Ned Vizzini Quotes

When we talk about the brain, it is anything but unidimensional or simplistic or reductionistic.

The brain is the most complicated organ in the universe. We have learned a lot about other human organs. We know how the heart pumps and how the kidney does what it does. To a certain degree, we have read the letters of the human genome. But the brain has 100 billion neurons. Each one of those has about 10,000 connections.

One of the things I've come to appreciate about the brain is the importance of location. It's not just a set of interchangeable parts that you can swap in and out.

In terms of the brain, you can in a crude way think of the human brain as a computer.

My brain is fine.

The brain is the black box: the final frontier.

When 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.

Mathematics may be a way of developing physically, that is anatomically, new connections in the brain.

Your brain forms roughly 10,000 new cells every day, but unless they hook up to preexisting cells with strong memories, they die. Serves them right.

I suspect that pleasure is mainly used to turn off parts of the brain so you can keep fresh the memories of things you're trying to learn. It protects the short-term memory buffers. That's one theory of pleasure.

The brain is such an incredible computer.

The brain was designed by evolution, so each part of it is optimized for what it does, and it's incredibly, incredibly complex.

We know a certain amount about neurons. You can do fMRI and watch parts of the brain light up. But what happens in the middle is poorly understood.

The cortex is the enemy.

In the brain, you have connections between the neurons called synapses, and they can change. All your knowledge is stored in those synapses.

I've always had this fascination with the brain. I'm not really much of a religious person, but like anybody, you are at least fascinated by what some call a soul - what I would call the brain - and who we are and how we work.

The brain is plastic its whole life span.

I'm sure our brains are working unconsciously. When you have a creative thought, it's parts of the brain talking to each other without your awareness.

There are no genes or areas in the brain devoted uniquely to reading. Rather, our ability to read represents our brain's protean capacity to learn something outside our repertoire by creating new circuits that connect existing circuits in a different way.

Neuroscience is a baby science, a mere century old, and our scientific understanding of the brain is nowhere near where we'd like it to be. We know more about the moons of Jupiter than what is inside of our skulls.

I blinked and I cured my brain.

If you could change the neural pathways in your brain so that you could recall everything you've ever heard, taste, smelled or touched, basically from the womb on, and use it at your disposal, that's an interesting concept.

The principal activities of brains are making changes in themselves.

Your brain does not manufacture thoughts. Your thoughts shape neural networks.