John Eccles Quotes

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.

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.

People often ask how I got interested in the brain; my rhetorical answer is: 'How can anyone NOT be interested in it?' Everything you call 'human nature' and consciousness arises from it.

Everything we do, every thought we've ever had, is produced by the human brain. But exactly how it operates remains one of the biggest unsolved mysteries, and it seems the more we probe its secrets, the more surprises we find.

The brain is the cornerstone of virtually every facet of our lives. I wish we knew more.

The brain is one of the richest green fields of science. There's so much yet to be discovered.

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.

We have learned more about the brain in the last fifteen years than in all prior human history, and the mind, once considered out of reach, is finally assuming center stage.

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

I do what I do merrily out of curiosity because I want to know how the brain works. That will get me up early in the morning and keep me going all day long.

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.

In school, I studied psychology, linguistics, neuroscience. I understand that there is a real lack of respect for the brain.

I'm tremendously optimistic about the future of my discipline, yet understanding the brain is so difficult that we neuroscientists need help.

To find better means of fixing the brain, we first need to achieve something more fundamental. We must understand how it works.

I was interested in big unknowns, and the brain is one of the biggest, so building tools that allow us to regard the brain as a big electrical circuit appealed to me.

People have wanted to look inside the human mind, the human brain, for thousands of years.

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.

The brain is the black box: the final frontier.

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.

As long as our brain is a mystery, the universe, the reflection of the structure of the brain will also be a mystery.

One of the things that got me transitioning from physical science to brain science was asking, Why do we understand so much about the universe?

We cannot study the brain, the instrument for fabricating the realities we inhabit, using the mental constructs of the past.

In the past thirty years we have learned more about the workings of the human brain than in all of previous history.

I read a lot of nonfiction - especially books about the brain.

After all my probing into the human brain, I should still be aware of mysteries and come up with them myself.