Ben Carson Quotes

The brain is behind the really big questions we have. Who am I, what is my identity? What is that based on? If memories are encoded in connectomes, your personality might be in your connectome. If that's the case, that's the basis of your uniqueness as a person.

The human brain is an incredible pattern-matching machine.

It's not even known how many kinds of cells there are in the brain. If you were looking for a periodic table of the brain, there is no such thing. I really like to think of the brain as a computer.

My cerebral cortex, the gray matter that MIT neuroscientist Steven Pinker likens to 'a large sheet of two-dimensional tissue that has been wadded up to fit inside the spherical skull,' is riddled instead of whole.

All our behaviours are a result of neurophysiological activity in the brain.

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.

Many cognitive psychologists see the brain as a computer. But every single brain is absolutely individual, both in its development and in the way it encounters the world.

We are not interested in the fact that the brain has the consistency of cold porridge.

Each brain is exposed to different circumstances. It's very likely that your brain is unique in the history of the universe.

The genetic you and the neural you aren't alternatives to the conscious you. They are its foundations.

When brains get sufficiently big, presumably, as human brains have, consciousness seems to emerge.

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

The brain sure as hell doesn't work by somebody programming in rules.

The connections in the brain fade away unless used. We know that early stimulation of children leads to higher cognitive scores.

The act of learning to read added an entirely new circuit to our hominid brain's repertoire. The long developmental process of learning to read deeply changed the very structure of that circuit's connections, which rewired the brain, which transformed the nature of human thought.

I believe that it is made out of the same cloth of mind, but it is an add-on, it was something that was specialized to create what we call the self. And it exists for very special purposes and it has very special, and I think by and large good consequences, although not only good consequences.

Listen, no part of me is more definitive of who I am than my brain.

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

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

Space and time, not proteins and neurons, hold the answer to the problem of consciousness. When we consider the nerve impulses entering the brain, we realize that they are not woven together automatically, any more than the information is inside a computer.

Everybody agrees that the brain is a remarkable machine. It's capable of generating an enormous number of phenomena, some of them very obvious and some of them less obvious. But I think that in the end there are going to be some very basic explanations for many things: emotions, awareness, consciousness, attention, perception, recognition.

The cause-effect sequences in our brains are just as determining, just as inescapable, as anywhere else in Nature.

Videogames make you feel like you're actually doing something. Your brain processes the tiered game achievements as real-life achievements. Every time you get to the next level, hot jets of reward chemical coat your brain in a lathery foam, and it seems like you're actually accomplishing stuff.

It must be born in mind that one does not see directly - as is the case in the exploration of the surface of the brain - where the electrodes are attacking.

The first six years of a child's life, it is like a tape recorder is on. Everything it sees, smells, touches, experiences in any way, whatever it hears, is being downloaded into the brain before the consciousness of the child is even made apparent.