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.

If you only have brains on your head you would be as good a man as any of them, and a better man than some of them. Brains are the only things worth having in this world, no matter whether one is a crow or a man.

I mean most girls are so dumb and all. After you neck them for a while, you can really watch them losing their brains. You take a girl when she really gets passionate, she just hasn't any brains. -Holden Caulfield

It is not so much that we, using our brains, spin our yarns, as that our brains, using yarns, spin us.

There are writers who can show you the excellence of their brains and writers who show you the depths of their souls: I don't know any writer who does both at the same time as brilliantly as Roxane Gay.

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.

All you've got to do is turn up and have a few facial tics and be a lunatic and throw someone around the room or blow their brains out and people think it's good acting.

Science fiction does not attempt to predict. It extrapolates. It just says, "What if?" not what will be? Because you can never predict what will happen, particularly in politics and economics. You can to some extent predict in the technological sphere - flying, space travel, but even there we missed badly on some things, like computers. No one imagined the incredible impact of computers, even though robot brains of various kinds but the idea that one day every house would have a computer in every room and that one day we'd have computers built into our clothing, nobody ever thought of that.

Words are not brains, you know.

We are social beings and our brains grow in a social environment.

The brains -the thinking organs- are the world producers -nature's genitals.

Basically there are two types of animals: animals, and animals that have no brains; they are called plants. They don't need a nervous system because they don't move actively, they don't pull up their roots and run in a forest fire! Anything that moves actively requires a nervous system; otherwise it would come to a quick death.

We 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

What can you conceive more silly and extravagant than to suppose a man racking his brains, and studying night and day how to fly? ... wearying himself with climbing upon every ascent, ... bruising himself with continual falls, and at last breaking his neck? And all this, from an imagination that it would be glorious to have the eyes of people looking up at him, and mighty happy to eat, and drink, and sleep, at the top of the highest trees in the kingdom.

Those who grew up digital have different brains.

The 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.

Travel makes the world look new, and when the world looks new, our brains work harder.

Marijuana allows one to take a breath and see the realities of a situation without the news beating their interpretation into our brains. Pot relaxes you.

College is a place where a professor's lecture notes go straight to the students' lecture notes, without passing through the brains of either.

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

There 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.

A long while ago an eager group of reformers wrote to me asking if I could suggest anything that would improve the morals of the American people. I replied that the trouble with the American people in general was not lack of morals but lack of brains.

Humans socialize in the largest groups of all primates because we are the only animals with brains large enough to handle the complexities of that social arrangement.

Accepting trial and error means accepting error. It means taking problems in our stride when a decision doesn't work out, whether through luck or misjudgment. And that is not something human brains seem to be able to do without a struggle.

When leaders lead in ways that people's brains can follow, good results follow as well.

We are all far less rational in our decision-making than standard economic theory assumes. Our irrational behaviors are neither random nor senseless: they are systematic and predictable. We all make the same types of mistakes over and over, because of the basic wiring of our brains.

Evolution has programmed our brains to find two things particularly interesting, and therefore memorable: jokes and sex - and especially, it seems, jokes about sex.

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.

The author isn't altogether certain that there is any such thing as exaggeration. Our brains permit us to use such a wee fraction of their resources that, in a sense, everything we experience is a reduction. We employ drugs, yoga techniques and poetics - and a thousand more clumsy methods - in an effort just to bring things back up to normal.

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.

I think of myself as a social scientist. In order to get hired and to get promoted, we're forced to declare a disciplinary and sub-disciplinary specialty, so I am a psychologist and I am a social psychologist within that. But I think the exciting thing is to think about the social sciences in general and the nature of society. It's one of the hardest things to think about, because our brains aren't designed to think about these emergent entities. We're not good at it.

If at age 20 you are not a Communist then you have no heart. If at age 30 you are not a Capitalist then you have no brains.

And stop talking in that puffed-up way they taught you. Words aren't brains, you know.

It takes uncommon guts to stick to one style in the face of all the pressures to 'come up with something new' every six months. It is tragically easy to be stampeded into change. But golden rewards await the advertiser who has the brains to create a coherent image, and the stability to stick with it over a long period.

It has always been preferable to attribute a woman's success to her beauty rather than to her brains, to reduce her to the sum of her sex life.

But I am a just man, even to my enemy - and I will acknowledge, beforehand, that they are cleverer brains than I thought them

The Ten Commandments are for lame brains. The first five are solely for the benefit of the priests and the powers that be; the second five are half truths, neither complete nor adequate.

What is Camille Paglia doing, writing that an actress as gifted as Anne Heche has the mental depth of a pancake? How many pancake brains could do what Heche did with David Mamet's dialogue in Wag the Dog? No doubt Heche has been stuck with a few bad gigs, but Paglia, of all people, must be well aware that being an actress is not the same safe ride as being the tenured university professor of humanities and media studies at the University of the Arts in Philadelphia.

Thinking is, or ought to be, a coolness and a calmness; and our poor hearts throb, and our poor brains beat too much for that.

What I appreciate is acknowledging to the audience that I think they have brains.

Our brains deal exclusively with special-case experiences.

Every 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.

When you're wounded and left on Afghanistan's plains, and the women come out to cut up what remains, jest roll to your rifle and blow out your brains and go to your gawd like a soldier.

Insofar as she recognized at all that she was dreaming, she realized that she must be exploring her subconscious mind. She had heard it said that humans are supposed only to use about a tenth of their brains, and that no one was really clear what the other nine tenths were for, but she had certainly never heard it suggested that they were used for storing penguins.

There's a difference between criminals and crooks. Crooks steal. Criminals blow some guy's brains out. I'm a crook.

Almost any problem, whether it's telling a family story, or telling a network-quality story, or answering a network note, becomes essentially instantly solvable, because you have a bunch of brains sitting in a room.

Our brains are no longer conditioned for reverence and awe. We cannot imagine a Second Coming that would not be cut down to size by the televised evening news, or a Last Judgment not subject to pages of holier-than-thou second-guessing in The New York Review of Books.