David Brooks Quotes

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

I'm your mind", it claims. "You can't parse ME into dendrites and synapses

Without consciousness there would, practically speaking, be no world, for the world exists as such only in so far as it is consciously reflected and considered by a psyche. Consciousness is a precondition of being.

Consciousness, rather than being something that we have, is something we participate in.

In Psychology we deal with minds and their processes, and leave out of account as far as possible the objects that we get to know by means of them.

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.

Consciousness poses the most baffling problems in the science of the mind. There is nothing that we know more intimately than conscious experience, but there is nothing that is harder to explain.

Without consciousness the mind-body problem would be much less interesting. With consciousness it seems hopeless.

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.

the brain, the mind, and all the things that happen inside it, it's a very erogenous zone.

The theory that thought is merely a movement in the brain is, in my opinion, nonsense; for if so, that theory itself would be merely a movement, an event among atoms, which may have speed and direction but of which it would be meaningless to use the words 'true' or 'false'.

It seems to me immensely unlikely that mind is a mere by-product of matter. For if my mental processes are determined wholly by the motions of atoms in my brain I have no reason to suppose that my beliefs are true. They may be sound chemically, but that does not make them sound logically. And hence I have no reason for supposing my brain to be composed of atoms.

Where there is a mind, there are feelings such as pain, pleasure, and joy. No sentient being wants pain: all wants happiness instead.

They do not think, therefore they are not.

Consciousness is the smallest player in the operations of the brain.

Consciousness is the awareness that emerges out of the dialectical tension between possibilities and limitations.

Minds are simply what brains do.

Whatever we know without inference is mental.

Materialism ends up denying the existence of any irreducible subjective qualitative states of sentience or awareness.

Consciousness is the foundation of all thinking; and thinking is the foundation of all consciousness.

Brain deals exclusively with the physical, and mind exclusively with the metaphysical.

You talk of our having an idea; we do not have an idea. The idea has us, and martyrs us, and scourges us, and drives us into the arena to fight and die for it, whether we want to or not.

It seems to me that the real problem is the mind itself and not the problem which the mind has created and tries to solve.

When you understand how the mind-brain functions together, you know that faith, which is believing before seeing, is the natural process of creation.