it recognized one or two. The message from the gestalt trickled down in intuition, gut feelings, geese walking on one's grave, deja vu.

The subjects were each placed in a functional MRI scanner and shown the same set of fourteen video clips (including a sentimental music video, a bit of slapstick comedy, a political debate), and the blood flow to various brain regions was individually measured as they viewed

We become, neurologically, what we think."(33)

Experiments show that just as the brain can build new or stronger circuits through physical or mental practice, those circuits can weaken or dissolve with neglect.

The Web has a very different effect. It places more pressure on our working memory, not only diverting resources from our higher reasoning faculties but obstructing the consolidation of long-term memories and the development of schemas.

When our brain is overtaxed, we find "distractions more distracting.

Our brains turn into simple signal-processing units, quickly shepherding information into consciousness and then back out again.

The influx of competing messages that we receive whenever we go online not only overloads our working memory; it makes it much harder for our frontal lobes to concentrate our attention on any one thing. The process of memory consolidation can't even get started.

Descartes may have been wrong about dualism, but he appears to have been correct in believing that our thoughts can exert a physical influence on, or at least cause a physical reaction in, our brains. We become, neurologically, what we think.

The paradox of neuroplasticity, observes Doidge, is that, for all the mental flexibility it grants us, it can end up locking us into "rigid behaviors.

The key to memory consolidation is attentiveness.

if, knowing what we know today about the brain's plasticity, you were to set out to invent a medium that would rewire our mental circuits as quickly and thoroughly as possible, you would probably end up designing something that looks and works a lot like the Internet.

The brain's plasticity is not limited to the somatosensory cortex, the area that governs our sense of touch. It's universal. Virtually all of our neural circuits—whether they're involved in feeling, seeing, hearing, moving, thinking, learning, perceiving, or remembering—are subject to change. The received wisdom is cast aside.

When it comes to the quality of our thought, our neurons and synapses are entirely indifferent. The possibility of intellectual decay is inherent in the malleability of our brains.

As we multitask online, he says, we are "training our brains to pay attention to the crap." The consequences for our intellectual lives may prove "deadly."54

The animals' neural pathways have woven themselves into a new map that corresponds to the new arrangement of nerves in their hands. At first, he can't believe what he's seen. Like every other neuroscientist, he's been taught that the structure of the adult brain is fixed.

Our brains become adept at forgetting, inept at remembering. Our growing dependence on the Web's information stores may in fact be the product of a self-perpetuating, self-amplifying loop. As our use of the Web makes it harder for us to lock information into our biological memory, we're forced to rely more and more on the Net's capacious and easily searchable artificial memory, even if it makes us shallower thinkers.

when you see someone injured, the primitive pain centers in your own brain activate almost instantaneously—the more sophisticated mental process of empathizing with psychological suffering unfolds much more slowly.

They would, as Robert Martensen describes in The Brain Takes Shape, fit the visible structure of the brain into their preferred metaphysical metaphor, arranging the organ's physical parts "so as to portray likeness in their own terms."2 Writing

What looks like instinct is hard-won skill. Those changes in the brain don't happen through passive observation. They're generated through repeated confrontations with the unexpected.

The genius of our brain's construction is not that it contains a lot of hardwiring but that it doesn't.

When it comes to the firing of our neurons, it's a mistake to assume that more is better.

It's easy, today, to chuckle at Aristotle's error. But it's also easy to understand how the great philosopher was led so far astray. The brain, packed neatly into the bone-crate of the skull, gives us no sensory signal of its existence. We feel our heart beat, our lungs expand, our stomach churn—but our brain, lacking motility and having no sensory nerve endings, remains imperceptible to us. The source of consciousness lies beyond the grasp of consciousness.

Fully transferring an explicit memory from the hippocampus to the cortex is a gradual process that can take many years.