Brain Quotes - Page 17

• 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.

  Tim Berners-Lee

  Cells, Connections, Neurons

  "Weaving the Web". Book by Tim Berners-Lee, 1999.

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• The human brain is the most complex mass of protoplasm on earth-perhaps even in our galaxy.

  Marian Diamond

  Earth, Mass, Humans

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• Now I have demonstrated, that the convolutions of the brain are nothing but the peripheric expansion of the bundles of which it is composed; consequently the convolutions of the brain must be recognized as the parts in which the instincts, sentiments, propensities are exercised; and, in general the moral and intellectual forces.

  Franz Joseph Gall

  Intellectual, Expansion, Moral

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• Mind, brain, and body make the man, and the man is capable of so much!

  Wilder Penfield

  Men, Mind, Body

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• With its hundred billion nerve cells, with their hundred trillion interconnections, the human brain is the most complex phenomenon in the known universe - always, of course, excepting the interaction of some six billion such brains and their owners within the socio-technological culture of our planetary ecosystem!

  Steven Rose

  Cells, Ecosystems, Culture

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• To explicate the uses of the Brain seems as difficult a task as to paint the Soul, of which it is commonly said, that it understands all things but itself.

  Thomas Willis

  Soul, Tasks, Use

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• It seems a miracle that young children easily learn the language of any environment into which they were born. The generative approach to grammar, pioneered by Chomsky, argues that this is only explicable if certain deep, universal features of this competence are innate characteristics of the human brain. Biologically speaking, this hypothesis of an inheritable capability to learn any language means that it must somehow be encoded in the DNA of our chromosomes. Should this hypothesis one day be verified, then lingusitics would become a branch of biology.

  Niels Kaj Jerne

  Children, Mean, Science

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• It is easy to make out three areas where scientists will be concentrating their efforts in the coming decades. One is in physics, where leading theorists are striving, with the help of experimentalists, to devise a single mathematical theory that embraces all the basic phenomena of matter and energy. The other two are in biology. Biologists-and the rest of us too-would like to know how the brain works and how a single cell, the fertilized egg cell, develops into an entire organism

  Dennis Flanagan

  Science, Cells, Eggs

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• But since the brain, as well as the cerebellum, is composed of many parts, variously figured, it is possible, that nature, which never works in vain, has destined those parts to various uses, so that the various faculties of the mind seem to require different portions of the cerebrum and cerebellum for their production.

  Georg Prochaska

  Nature, Science, Mind

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• The wreath of cigarette smoke which curls about the head of the growing lad holds his brain in an iron grip which prevents it from growing and his mind from developing just as surely as the iron shoe does the foot of the Chinese girl.

  Hudson Maxim

  Girl, Science, Cigarette Smoke

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• You must capture and keep the heart of the original and supremely able man before his brain can do its best.

  Andrew Carnegie

  Loyalty, Heart, Men

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• Researches at Yale found a connection between brain cancer and work environment. The No. 1 most dangerous job for developing brain cancer? Plutonium hat model.

  Jimmy Fallon

  Jobs, Cancer, Yale

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• Boxing is the only sport you can get your brain shook, your money took and your name in the undertaker book.

  Joe Frazier

  Funny, Sports, Money

  "Underdog Boxing: Pumped up for the Pacquiao-Mosley undercard fights" by Carlo L.Pamintuan, www.gmanetwork.com. February 10, 2011.

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• Let schoolmasters puzzle their brain, With grammar, and nonsense, and learning, Good liquor, I stoutly maintain, Gives genius a better discerning.

  Oliver Goldsmith

  Giving, Intelligence, Liquor Stores

  'She Stoops to Conquer' (1773) act 1, sc. 1, song

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• I'm married, which means that instead of occasionally wondering about men from afar, I actually live with one and can be constantly astounded by the strange male brain.

  Cathy Guisewite

  Mean, Men, Males

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• Overall, the human brain is the most complex object known in the universe - known, that is, to itself.

  E. O. Wilson

  Humans, Complexes, Objects

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• Never trust anything that can think for itself if you can't see where it keeps its brain.

  J. K. Rowling

  Trust, Halloween, Technology

  J. K. Rowling (1999). “Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets”, Raincoast Books

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• The brain is a monstrous, beautiful mess.

  Susannah Cahalan

  Beautiful, Neurons, Tangled Webs

  Susannah Cahalan (2012). “Brain on Fire: My Month of Madness”, p.107, Simon and Schuster

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• Because we do not understand the brain very well we are constantly tempted to use the latest technology as a model for trying to understand it. In my childhood we were always assured that the brain was a telephone switchboard...Sherrington, the great British neuroscientist, thought the brain worked like a telegraph system. Freud often compared the brain to hydraulic and electromagnetic systems. Leibniz compared it to a mill...At present, obviously, the metaphor is the digital computer.

  John Searle

  Science, Technology, Childhood

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• When can our brain's innate objectivity begin to flourish? Only when our inappropriate Self-centered subjectivity begins to dissolve.

  James H. Austin

  Self, Objectivity, Subjectivity

  James H. Austin (2011). “Meditating Selflessly: Practical Neural Zen”, p.12, MIT Press

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• 

  No diet will remove all the fat from your body because the brain is entirely fat. Without a brain, you might look good, but all you could do is run for public office.

  George Bernard Shaw

  Running, Loss, Office

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• You can exist without your soul, you know, as long as your brain and heart are still working. But you’ll have no sense of self anymore, no memory, no . . . anything. There’s no chance at all of recovery. You’ll just — exist. As an empty shell. And your soul is gone forever . . . lost.

  J. K. Rowling

  Memories, Heart, Recovery

  Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban ch. 12 (1999). Ellipsis in the original.

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• The human brain must continue to frame the problems for the electronic machine to solve.

  David Sarnoff

  Mistake, Decision, Machines

  David Sarnoff (1952*). “הקידמה באלקטרוניקה”

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• And of course, the brain is not responsible for any of the sensations at all. The correct view is that the seat and source of sensation is the region of the heart.

  Aristotle

  Heart, Views, Responsible

  Aristotle, Arthur Leslie Peck (1961). “Parts of animals”, Loeb Classical Library

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• The brain is a tissue. It is a complicated, intricately woven tissue, like nothing else we know of in the universe, but it is composed of cells, as any tissue is. They are, to be sure, highly specialized cells, but they function according to the laws that govern any other cells. Their electrical and chemical signals can be detected, recorded and interpreted and their chemicals can be identified; the connections that constitute the brain's woven feltwork can be mapped. In short, the brain can be studied, just as the kidney can.

  David H. Hubel

  Law, Cells, Kidneys

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