Sam Kean Quotes

The brain is the cornerstone of virtually every facet of our lives. I wish we knew more.

My philosophy is really based on humility. I don't think we know enough to fix either diagnostics or therapeutics. The future of psychiatry is clinical neuroscience, based on a much deeper understanding of the brain.

I read a lot of nonfiction - especially books about the brain.

I do what I do merrily out of curiosity because I want to know how the brain works. That will get me up early in the morning and keep me going all day long.

When scientists get old, they get interested in the brain, and I'm a little bit afraid I'm falling into that.

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 is not a bag of traits. It's startlingly complex. There are few or no single genes with a consistent effect on the mind.

In school, I studied psychology, linguistics, neuroscience. I understand that there is a real lack of respect for the brain.

Mind mapping is a technique based on memory and creativity and comprehension and understanding, so when the student or a child uses the mind map, they are using their brain in the way their brain was designed to be used, and so the mind helps them in all learning and cognitive skills. It simply helps them in what the brain does naturally.

We have to remain humble about our understanding of the brain, because even our most powerful tools remain pretty blunt instruments for decoding the brain. In fact, we still do not know how to decipher the basic language of how the brain works.

I'm tremendously optimistic about the future of my discipline, yet understanding the brain is so difficult that we neuroscientists need help.

To find better means of fixing the brain, we first need to achieve something more fundamental. We must understand how it works.

If little else, the brain is an educational toy.

Whatever debases the intelligence degrades the entire human being.

The brain is one of the richest green fields of science. There's so much yet to be discovered.

Subconsciously - I didn't know it then, I realize it today when I know a little bit more about the mind and the brain - I fought like I didn't deserve to live.

Reading requires the brain to rearrange its original parts to learn something new.

Neuroscience is a baby science, a mere century old, and our scientific understanding of the brain is nowhere near where we'd like it to be. We know more about the moons of Jupiter than what is inside of our skulls.

The heart is the chief feature of a functioning mind.

It's kind of sad, the way we've turned the entertainment of reading into a kind of psychic broccoli - something to feel guilty about if you don't force it on your face-making children while dutifully consuming a few token florets yourself.

No machines will ever truly fully figure the brain out, because the brain's performance is constantly altered or else constrained by this inanimate, rogue artifact you can't control, namely, speech.

I just really like learning. I have to keep using my brain; otherwise, I get depressed.

As a college student, what really interested me was the human brain and human intelligence.

On the basis of research in several disciplines, including the study of how human capacities are represented in the brain, I developed the idea that each of us has a number of relatively independent mental faculties, which can be termed our 'multiple intelligences.'

Your brain is so lovely and so willing to please. It wants to help so much.