Quotes About Brains

How did the dolphins and whales get such big brains? They obviously don't need such big brains to catch fish.

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.

Time and again, my sociobiological colleagues have upbraided me as a turncoat, because I will not agree with them that the ultimate criterion for the success of a meme must be its contribution to Darwinian "fitness". At bottom, they insist, a "good meme" spreads because brains are receptive to it, and the receptiveness of brains is ultimately shaped by (genetic) natural selection.

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.

George Harrison: The day after the Blue Angel audition, John showed up to rehearsal with a long list of name suggestions, and I remember each and every one of them: the Deads-men, the Deadmen, the Undeads-men, the Undeadmen, the Rots, the Rotters, the Dirts, the Dirty Ones, the Grayboys, the Eaten Brains, the Eating Brains, the Mersey Beaters, the Mersey Beaten, the Bloodless, the Graves, the Headstones, and the Liverpools of Blood. Paul ripped off John's right arm and used it to slap John across the face, then he said, "Those're horrible, mate, just horrible, y'know.

You may reason that we have [brains] to perceive the world or to think, and that's completely wrong.

And 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.

It bothers me when I can't, for example, remember a name. I don't know if it's pre-senility or whether there are too many names packed in our brains.

Words can be twisted into any shape. Promises can be made to lull the heart and seduce the soul. In the final analysis, words mean nothing. They are labels we give things in an effort to wrap our puny little brains around their underlying natures, when ninety-nine percent of the time the totality of the reality is an entirely different beast. The wisest man is the silent one. Examine his actions. Judge him by them.

I am thinking,’ he remarked quietly, ’whether I shall add to the disorder in this room, by scattering your brains about the fireplace.

For 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."

The way financing for independent movies goes is great. You get the money from the guy who's actually doing the distribution in France. You say, "Do you want a piece of this movie?" And he's got to sell this movie to get his money back. That's the brains of it; that's the genius of this financing. "You want Germany? Give us a million dollars and you've got Germany."

Persistence goes a lot farther than brains.

Let me tell you, though: being the smartest boy in the world wasn’t easy. I didn’t ask for this. I didn’t want this. On the contrary, it was a huge burden. First, there was the task of keeping my brain perfectly protected. My cerebral cortex was a national treasure, a masterpiece of the Sistine Chapel of brains. This was not something that could be treated frivolously. If I could have locked it in a safe, I would have. Instead, I became obsessed with brain damage.

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

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

What a frightful weapon is human thought! It is our defense and our safeguard, the most precious gift that God has made us. It is ours and it obeys us; we may launch it forth into space, but, once outside of our feeble brains, it is gone; we can no longer control it.

The sum of the crowd's IQ was far below that of its most modest single member. Mobs have passions, not brains.

Music is supposed to be entertaining and if it touches you emotionally, so much the better. Sometimes you do it to save your own life, not anybody else's. That's why I write. I'm not trying to change anybody else's life or the world, I'm trying to keep from blowing my own brains out. That's the real point.

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.

While our behavior is still significantly controlled by our genetic inheritance, we have, through our brains, a much richer opportunity to blaze new behavioral and cultural pathways on short timescales.

The Scarecrow watched the Woodman while he worked and said to him "I cannot think why this wall is here nor what it is made of." "Rest you brains and do not worry about the wall," replied the Woodman, "when we have climbed over it we shall know what is on the other side.

I never went in thinking, "You're an African-American woman, so you're never going to win." I was just in career doing beauty pageants for the experience, and to show my brains and talent and help break stereotypes. It wasn't like, "Oh, I'll become a star. I'm beautiful." I never thought I was pretty. I couldn't even put on eyelashes or makeup. When you come from an environment that's military, and they don't stress that topic of aesthetics or beauty pageants and makeup, there are a lot of things you just don't have that city girls have.

People repeat behaviour that leads to flooding their brains with pleasurable chemicals. The short-term reward loop acts over hours to years, and the long-term reproductive success loop over generations.

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.

We cannot all hope to combine the pleasing qualities of good looks, brains, and eloquence.

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.

The thing that concerns me more than anything is when anybody becomes closed off and exclusive of other people's ideas. All of our brains are in the same mode of searching when trying to understand reality, and when we come to a belief system that makes sense to us we hold it strongly, whether it's an atheist view, or a Christian view, or a Muslim view, whatever, then it's very hard to let go and I think it's so important to try to foster dialogue.

I wish I could tell you to always follow your heart, but I think it is bad advice. You have a heart, yes, it is true, but also a brain and also a soul. I've come to believe that we love with our brains as much as our hearts. Real Love is not just instinct, but intent...... From year to year, you may not always be the same Jane. This is perfectly normal. A Jane is many Janes in a lifetime.

The human mind has a desire to know its place in the universe and the role we play in the tapestry of life. This is actually hardwired into our brains, the desire the know our relationship to the universe. This was good for our evolution, since it enabled us to see our relationship to others and to nature which was good for our survival. And it is also what drives our curiosity to understand the universe.

With 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.

I'm deadly serious even when I play tennis against my kids. I want to beat their brains out.

By the time we get to the 2040s, we'll be able to multiply human intelligence a billionfold. That will be a profound change that's singular in nature. Computers are going to keep getting smaller and smaller. Ultimately, they will go inside our bodies and brains and make us healthier, make us smarter.

If language naturally evolves to serve the needs of tiny rodents with tiny rodent brains, then what's unique about language isn't the brilliant humans who invented it to communicate high-level abstract thoughts. What's unique about language is that the creatures who develop it are highly vulnerable to being eaten.

I guess politicians can be excused for thinking the electorate is stupid because they keep winning reelection. If you were Barbara Boxer or Harry Reid and you kept being reelected, you'd have to think, 'Half of my state is stupid.' But then you wouldn't be smart enough to think that if you had their brains.

This is my child, he said. I wash a dead man's brains out of his hair. That is my job.

What can you conceive more silly and extravagant than to suppose a man racking his brains, and studying night and day how to fly?

Absolute truisms rot brains absolutely.[...]'Power corrupts' is useless as a tool for understanding the past, and gives us nothing as a guide to action.

Agitation is the atmosphere of the brains.

I like the diversity that my children are exposed to every day. I love the way their brains work. Joe [her son] turns to me the other day and says, ‘One day, I will have a girlfriend. But I might have a boyfriend. If I’m gay.’ He’s 7! And I said, ‘You might have a girlfriend or a boyfriend, darling.’ And he said, ‘Which would you prefer?’ And I said, ‘My love, that would be entirely up to you, and it doesn’t make any difference to me.’ But that he knows! It’s a real privilege. Talk about the best education.

Reality TV rots people's brains.

I couldn't help but to think back to my classmates at Thomas Jefferson High School in San Antonio. They had the same talent, the same brains, the same dreams as the folks we sat with at Stanford and Harvard. I realized the difference wasn't one of intelligence or drive. The difference was opportunity.

If our brain is understanding some parts of the universe and not understanding other parts, and those understandings are about the laws of physics that our brains are built on top of, then it's kind of a loop, right?

The heaping together of paintings by Old Masters in museums is a catastrophe; likewise, a collection of a hundred Great Brains makes one big fathead.

No fools are so difficult to manage as those with some brains.

A working brain is probably a lot like a map, where anybody can get from one place to another on the freeways. It's the nonworking brains that get blocked, that have dead ends, that are under construction like mine.

For years we've been playing and writing songs that sound happy. And yet if you listen, the words are all like "My brains are falling out of my ears; would someone please pull me together?"

To obtain an assured favorable response from people, it is better to offer them something for their stomachs instead of their brains.