Helen Fisher Quotes

Our brain is mapping the world. Often that map is distorted, but it's a map with constant immediate sensory input.

The areas of the brain that have to do with speech are very connected with the same parallel processors that have to do with the kind of ballistic calculations you need to hit small game with a rock.

It's not even known how many kinds of cells there are in the brain. If you were looking for a periodic table of the brain, there is no such thing. I really like to think of the brain as a computer.

The theory of isolation of certain tasks in certain hemispheres of the brain suggests I shouldn't even be able to speak, never mind write.

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.

One of the things I've come to appreciate about the brain is the importance of location. It's not just a set of interchangeable parts that you can swap in and out.

We think of our eyes as video cameras and our brains as blank tapes to be filled with sensory inputs.

You can't hear a word and just hear it as raw sound; it always evokes an associated meaning and emotion in the brain.

Exact information about the functional significance of the deep sections of the brain is only obtained by working through the brain histologically in serial section.

I believe that the brain has evolved over millions of years to be responsive to different kinds of content in the world. Language content, musical content, spatial content, numerical content, etc.

The amount of sensory material stored up or stored down in the brain's and the body's systems is inestimable. It's like a culture at the bottom of a jar, although it doesn't grow, I think, or help anything else to grow unless you find a way to reach it and touch it.

It turns out our brain is sensitive, maybe too sensitive, to motion. It's a survival mechanism.

Bodies do not produce sensations, but complexes of elements (complexes of sensations) make up bodies.

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.

A sense is what has the power of receiving into itself the sensible forms of things without the matter, in the way in which a piece of wax takes on the impress of a signet-ring without the iron or gold.

In my view, while the single neuron is the basic anatomical and information processing-signaling unit of the brain, it is not capable of generating behaviors and, ultimately, thinking. Instead, the true functional unit of the central nervous system is a population of neurons, or neural ensembles or cell assemblies.

The brain may be regarded as a kind of parasite of the organism, a pensioner, as it were, who dwells with the body.

I think that we are already making steps toward mapping out the brain so we can identify the chemical patterns that create and store memory.

The brain is the most complicated organ in the universe. We have learned a lot about other human organs. We know how the heart pumps and how the kidney does what it does. To a certain degree, we have read the letters of the human genome. But the brain has 100 billion neurons. Each one of those has about 10,000 connections.

There is an adage in neuroscience that circuits that wire together fire together. By engaging the brain and spinal cord together, we may be able to enhancce teh growth of [brain] circuits during rehabilitation.

The brain is the most complex, challenging scientific puzzle we have ever tried to decode.

The brain has this amazing level of almost fractal complexity to it. When you start looking at any part of it in detail, you realize that it's much more complex than you thought.

We pretend that the brain is binary, like a computer. But it's not. It's completely holographic.

The thing you realize when you get into studying neuroscience, even a little bit, is that everything is connected to everything else. So it's as if the brain is trying to use everything at its disposal - what it is seeing, what it is hearing, what is the temperature, past experience.