Daniel Dennett Quotes

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

It is the brain, not the heart or lungs, that is the critical organ.

No, honestly, my mouth shouldn't be able to function unless my brain's engaged.

Once you read something, you can't erase it from your brain.

The brain is the citadel of sense perception.

I’m not a brain surgeon, I’m not saving anyone from any life-threatening illnesses. But I get to tell stories, and that’s a pretty important task.

All we have is the story we tell. Everything we do, every decision we make, our strength, weakness, motivation, history, and character-what we believe-none of it is real; it's all part of the story we tell. But here's the thing: it's our goddamned story!

The human brain has left and right brain symmetry with its own nature and can process information which initially appears to have no pattern or order. However, the brain has the ability to process visual information much more efficiently.

The brain is a robot-computer perfectly designed to fabricate any reality we program it to construct.

The brain is the highest of the organs in position, and it is protected by the vault of the head; it has no flesh or blood or refuse. It is the citadel of sense-perception.

He said to me I was a tree in a story about a forest, and that it was arrogant of me to believe any differently. And he told me the story of the forest is better than the story of the tree.

The brain is not an organ we are authorized to use. We are supposed to use only our hands and legs.

The left hemisphere acts as an "interpreter," watching the actions and behaviors of the body and assigning a coherent narrative to these events. And the left hemisphere works this way even in normal, intact brains. Hidden programs drive actions, and the left hemisphere makes justifications. This idea of retrospective storytelling suggests that we come to know our own attitudes and emotions, at least partially, by inferring them from observations of our own behavior.

My mother used to say, "Tell your brain you want that piece of information or you want to solve this problem, and then just walk away from it. Just forget about it. Just do something else, completely distract yourself, and you'll see, it's like a computer. Eventually, it will deliver it up." And I find that's really true.

I don't think it takes a brain surgeon to understand how to read a story.

When you understand how the mind-brain functions together, you know that faith, which is believing before seeing, is the natural process of creation.

Small though it is, the human brain can be quite effective when used properly.

You gleefully say, "I just thought of something!", when in fact your brain performed an enormous amount of work before your moment of genius struck. When an idea is served up from behind the scenes, your neural circuitry has been working on it for hours or days or years, consolidating information and trying out new combinations. But you take credit without further wonderment at the vast, hidden machinery behind the scenes.

Keep thinking. You can hear our brains rattling around inside us, like the littler Russian dolls.

It's like everyone tells a story about themselves inside their own head. Always. All the time. That story makes you what you are. We build ourselves out of that story.

Yet as human beings we have to accept-with humility-that the question of ultimate origins will always remain with us, no matter how deeply we understand the brain and the cosmos that it creates.

To ask "Where in your brain is intelligence?" is like asking "Where is the voice in the radio?"

I could not think without writing.

Apparently there is redundancy in memory: You store the same memory in different parts of your brain for accessing at different speeds. That speed would depend on the frequency of use and the importance of the knowledge.