Jennifer Ashton Quotes

When brains get sufficiently big, presumably, as human brains have, consciousness seems to emerge.

The connections in the brain fade away unless used. We know that early stimulation of children leads to higher cognitive scores.

It may sound lovey-dovey, but there's research showing the positive effect of meditation on parts of the brain that control emotion.

It is literally the case that learning languages makes you smarter. The neural networks in the brain strengthen as a result of language learning.

The human brain is an incredible pattern-matching machine.

All human states are organic brain states - happiness, sadness, fear, lust, dreaming, doing math problems and writing novels - and our brains are not static.

The brain is a complex biological organ possessing immense computational capability: it constructs our sensory experience, regulates our thoughts and emotions, and controls our actions.

One of the things I've come to appreciate about the brain is the importance of location. It's not just a set of interchangeable parts that you can swap in and out.

If you will give the matter a moment's thought, you'll see that memory is the highest faculty of the human mind.

People talk about the brain weakening as it ages. Mine feels stronger.

There's an old rule in neuroscience that does not alter with age: use it or lose it. It is a very hopeful principle when applied to critical thought in the reading brain because it implies choice.

Much of our brainpower goes unused, and many people could benefit greatly from optimizing their mental assets.

Intelligence is an extremely subtle concept. It's a kind of understanding that flourishes if it's combined with a good memory, but exists anyway even in the absence of good memory. It's the ability to draw consequences from causes, to make correct inferences, to foresee what might be the result, to work out logical problems, to be reasonable, rational, to have the ability to understand the solution from perhaps insufficient information. You know when a person is intelligent, but you can be easily fooled if you are not yourself intelligent.

Since the idea that modification of synaptic function can provide a basis for memory arose shortly after the first anatomical description of the synapse a number of models (Hebb 1949 . . Hayek 1952 . . Kendel 1981) have been proposed in which various cognitive activities are represented by combinations of the firing patterns of individual neurons.

If you could change the neural pathways in your brain so that you could recall everything you've ever heard, taste, smelled or touched, basically from the womb on, and use it at your disposal, that's an interesting concept.

Curiosity is one of the lowest of the human faculties. You will have noticed in daily life that when people are inquisitive they nearly always have bad memories and are usually stupid at bottom.

Your memory is your first and best weapon, ladies. Learn to use it.

One of the most impressive features of brains - and especially human brains - is the flexibility to learn almost any kind of task that comes its way.

Science is now documenting that it's not the objects of meditation that are important, it's the process of paying attention to them - the attending - that actually influences the organism in a whole range of different ways. The brain changes significantly enough to impact thought, emotion, and other biological functions. Today, people recognize that they're not going to find well-being from the outside, or from a pill; they're going to find it by looking inside. All the suffering, stress, and addiction comes from not realizing you already are what you are looking for.

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

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

When we meditate, we go beyond the swirl of thoughts, memories and emotions that tend to keep us stuck in our ego's story of who we are. We enter an expanded state of awareness and discover our own inner fountain of joy, a source of happiness that isn't dependent on anyone or anything.

The most common response I hear when I tell people I teach meditation is, "I'm so stressed out. I could use some of that!" A response I also sometimes hear, which amuses me a lot is, "My partner should really meet you!"

The human brain has left and right brain symmetry with its own nature and can process information which initially appears to have no pattern or order. However, the brain has the ability to process visual information much more efficiently.

One of the unique things about the human brain is that it can do only what it thinks it can do. The minute you say 'my memory isn't what it used to be' or 'I can't remember a thing today.' You are actually training your brain to live up to your diminished expectations.