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Brains are tricky and adaptable organs. For all the 'neuroplasticity' allowing our brains to reconfigure themselves to the biases of our computers, we are just as neuroplastic in our ability to eventually recover and adapt.
Douglas RushkoffI 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.
Temple GrandinIf minds are wholly dependent on brains and brains on biochemistry, and biochemistry (in the long run) on the meaningless flux of the atoms, I cannot understand how the thought of those minds should have any more significance than the sound of the wind in the trees.
C. S. LewisAnd the reward when good people die - her mother paused, swallowed, paused again - the reward when good people die is that they get to help make the people in their families who haven't been born yet. They pick out what kinds of traits they want the new people to have - they give them all the raw material of their souls, like their talents and their brains and their potential. Of course it's up to the new ones, once they're born, what they'll use and what they won't but that's what everyone who dies is doing, I think.
Dara HornI feel my brains, like a pear, to see if it's ripe; it will be exquisite by September.
Virginia WoolfIt's the quintessential Greek sport: harmonious, competitive, agonizing, nautical, and above all, intelligent. It combines Odysseus's brains and brawn and love of the sea with the tactical precision of the Spartan pikeman.
Barry S. StraussFor some reason California's always been where the struggle is about how much authority you can impose on people's private lives. It seems to show up there most clearly. They had a helmet law for motorcycles in California and the bikies were saying things like, "It restricts my vision. I can't hear what my bike's doing. If it was on fire I wouldn't know it until my ass caught." And at the bottom line what the bikies were saying was, "Look, it's my goddamn head and if I want to splatter my brains all over the guardrails on the Coast Highway, super for me."
Stephen KingIf we are not using our brains' capacity for challenge it feels to me as though it atrophies like an unused muscle.
Philippa PerryI eat 'The Walking Dead' like its made of brains. Can't even watch the show, I love the book so much.
Joss WhedonWe are the only species on the planet, so far as we know, to have invented a communal memory stored neither in our genes nor in our brains. The warehouse of this memory is called the library
Carl SaganWhat 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.
Katie MacAlisterWriting for adults, you have to keep reminding them of what is going on. The poor things have given up using their brains when they read. Children you only need to tell things to once.
Diana Wynne JonesCelebrities meet a lot of people and we just can't maintain them all in our fuddled brains.
Cliff RichardThe most advanced medical brains in the universe have yet to discover a way for a man to relax himself, and looking at a golf ball is not the cure.
Milt GrossCollege is a place where a professor's lecture notes go straight to the students' lecture notes, without passing through the brains of either.
Mark TwainThere are billions of neurons in our brains, but what are neurons? Just cells. The brain has no knowledge until connections are made between neurons. All that we know, all that we are, comes from the way our neurons are connected.
Tim Berners-LeeI wouldn't have raced a horse. But you'll then throw back at me that Jesse Owens raced against a horse and he's one of my heroes so I'm not going to say it was a silly stunt. I know too much about horses. They're highly unreliable and they've got brains the size of golf balls.
Sebastian CoeYou'll see that it'll take more than five and a half months to wipe away peel;scrape away the blanket of ignorance that has been plastered and replastered over those brains in the past three hundred years. You'll see.
Matthew AntoineHappiness comes only when we push our brains and hearts to the farthest reaches of which we are capable.
Leo RostenFriendship is an island that you retreat to and you all fall on the floor and laugh at all the other ninnies that don't have enough brains to have your good taste.
Ray BradburyAll through my life I never did believe in human measurement. Numbers, time, inches, feet. All are just ploys for cutting nature down to size. I know the grand scheme of the world is beyond our brains to fathom, so I don't try, just let it in.
Louise ErdrichYou are very clever," said the old man shyly. "I would like to eat your brains, one day.
Terry PratchettYour brain may give birth to any technology, but other brains will decide whether the technology thrives. The number of possible technologies is infinite, and only a few pass this test of affinity with human nature.
Robert WrightWork addiction seems to be an addiction we are proud of. We almost seem to brag with mock displeasure that we are "overwhelmed" with busyness, sometimes as an excuse for not really being able to do what we really want to be doing. Work addiction is a symptom not of working your brains out but of your brain working you out. Why are you doing what you're doing for a career and how do you like doing it? Do you like your answer?
Paul PearsallThey take the circuits out of peopleโs brains that make it possible for them to think for themselves. Their world is like the one that George Orwell depicted in his novel. Iโm sure you realize that there are plenty of people who are looking for exactly that kind of brain death. It makes life a lot easier. You donโt have to think about difficult things, just shut up and do what your superiors tell you to do.
Haruki MurakamiWe try to organize the world, which isn't organized the way our brains want to organize it. We tell stories about the people in our lives, we project ideas onto them. We project relationships with people, we make our lives into stories. I don't think we can avoid doing that.
Charlie KaufmanI've been with a lot of women, but who's counting? It's nothing I'm proud of. It's a physical need. Sometimes afterwards I just want to blow my brains out, it's so meaningless.
Mickey RourkeI don't care. People here have to find their own way, negotiate for themselves, use their own brains.
Hans MondermanWhen 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.
John Towner WilliamsGentlemen ... Do you not see that so long as society says a woman is incompetent to be a lawyer, minister or doctor, but has ample ability to be a teacher, that every man of you who chooses this profession tacitly acknowledges that he has no more brains than a woman?
Susan B. AnthonyWhen I look at the human brain I'm still in awe of it. Every single time you lift off the bone and open the durra and there it is - the human brain, the thing that gives a person a personality, that distinguishes each one of us, that there could be more than 6 billion of us here on this planet with brains that look the same, but each one being distinctly different because of what is going on in that thing. I'll never get over my awe of that.
Benjamin CarsonWith so many mind-bytes to be downloaded, so many mental codons to be replicated, it is no wonder that child brains are gullible, open to almost any suggestion, vulnerable to subversion, easy prey to Moonies, Scientologists and nuns. Like immune-deficient patients, children are wide open to mental infections that adults might brush off without effort.
Richard DawkinsBrains are far more important than money or connections. Everyone and anyone can create a business out of their bedroom.
Mark CubanEvery year, it takes more brains to navigate this complicated world. More people are falling below what I call the 'incompetence line' through no fault of their own.
Scott AdamsLaughter is the valve on the pressure cooker of life. Either you laugh and suffer, or you got your beans or brains on the ceiling.
Wavy GravyThere is, on the whole, nothing on earth intended for innocent people so horrible as a school. To begin with, it is a prison. But in some respects more cruel than a prison. In a prison, for instance, you are not forced to read books written by the warders and the governor. . . .In the prison you are not forced to sit listening to turnkeys discoursing without charm or interest on subjects that they don't understand and don't care about, and therefore incapable of making you understand or care about. In a prison they may torture your body; but they do not torture your brains.
George Bernard ShawI maintain that the human mystery is incredibly demeaned by scientific reductionism, with its claim in promissory materialism to account eventually for all of the spiritual world in terms of patterns of neuronal activity. This belief must be classed as a superstition. ... We have to recognize that we are spiritual beings with souls existing in a spiritual world as well as material beings with bodies and brains existing in a material world.
John EcclesWe admit, in geometry, not only infinite magnitudes, that is to say, magnitudes greater than any assignable magnitude, but infinite magnitudes infinitely greater, the one than the other. This astonishes our dimension of brains, which is only about six inches long, five broad, and six in depth, in the largest heads.
VoltaireThe way to elegancy of style is to employ your pen upon every errand; and the more trivial and dry it is, the more brains must be allowed for sauce.
Frances OsborneI never could understand the popular belief that because a man makes a lot of money he has a lot of brains. Some very rich men who made their fortunes have been among the stupidest men I have ever met.
Julius RosenwaldThe Internet gives us everything and forces us to filter it not by the workings of culture, but with our own brains. This risks creating six billion separate encyclopedias, which would prevent any common understanding whatsoever.
Umberto EcoGod is not a magic eight ball we shake up and peer into whenever we have a decision to make. He is a good God who gives us brains, shows us the way of obedience, and invites us to take risks for him.
Kevin DeYoung