Quotes About Brain

neurotransmitters

Helen was suffering from the early stages of cerebral atrophy, a degenerative shrinkage of the brain tissues that can be symptomatic of a variety of ills, including the viral infection that had caused her to be rushed home from Korea and led to full-blown syphilis. Alcohol and depressants such as tranquilizers only aggravate symptoms,

There's a lot of neuroscience now raising the question, 'Is all the intelligence in the human body in the brain?', and they're finding out that, no, it's not like that. The body has intelligence itself, and we're much more of an organic creature in that way.

goes back to the design of the brain…. It's designed to pay attention to the stuff that matters to you.

Creativity is not [where you create] some new thing that's emerged from your brain," Nathan told me. "It's a new association between two things that were already there.

Your brain can only produce one or two thoughts" in your conscious mind at once. That's it. "We're very, very single-minded." We have "very limited cognitive capacity." This is because of the "fundamental structure of the brain," and it's not going to change. But rather than acknowledge this, Earl told me, we invented a myth. The myth is that we can actually think about three, five, ten things at the same time.

Antidepressant drugs that increase serotonin in the brain have the same modest effect, in clinical trials, as drugs that reduce serotonin in the brain.

Creativity is not [where you create] some new thing that's emerged from your brain," Nathan told me. "It's a new association between two things that were already there." Mind-wandering allows "more extended trains of thought to unfold, which allows for more associations to be made.

The science is so clear on this that a recent summary explained: "It is now obvious that stress can cause structural changes in the brain with long-term effects.

The pain caused by life going wrong can trigger a response that is "so powerful that [the brain] tends to stay there [in a pained response] for a while, until something pushes it out of that corner, into a more flexible place." And if the world keeps causing you deep pain, of course you'll stay trapped there for a long time, with the snowball growing.

You are not suffering from a chemical imbalance in your brain. You are suffering from a social and spiritual imbalance in how we live. Much more than you've been told up to now, it's not serotonin; it's society. It's not your brain; it's your pain. Your biology can make your distress worse, for sure. But it's not the cause. It's not the driver. It's not the place to look for the main explanation, or the main solution.

And many of our scientists imagine the root cause of addiction can be found on a brain scan, in a society that is falling apart, where many people have no friends, where they are taught life is all about buying things and showing them off on Instagram, where they are experiencing more and more humiliation as each day passes.

You are not suffering from a chemical imbalance in your brain. You are suffering from a social and spiritual imbalance in how we live. Much more than you've been told up to now, it's not serotonin; it's society. It's not your brain; it;s your pain.

The term doesn't really make any sense, she said: we don't know what a "chemically balanced" brain would look like. People are told that drugs like antidepressants restore a natural balance to your brain, she said, but it's not true—they create an artificial state. The whole idea of mental distress being caused simply by a chemical imbalance is "a myth," she has come to believe, sold to us by the drug companies.

The public was being told two clashing things. First, that the symptoms of depression are straightforwardly the result of a chemical imbalance in the brain that has to be fixed with drugs. Second, that somehow, and at the same time, there was one unique situation where all the symptoms of depression were, in fact, a response to something terrible happening in your life, and in that one unique case, a chemical imbalance is not the cause, and drugs are not the solution.

If you believe that your depression is due solely to a broken brain, you don't have to think about your life, or about what anyone might have done to you. The belief that it all comes down to biology protects you, in a way, for a while. If you absorb this different story, though, you have to think about those things. And that hurts.

When we sleep, our minds start to identify connections and patterns from what we've experienced during the day. This is one of the key sources of our creativity—it's why narcoleptic people, who sleep a lot, are significantly more creative.

Throughout the day, in your brain, a chemical called adenosine is building up, and it signals to you when you are sleepy. Caffeine blocks the receptor that picks up on the level of adenosine. "I liken it to putting a Post-it note over your fuel-gauge indicator. You're not giving yourself more energy—you're just not realizing how empty you are. When the caffeine wears off, you're doubly exhausted.

It fascinated me that you could change behavior so dramatically by changing brain chemistry….

That doesn't mean all chemical antidepressants are bad: some credible scientists argue they give some temporary relief to a minority of users, and that shouldn't be dismissed. The false story is the claim that depression is caused by a chemical imbalance in the brain and that the primary solution for most people is a chemical antidepressant.

Sleep deprivation damages memory as well.

the faster you make them go, the less they will understand. More speed means less comprehension. ...This showed there's just a maximum limit for how quickly humans can absorb information, and trying to bust through that barrier simply busts your brain's ability to understand it instead. The scientists investigating this also discovered that if you make people read quickly, they are much less likely to grapple with complex or challenging material. They start to prefer simplistic statements.

This showed there's just a maximum limit for how quickly humans can absorb information, and trying to bust through that barrier simply busts your brain's ability to understand it instead.

Thoughts jostled for space in my crowded brain as I struggled to give them some order which might serve to motivate my listless life