Neural Connectivity Quotes

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.

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

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.

We've done fMRI scans of people taking the 'Reading the Eyes' test, and what we've found is that the amygdala lights up in trying to figure out people's thoughts and feelings. In people with autism, they show highly reduced amygdala activity.

Research indicates that, as long as we keep using our brains in an active way, we continue to build neural pathways as we get older. This gives us not only the ongoing potential for creative thought, but also an additional incentive for continuing to stretch ourselves.

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.

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.

Cognitive neuroscience is entering an exciting era in which new technologies and ideas are making it possible to study the neural basis of cognition, perception, memory and emotion at the level of networks of interacting neurons, the level at which we believe many of the important operations of the brain take place.

In adult centers the nerve paths are something fixed, ended, immutable. Everything may die, nothing may be regenerated.

If we can map the retina, that will help us understand how it functions in vision, as well as devise new ways of repairing its malfunctions. And if we can really figure out the retina, perhaps we will have a shot at figuring out the vastly more complicated brain.

All evidence indicates that the neuron does not reset. The synapses do not reset. They are always different. They're changing every millisecond. Your brain today is very, very different from what it was when you were 10 years old, and yet you may have profound memories from when you were 10.

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.

Exciting discoveries in neuroscience are allowing us to fit educational methods to new understandings of how the brain develops.

What we found was that rather than being haphazardly arranged or independent pathways, we find that all of the pathways of the brain taken together fit together in a single exceedingly simple structure. They basically look like a cube. They basically run in three perpendicular directions, and in each one of those three directions the pathways are highly parallel to each other and arranged in arrays. So, instead of independent spaghettis, we see that the connectivity of the brain is, in a sense, a single coherent structure.

Brain cells are normally not sensitive to light. So by introducing light-sensitive proteins into specific types of neurons, we can now selectively control that specific type of neuron by shining light in the brain.

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

A typical neuron makes about ten thousand connections to neighboring neurons. 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.

Physiology seeks to derive the processes in our own nervous system from general physical forces, without considering whether these processes are or are not accompanied by processes of consciousness.

The relationship between the prefrontal cortex and the amygdala fundamentally changes with meditation.

Imagine something a million times more powerful than your smartphone that is the size of a brain cell interfacing with your biological neurons. That will be the complete symbiosis. That will be when we augment our brains at the level of the neuron.

Sticking wires into the brain is obviously rather crude. It's hard to do in animals that run around, and there is a physical limit to the number of wires that can be inserted simultaneously.

The human brain is the most public organ on the face of the earth, open to everything, sending out messages to everything. To be sure, it is hidden away in bone and conducts internal affairs in secrecy, but virtually all the business is the direct result of thinking that has already occurred in other minds.

There have been studies done on people who meditate and they have found that they actually have increased grey matter in certain parts of their brain and more neural conductivity, meaning more connections between certain parts of the brain. They have increased capacity for, in some cases, memory, or reasoning.

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