Jonathan Haidt Quotes

But the newest research is showing that many properties of the brain are genetically organized, and don't depend on information coming in from the senses.

The mind of the polyglot is a very particular thing, and scientists are only beginning to look closely at how acquiring a second language influences learning, behavior and the very structure of the brain itself.

We are cyborgs already. If you learn to read, it causes permanent changes to the structure of your brain for your entire life.

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

By removing the obstacles that have built up over time, you can grow your brain from baseline to super brain.

The principal activities of brains are making changes in themselves.

Picture your brain forming new connections as you meet the challenge and learn. Keep on going.

The cognitive functioning of a human brain depends on a delicate orchestration of many factors, especially during the critical stages of embryo development-and it is much more likely that this self-organizing structure, to be enhanced, needs to be carefully balanced, tuned, and cultivated rather than simply flooded with some extraneous potion.

When I look at the human brain I'm still in awe of it. Every single time you lift off the bone and open the durra and there it is - the human brain, the thing that gives a person a personality, that distinguishes each one of us, that there could be more than 6 billion of us here on this planet with brains that look the same, but each one being distinctly different because of what is going on in that thing. I'll never get over my awe of that.

The brain weighs only three pounds, yet it is the most complex object in the solar system.

Every experience in life changes the brain's anatomy.

The human brain, then, is the most complicated organization of matter that we know.

Those who grew up digital have different brains.

If you measure someone's brain and see very little activity during a task, it does not necessarily indicate that they're not trying - it more likely signifies that they have worked hard in the past to burn the programs into the circuitry. Consciousness is called in during the first phase of learning and is excluded from the game playing after it is deep in the system.

Whatever you train, you change your brain.

Mathematics may be a way of developing physically, that is anatomically, new connections in the brain.

Just the attempt to learn a [new] language is like running different software through the brain.

In the brain, you have connections between the neurons called synapses, and they can change. All your knowledge is stored in those synapses. You have about 1,000-trillion synapses - 10 to the 15, it's a very big number.

If you have certain problems with your brain but are raised in a good home, you might turn out okay. If your brain is fine and your home is terrible, you might still turn out fine. But if you have mild brain damage and end up with a bad home life, you're tossing the dice for a very unlucky synergy.

I have only a bare working knowledge of the human brain but it's enough to make me proud to be an American.

the brain works better if the hand works too.

When you get new rules that work, you're changing the physiology of your brain. And then your brain has to reconfigure itself in order to deal with it.

We are like a rider on top of a gigantic elephant. We can steer the elephant, and if he's not busy, he'll go where we want, but if he has other desires, he'll often go where he wants. How can one control the elephant? In part, this comes with maturity. In part, this comes with the development of your frontal cortex, so the frontal areas of the brain are especially involved in self-control, in suppressing your initial instinct to act. This is why teenagers are so impulsive. So it's terrible to allow the death penalty for teenagers, because they really don't have working brains yet.

There are in the human mind a group of faculties and in the brain groups of convolutions, and the facts assembled by science so far allow to state, as I said before, that the great regions of the mind correspond to the great regions of the brain.

Children will grow up substantially what they are by nature--and only that.