Quotes About Brain

Here's what I don't understand: if something called neuroplasticity is a hard, cold fact, why haven't we, the masses, heard much about it? Why are we left sitting here with a measly fourteen shades of grey, when, if we're talking about the brain, there are a trillion possible shades.

Our brain has been shaped by evolutionary pressure over time to provide our bodies with ever more efficient ways of surviving and reproducing. It is designed to process all information for the purpose of living on, it doesn't care about happiness – it has things to do, places to go.

To let the famous brain surgeon into Palestine would mean helping the Jews. The British would sooner throw him in jail.

Americans love to mess about with the brain--that's why they are at the forefront of neurosurgery.

The scraggly spiders of her words crept around my brain

That soft but penetrating voice that caressed your ears and climbed through your brain like a vine.

You can't make a falcon love you, but you can convince its little bird brain that sitting on your glove means a full croup." "Unless it's a Harris Hawk.

If our well-being depends upon the interaction between events in our brains and events in the world, and there are better and worse ways to secure it, then some cultures will tend to produce lives that are more worth living than others; some political persuasions will be more enlightened than others; and some world views will be mistaken in ways that cause needless human misery.

How can we be "free" as conscious agents if everything that we consciously intend is caused by events in our brain that we do not intend and of which we are entirely unaware?

How can we be "free" as conscious agents if everything that we consciously intend is caused by events in our brain that we do not intend and of which we are entirely unaware? We can't.

Decisions, intentions, efforts, goals, willpower, etc., are causal states of the brain, leading to specific behaviors, and behaviors lead to outcomes in the world. Human choice, therefore, is as important as fanciers of free will believe. But the next choice you make will come out of the darkness of prior causes that you, the conscious witness of your experience, did not bring into being.

There will always be some delay between the first neuropsychological events that kindle my next conscious thought and the thought itself. And even if they weren't — even if all mental states were truly coincident with their underlying brain states — I cannot decide what I will next think or intend until a thought or intention arises. What will my next mental state be? I do not know — it just happens. Where is the freedom in that?

it seems to me that, on balance, soul/body dualism has been the enemy of compassion. For instance, the moral stigma that still surrounds disorders of mood and cognition seems largely the result of viewing the mind as distinct from the brain. When the pancreas fails to produce insulin, there is no shame in taking synthetic insulin to compensate for its lost function.

In adaptive terms, belief has been extraordinarily useful. It is, after all, by believing various propositions about the world that we predict events and consider the likely consequences of our actions. Beliefs are principles of action: whatever they may be at the level of the brain, they are processes by which our understanding (and misunderstanding) of the world is represented and made available to guide our behavior.

And just as some people have obvious moral deficits, others must possess moral talent, moral expertise, and even moral genius. As with any human ability, these gradations must be expressed at the level of the brain. Game

Despite our attachment to notions of free will, most us know that disorders of the brain can trump the best intentions of the mind.

One fact now seems indisputable: Some moments before you are aware of what you will do next—a time in which you subjectively appear to have complete freedom to behave however you please—your brain has already determined what you will do.

Different techniques produce long-lasting changes in attention, emotion, cognition, and pain perception, and these correlate with both structural and functional changes in the brain.

It has long been known that stress, especially early in life, alters brain structure. For instance, studies both in animals and in humans have shown that early stress increases the size of the amygdalae. One study found that an eight-week program of mindfulness meditation reduced the volume of the right basolateral amygdala, and these changes were correlated with a subjective decrease in stress.

mere five minutes of practice a day (for five weeks) increased left-sided baseline activity in the frontal cortex—a pattern that, as we saw in the discussion of the split brain, has been associated with positive emotions.

To see how fully our moral intuitions must shift, consider what would happen if we discovered a cure for human evil. Imagine that every relevant change in the human brain could now be made cheaply, painlessly, and safely. In fact, the cure could be put directly into the food supply, like vitamin D. Evil would become nothing more than a nutritional deficiency.

My brain is only a receiver, in the Universe there is a core from which we obtain knowledge, strength and inspiration. I have not penetrated into the secrets of this core, but I know that it exists.

We need strength, we need energy, we need quickness and we need brain in this country to turn it around.

Some people can never learn to ski powder snow without exerting tremendous effort and strength because they allow their rational, left-brain hemisphere to control the entire situation.