Stanislav Grof Quotes

You simply cannot understand psychedelic drugs, which activate the brain, unless you understand something about computers.

What people notice about [when they are on] LSD is either what's right or wrong with themselves or how freaky the world is.

The experience of making a movie, you start to see it everywhere. It's just this amazing mechanism that your brain does because it just so badly wants to be helpful and keep all the information that you need as accessible as possible.

Remember that feelings or emotions emanate from the more ancient, less evolved, lower part of the human brain, while thoughts are a product of our highly evolved, uniquely human, outer part of the brain.

The brains -the thinking organs- are the world producers -nature's genitals.

There is no fundamental truth and there's nothing to be connected to: I just believe that [LSD] makes you feel better.

The human brain is the most public organ on the face of the earth, open to everything, sending out messages to everything. To be sure, it is hidden away in bone and conducts internal affairs in secrecy, but virtually all the business is the direct result of thinking that has already occurred in other minds.

The continuous networks of neural circuitry accomplish their functions using multiple, independently discovered strategies. The brain lends itself well to the complexity of the world, but poorly to clear-cut cartography.

Daniel Levitin takes the most sophisticated ideas that exist about the brain and mind, applies them to the most emotionally direct art we have, our songs, and makes beautiful music of the two together.

Humans evolved brains that are pattern-recognition machines, adept at detecting signals that enhance or threaten survival amid a very noisy world. ... But there is only one surefire method of proper pattern recognition, and that is science.

Once you read something, you can't erase it from your brain.

Wherefore the heart and the diaphragm are particularly sensitive, they have nothing to do, however, with the operations of the understanding, but of all these the brain is the cause.

You can't *discover* that the brain is a digital computer. You can only *interpret* the brain as a digital computer.

Your eyes is camera and your brain is a file cabinet.

The eye and brain are conspirators, and, like most conspiracies, theirs is negotiated behind closed doors, in the back room, outside of our awareness.

Although we tend to think of the brain as a discrete organ - a lump of squidgy tissue - it is better to think of it as part of an elaborate network of nervous tissue that reaches out to every single part of the body.

Oftentimes, those special brains, the ones that are capable of focusing more intently than others, do so at the expense of emotional maturity

That was when Leonard realized something crucial about depression. The smarter you were, the worse it was. The sharper your brain, the more it cut you up.

The brain is the citadel of sense perception.

It is in the brain that the poppy is red, that the apple is odorous, that the skylark sings.

Awareness of your surroundings occurs only when sensory inputs violate expectations. When the world is successfully predicted away, awareness is not needed because the brain is doing its job well.

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

We are our brains. My brain is talking to your brain; our bodies are hanging along for the ride.

If you know that most processing is below the level of awareness, you learn the value of sleep. You're brain is working on the problem anyway.

Most of the brain's work is done while the brain's owner is ostensibly thinking about something else, so sometimes you have to deliberately find something else to think and talk about.