Herbert Spencer Quotes

Much more of the brain is devoted to movement than to language. Language is only a little thing sitting on top of this huge ocean of movement.

The human brain, then, is the most complicated organization of matter that we know.

Today, you have neuroscientists working on a genetic, behavioural or cognitive level, and then you have informaticians, chemists and mathematicians. They all have their own understanding of how the brain functions and is structured. How do you get them all around the same table?

Neuroscientists talk a lot about brain circuits. In fact, the word 'circuit' is probably misleading. We do not know where most circuits begin and end. And unlike an electrical circuit, brain connections are heavily reciprocal and recursive, so that a direction of information flow can be inferred but sometimes not proven.

Some scholars argue that although the brain might contain neural subsystems, or modules, specialized for tasks like recognizing faces and understanding language, it also contains a part that constitutes a person, a self: the chief executive of all the subsystems.

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.

Now, we used to think the brain was like a computer. But now, we realize that's not true. There's no programming of the brain. There's no Windows. And we think the brain is more like a large corporation. Because think of the unconscious mind. In a corporation, you have subdivisions which operate independently of the main office.

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

The amygdala is one of those brain structures that a lot of people know a little bit about, and there's a definite tendency to conflate the amygdala and the fear response itself - as if the amygdala, and the amygdala alone, 'causes' fear.

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.

The thing I'm most interested in is the nervous system. How do brains grow? How do genes build complicated nervous systems?

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

This is what I do. I look at brains. I'm fascinated by it. I can spend hours doing it. In fact, if I want to relax, that's one way I can relax.

Shaped a little like a loaf of French country bread, our brain is a crowded chemistry lab, bustling with nonstop neural conversations.

Free will is located in or near the anterior cingulate sulcus.

Listen, no part of me is more definitive of who I am than my brain.

Your world is all these elements. Of light and sound, of taste, smell, and touch, woven together in many dimensions on the fabulous loom of your brain. Your brain; the most complicated thing in the world, which you yourself grew...without even thinking about it.

Shaped a little like a loaf of French country bread, our brain is a crowded chemistry lab, bustling with nonstop neural conversations.Imagine the brain, that shiny mound of being, that mouse-gray parliament of cells, that dream factory, that petit tyrant inside a ball of bone, that huddle of neurons calling all the plays, that little everywhere, that fickle pleasuredome, that wrinkled wardrobe of selves stuffed into the skull like too many clothes into a gym bag.

The brain is really hard to see. The whole thing is very large - the human brain is several pounds in weight - but the connections between brain cells, known as synapses, are really tiny. They're nanoscale in dimension. So if you want to see how the cells of the brain are connected in networks, you have to see those connections, those synapses.

It's gross. We use real brains - I think they're lamb or cow or something. Intestines smell. Brains don't really smell, but what's amazing about the brain is that it's almost like scrambled eggs or soft tofu, almost like a gel. The brain controls so much of what we do, but you could put your finger right through it.

When I look at the human brain I'm still in awe of it. Every single time you lift off the bone and open the durra and there it is - the human brain, the thing that gives a person a personality, that distinguishes each one of us, that there could be more than 6 billion of us here on this planet with brains that look the same, but each one being distinctly different because of what is going on in that thing. I'll never get over my awe of that.

Although we tend to think of the brain as a discrete organ - a lump of squidgy tissue - it is better to think of it as part of an elaborate network of nervous tissue that reaches out to every single part of the body.

I have only a bare working knowledge of the human brain but it's enough to make me proud to be an American.