Neal Stephenson Quotes

I think that all the years of exposure to amps and electricity has altered my body chemistry.

If the rewiring of the brain that yielded recursive generation of hierarchically structured expressions took place in an individual, not a group (and there seems to be no coherent alternative), then interaction must have been a later phenomenon.

Each new generation of children grows up in the new environment its parents have created, and each generation of brains becomes wired in a different way. The human mind can change radically in just a few generations.

The brain is such an incredible computer.

I talked to a brain specialist who told me when you think like someone else for such a long time, your brain actually changes.

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

I've always had this fascination with the brain. I'm not really much of a religious person, but like anybody, you are at least fascinated by what some call a soul - what I would call the brain - and who we are and how we work.

I don't have anything personal against Valentina, but I think she changed a lot, her personality. In one interview, she says something and the other one she goes completely the other way.

The brain is the black box: the final frontier.

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.

Every minute, every second, the pattern of genes being expressed in your brain changes, often in direct or indirect response to events outside the body. Genes are the mechanisms of experience.

I have not suggested that the emergence of language is instantaneous. Rather, that the rewiring of the brain enabling an infinite array of structured expressions was in effect instantaneous. I have never heard of an alternative to this suggestion.

Given her deafness, the auditory part of the brain, deprived of its usual input, had started to generate a spontaneous activity of its own, and this took the form of musical hallucinations, mostly musical memories from her earlier life. The brain needed to stay incessantly active, and if it was not getting its usual stimulation..., it would create its own stimulation in the form of hallucinations.

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 initial organization of the brain does not depend that much on experience. Nature provides a first draft, which experience then revises.

When you repeat a new pattern often, you literally change the neural pathways in your brain. This shift helps true change settle in.

Neurons that fire together wire together. You can rewire your brain for higher consciousness by focusing on love.

Fascinating, Doidge's book is a remarkable and hopeful portrait of the endless adaptability of the human brain.

Habits, scientists say, emerge because the brain is constantly looking for ways to save effort.

Every experience in life changes the brain's anatomy.

Who you are depends on the sum total of your neurobiology.

The interesting thing is that you don't have to know the answers - simply asking the questions and your reflection itself causes the rewiring of the brain.

When you encourage someone, it literally changes their brain chemistry to be able to perform... sends fuel to the brain.

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.