Matthew Walker Quotes

The brain is the cornerstone of virtually every facet of our lives. I wish we knew more.

In school, I studied psychology, linguistics, neuroscience. I understand that there is a real lack of respect for the brain.

Of course, genes can't pull the levers of our behavior directly. But they affect the wiring and workings of the brain, and the brain is the seat of our drives, temperaments and patterns of thought.

In general, people are afraid to acknowledge hallucinations because they immediately see them as a sign of something awful happening to the brain, whereas in most cases they're not.

Much of what we now consider 'personality' will be explained away as structural and chemical functions of the brain.

Every night of our lives, we dream, and our brain concocts visions which are, at least until we wake up, highly convincing. Most of us have had experiences which are verging on hallucination. It shows the power of the brain to knock up illusions.

People often ask how I got interested in the brain; my rhetorical answer is: 'How can anyone NOT be interested in it?' Everything you call 'human nature' and consciousness arises from it.

I read a lot of nonfiction - especially books about the brain.

I'm so interested in the brain. I read true crime.

Honestly, I don't remember the last time I had a dream. I don't really sleep often enough to be able to have any dreams.

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

There is no such thing as a disembodied mind. The mind is implanted in the brain, and the brain is implanted in the body.

Emotional life grows out of an area of the brain called the limbic system, specifically the amygdala, whence come delight and disgust and fear and anger.

The adage that fact is stranger than fiction seems to be especially true for the workings of the brain.

When scientists get old, they get interested in the brain, and I'm a little bit afraid I'm falling into that.

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

The brain is an immensely complex organ, and many mysteries remain. Exactly how brain and mind or soma and psyche are related is one of them.

All our behaviours are a result of neurophysiological activity in the brain. There is no reason to believe there is any magic going on.

All human states are organic brain states - happiness, sadness, fear, lust, dreaming, doing math problems and writing novels - and our brains are not static.

According to materialistic science, any memory requires a material substrate, such as the neuronal network in the brain or the DNA molecules of the genes.

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

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

I was interested in the nature of human mental processes, which is what got me interested in psychoanalysis. And it became clear to me after a while that mental processes come from the brain, and in order to understand them, you need to be a biologist of the brain.

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.