Paul Allen Quotes

The brain has this amazing level of almost fractal complexity to it. When you start looking at any part of it in detail, you realize that it's much more complex than you thought.

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

Now, we used to think the brain was like a computer. But now, we realize that's not true. There's no programming of the brain. There's no Windows. And we think the brain is more like a large corporation. Because think of the unconscious mind. In a corporation, you have subdivisions which operate independently of the main office.

Many cognitive psychologists see the brain as a computer. But every single brain is absolutely individual, both in its development and in the way it encounters the world.

Neuroplasticity research showed that the brain changes its very structure with each different activity it performs, perfecting its circuits so it is better suited to the task at hand.

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

The brain may be regarded as a kind of parasite of the organism, a pensioner, as it were, who dwells with the body.

We pretend that the brain is binary, like a computer. But it's not. It's completely holographic.

One of the things I've come to appreciate about the brain is the importance of location. It's not just a set of interchangeable parts that you can swap in and out.

When brains get sufficiently big, presumably, as human brains have, consciousness seems to emerge.

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

In terms of the brain, you can in a crude way think of the human brain as a computer.

We cannot experimentally map out the brain. It's just too big. In a piece of the brain the size of a pinhead there are 3,000 pathways like a city with 3,000 streets.

The human brain is an incredible pattern-matching machine.

The brain isn't like the heart. They learned how to transplant a heart. The brain is more complex.

The brain is a complex biological organ possessing immense computational capability: it constructs our sensory experience, regulates our thoughts and emotions, and controls our actions.

We are not interested in the fact that the brain has the consistency of cold porridge.

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.

The brain is the most complicated organ in the universe. We have learned a lot about other human organs. We know how the heart pumps and how the kidney does what it does. To a certain degree, we have read the letters of the human genome. But the brain has 100 billion neurons. Each one of those has about 10,000 connections.

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.

What people don't realize is the human body and the brain are so well designed to do - by millions of years of evolution - what we do.

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

The connections in the brain fade away unless used. We know that early stimulation of children leads to higher cognitive scores.

The brain is a monstrous, beautiful mess.

The dog, on the other hand, has few or no ideas because his brain acts in coarse fashion and because there are few connections with each single process.