Quotes About Brains

From study of known normal brains we have learned that there is a certain range of variation. No two brains are exactly alike, and the greatest source of error in the assertions of Benedict and Lombroso has been the finding of this or that variation in a criminal's brains, and maintaining such to be characteristic of the 'criminal constitution,' unmindful of the fact that like variations of structure may and do exist in the brains of normal, moral persons.

A somewhat casual observer from outer space might well deduce that the course of evolution in this planet had produced a species of large four-wheeled bugs with detachable brains; peculiar animals which rested when they sent their brains away from them but performed in rather predictable manner when their brains were recalled.

We can certainly go further than cats, but why should it be that our brains are somehow so suited to the universe that our brains will be able to understand the deepest workings?

Our visual cortexes are wired to quickly recognize faces and then quickly subtract massive amounts of detail from them, zeroing in on their essential message: Is this person happy? Angry? Fearful? Individual faces may vary greatly, but a smirk on one is a lot like a smirk on another. Smirks are conceptual, not pictorial. Our brains are like cartoonists - and cartoonists are like our brains, simplifying and exaggerating, subordinating facial detail to abstract comic concepts.

We learn more about how human brains work. And that leads us to ideas about how to make human brains work better.

I think that autistic brains tend to be specialized brains. Autistic people tend to be less social. It takes a ton of processor space in the brain to have all the social circuits. I mean after all, the first stone spear was not designed by the totally social people.

I am a fool with a heart but no brains, and you are a fool with brains but no heart; and we’re both unhappy, and we both suffer.

They hadn’t counted on the highly controlled jabberjay having the brains to adapt to the wild, to pass on its genetic code, to thrive in a new form. They hadn’t anticipated its will to live.

The status quo and the media is doing everything it can to fry children's brains and make them grow up maladjusted.

Human beings do not carry civilization in their genes. All that we do carry in our genes are certain capacities- the capacity to learn to walk upright, to use our brains, to speak, to relate to our fellow men, to construct and use tools, to explore the universe, and to express that exploration in religion, in art, in science, in philosophy.

Some have brains, and some haven't, and there it is.

What do you know about women?" They smell nice, they don't like to be told they can't do something, and, when they're naked, they hold some sort of mystical power that overrides our brains and makes us do and say things that would normally be inconceivable.

She had a dour Presbyterian mind and a code of morals that pinned down and beat the brains out of nearly everything that was pleasant to do.

Literature and the other arts play with pattern - our brains understand our world by recognizing patterns - and with possibility. The arts harness our sharpest senses, sight and sound, and our richest ways of understanding, in language and narrative. They were our first schools before schools were ever invented. They develop our imaginations, extend our possibilities, and deepen what we can all share.

For centuries, magicians have intuitively taken advantage of the inner workings of our brains.

Do not be so open-minded that your brains fall out.

Our brains have evolved to help us survive within the orders of magnitude of size and speed which our bodies operate at. We never evolved to navigate in the world of atoms.

Pedantry crams our heads with learned lumber and takes out our brains to make room for it.

I think the neural pathways in our brains affect what happens in our bodies, and so can alter our health.

If you have ever seen the movie Night of the Living Dead, you have a rough idea how modern corporations and organizations operate, with projects and proposals that everybody thought were killed constantly rising from their graves to stagger back into meetings and eat the brains of the living.

In the era of big brains, life stories could end up any which way. Look at mine.

I believe in an open mind, but not so open that your brains fall out.

We have sexual lust even though we know perfectly well that, because we're using contraception, it is not going to result in the propagation of our genes. That doesn't matter, because the lust was built into our brains at a time when there was no contraception.

Believe me, the man who earns his bread by the sweat of his brow, eats oftener a sweeter morsel, however coarse, than he who procures it by the labor of his brains.

My brother used to say that when you deal with women, it's difficult to remove emotions from an argument. I never really knew what he meant. Then I read an article that said when it comes to emotion and logic, men's and women's brains are different - my brother was right! Women are very mysterious, but that's part of their joy.

Often people with fine countenances and fit bodies were mistakenly assumed by others to have the brains to match.

Its big men are mostly little men with fancy offices and a lot of money. A great many of them are stupid little men, with reach-me-down brains, small-town arrogance and a sort of animal knack of smelling out the taste of the stupidest part of the public. They have played in luck so long that they have come to mistake luck for enlightenment." - on Hollywood

I think that's what I really dig about science fiction these days - we've caught up to it in a way. It's no longer about people with huge brains. Now it's really much more, as Jim Cameron says, the nature of being human. What it is to be human in society. How to retain one's humanity in society.

Only those moments count, when the desire to remain by yourself is so powerful that you'd prefer to blow your brains out than exchange a word with someone.

The brains of members of the Press departments of motion-picture studios resemble soup at a cheap restaurant. It is wiser not to stir them.

When you think about Boston, Harvard and M.I.T. are the brains of the city, and its soul might be Faneuil Hall or the State House or the Old Church. But I think the pulsing, pounding heart of Boston is Fenway Park.

Being thick isn't an affliction if you're a footballer, because your brains need to be in your feet. And Beckham works hard, he's brave and he crosses a ball superbly. He treats a football like he does a wife, lovingly, with caresses.

Most guys my age are boring human beings. They sit in bars, get drunk, and then go home to tell their kids the way to rule their lives, while they're absolutely stewed out of their brains.

He will often have to scratch his head, and bite his nails to the quick. [To succeed he will have to puzzle his brains and work hard.]

It is essential to understand our brains in some detail if we are to assess correctly our place in this vast and complicated universe we see all around us.

Newton was a genius, but not because of the superior computational power of his brain. Newton's genius was, on the contrary, his ability to simplify, idealize, and streamline the world so that it became, in some measure, tractable to the brains of perfectly ordinary men.

Japan had a more radical experience of future shock than any other nation in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries. They were this feudal place, locked in the past, but then they bought the whole Industrial Revolution kit from England, blew their cultural brains out with it, became the first industrialized Asian nation, tried to take over their side of the world, got nuked by the United States for their trouble, and discovered Steve McQueen! Their take on iconic menswear emerges from that matrix.

Even while writing his book, he had become painfully aware how little he knew his own planet while attempting to piece together another one from jagged bits filched from deranged brains.

Blow your brains out and do it right, make sure it's on prime time and on Saturday night.

Let me explain something to you, he said. If you want to get something out of a man, dashing out his brains against a lamppost isn't the way to do it.

We basically created a computational unit out of two brains.

Freedom! To fill people's mailboxes, eyes, ears and brains with commercial rubbish against their will, television programs that are impossible to watch with a sense of coherence. Freedom! To force information on people, taking no account of their right not to accept it or their right of peace of mind. Freedom! To spit in the eyes and souls of passersby with advertisements.

When women understand that governments and religions are human inventions; that Bibles, prayer-books, catechisms, and encyclical letters are all emanations from the brains of man, they will no longer be oppressed by the injunctions that come to them with the divine authority of *Thus sayeth the Lord.*

The only way to get anything out of a writer's brains is to leave him or her alone until he or she is damn well ready to write it down.

Even the scholars in various lands have been acting as if their brains had been amputated.

We use only 10% of our brains... Imagine how smart we would be if we used the other 60%!

The effect of the advertising way of thinking on our brains, and how we live on our planet, is very disturbing. It's not a very good thing, and it's not the kind of thing to just make into kind of a "ha-ha."

The best buy by way of management is brains-at any price.