Primo Levi Quotes

To know the brain...is equivalent to ascertaining the material course of thought and will, to discovering the intimate history of life in its perpetual duel with external forces.

You, your joys and sorrows, your memories and your ambitions, your sense of personal identity and your free will are in fact no more than the behavior of a vast assembly of nerve cells and their associated molecules.

The brain runs its show incognito.

I know my mind is made of matter but I need to know exactly what is the matter at it's core? Because my heart is just a muscle and simply put, it's sore.

Brain: an apparatus with which we think that we think. Mind, n. A mysterious form of matter secreted by the brain.

People often ask how I got interested in the brain; my rhetorical answer is: 'How can anyone NOT be interested in it?' Everything you call 'human nature' and consciousness arises from it.

No matter how closely you examine the water, glucose, and electrolyte salts in the human brain, you can't find the point where these molecules became conscious.

The brain is an immensely complex organ, and many mysteries remain. Exactly how brain and mind or soma and psyche are related is one of them.

I was interested in the nature of human mental processes, which is what got me interested in psychoanalysis. And it became clear to me after a while that mental processes come from the brain, and in order to understand them, you need to be a biologist of the brain.

People have wanted to look inside the human mind, the human brain, for thousands of years.

I don't know about you, but I find it exhilarating to see how vague psychological notions evaporate and give rise to a physical, mechanistic understanding of the mind, even if it's the mind of the fly.

I think that I cannot immediately see the route by which we should really understand memory and the workings of the brain.

The widespread assumption is that somehow, the brain produces the mind; somehow millions of neurons fire signals at one another create or produce consciousness... but we have no idea how or why this happens. I'm afraid that in many cases, people in the tech world fail to understand that.

The brain is a body part too; we just know less about it.

Shaped a little like a loaf of French country bread, our brain is a crowded chemistry lab, bustling with nonstop neural conversations.

In the words of the late Francis Crick...You, your joys and your sorrows, your memories and your ambitions, your sense of personal identity and free will, are in fact no more than the behavior of a vast assembly of nerve cells and their associated molecules. (13)

Shaped a little like a loaf of French country bread, our brain is a crowded chemistry lab, bustling with nonstop neural conversations.Imagine the brain, that shiny mound of being, that mouse-gray parliament of cells, that dream factory, that petit tyrant inside a ball of bone, that huddle of neurons calling all the plays, that little everywhere, that fickle pleasuredome, that wrinkled wardrobe of selves stuffed into the skull like too many clothes into a gym bag.

We have our own brains.

How does the water of the brain turn into the wine of consciousness?

Even though its common knowledge these days, it never ceases to amaze me that all the richness of our mental life - all our feelings, our emotions, our thoughts, our ambitions, our love life, our religious sentiments and even what each of us regards us his own intimate private self - is simply the activity of these little specks of jelly in your head, in your brain. There is nothing else.

Sometimes people feel mind is merely the - in some animal, the energy or something from the brain. Now there are little sort of curiosities or I think doubt sometimes a sheer sort of mental attitude, some change in our brain. So these fields, now scientists are showing some interest.

As followers of natural science we know nothing of any relation between thoughts and the brain, except as a gross correlation in time and space.

I would be so curious to wire my brain up and see what's occurring when I act, because a performance is such a heightened state. I've always found that with doing theatre especially. It's so hard to come down.

Listen, no part of me is more definitive of who I am than my brain.

The task of neural science is to explain behaviour in terms of the activities of the brain. How does the brain marshall its millions of individual nerve cells to produce behaviour, and how are these cells influenced by the environment...? The last frontier of the biological sciences – their ultimate challenge – is to understand the biological basis of consciousness and the mental processes by which we perceive, act, learn, and remember.