Johannes P. Muller Quotes

When we have any function, whether it's language or vision or cognitive functions like memory, we aren't dealing with a straight line to the brain that says 'This is what I do.' The brain builds a network of connections, a network of neurons that have a particular role in that function.

The mental act of sensation which issues in reflex movement is so simple as to defy analysis.

There's a lot of real estate in our brain dedicated to facial recognition and to physics. That takes a lot of processing power out of our brain.

Psychology is still trying to explain the perception of the position of an object in space, along with its shape, size, and so on, and to understand the sensations of color.

At Oculus, we're now looking at eye specialists, people who really understand how the human eye works, and how that affects human emotion.

The brain, which is plastic when young, must be exposed to certain sights early in life, or it will remain blind to those sights forever.

Innate mechanisms endow the visual system with highly specific connections, but visual experience early in life is necessary for their maintenance and full development. Deprivation experiments demonstrate that neural connections can be modulated by environmental influences during a critical period of postnatal development.

Physiology seeks to derive the processes in our own nervous system from general physical forces, without considering whether these processes are or are not accompanied by processes of consciousness.

The thing you realize when you get into studying neuroscience, even a little bit, is that everything is connected to everything else. So it's as if the brain is trying to use everything at its disposal - what it is seeing, what it is hearing, what is the temperature, past experience.

Moore's Law-based technology is so much easier than neuroscience. The brain works in such a different way from the way a computer does.

Animals see a video of the world. If an animal were only to see still images, how would its vision develop? Neuroscientists have run experiments in cats in a dark environment with a strobe so it can only see still images - and those cats' visual systems actually underdevelop. So motion is important, but what is the algorithm?

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.

It is a common fact that we see light flashes in a dark environment while living up here, and this experiment is essentially trying to detect how we humans detect these flashes - not sure if these are visual, if they are some type of radiation maybe sensed by some other part of the brain.

The eye obeys exactly the action of the mind.

We only have our nervous system to paint.

The eye and brain are not like a fax machine, nor are there little people looking at the images coming in.

We can only know in the nervous system what we have known in behavior first.

There's a technical reason why I think that frame rate is weird and it has to with your brain's ability to scan beyond a certain rate. The point is I find it looks weird.

People expect the math to be simplified, but I want to surprise them right from the start. When the brain gets lost, it doesn't stop working. It tries to makes sense of things. It begins to speculate and guess, and that's when things open up. That's exciting.

The eye deals with excess more easily than the stomach does.

Pictures, propagated by motion along the fibers of the optic nerves in the brain, are the cause of vision.

Laughter puts your brain, your central nervous system and your whole being into a state of free play.

Every atom is working and resisting every thought in the mind. Everything we see and know is but the resultant of these two forces.

It's instinctive in a certain kind of painting...It's like a nervous system. It's not described, it's happening. The feeling is going on with the task. The line is the feeling, from a soft thing, a dreamy thing, to something hard, something arid, something lonely, something ending, something beginning.