Quotes About Brain

Since functional brain imaging first emerged, we have learned that there aren't very many brain regions uniquely responsible for specific tasks; most complex tasks engage many if not all of the brain's major networks. So it is fairly hard to make general psychological inferences just from brain data.

Given that the dreaming brain must perform these remarkable contortions - creating a world, living in it, responding to it, and then carefully blocking all the responses in a manner that does not cross the threshold of awareness - it is no wonder that this dreaming brain seems to be more active than the waking brain.

Now I realize, and I acknowledge, that the right brain/left brain distinction is a tremendous oversimplification. We don't come neatly divided into right and left hemispheres, but the fact is that the two hemispheres of the brain do specialize in certain functions.

So many people are struggling to create happiness while their brain is inundated by noise. If your brain is receiving too much information, it automatically thinks you're under threat and scans the world for the negative first. Because the brain is limited, whatever you attend to first becomes your reality.

Dr. Leonard Shlain, chairman of laparoscopic surgery at California Pacific Medical Center, said they took some four and five year-olds and gave them video games and asked them to figure out how to play them without instructions. Then they watched their brain activity with real-time monitors. At first, when they were figuring out the games, he said, the whole brain lit up. But by the time they knew how to play the games, the brain went dark, except for one little point.

I can't experience my brain because I'm inside of it. If you're imaging your brain, you can also find scary things. As one ages, your brain shrinks. And how much it shrinks, and where it shrinks, relates to conditions like Alzheimer's and dementia.

In the field of consciousness research-and also in physics and astronomy-we are breaking past the cause-and-effect, mechanistic way of interpreting things. In the biological sciences, there is a vitalism coming in that goes much further toward positing a common universal consciousness of which our brain is simply an organ. Consciousness does not come from the brain. The brain is an organ of consciousness. It focuses consciousness and pulls it in and directs it through a time and space field. But the antecedent of that is the universal consciousness of which we are all just a part.

The information. Every bit that of information that was ever in your brain. But the information is not the mind Jenna. That we've never accomplished before. What we've done with you is groundbreaking. We cracked the code. The mind is an energy that the brain produces. Think of a glass ball twirling on your fingertip. If it falls, it shatters into a million pieces. All the parts of a ball are still there, but it will never twirl with that force on your fingertip again. The brain is the same way.

Scientists who study brain-wave activity found that the longer one watches television, the more likely the brain will slip into "alpha" level: a slow, steady brain-wave pattern in which the mind is in its most receptive mode. It is noncoggnitive mode; i.e., information can be placed into the mind directly, without viewer participation.

Insomnia is a variant of Tourette's--the waking brain races, sampling the world after the world has turned away, touching it everywhere, refusing to settle, to join the collective nod. The insomniac brain is a sort of conspiracy theorist as well, believing too much in its own paranoiac importance--as though if it were to blink, then doze, the world might be overrun by some encroaching calamity, which its obsessive musings are somehow fending off.

I want good science, and I want it to be realistically marketed. I wouldn't like only two countries on the planet that allow pharmaceutical companies to market directly to people, New Zealand and the United States. It ought to be better regulated. And when it's presented to people, it ought to be presented in a way that's realistic. For example, often people will prescribe antidepressant medications, and we'll say, you have a brain disease; you'll have to be on these medications permanently. There is no biological marker for depression. It's not true that we know that it's a brain disease.

The brain doesn't care about change. As the world's most sophisticated survival organ, the brain cares about loss.

I learned how the brain is the softest organ we have - how soft the brain literally is and also how easily it can be manipulated. I think I will survive the whole thing, but there are lots of coincidences. For example, somehow I might have been trained to sustain stress through my life and through my art.

The last 100 years of research into the human brain...sees the brain as an organ that works by physical principles just like the other organs in the body...our emotions and higher callings, such as religion, as well as our grubby low-level physical systems like stereo vision and motor control, are products of a machine.

You have a brake in your brain that stops you doing stupid things. The older you are, the earlier that brake comes on. When you're 20 you stop at nothing; when you're older you're cleverer than when you're 20, so your brain brake operates more often!

I did get to shadow some amazing brain surgeons, a female brain surgeon in Toronto, another surgeon in London. And then we had a surgeon onset [of Doctor Strange] every day. So and he taught me to do sutures and was practicing on turkey breasts, raw turkey breasts.

No substance in nature, as far as yet known, has, when it reaches the brain, such power to induce mental and moral changes of a disastrous character as alcohol. Its transforming power is marvelous, and often appalling. It seems to open a way of entrance into the soul for all classes of foolish, insane or malignant spirits, who, so long as it remains in contact with the brain, are able to hold possession.

When love doesn't work, we hurt. Indeed, “hurt feelings” is a precisely accurate phrase, according to psychologist Naomi Eisenberger of the University of California. Her brain imaging studies show that rejection and exclusion trigger the same circuits in the same part of the brain, the anterior cingulate, as physical pain.

I recently read that it's the left brain that does all that calculating, and the right brain that does the poetry. Somehow I've veered way towards the left. I've been doing it for years. Maybe I do art to balance it out.

Brain cells create ideas. Stress kills brain cells. Stress is not a good idea

More may have been learned about the brain and the mind in the 1990s - the so-called decade of the brain - than during the entire previous history of psychology and neuroscience.

I believe in the hand-brain, pencil-to-paper-brain connection. In fact, I teach and I have the first year students do all of their drafting by hand to remind them that there is this physical connection between the two.

The origin of brain disease is in many cases predominantly dietary. Although several factors play into the genesis and progression of brain disorders, to a large extent numerous neurological afflictions often reflect the mistake of consuming too many carbs and too few healthy fats.

The brain has an attentional mode called the "mind wandering mode" that was only recently identified. This is when thoughts move seamlessly from one to another, often to unrelated thoughts, without you controlling where they go. This brain state acts as a neural reset button, allowing us to come back to our work with a refreshed perspective. Different people find they enter this mode in different ways: reading, a walk in nature, looking at art, meditating, and napping. A 15-minute nap can produce the equivalent of a 10-point boost in IQ.

I'm fortunate to have some really great people around me, my fiancee being one, my parents being another. Over the last couple of years, I feel like I've figured out the importance of continuing to learn and the development of the brain and how the brain hooks up with the body.

The nervous system functions in a fourth, unique way, as different as dreaming is from sleeping as sleeping is from waking. When you transcend, it's the only experience that lights the full brain on an EEG machine. It's the only experience that utilizes the full brain.

If little else, the brain is an educational toy. Why it may be a frustrating play thing - one whose finer points recede just when you think you are mastering them - it is nonetheless perpetually fascinating, frequently surprising, occasionally rewarding, and it comes already assembled. [...] Alas! the brain is a toy that plays games of its own. Its very most favorite game is the one-thing-leads-to-another game.

The world intrudes in my brain daily. Since my brain is dripping with all kinds of stuff that's out there in the world, that I can't seem to be able to shut out, it has to end up being in my work as well.

There are in the human mind a group of faculties and in the brain groups of convolutions, and the facts assembled by science so far allow to state, as I said before, that the great regions of the mind correspond to the great regions of the brain.

At the level of the mind, you are part of the human mind; at the level of the brain you are part of the global brain. This is a perfect example of becoming the change that you want to see.

Exact information about the functional significance of the deep sections of the brain is only obtained by working through the brain histologically in serial section.

The autistic brain tends to be a specialist brain, good at one thing, bad at something else.

I try to see what the dream might be referring to - because the information in the world is being interpreted by my brain which only has the concepts derived from our five senses. So I think of the sequences in my dream as my brain doing its very best to process information in a way it knows I can deal with.

The brain and muscles must develop simultaneously. Iron nerves with an intelligent brain — and the whole world is at your feet.

The very same brain centers that interpret and feel physical pain also become activated during experiences of emotional rejection. In brain scans, they light up in response to social ostracism, just as they would when triggered by physically harmful stimuli. When people speak of feeling hurt or of having emotional pain, they are not being abstract or poetic, but scientifically quite precise.

The structure of the human brain is enormously complex. It contains about 10 billion nerve cells (neurons), which are interlinked in a vast network through 1,000 billion junctions (synapses). The whole brain can be divided into subsections, or sub-networks, which communicate with each other in a network fashion. All this results in intricate patterns of intertwined webs, networks of nesting within larger networks.

Everything is super personal. Basically all of the songs are 'this is my life and what I feel about it.' That's how my brain works and thinks about things. It's really strange because I never really think about what I want to write about - it sort of just comes out. I literally say whatever is in my brain.

The brain's preferred source of fuel is glucose/carbohydrates. And when you go on a low-carb/high-protein diet, your brain is using low-octane fuel. You'll be a little groggy, a little grumpy.

Creativity comes from the spiritual realm, the collective consciousness. And the mind is in a different realm than the molecules of the brain. The brain is a receiver, not a source.

Brain studies of mental workouts in which you sustain a single, chosen focus show that the more you detach from what's distracting you and refocus on what you should be paying attention to, the stronger this brain circuitry becomes.

I could lay here and read all night. I am not able to fall asleep without reading. You have the time when your brain has nothing to do so it rambles. I fool my brain out of that by making it read until it shuts off. I just think it is best to do something right up until you fall asleep.

People say that the brain is a muscle and that one of the best exercises for any brain is learning another language and to switch from one to another as much as you can. I've found out that when I have trouble regarding any character or any particular scene in English, sometimes I'll switch to Spanish and I'll solve the problem that I've encountered. If I'm working in Spanish and I don't know how to approach certain scenes or certain emotions, or how to say this and that, I just switch to English to try to solve it that way and it works.

Suppose there were an experience machine that would give you any experience you desired. Superduper neuropsychologists could stimulate your brain so that you would think and feel you were writing a great novel, or making a friend, or reading an interesting book. All the time you would be floating in a tank, with electrodes attached to your brain. Should you plug into this machine for life, preprogramming your life experiences?...Of course, while in the tank you won't know that you're there; you'll think that it's all actually happening...Would you plug in?

Brain, v. [as in "to brain"]: To rebuke bluntly, but not pointedly; to dispel a source of error in an opponent.

I couldn't listen to music with lyrics for the first few months after the brain surgery, because they were too complex and disturbing. So I listened to a lot of classical music. I didn't really want to read, either, so I listened to books on tape or watched movies. I also re-taught myself all of my childhood piano pieces. It helped me repair my brain.

What we found was that rather than being haphazardly arranged or independent pathways, we find that all of the pathways of the brain taken together fit together in a single exceedingly simple structure. They basically look like a cube. They basically run in three perpendicular directions, and in each one of those three directions the pathways are highly parallel to each other and arranged in arrays. So, instead of independent spaghettis, we see that the connectivity of the brain is, in a sense, a single coherent structure.

My thinking brain never stops my creative brain never stops so they wrestle a lot and get in fights sometimes they fight in the night and keep me up.

Just as important as getting enough sleep is thinking about sleep in the right way. Stop thinking of sleep and naps as “downtime” or as a “waste of time.” Think of them as opportunities for memory consolidation and enhancing the brain circuits that help skill learning. Nor should you feel guilty about sleep. It's just as crucial a part of successful brain work as the actual task itself.