William James Quotes

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.

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.

If little else, the brain is an educational toy.

The evolution of the brain not only overshot the needs of prehistoric man, it is the only example of evolution providing a species with an organ which it does not know how to use.

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.

The quality of our reading is not only an index of the quality of our thought; it is our best-known route to developing whole new pathways in the cerebral evolution of our species.

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

When you are a kid you have your own language, and unlike French or Spanish or whatever you start learning in fourth grade, this one you are born with, and eventually lose...Kids think with their brains cracked wide open; becoming an adult...is only a slow sewing it shut.

Physiologically adult humans are not meant to spend an additional 10 years in a school system; their brains map that onto "I have been assigned low tribal status". And so, of course, they plot rebellion - accuse the existing tribal overlords of corruption plot, perhaps to split off their own little tribe in the savanna, not realizing that this is impossible in the Modern World.

Today, there are over 7,000 languages spoken throughout the world. They may sound different, but in every case, they're drawing on the same regions of the brain. If you had told me that stone-tool-making had something to do with our ability to speak, I would have said you've got rocks in your head, but the latest studies indicate that once Homo erectus got creative with stone, our brains were on the way to inventing the most powerful tool of all: language.

Children use the fist until they are of age to use the brain.

Consider a cow. A cow doesn't have the problem-solving skill of a chimpanzee, which has discovered how to get termites out of the ground by putting a stick into a hole. Evolution has developed the brain's ability to solve puzzles, and at the same time has produced in our brain a pleasure of solving problems.

The power of music and the plasticity of the brain go together very strikingly, especially in young people.

One thing I am determined on is that by the time I die my brain shall weigh as much as a man's if study and learning can make it so.

I suppose he must have taken about a nine or something in hats. Shows what a rotten thing it is to let your brain develop too much.

Those who grew up digital have different brains.

Everyone in the world was programmed by the place they were born, hemmed in by their beliefs, but you had to at least try to grow your own brain.

That special substance according to whose mass and degree of development all the creatures of this world take rank in the scale of creation, is not bone, but brain.

We need to develop the intuitive capacities of the brain that some geniuses have manifested over humanity's lengthy history.

Teachers' using grades and the fear of failure mould the brains of the young until they have lost every ounce of imagination they might once have possessed.

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

I always wonder: the images that hit your brain when you're young are so significant, because there's not that much information in your brain. As you get older, things just bounce off. I can remember these minute details of stupid TV shows from the '70s, and I can't remember a book I read yesterday.

I had an unusually large-sized head, though this was not uncommon for a baby in the Midwest. The craniums in our part of the country were designed to leave a little extra room for the brain to grow in case one day we found ourselves exposed to something we didn't understand, like a foreign language, or a salad.

I was talking to my friend who's a psychologist, who says a woman's frontal cortex isn't fully developed till 25 and a man's till 28. I was almost 34 when we met; he was 39. So I wouldn't say either of us has wildly changed; I just love him more and more.