Arthur Koestler Quotes

Neuroscience is by far the most exciting branch of science because the brain is the most fascinating object in the universe. Every human brain is different - the brain makes each human unique and defines who he or she is.

When it comes to brains, size matters. It's not all that matters, of course. Whales and dolphins have brains that are larger than humans', but few of the flippered and fluked set win tenure at Stanford. Our brains are the largest in proportion to body size, and they're also highly sophisticated.

The early development of the human brain is extremely important for setting the table, if you will, for potential future accomplishment.

Most of our brain cells are glial cells, once thought to be mere support cells, but now understood as having a critical role in brain function. Glial cells in the human brain are markedly different from glial cells in other brains, suggesting that they may be important in the evolution of brain function.

The human brain long ago evolved a mechanism for rewarding us when we encountered new information: a little shot of dopamine in the brain each time we learned something new. Across evolutionary history, compulsively seeking information was adaptive behavior.

Human brains - in terms of cognition and emotion and consciousness - are essentially the same as they were at the time of Shakespeare or Jesus or Cleopatra or the Stone Age. They are not evolving with the pace of change.

As work in neurosciences indicates, the acquisition of literacy necessitated a new circuit in our species' brain more than 6,000 years ago. That circuit evolved from a very simple mechanism for decoding basic information, like the number of goats in one's herd, to the present, highly elaborated reading brain.

I don't think there was a thunderclap or a divine spark that suddenly made one species smart. You can see, in our ancestors, there was a gradual expansion of the brain; there was an expansion of the complexity of tools.

Exciting discoveries in neuroscience are allowing us to fit educational methods to new understandings of how the brain develops.

I was taught that the human brain was the crowning glory of evolution so far, but I think it's a very poor scheme for survival.

I believe that the brain has evolved over millions of years to be responsive to different kinds of content in the world. Language content, musical content, spatial content, numerical content, etc.

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.

The brain is hugely complicated, and because it is so complicated, it requires multidisciplinary research.

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

All of imagination - everything that we think, we feel, we sense - comes through the human brain. And once we create new patterns in this brain, once we shape the brain in a new way, it never returns to its original shape.

As a college student, what really interested me was the human brain and human intelligence.

The brain sure as hell doesn't work by somebody programming in rules.

The brain is plastic its whole life span.

The brain is so intricate. It can do so many things, and people sleep on it. It's not just a piece of meat in there - it can do so much.

I am an educator and neuroscientist who studies how the brain learns to read and what happens when a young brain can't learn to read easily, as in the childhood learning challenge, developmental dyslexia.

The brain is the cornerstone of virtually every facet of our lives. I wish we knew more.

Your brain - every brain - is a work in progress. It is 'plastic.' From the day we're born to the day we die, it continuously revises and remodels, improving or slowly declining, as a function of how we use it.

The brain is not a bag of traits. It's startlingly complex. There are few or no single genes with a consistent effect on the mind.

The human brain is an incredible pattern-matching machine.

We need a self because the complexity of the chemical processes that make up our individual humanities exceeds the processing power of our brains.