Quotes About Brain

In some studies, brain scans of severely sleep-deprived individuals are similar to those of psychopaths, people with an extreme form of antisocial personality disorder.

Memes don't move: Signal-instigators do. This means the idea of a meme may be a meme, but the spoken word 'meme' is not itself a meme; it is a signal. A meme can only be a state of matter coded in 'brain language.

Without awareness of common pitfalls such as confirmation bias, positive-outcome bias, and subjective validation, a person trained in logic and fallacy detection is easily deceived into thinking that he or she has acquired invincible armor against assaults of unreason. Expressions like post hoc ergo propter hoc and false cause, should be informed by knowledge of evolution and how the brain works to jump to conclusions about causal connections.

At the very least, one would hope that by becoming aware of the many ways our brain can trick us, we would arrive at the conclusion Bertrand Russell thought was a necessary consequence of the limits of knowledge: we should be less cocksure of our beliefs, hold them tentatively, and always be on guard against thinking our feeling of absolute certainty implies we're right.

There is overwhelming scientific evidence on memory that shows memories are constructed by all of us and that the construction is a mixture of fact and fiction. Something similar is true for perception. Our perceptions are constructions that are a mixture of sense data processed by the brain and other data that the brain supplies to fill in the blanks.

To put it crudely, in cortical democracies citizens reason together; in limbic democracies they feel together.

Some researchers had even concluded that the effort to understand the brain was necessarily doomed—that consciousness cannot comprehend consciousness any more than a box may contain itself. "This

The first step toward becoming rational is to understand our fundamental irrationality. There are two factors that should render this more palatable to our egos: nobody is exempt from the irresistible effect of emotions on the mind, not even the wisest among us; and to some extent irrationality is a function of the structure of our brains and is wired into our very nature by the way we process emotions. Being irrational is almost beyond our control.

The environment we operate in may be different, but the brain is essentially the same, and its power to learn, adapt, and master time is universal.

people get the mind and quality of brain that they deserve through their actions in life.

As many neuroscientists have affirmed, this evolution has led to the higher mammalian brain being composed of three parts. The oldest is the reptilian part of the brain, which controls all automatic responses that regulate the body. This is the instinctive part. Above that is the old mammalian or limbic brain, governing feeling and emotion. And on top of that has evolved the neocortex

Daily Law: Remember that greater control over events will come from realistic assessments of the situation, precisely what is made most difficult by a brain submerged in trivia. The Laws of Human Nature, 6: Elevate Your Perspective—The Law of Shortsightedness

Let us call the collection of these forces that push and pull at us from deep within human nature. Human nature stems from the particular wiring of our brains, the configuration of our nervous system, and the way we humans process emotions, all of which developed and emerged over the course of the five million years or so of our evolution as a species.

On the other hand, there is the opposing tendency of the brain to want to make connections between everything. This generally occurs among individuals who pursue knowledge far enough that these associations come to

Los científicos han demostrado que, por el contrario, es muy plástico: que nuestros pensamientos determinan nuestro paisaje mental.

Las personas pasivas generan un paisaje mental más bien árido. Dadas las limitaciones de sus actos y experiencias, muchas conexiones de su cerebro se esfuman por falta de uso.

He was shaking violently. He had to clench his teeth to stop them chattering. And yet, oddly, he felt no panic. Panic was quite different to fear, he was discovering. Panic was moral and nervous collapse, a waste of precious energy, whereas fear was all sinew and instinct: an animal that stood up on its hind legs and filled you completely, that took control of your brain and your muscles.

the connecting fibers of the corpus callosum;

Sustained stress has numerous adverse effects. The amygdala becomes overactive and more coupled to pathways of habitual behavior; it is easier to learn fear and harder to unlearn it.

Powerful support for an amygdaloid role in fear processing comes from post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). In PTSD sufferers the amygdala is overreactive to mildly fearful stimuli and is slow in calming down after being activated.13 Moreover, the amygdala expands in size with long-term PTSD.

stress weakens frontal connections with the hippocampus—essential for incorporating the new information that should prompt shifting to a new strategy—while strengthening frontal connections with more habitual brain circuits.

the average level of happiness increases in old age; fewer negative emotions occur and, when they do, they don't persist as long. Connected to this, brain-imaging studies show that negative images have less of an impact, and positive images have more of an impact on brain metabolism in older people, as compared to young.

And their brains? Decreased total brain size, gray matter, white matter, frontal cortical metabolism, connectivity between regions, sizes of individual brain regions. Except for the amygdala. Which is enlarged. That pretty much says it all.

Because it is the last to mature, by definition the frontal cortex is the brain region least constrained by genes and most sculpted by experience. This must be so, to be the supremely complex social species that we are. Ironically, it seems that the genetic program of human brain development has evolved to, as much as possible, free the frontal cortex from genes.