Gerald Edelman Quotes

In the brain, you have connections between the neurons called synapses, and they can change. All your knowledge is stored in those synapses.

To live (as I understand it) is to exist within a conception of time. But to remember is to vacate the very notion of time. Every memory, no matter how remote its subject, takes place 'Now,' at the moment it's called to the mind. The more something is recalled, the more the brain has a chance to refine the original experience. Because every memory is a re-creation, not a playback.

Memory is everything. Without it we are nothing.

Moment by moment throughout our lifetime, our brains hum with the work of making meaning: weaving together many thousands of threads of information into all manner of thoughts, feelings, memories, and ideas.

In the brain, you have connections between the neurons called synapses, and they can change. All your knowledge is stored in those synapses. You have about 1,000-trillion synapses - 10 to the 15, it's a very big number.

Mind is memory, not intelligence.

There have been studies done on people who meditate and they have found that they actually have increased grey matter in certain parts of their brain and more neural conductivity, meaning more connections between certain parts of the brain. They have increased capacity for, in some cases, memory, or reasoning.

The way real memories work, from what we understand, is really complex. And it's an interconnection of different things and redundancy in the brain. So the idea of a memory existing as a little snow globe - the way we represent it in the film - is actually not scientifically accurate at all.

Why does the brain retain the memory of the hurt from yesterday?

Given her deafness, the auditory part of the brain, deprived of its usual input, had started to generate a spontaneous activity of its own, and this took the form of musical hallucinations, mostly musical memories from her earlier life. The brain needed to stay incessantly active, and if it was not getting its usual stimulation..., it would create its own stimulation in the form of hallucinations.

I think of memory as a game, that is as something one engages in with a very profound kind of "playfulness."

As I have said so often before, the long memory is the most radical idea in America...

Memory is imagination pinned down.

I've met quite a number of people in my career, but I do have an extraordinary memory. And even though they may drift into the periphery of my memory, I can bring them right back when I need them.

The human brain is like a memory system that records every thing that happens to us and makes intelligent predictions based on those experiences.

I can state with complete assurance that for each of us our brains form the material basis of our experiences and memories, our imaginations, our dreams.

Experience teaches that a strong memory is generally joined to a weak judgment.

A person's memory is everything, really. Memory is identity. It's you.

Memory was such a worthless thing, really. Nothing it dealt with was attainable. It was concerned with phantom acts and feelings, with all that was uncapturable except in thought. It was without satisfaction.

It is the power of memory that gives rise to the power of imagination.

Of all the faculties of the mind, memory is the first that flourishes, and the first that dies.

Memory changes as a person matures.

Memory. My poison, my food.

Memory, the warder of the brain.

My biggest fear is losing memory because memory is what we are. Your very soul and your very reason to be alive is tied up in memory.