Maynard James Keenan Quotes

Music is the effort we make to explain to ourselves how our brains work. We listen to Bach transfixed because this is listening to a human mind.

I try and stay in my right brain as much as I can, but my left takes over.

I happen to be extremely left-brained; my instinct is to draw a chart rather than a picture. I'm trying to get my right-brain muscles into shape. I actually think this shift toward right-brain abilities has the potential to make us both better off and better in a deeper sense.

Letter scrambling and trouble reading is just a small part of dyslexia. It is also an auditory processing problem.

Art works because it appeals to certain faculties of the mind. Music depends on details of the auditory system, painting and sculpture on the visual system. Poetry and literature depend on language.

I recently read that it's the left brain that does all that calculating, and the right brain that does the poetry. Somehow I've veered way towards the left. I've been doing it for years. Maybe I do art to balance it out.

I suspect music is auditory cheesecake, an exquisite confection crafted to tickle the sensitive spots of... our mental faculties.

My left brain has gradually 'eaten' the right-brain capabilities away.

If I throw you into an MRI machine right now, I can tell you what words you're about to say.

I thank the Lord for the brain He put in my head. Occasionally, I love to just stand to one side and watch how it works.

When a person has access to both the intuitive, creative and visual right brain, and the analytical, logical, verbal left brain, then the whole brain is working...And this tool is best suited to the reality of what life is, because life is not just logical-it is also emotional.

It turns out your conscious mind - the part you think of as you - is really the smallest part of what’s happening in your brain, and usually the last one in line to find out any information.

Remember, when we're conscious of something, that state is quite often generated by unconscious processes that happen right before it.

To know the brain...is equivalent to ascertaining the material course of thought and will, to discovering the intimate history of life in its perpetual duel with external forces.

Keep thinking. You can hear our brains rattling around inside us, like the littler Russian dolls.

At the sight of blackbirds Flying in a green light, Even the bawds of euphony Would cry out sharply.

There is no one part of the brain which recognizes or responds emotionally to music. Instead, there are many different parts responding to different aspects of music: to pitch, to frequency, to timbre, to tonal intervals, to consonance, to dissonance, to rhythm, to melodic contour, to harmony.

The right brain is finally being taken seriously.

Listening to the Fifth Symphony of Ralph Vaughan Williams is like staring at a cow for 45 minutes.

Listening to music engages the previously acquired personal knowledge of the listener.

You cannot hear music and noise at the same time.

...is the carbon molecule lined with thought?

The brain is not, and cannot be, the sole or complete organ of thought and feeling.

Thinking is movement confined to the brain

The music is a vibration in the brain rather than the ear.