Marvin Minsky Quotes

The brain is a wonderful organ; it starts working the moment you get up in the morning and does not stop until you get into the office.

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

When I first retired, I had short-term memory loss, and I started reading about neuroplasticity in the brain, about how the brain can regenerate itself, and I don't know if it can or not.

Your brain is triggered to produce.

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

The theory of isolation of certain tasks in certain hemispheres of the brain suggests I shouldn't even be able to speak, never mind write.

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

The brain is a complex biological organ possessing immense computational capability: it constructs our sensory experience, regulates our thoughts and emotions, and controls our actions.

The brain may be regarded as a kind of parasite of the organism, a pensioner, as it were, who dwells with the body.

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.

Although it's the hub of the nervous system and the ultimate terminus of every nerve, the brain itself lacks enervation and therefore cannot feel pain.

The hippocampus helps record both types of memories initially, and it helps retain them for the medium term. The hippocampus also helps us access old personal memories in long-term storage in other parts of the brain.

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

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.

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

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.

Mediums change you by their very existence. They do this on fundamental levels because they force you to favour certain parts of your brain over others.

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 brain is constantly adapting.

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

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.

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

We now know that we imprint information during the day. We sort of - that seed is planted there within the brain during the day. In other words, we learn information. But we also know that that vision that was planted in the brain still remains in the sound of silence, in this - in the dark of night.

One of the leading theories of why electroconvulsive therapy is effective for most severe depressions is that it causes a loss of short-term memory - patients feel better because they can't remember why they were sad.