Neural Activity Quotes

All human states are organic brain states - happiness, sadness, fear, lust, dreaming, doing math problems and writing novels - and our brains are not static.

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

For the longest time, neuroscientists were forced to be passive observers of brain activity.

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.

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.

To say that mind is a product or function of protoplasm, or of its molecular changes, is to use words to which we can attach no clear conception.

What I find fascinating is the idea that we all have a physical brain, but we also have this mental part, and we have to figure out how they work together.

We started all this research way back in the early 1990s, developing a technique that allows us to record the electrical signals produced by neurons simultaneously.

Remember, when we're conscious of something, that state is quite often generated by unconscious processes that happen right before it.

Everything we do, every thought we've ever had, is produced by the human brain. But exactly how it operates remains one of the biggest unsolved mysteries, and it seems the more we probe its secrets, the more surprises we find.

...is the carbon molecule lined with thought?

Thinking is movement confined to the brain

If I throw you into an MRI machine right now, I can tell you what words you're about to say.

We see in the electroencephalogram a concomitant phenomenon of the continuous nerve processes which take place in the brain, exactly as the electrocardiogram represents a concomitant phenomenon of the contractions of the individual segments of the heart.

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.

People often ask how I got interested in the brain; my rhetorical answer is: 'How can anyone NOT be interested in it?' Everything you call 'human nature' and consciousness arises from it.

The feeling of an unbridgeable gulf between consciousness and brain-process:When does this feeling occur in the present case?It is when I (for example) turn my attention in a particular way on to my own consciousness, and, astonished, say to myself: THIS is supposed to be produced by a process in the brain!--as it were clutching my forehead.

As the brain matures, one thing that happens is the pruning of the synapses. Synaptic pruning does not occur willy-nilly; it depends largely on how any one brain pathway is used.

I can tell you what images are in your head. I can tell what music you're thinking of. I can tell if you're listening to me or not. That's possible with an MRI now.

It must be born in mind that one does not see directly - as is the case in the exploration of the surface of the brain - where the electrodes are attacking.

As a programmer, you're working with very simple structures compared to the brain. So I was always fascinated by how the brain works.

The cortex is the enemy.

The brain is not, and cannot be, the sole or complete organ of thought and feeling.

Brain power improves by brain use, just as our bodily strength grows with exercise.

The brain seems a thoroughfare for nerve-action passing its way to the motor animal. It has been remarked that Life's aim is an act not a thought. To-day the dictum must be modified to admit that, often, to refrain from an act is no less an act than to commit one, because inhibition is coequally with excitation a nervous activity.