Wilhelm Wundt Quotes

In the human mind, the number of possible connections that can be made between neurons greatly exceeds the number of atoms in the universe.

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

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

It was quite difficult to find a place to do what we wanted, namely to study the neurological basis of behaviour and especially learning and memory, which we were particularly interested in.

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

No machines will ever truly fully figure the brain out, because the brain's performance is constantly altered or else constrained by this inanimate, rogue artifact you can't control, namely, speech.

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.

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

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.

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

When we have any function, whether it's language or vision or cognitive functions like memory, we aren't dealing with a straight line to the brain that says 'This is what I do.' The brain builds a network of connections, a network of neurons that have a particular role in that function.

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.

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.

Cognitive neuroscience is entering an exciting era in which new technologies and ideas are making it possible to study the neural basis of cognition, perception, memory and emotion at the level of networks of interacting neurons, the level at which we believe many of the important operations of the brain take place.

With its billions of interconnected neurons, whose interactions change from millisecond to millisecond, the human brain is an archetypal complex system.

The reason I'm not a neurobiologist but a cognitive psychologist is that I think looking at brain tissue is often the wrong level of analysis. You have to look at a higher level of organization.

The kind of neuroscience that I do and my colleagues do is almost like the weatherman. We are always chasing storms. We want to see and measure storms - brainstorms, that is.

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

In 'Self Comes to Mind' I pay a lot of attention to simple creatures without brains or minds, because those 'cartooned abstractions of who we are' operate on precisely the same principles that we do.

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

Space and time, not proteins and neurons, hold the answer to the problem of consciousness. When we consider the nerve impulses entering the brain, we realize that they are not woven together automatically, any more than the information is inside a computer.

We're told that when we remember, the same parts of our brain light up as when we experienced the event we're remembering. Your brain lives through it again.

The cause-effect sequences in our brains are just as determining, just as inescapable, as anywhere else in Nature.

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.

A single neuron in the brain is an incredibly complex machine that even today we don't understand. A single 'neuron' in a neural network is an incredibly simple mathematical function that captures a minuscule fraction of the complexity of a biological neuron.