cerebral activity Quotes

Imagination is strong in a man when that particular function of the brain which enables him to observe is roused to activity without any necessary excitement of the sense. Accordingly, we find that imagination is active just in proportion as our sense are not excited by external objects. A long period of solitude, whether in prison or in a sick room; quiet, twilight, darkness-these are the things that promote its activity; and under their influence it comes into play of itself.

Thinking is the hardest work we can do, and among the most important

Thinking is the highest form of leverage.

Shaped a little like a loaf of French country bread, our brain is a crowded chemistry lab, bustling with nonstop neural conversations.Imagine the brain, that shiny mound of being, that mouse-gray parliament of cells, that dream factory, that petit tyrant inside a ball of bone, that huddle of neurons calling all the plays, that little everywhere, that fickle pleasuredome, that wrinkled wardrobe of selves stuffed into the skull like too many clothes into a gym bag.

My brain? It's my second favorite organ!

I like the cerebral process.

Thinking is harder work than hard work.

Thinking is movement confined to the brain

This cell belongs to a brain, and it is my brain, the brain of me who is writing; and the cell in question, and within it the atom in question, is in charge of my writing, in a gigantic minuscule game which nobody has yet described. It is that which at this instant, issuing out of a labyrinthine tangle of yeses and nos, makes my hand run along a certain path on the paper, mark it with these volutes that are signs: a double snap, up and down, between two levels of energy, guides this hand of mine to impress on the paper this dot, here, this one.

MIND, n. A mysterious form of matter secreted by the brain. Its chief activity consists in the endeavour to ascertain its own nature, the futility of the attempt being due to the fact that it has nothing but itself to know itself with.

I pressed down the mental accelerator. The old lemon throbbed fiercely. I got an idea.

It's good to make your brain work more than your body.

My mind is always going.

Keep thinking. You can hear our brains rattling around inside us, like the littler Russian dolls.

But how entirely I live in my imagination; how completely depend upon spurts of thought, coming as I walk, as I sit; things churning up in my mind and so making a perpetual pageant, which is to be my happiness.

Research now seems to indicate that one hour of inner action is worth seven hours of out-in-the-worl d action. Think about that. You're working too hard.

But if I didn't read, I'd think, and thinking, when you come down to it, is the most painful thing of all, and the most monopolizing

Brain: an apparatus with which we think that we think. Mind, n. A mysterious form of matter secreted by the brain.

Much has been written about the life of the mind.

I'm not sure if I could tell the difference—between just staring into space and thinking. We're usually thinking all the time, aren't we? Not that we live in order to think, but the opposite isn't true either—that we think in order to live. I believe, contrary to Descartes, that we sometimes think in order not to be. Staring into space might unintentionally have the opposite effect.

Writing poetry and reading books causes brain damage.

Smell is a very animal thing, almost reptilian, where the more cerebral things like reading less so.

It's true that you might be socially isolated because you're reading in the library, at home and so on, but you're intensely alive. In fact you're much more alive than these folk walking the streets of New York in crowds, with no intellectual interrogation and questioning going at all.

To know the brain...is equivalent to ascertaining the material course of thought and will, to discovering the intimate history of life in its perpetual duel with external forces.