Ronald Graham Quotes

After all my probing into the human brain, I should still be aware of mysteries and come up with them myself.

It's the way the human brain works: when enough events occur in a pattern, we stop thinking and go into macro mode.

The brains of humans contain a mechanism that is designed to give priority to bad news.

The human brain is built to compare; it's Darwinian to consider an alternative when one presents itself.

Mathematicians aren't satisfied because they know there are no solutions up to four million or four billion, they really want to know that there are no solutions up to infinity.

We’re not used to calculating large amounts of data. Our brains think anecdotally.

Mathematicians deal with large numbers sometimes, but never in their income.

If our brains were simple enough to be understood, we wouldn't be smart enough to understand them.

Mathematics is not the rigid and rigidity-producing schema that the layman thinks it is; rather, in it we find ourselves at that meeting point of constraint and freedom that is the very essence of human nature.

You know more than you think you know, just as you know less than you want to know.

Many people believe that the grains of sand are infinite in multitude ... Others think that although their number is not without limit, no number can ever be named which will be greater than the number of grains of sand. But I shall try to prove to you that among the numbers which I have named there are those which exceed the number of grains in a heap of sand the size not only of the earth, but even of the universe

Experience teaches that a strong memory is generally joined to a weak judgment.

Only Numbers. Pure math. You have to accustom yourself to thinking that way.

All my important decisions are made for me by my subconscious. My frontal lobes are just kidding themselves that they decide anything at all. All they do is think up reasons for the decisions that are already made.

It is decreed by a merciful Nature that the human brain cannot think of two things simultaneously . . .

Your brain has a music room, and evolution would not have gone to the trouble of designing that if it didn't have some benefits. So, that suggests to me that we and our ancestors have had music as a central part of our experience for eons. And we're just beginning to understand how that might be. I think that's fascinating.

I think that what the machines can do, of course, is wonderful, but it's not the same as what the brain can do.

Thinking doesn't seem to help very much. The human brain is too high-powered to have many practical uses in this particular universe.

Man's brain, enlarged fortuitously, invented words in an ambitious attempt to learn how to think, only to have them usurped by his emotions. But we still try.

Only the human brain can deliberately change perceptions, change patterns, invent concepts and tolerate ambiguity.

It will be another million years, at least, before we understand the primes.

Indeed, the line between perceiving and hallucinating is not as crisp as we like to think. In a sense, when we look at the world, we are hallucinating all the time. One could almost regard perception as the act of choosing the one hallucination that best fits the incoming data.

Prime numbers are what is left when you have taken all the patterns away. I think prime numbers are like life. They are very logical but you could never work out the rules, even if you spent all your time thinking about them.

You can only be afraid of what you think you know.

We categorize as we do because we have the brains and bodies we have and because we interact in the world as we do.