Simon McBurney Quotes

Consciousness turns out to consist of a maelstrom of events distributed across the brain. These events compete for attention, and as one process outshouts the others, the brain rationalizes the outcome after the fact and concocts the impression that a single self was in charge all along.

Brain: an apparatus with which we think we think.

The brain is probably the most mysterious subject there is.

Our minds influence the key activity of the brain, which then influences everything; perception, cognition, thoughts and feelings, personal relationships; they're all a projection of you.

We're all just bags of bones and muscle and hormones; I'll never understand what makes our minds do the things we do. It's like that statue of the monkey holding a skull. We're trying to use a thing we don't understand to understand ourselves.

The brain is an immensely complex organ, and many mysteries remain. Exactly how brain and mind or soma and psyche are related is one of them.

The human body is not the person. Identity is the way the brain operates; it's memories, it's sensory input and output. The mind is the person.

People who believe that they are strong-willed and the masters of their destiny can only continue to believe this by becoming specialists in self-deception.

Does the brain control you or are you controlling the brain? I don't know if I'm in charge of mine.

I read a lot of nonfiction - especially books about the brain.

Genetics is crude, but neuroscience goes directly to work on the brain, and the mind follows.

If you're a thinking person, the liver is interesting, but nothing is more intriguing than the brain.

The great mystery of our consciousness is beyond our grasp.

You can't control your mind. Why would you want to?

As far as I can see, it's not important that we have free will, just as long as we have the illusion of free will to stop us going mad.

I drink therefore I am.

The 'I think' which Kant said must be able to accompany all my objects, is the 'I breathe' which actually does accompany them.

A question that sometimes drives me hazy: am I or are the others crazy?

Why do people believe that there are dangerous implications of the idea that the mind is a product of the brain, that the brain is organized in part by the genome, and that the genome was shaped by natural selection?

Censors tend to do what only psychotics do: they confuse reality with illusion.

The mind is the effect, not the cause.

Everybody agrees that the brain is a remarkable machine. It's capable of generating an enormous number of phenomena, some of them very obvious and some of them less obvious. But I think that in the end there are going to be some very basic explanations for many things: emotions, awareness, consciousness, attention, perception, recognition.

We're living under the illusion that we have the power to determine what to do with it.

I proved to my own satisfaction that I am madder than I think.

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.