Neuroscience Quotes

• The brain is the organ of destiny. It holds within its humming mechanism secrets that will determine the future of the human race.

  Wilder Penfield

  Future, Destiny, Anatomy And Physiology

  Wilder Penfield (1963). “The second career: with other essays and addresses”

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• There is no scientific study more vital to man than the study of his own brain. Our entire view of the universe depends on it.

  Francis Crick

  Science, Men, Views

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• Neuroscience is by far the most exciting branch of science because the brain is the most fascinating object in the universe. Every human brain is different - the brain makes each human unique and defines who he or she is.

  Stanley B. Prusiner

  Unique, Brain, Different

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• Genetics is crude, but neuroscience goes directly to work on the brain, and the mind follows.

  Leon Kass

  Brain, Mind, Genetics

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• When it comes to exploring the mind in the framework of cognitive neuroscience, the maximal yield of data comes from integrating what a person experiences - the first person - with what the measurements show - the third person.

  Daniel Goleman

  Yield, Data, Mind

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• Brain: an apparatus with which we think we think.

  Ambrose Bierce

  Education, Math, Thinking

  "The Devil's Dictionary". Book by Ambrose Bierce, 1911.

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• The neuroscience area - which is absolutely in its infancy - is much more important than genetics.

  Leon Kass

  Infancy Is, Important, Genetics

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• More may have been learned about the brain and the mind in the 1990s - the so-called decade of the brain - than during the entire previous history of psychology and neuroscience.

  Antonio Damasio

  Psychology, Mind, Brain

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• Within psychology and neuroscience, some new and rigorous experimental paradigms for studying consciousness have helped it begin to overcome the stigma that has been attached to the topic for most of this century.

  David Chalmers

  Psychology, Overcoming, Topics

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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, Brain

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• Neuroscience over the next 50 years is going to introduce things that are mind-blowing.

  David Eagleman

  Years, Mind Blowing, Next

  "David Eagleman: 'We won't die - our consciousness will live forever on the internet'". Interview With Sean O'Hagan, www.theguardian.com. April 3, 2010.

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• Anyway, there is a lot of really interesting work going on in the neuroscience and psychology of consciousness, and I would love to see philosophers become more closely involved with this.

  David Chalmers

  Interesting, Psychology, Philosopher

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• Actually, I think my view is compatible with much of the work going on now in neuroscience and psychology, where people are studying the relationship of consciousness to neural and cognitive processes without really trying to reduce it to those processes.

  David Chalmers

  Thinking, Views, People

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• If you want to know how to please a woman, just talk to a neuroscience major from Columbia.

  Bob Dylan

  Want, Columbia, Please

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• The Holy Grail of neuroscience has been to understand how and where information is encoded in the brain.

  Thomas R. Insel

  Holy Grail, Brain, Information

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• Make sure to immediately write down any impressions you receive. Intuitive impressions are often subtle and therefore 'evaporate' very quickly, so make sure to capture them in writing as soon as possible. Recent research in neuroscience indicates that an intuitive insight - or any new idea - not captured within 37 seconds is likely never to be recalled again. In 7 minutes, it's gone forever. As my buddy Mark Victor Hansen likes to say, 'As soon as you think it, ink it!'

  Jack Canfield

  Writing, Thinking, Ideas

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• As modern-day neuroscience tells us, we are never in touch with the present, because neural information-processing itself takes time. Signals take time to travel from your sensory organs along the multiple neuronal pathways in your body to your brain, and they take time to be processed and transformed into objects, scenes, and complex situations. So, strictly speaking, what you are experiencing as the present moment is actually the past.

  Thomas Metzinger

  Past, Information Processing, Brain

  Thomas Metzinger (2009). “The Ego Tunnel: The Science of the Mind and the Myth of the Self”, p.36, Basic Books

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• Exciting discoveries in neuroscience are allowing us to fit educational methods to new understandings of how the brain develops.

  John Katzman

  Educational, Discovery, Understanding

  "Bringing Free Market Choices to Education" by John Katzman, www.huffingtonpost.com. March 28, 2013.

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• I see psychoanalysis, art and biology ultimately coming together, just like cognitive psychology and neuroscience have merged.

  Eric Kandel

  Art, Psychology, Together

  Source: www.spiegel.de

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• One of the difficulties in understanding the brain is that it is like nothing so much as a lump of porridge.

  Richard Gregory

  Understanding, Brain, Porridge

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• The Neurosciences do not exist exclusively to understand man's nature. They also serve a social function, such as in the treatment of the cerebral diseases or when helping us to have a more pleasant and constructive life. It is a thing that one could explore well.

  Rodolfo Llinas

  Men, Disease, Helping

  Source: www.cerebromente.org.br

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• If I want to know how we learn and remember and represent the world, I will go to psychology and neuroscience. If I want to know where values come from, I will go to evolutionary biology and neuroscience and psychology, just as Aristotle and Hume would have, were they alive.

  Patricia Churchland

  Psychology, Alive, World

  "Causal machines". Interview with Richard Marshall, www.3ammagazine.com. April 10, 2012.

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• I'm enormously interested to see where neuroscience can take us in understanding these complexities of the human brain and how it works, but I do think there may be limits in terms of what science can tell us about what does good and evil mean anyway, and what are those concepts about?

  Francis Collins

  Mean, Thinking, Evil

  "N.I.H. Director Francis Collins On Agency Goals". "Talk of the Nation" with Ira Flatow, www.npr.org. September 11, 2009.

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• Neuroscience has proven that similar areas of the brain are activated both in the person who suffers and in the one who feels empathy. Thus empathic suffering is a true experience of suffering.

  Matthieu Ricard

  Empathy, Brain, Suffering

  "Is Compassion Meditation the Key to Better Caregiving?" by Matthieu Ricard, www.huffingtonpost.com. October 5, 2010.

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• If we dedicate a certain amount of time each day to cultivating compassion or any other positive quality, we are likely to attain results, just like when we train the body... Meditation consists of familiarizing ourselves with a new way of being, of managing our thoughts and the way we perceive the world. Through the recent advances in neuroscience it is now possible to evaluate these methods and to verify their impact on the brain and body.

  Matthieu Ricard

  Compassion, Impact, Meditation

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