Phil Klay Quotes

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

What the brain does by itself is infinitely more fascinating and complex than any response it can make to chemical stimulation.

Neuroscience is exciting. Understanding how thoughts work, how connections are made, how the memory works, how we process information, how information is stored - it's all fascinating.

What we find is that our brains have colossal things happening in them all the time.

Your brain is triggered to produce.

We will move from looking at correlations between brain activity and behaviour to studying how the brain causes mental states and behaviour.

For the longest time, neuroscientists were forced to be passive observers of brain activity.

The kind of neuroscience that I do and my colleagues do is almost like the weatherman. We are always chasing storms. We want to see and measure storms - brainstorms, that is.

We have about 100 million cells interconnected in our brains. They communicate with one another through electrical signals.

As a programmer, you're working with very simple structures compared to the brain. So I was always fascinated by how the brain works.

As an ex-programmer, I'm still just curious about how the brain functions, how that flow of information really happens.

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

Neuroscientists talk a lot about brain circuits. In fact, the word 'circuit' is probably misleading. We do not know where most circuits begin and end. And unlike an electrical circuit, brain connections are heavily reciprocal and recursive, so that a direction of information flow can be inferred but sometimes not proven.

In the human mind, the number of possible connections that can be made between neurons greatly exceeds the number of atoms in the universe.

Everything we do, every thought we've ever had, is produced by the human brain. But exactly how it operates remains one of the biggest unsolved mysteries, and it seems the more we probe its secrets, the more surprises we find.

My cerebral cortex, the gray matter that MIT neuroscientist Steven Pinker likens to 'a large sheet of two-dimensional tissue that has been wadded up to fit inside the spherical skull,' is riddled instead of whole.

Your brain is built of cells called neurons and glia - hundreds of billions of them. Each one of these cells is as complicated as a city.

The human brain is an incredible pattern-matching machine.

Many cognitive psychologists see the brain as a computer. But every single brain is absolutely individual, both in its development and in the way it encounters the world.

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

When we talk about the brain, it is anything but unidimensional or simplistic or reductionistic.

There is no memory or retentive faculty based on lasting impression. What we designate as memory is but increased responsiveness to repeated stimuli.

It was quite difficult to find a place to do what we wanted, namely to study the neurological basis of behaviour and especially learning and memory, which we were particularly interested in.

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

Experiences shape the brain, but the brain shapes the way we view experiences, too.