Brain Circuitry Quotes

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.

One can, in principle, outline sort of a set of neural circuits that are critically involved and even identify disorders that affect different components of that neural circuit and see what happens if you knock out, for example, inability to recognize faces, how it affects your response to portraiture.

I think drug addicts have brains wired like adventurers and they didn't get the opportunity to find it. You know, the people I get to work with - not all of them are well-adjusted. Some of them are driven by heavy demons.

Brain studies of mental workouts in which you sustain a single, chosen focus show that the more you detach from what's distracting you and refocus on what you should be paying attention to, the stronger this brain circuitry becomes.

Our genetic heritage endows each of us with a series of emotional set-points that determines our temperament. But the brain circuitry involved is extraordinarily malleable; temperament is not destiny.

All that's known is this: there is no central processor, no single computer. Nothing that simple. Millions of neurons process information simultaneously and in parallel, not linearly, but the actual chemistry and electrical properties of that integrative process are still being mapped. Even so, it seems odd that during the evolution of brain circuitry and thinking, the ability to understand itself did not get wired in. Such built-in innocence seems like a terrible oversight.

We have to move into the 21st century, but we should do so with great care to build a 'bi-literate' brain that has the circuitry for 'deep reading' skills and, at the same time, is adept with technology.

Given the billions of neurons, this means there are as many connections in a single cubic centimeter of brain tissue as there are stars in the Milky Way galaxy.

Well. There is a psychiatric occurrence we see in men-not often women-where they put all their hopes and dreams onto one person, so intensely that at some point it trips a wire in the brain circuitry, and that causes them to go, in a minute, 180 degrees the other way.