Stanislaw Ulam Quotes

Thinking is a physical process, the human brain is not exempt from evolution

Most of our brain cells are glial cells, once thought to be mere support cells, but now understood as having a critical role in brain function. Glial cells in the human brain are markedly different from glial cells in other brains, suggesting that they may be important in the evolution of brain function.

Every minute, every second, the pattern of genes being expressed in your brain changes, often in direct or indirect response to events outside the body. Genes are the mechanisms of experience.

In the brain, you have connections between the neurons called synapses, and they can change. All your knowledge is stored in those synapses. You have about 1,000-trillion synapses - 10 to the 15, it's a very big number.

We do not know where to look, or what to look for, when something is memorized. We do not know what it means, or what change there is in the nervous system, when a fact is learned. This is a very important problem which has not been solved at all.

The three-pound organ in your skull - with its pink consistency of Jell-o - is an alien kind of computational material. It is composed of miniaturized, self-configuring parts, and it vastly outstrips anything we've dreamt of building.

Your brain is built of cells called neurons and glia - hundreds of billions of them. Each one of these cells is as complicated as a city.

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

I think what's known about neurology is still scattered and uncertain.

Neuron

The cortex is the enemy.

By removing the obstacles that have built up over time, you can grow your brain from baseline to super brain.

The principal activities of brains are making changes in themselves.

Rather marvelously, the older brain only permits change when it judges that change to be important, rewarding or good for it.

Given the billions of neurons, this means there are as many connections in a single cubic centimeter of brain tissue as there are stars in the Milky Way galaxy.

Given her deafness, the auditory part of the brain, deprived of its usual input, had started to generate a spontaneous activity of its own, and this took the form of musical hallucinations, mostly musical memories from her earlier life. The brain needed to stay incessantly active, and if it was not getting its usual stimulation..., it would create its own stimulation in the form of hallucinations.

When you get new rules that work, you're changing the physiology of your brain. And then your brain has to reconfigure itself in order to deal with it.

We are like a rider on top of a gigantic elephant. We can steer the elephant, and if he's not busy, he'll go where we want, but if he has other desires, he'll often go where he wants. How can one control the elephant? In part, this comes with maturity. In part, this comes with the development of your frontal cortex, so the frontal areas of the brain are especially involved in self-control, in suppressing your initial instinct to act. This is why teenagers are so impulsive. So it's terrible to allow the death penalty for teenagers, because they really don't have working brains yet.

I think the growth of the brain is a slow process. But you do change and the more you accept change and embrace change, the better.

Neurons that fire together wire together. You can rewire your brain for higher consciousness by focusing on love.

Fascinating, Doidge's book is a remarkable and hopeful portrait of the endless adaptability of the human brain.

Every experience in life changes the brain's anatomy.

The brain does not create consciousness, but conciousness created the brain, the most complex physical form on earth, for its expression.

The research shows that if you meditate, the mind becomes still, and they can see the functionality and gray matter in the brain increase, the nervous system calm, the immune system improve and a reduction in stress.

Whatever you train, you change your brain.