Miguel Nicolelis Quotes

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.

The human brain is an incredible pattern-matching machine.

The human brain has 100 billion neurons, each neuron connected to 10 thousand other neurons. Sitting on your shoulders is the most complicated object in the known universe.

The brain was designed by evolution, so each part of it is optimized for what it does, and it's incredibly, incredibly complex.

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

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.

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

What does it mean, exactly, for a given system to be a 'neural correlate of consciousness'?

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

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.

We cannot experimentally map out the brain. It's just too big. In a piece of the brain the size of a pinhead there are 3,000 pathways like a city with 3,000 streets.

All our behaviours are a result of neurophysiological activity in the brain. There is no reason to believe there is any magic going on.

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.

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

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.

When brains get sufficiently big, presumably, as human brains have, consciousness seems to emerge.

We know a certain amount about neurons. You can do fMRI and watch parts of the brain light up. But what happens in the middle is poorly understood.

In the brain, you have connections between the neurons called synapses, and they can change. All your knowledge is stored in those synapses.

In terms of the brain, you can in a crude way think of the human brain as a computer.

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

When we have any function, whether it's language or vision or cognitive functions like memory, we aren't dealing with a straight line to the brain that says 'This is what I do.' The brain builds a network of connections, a network of neurons that have a particular role in that function.

The neurochemistry of the brain is astonishingly busy, the circuitry of a machine more wonderful than any devised by humans. But there is no evidence that its functioning is due to anything more than the 10(14) neural connections that build an elegant architecture of consciousness.

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.

Nerve cells communicate with one another at specialized points called synapses. And these synapses are plastic - they can be modified by learning.