Neural Connections Quotes

The brain is the last and grandest biological frontier, the most complex thing we have yet discovered in our universe. It contains hundreds of billions of cells interlinked through trillions of connections. The brain boggles the mind.

Now, we used to think the brain was like a computer. But now, we realize that's not true. There's no programming of the brain. There's no Windows. And we think the brain is more like a large corporation. Because think of the unconscious mind. In a corporation, you have subdivisions which operate independently of the main office.

Your brain forms roughly 10,000 new cells every day, but unless they hook up to preexisting cells with strong memories, they die. Serves them right.

The early development of the human brain is extremely important for setting the table, if you will, for potential future accomplishment.

I think that I cannot immediately see the route by which we should really understand memory and the workings of the brain.

Neurons that fire together wire together. You can rewire your brain for higher consciousness by focusing on love.

Neuroscience is exciting. Understanding how thoughts work, how connections are made, how the memory works, how we process information, how information is stored - it's all fascinating.

The way real memories work, from what we understand, is really complex. And it's an interconnection of different things and redundancy in the brain. So the idea of a memory existing as a little snow globe - the way we represent it in the film - is actually not scientifically accurate at all.

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.

The human brain is an incredible pattern-matching machine.

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.

The brain is really hard to see. The whole thing is very large - the human brain is several pounds in weight - but the connections between brain cells, known as synapses, are really tiny. They're nanoscale in dimension. So if you want to see how the cells of the brain are connected in networks, you have to see those connections, those synapses.

Every time I am looking into the depths of somebody's brain, I'm thinking, 'This is what makes a person who they are. That structure contains memories. Everything that they've ever experienced is right in there.'

Use it or lose it is a cliche because it's true.

The brain is behind the really big questions we have. Who am I, what is my identity? What is that based on? If memories are encoded in connectomes, your personality might be in your connectome. If that's the case, that's the basis of your uniqueness as a person.

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.

X-rays revealed that some people were born without a corpus callosum, and they seemed just fine.

Essentially, there's a universe inside your brain. The number of connections possible inside your brain is limitless. And as people have learned to have more managerial and direct creative access to their brains, they have also developed matrices or networks of people that communicate electronically. There are direct brain/computer link-ups. You can just jack yourself in and pilot your brain around in cyberspace-electronic space.

There's a lot of neuroscience now raising the question, 'Is all the intelligence in the human body in the brain?', and they're finding out that, no, it's not like that. The body has intelligence itself, and we're much more of an organic creature in that way.

It is not the amount of knowledge that makes a brain. It is not even the distribution of knowledge. It is the interconnectedness.

Innate mechanisms endow the visual system with highly specific connections, but visual experience early in life is necessary for their maintenance and full development. Deprivation experiments demonstrate that neural connections can be modulated by environmental influences during a critical period of postnatal development.

Essentially, all expressions of human nature ever produced, from a caveman's paintings to Mozart's symphonies and Einstein's view of the universe, emerge from the same source: the relentless dynamic toil of large populations of interconnected neurons.

To build and strengthen new connections, the brain needs the challenge of fresh and unusual stimuli. .... There's a lot of evidence to suggest that repetition is bad for brain health, and novelty is good.

The human brain starts working the moment you are born and never stops until you stand up to speak in public.

Your brain has more than 100 billion cells, each connected to at least 20,000 other cells. The possible combinations are greater than the number of molecules in the known universe.