Quotes About Brain

People who have a good supply of GABA or have brains that are naturally very responsive to GABA may be the people who are naturally cool and calm, possessed of an innate equanimity.

In a neurotypical brain, when the TPN is turned on and you're on task, the DMN is turned off. But in the ADHD brain, the fMRI shows that when the TPN is turned on, the DMN is turned on as well, trying to muscle its way in and pull you into its grasp, thereby distracting you. In ADHD, therefore, the DMN competes with the TPN, which in most people it does not do.

If there is one takeaway in distilling down the complexity of the DMN and the TPN, it boils down to the fact that the toggle switches between them are off in those with ADHD.

These examples reflect the stuff adult ADD is made of. Peter's piles are particularly emblematic. So many adults with ADD have piles, little mess-piles, big mess-piles, piles everywhere. They are like a by-product of the brain's work. What other people somehow put away, people with ADD put into piles.

There are several medications used in the treatment of ADD. They all help the individual to focus better. In a sense, they act like internal eyeglasses, increasing the brain's ability to focus on one task over time while filtering out competing stimuli or distractions.

As mentioned earlier, one way to think about the central challenge in ADHD is gaining better braking control over the metaphorical Ferrari brain, both in terms of the speed at which it operates and the level of emotion it can emit.

innate censors and motivators exist in the brain that deeply and unconsciously affect our ethical premises; from these roots, morality evolved as instinct. If that perception is correct, science may soon be in a position to investigate the very origin and meaning of human values, from which all ethical pronouncements and much of political practice flow.

if our genes are inherited and our environment is a train of physical events set in motion before we were born, how can there be a truly independent agent within the brain? The agent itself is created by the interaction of the genes and the environment.

Learning to play a musical instrument even alters the structure of the brain, from subcortical circuits that encode sound patterns to neural fibers that connect the two cerebral hemispheres and patterns of gray matter density in certain regions of the cerebral cortex.

What drove the hominins on through to larger brains, higher intelligence, and thence language-based culture? That, of course, is the question of questions.

Ethical philosophers intuit the deontological canons of morality by consulting the emotive centers of their own hypothalamic-limbic system... Only by interpreting the activity of the emotive centers as a biological adaptation can the meaning of the ethical canons be deciphered.

The integrative powers of the brain for the sensations that come from handling objects spills out into all other domains of intelligence.

A great deal remains to be learned about the genetic control of brain development

If there is one central intellectual reality at the end of the twentieth century, it is that the biological approach to psychiatry--treating mental illness as a genetically influenced disorder of brain chemistry--has been a smashing success. Freud's ideas, which dominated the history of psychiatry for the past half century, are now vanishing like the last snows of winter.

Given that the pre-frontal cortex is a key to our success as a species, consuming any amount of alcohol or other intoxicant seems really stupid.

The spoken language is a symbolization of something that happened, could have happened, or is in the process of happening, while the written language is a symbolization of the spoken language. James Joyce, for example, dedicated his life to trying to close the gap between the two systems. In Finnegans Wake, Joyce portrays in writing the workings of the verbal parts of the brain.

It's the guessing that develops a man's brain power. Just consider what you have to do to guess right.

Civilization is not a planet or land and its resources. It is just your brain how works that, constructive or destructive.

If the recently graduated college alumna can't turn her trained brain to some intelligent awareness of our responsibilities in World Affairs, we're going to foul up our leadership like England did, as sure as God made little green apples.

When seeing photos of their loved ones being unhappy, sensitive persons also showed more activation in areas suggesting they wanted to do something, to act, even more than in areas involving empathy (perhaps we learn to cool down our intense empathy in order to help). But overall, brain activation indicating empathy was stronger in HSPs

For example, Kagan found that babies who later showed this trait also had cooler foreheads on the right side of their head, which indicates greater activity on the right side of the brain. (The blood is drawn away from the surface toward the activity.)

The brain is a commodity used to fertilize ideas.

Stava reagendo spiegandomi di fatto che non avevo vinto niente, che al mondo non c'era alcunché da vincere, che la sua vita era piena di avventure diverse e scriteriate proprio quanto la mia, e che il tempo semplicemente scivolava via senza alcun senso, ed era bello solo vedersi ogni tanto per sentire il suono folle del cervello dell'una echeggiare dentro il suono folle del cervello dell'altra.

I'm still fascinated by how our brains elaborates strategies and carries them out without revealing them. To say that it's a matter of the unconscious seems to me approximate, maybe even hypocritical.