Gretel Ehrlich Quotes

Brain: an apparatus with which we think we think.

The brain has this amazing level of almost fractal complexity to it. When you start looking at any part of it in detail, you realize that it's much more complex than you thought.

One can, in principle, outline sort of a set of neural circuits that are critically involved and even identify disorders that affect different components of that neural circuit and see what happens if you knock out, for example, inability to recognize faces, how it affects your response to portraiture.

I read a couple of books about neuroscience and the relationship between the mind and the body.

Our bodies are hanging along for the ride, but my brain is talking to your brain. And if we want to understand who we are and how we feel and perceive, we really understand what brains are.

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

Even two of humanity's most intimate possessions - a sense of self and a body image - are fluid, highly modifiable creations of the brain's mischievous deployment of electricity and a handful of chemicals. They both can change or be changed on less than a second's notice.

The brain is an immensely complex organ, and many mysteries remain. Exactly how brain and mind or soma and psyche are related is one of them.

We cannot experimentally map out the brain. It's just too big. In a piece of the brain the size of a pinhead there are 3,000 pathways like a city with 3,000 streets.

The human brain is an incredible pattern-matching machine.

One of the ultimate challenges for biology is to understand the brain's processing of unconscious and conscious perception, emotion, and empathy.

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.

You, your joys and sorrows, your memories and your ambitions, your sense of personal identity and your free will are in fact no more than the behavior of a vast assembly of nerve cells and their associated molecules.

The brain is the most complex, challenging scientific puzzle we have ever tried to decode.

We pretend that the brain is binary, like a computer. But it's not. It's completely holographic.

As an ex-programmer, I'm still just curious about how the brain functions, how that flow of information really happens.

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

The neurochemistry of the brain is astonishingly busy, the circuitry of a machine more wonderful than any devised by humans. But there is no evidence that its functioning is due to anything more than the 10(14) neural connections that build an elegant architecture of consciousness.

It turns out your conscious mind - the part you think of as you - is really the smallest part of what’s happening in your brain, and usually the last one in line to find out any information.

The human brain is like a memory system that records every thing that happens to us and makes intelligent predictions based on those experiences.

It is never possible to understand completely any other human being; and no individual will ever really understand himself - the complexity is too great and there is not the time to constantly take things apart and examine them.

I think the power of the mind is amazing, and we've barely scratched the surface of what it can do.

I do not comprehend all that I am. Is the mind, therefore, too limited to possess itself?

Consciousness is the foundation of all thinking; and thinking is the foundation of all consciousness.

I imagine John Watson thinks love’s a mystery to me, but the chemistry is incredibly simple and very destructive. When we first met, you told me that a disguise is always a self portrait, how true of you, the combination to your safe – your measurements. But this is far more intimate. This is your heart, and you should never let it rule your head. You could have chosen any random number and walked out of here today with everything you worked for. But you just couldn’t resist it, could you? I’ve always assumed that love is a dangerous disadvantage. Thank you for the final proof.