Thomas R. Insel Quotes

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

As an ex-programmer, I'm still just curious about how the brain functions, how that flow of information really happens.

There are billions of neurons in our brains, but what are neurons? Just cells. The brain has no knowledge until connections are made between neurons. All that we know, all that we are, comes from the way our neurons are connected.

Everything we do, every thought we've ever had, is produced by the human brain. But exactly how it operates remains one of the biggest unsolved mysteries, and it seems the more we probe its secrets, the more surprises we find.

Neuroscience is exciting. Understanding how thoughts work, how connections are made, how the memory works, how we process information, how information is stored - it's all fascinating.

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.

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

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

As someone who was basically a software engineer for many years, I became fascinated with how the brain functions and is put together and works in such a different fashion than computers do.

As a programmer, you're working with very simple structures compared to the brain. So I was always fascinated by how the brain works.

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.

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.

It's not even known how many kinds of cells there are in the brain. If you were looking for a periodic table of the brain, there is no such thing. I really like to think of the brain as a computer.

Many Nobel Prizes are awaiting good research to understand and explain the many mysteries of our bodies, such as the basic mechanism of memory or imagination.

Exact information about the functional significance of the deep sections of the brain is only obtained by working through the brain histologically in serial section.

One of the ultimate challenges for biology is to understand the brain's processing of unconscious and conscious perception, emotion, and empathy.

We are not interested in the fact that the brain has the consistency of cold porridge.

The human brain has 100 billion neurons, each neuron connected to 10 thousand other neurons. Sitting on your shoulders is the most complicated object in the known universe.

We have about 100 million cells interconnected in our brains. They communicate with one another through electrical signals.

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

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

I don't know about you, but I find it exhilarating to see how vague psychological notions evaporate and give rise to a physical, mechanistic understanding of the mind, even if it's the mind of the fly.

I think we're all fascinated and a little mystified by how the brain works. One of the most mysterious of the physical sciences is neurological science.

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

I find the function of the brain incredibly fascinating, and it's like trying to crack the toughest, most complicated problem there is.