Neural Development Quotes

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

The difference between a chimpanzee and a human brain is that the brain of a chimpanzee is largely unfurnished. Whereas we fill our brains with memes. We download hundreds of thousands of memes, and that's where we get our power from. Your computer or your phone isn't a very powerful device until you download some apps to it. Those are like memes.

If you want your tree to produce plenty o' fruit, you've got to cut it back from time to time. Same thing with your neural cells. Some people might call it brain damage. I call it prunin'.

Thinking is a physical process, the human brain is not exempt from evolution

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.

Smell was our first sense. It is even possible that being able to smell was the stimulus that took a primitive fish and turned a small lump of olfactory tissue on its nerve cord into a brain. We think because we smelled.

There are many ways in which genes influence the brain.

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

Neuroscience is now a very important research area in biology. We are now understanding a lot more about brains in babies, as well as children and adults.

Your world is all these elements. Of light and sound, of taste, smell, and touch, woven together in many dimensions on the fabulous loom of your brain. Your brain; the most complicated thing in the world, which you yourself grew...without even thinking about it.

The mission of DNA is to evolve nervous systems capable of deciphering the mission of DNA.

In any complex organism, brain formation and function must be controlled in part by genes.

In the early Sixties, having begun to describe the physiology of cells in the adult cat visual cortex, David Hubel and I decided to investigate how the highly specific response properties of cortical cells emerged during postnatal development.

The brain, which is plastic when young, must be exposed to certain sights early in life, or it will remain blind to those sights forever.

Iodine has an incredible effect on the development of a child, during pregnancy and afterwards as well. Iodine is one of the micronutrients that the body does not produce or retain. Therefore we need to have iodize salt.

Eighteen years later, pregnant with my first child, I started eating fish. Oily fish in particular contains plenty of long-chain omega-3 fatty acids, essential for neural development.

In its evolution from a more primitive nervous system, the brain, as an organ with ten or more billion neurons and many more connections between them must have changed and grown as a result of many accidents.

The newborn infant is now seen to be wired with awesome precision... This marvelous robot will be launched into the world under the care of its parents... But to what extent does the wiring of the neurons, so undeniably encoded in the genes, preordain the directions that social development will follow?

The human brain is by no means fully formed at birth. It continues to shape itself through life, with the most intense growth occurring during childhood.

But the newest research is showing that many properties of the brain are genetically organized, and don't depend on information coming in from the senses.

The idea of critical windows extends beyond just vision, of course: almost every system in the brain has a critical window when it needs to experience certain stimuli, or it won't get wired up properly. The most obvious example is language: if you don't learn a language early on, it's nigh impossible to become truly fluent.

Many cognitive psychologists see the brain as a computer. But every single brain is absolutely individual, both in its development and in the way it encounters the world.

The brain does not create consciousness, but conciousness created the brain, the most complex physical form on earth, for its expression.

You still have only one self and one identity. However, self, identity and personality are not things, they are not objects, and they certainly are not rigid. Instead, they are biological processes built within the brain from numerous interactive components, step by step, over a period of time.