Jonah Lehrer Quotes

Imagination is not the exclusive appanage of artists, but belongs in varying degrees to all men.

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.

If little else, the brain is an educational toy.

The human brain works in, so far, mysterious and wondrous ways that are completely different than the ways that computers calculate. Things like appetite or emotion, how do those function in the brain?

Lulled in the countless chambers of the brain, our thoughts are linked by many a hidden chain; awake but one, and in, what myriads rise!

Of course creativity is a mystery. We don't know what drives it or what constitutes it. It's one of those things, like genius, you know it when you see it but it's impossible to define.

God has given us an imagination, and our imagination is really the principle tool from which all creativity and artistry comes from.

I like to see a film and then start scoring it in my mind while doing something unrelated. You just grasp a film and start working, and something unpredictable comes out from a third element. The mind, the more active it is, the more productive it is.

Without this playing with fantasy no creative work has ever yet come to birth. The debt we owe to the play of the imagination is incalculable.

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

Reason is mechanical, wit chemical, and genius organic spirit.

Imagination decides everything.

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

I actually feel that the different kinds of stories come out of different parts of my brain.

Usually I say I have no imagination.

I think that an artist is a bit like a computer. He receives information from the world around him and from his past and from his own experiences. And it all goes into the brain.

Only in men's imagination does every truth find an effective and undeniable existence. Imagination, not invention, is the supreme master of art as of life.

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

It will be found, in fact, that the ingenious are always fanciful, and the truly imaginative never otherwise than analytic.

I have more of a vivid imagination than I have talent. I cook up ideas. It's just a characteristic.

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

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.

Imagination grows by exercise, and contrary to common belief, is more powerful in the mature than in the young.

Imagination has rules, but we can only guess what they are.

The mind of the polyglot is a very particular thing, and scientists are only beginning to look closely at how acquiring a second language influences learning, behavior and the very structure of the brain itself.