Steven Pinker Quotes

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

There are many ways in which genes influence 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. Each of us is dealt a unique hand of tastes and aptitudes, like curiosity, ambition, empathy, a thirst for novelty or for security, a comfort level with the social or the mechanical or the abstract. Some opportunities we come across click with our constitutions and set us along a path in life.

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

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.

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.

Our show is different, because it's not about law and order, it's about psychology, the intent of somebody.

While nobody has identified any gene for religion, there are certainly some candidate genes that may influence human personality and confer a tendency to religious feelings. Some of the genes likely to be involved are those which control levels of different chemicals called neurotransmitters in the brain.

You, your joys and sorrows, your memories and your ambitions, your sense of personal identity and your free will are in fact no more than the behavior of a vast assembly of nerve cells and their associated molecules.

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

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.

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

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

It's not clear whether the brain actually is designed to have nightmares or whether this is actually the process going awry.

I'm very interested in the human mind, what's going on in there.

Ideologies aren't all that important. What's important is psychology.

I've studied psychology. I'm fascinated by the human mind, and I love people.

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.

I am an observer, I like to watch people. I am into psychology and people - how they act and such.

Psychology is the science of the act of experiencing, and deals with the whole system of such acts as they make up mental life.

The mind is the effect, not the cause.

I really enjoyed my degree, for me it was the best course you can do. To be able to study the brain and nervous system and the mind with a scientific approach is just incredible! Its philosophical, psychological and biological, three very interesting areas to me.