Daniel Levitin Quotes

The same regions of the brain light up when someone touches their smartphone as when they touch a family member or a pet.

It is a common fact that we see light flashes in a dark environment while living up here, and this experiment is essentially trying to detect how we humans detect these flashes - not sure if these are visual, if they are some type of radiation maybe sensed by some other part of the brain.

This moment where we think we rest, when the brain is floating, you know, in sleep, is actually a moment where I could be very creative in a very strange, uncontrolled way.

Life and consciousness are the two great mysteries. Actually, their substrates are the inanimate. And how do you get from neurons shooting around in the brain to the thought that pops up in your head and mine? There's something deeply mysterious about that. And if you're not struck by the mystery, I think you haven't thought about it.

When we are exposed to a real or perceived threatening situation, powerful things happen in the brain to memorialize aspects of the event, including all manner of associated circumstances like where, when and how it occurred.

All our behaviours are a result of neurophysiological activity in the brain.

Our minds influence the key activity of the brain, which then influences everything; perception, cognition, thoughts and feelings, personal relationships; they're all a projection of you.

The brain process that results in a joke materializing where no joke was before remains a mystery. I'm not aware of any scholarly, scientific or neurological studies on the subject.

As the heat of the coal differs from the coal itself, so do memory, perception, judgment, emotion, and will, differ from the brain which is the instrument of thought.

Neuroscience has proven that similar areas of the brain are activated both in the person who suffers and in the one who feels empathy. Thus, empathic suffering is a true experience of suffering.

All our behaviours are a result of neurophysiological activity in the brain. There is no reason to believe there is any magic going on.

The brain is like a muscle. When it is in use we feel very good. Understanding is joyous.

What a peculiar privilege has this little agitation of the brain which we call 'thought'.

A new laboratory technique, positron emission tomography, uses radioactively labeled oxygen or glucose that essentially lights up specific and different areas of the brain being activated when a person speaks words or sees words or hears words, revealing the organic location for areas of behavioral malfunction.

From morning when I wake up until I go to sleep, I am working. I go to bed and I want to switch off, but the brain doesn't switch off.

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.

Phrenology taught us that the mind thinks by means of the brain, is liable to become fatigued by too long attention, as the locomotive muscles are by too much walking; and I therefore proposed to them to take a brief rest.

It is now possible to quantify people's levels of happiness pretty accurately by asking them, by observation, and by measuring electrical activity in the brain, in degrees from terrible pain to sublime joy.

Independent of what is happening around you in the outside world, humans constantly have internal activity in the brain.

Abnormalities in brain function have traditionally been detected using electroencephalography (EEG), which involves the measurement of the ongoing electrical activity generated by the brain.

Space and time, not proteins and neurons, hold the answer to the problem of consciousness. When we consider the nerve impulses entering the brain, we realize that they are not woven together automatically, any more than the information is inside a computer.

Everybody agrees that the brain is a remarkable machine. It's capable of generating an enormous number of phenomena, some of them very obvious and some of them less obvious. But I think that in the end there are going to be some very basic explanations for many things: emotions, awareness, consciousness, attention, perception, recognition.

We're told that when we remember, the same parts of our brain light up as when we experienced the event we're remembering. Your brain lives through it again.

I love doing crosswords, it's so important to keep the brain going.

If little else, the brain is an educational toy.