Maria Konnikova Quotes

We're not that far from being able to plant images, memories, and emotional states directly into the brain.

Implanting a microchip inside the brain to augment its mental powers has long been a science fiction trope.

Studies of social games, puzzle games, and brain-training games have shown they have little effect on the brain despite often being marketed as improving memory and reaction speeds.

I think, in general, medicine in the 21st century will switch from healing the sick to upgrading the healthy... If you find ways to repair the memory damaged by Alzheimer's disease or dementia and so forth, it is very likely that the same methods could be used to upgrade the memory of completely healthy people.

Ask not what the brain can do for the computer. Ask what the computer can do for the brain.

It is literally the case that learning languages makes you smarter. The neural networks in the brain strengthen as a result of language learning.

I've always been fascinated by intelligence and how our brains work, and how they can be improved.

What I'm really interested in is this idea of a 'brain co-processor' - a device that can record from, and deliver information to, so many points in the brain, with a computational infrastructure in between - a computer that can process the information and compute exactly what needs to be restored.

We believe that people will use real-time fMRI feedback to hone cognitive strategies that will increase activation of brain regions.

Just as physical exercise is a well-known and well-accepted means to improve health for anyone, regardless of age or background, so can the brain be put 'into shape' for optimal learning.

I visited a scientist who had a helmet with magnetic fields controlled by computer sequences that could profoundly affect your mood and your perceptions.

Who should have spent their money on a brain implant?

I spend a lot of time upside down. It increases the blood flow to the brain, so it really helps your creativity.

I've always been fascinated by the brain. I wrote a lot about brain-tech in my first non-fiction book, 'More Than Human.' So when I decided to write science fiction, that was the technology I gravitated towards.

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 truth is that we have no idea what the long-term effects of any artificial enhancement may be. Will our brains be able to withstand running at artificially heightened capacity?

The Internet of things will augment your brain.

Anyone who gives a surgeon six thousand dollars for breast augmentation should give some thought to investing a little more in brain augmentation.

Imagine something a million times more powerful than your smartphone that is the size of a brain cell interfacing with your biological neurons. That will be the complete symbiosis. That will be when we augment our brains at the level of the neuron.

When you think of things like medicine, people who have lost limbs now have a chance to have a limb replaced that is connected to the brain that they can actually control with their mind. That's amazing.

If there was a button that I could push that would agog my brain to the level that I felt first seeing 'Avatar' in its entirety and another one for food pellets, I would die of starvation.

In order to sharpen its prediction skills, our brains constantly build models, or 'templates,' of the world. The better the template, the better the performance. And now we know playing action video game actually fosters better templates.

'The cloud' is effectively an augmentation of our brains' memories.

People's brains work differently. The brain is like a muscle and you have to train it, keep it active, keep active in races. I notice if I haven't raced for a while. It's hard to see things clearly so you have to relearn that.

I take vitamins when I wake up. One of them I need to take is to wake up my brain. It has some caffeine in it, and it stimulates my brain and I'm literally not a person without it.