Susan Greenfield from The Private Life of the Brain , The question of how the ebb and flow of a highly developed mind can be catered to by a physical brain, and the related question of how the one impacts the other, are the hardest-ever challenges to human ingenuity and imagination.
Allan Hobson from The Dream Drugstore. This is like the brain and its mind. Pinckney J. Harman from James Arthur Lecture on the Evolution of the Human Brain , It is not unreasonable to expect that man's brain will continue to study itself so long as Homo sapiens shall last.
Sydney J. Harris Knowledge fills a large brain; it merely inflates a small one. Erich Harth from Windows on the Mind , The brain presents two seemingly irreconcilable aspects: It is a material body, exhibiting all the physical properties of matter, and it possesses a set of faculties and attributes, collectively called mind, that are not found in any other physical system. Joel Havemann from A Life Shaken , What seems astonishing is that a mere three-pound object, made of the same atoms that constitute everything else under the sun, is capable of directing virtually everything that humans have done: flying to the moon and hitting seventy home runs, writing Hamlet and building the Taj Mahal -- even unlocking the secrets of the brain itself.
Jimi Hendrix from song, Purple Haze , Purple haze was in my brain, Lately things don't seem the same, Actin' funny, but I don't know why, 'Scuse me while I kiss the sky. Hippocrates about B. Men ought to know that from the brain, and from the brain only, arise our pleasures, joy, laughter and jests, as well as our sorrows, pains, griefs, and tears. Finger, Wherefore the heart and the diaphragm are particularly sensitive, they have nothing to do, however, with the operations of the understanding, but of all these the brain is the cause.
Benjamin L. Hooks from African American Wisdom The most enduring contributions made to civilization have not been made by brawn, they have been made by brain. Men are not superior by reason of the accidents of race or color. They are superior who have the best heart - the best brain. James I of England, James VI of Scotland from A Counter-blaste to Tobacco , A custom loathsome to the eye, hateful to the nose, harmful to the brain, dangerous to the lungs, and in the black, stinking fume thereof nearest resembling the horrible Stygian smoke of the pit that is bottomless.
Judith Hooper and Dick Teresi from The Three-Pound Universe , The brain is a little saline pool that acts as a conductor, and it runs on electricity. David Hubel from Scientific American , September , p. It is a complicated, intricately woven tissue, like nothing else we know of in the universe, but it is composed of cells, as any tissue is.
They are, to be sure, highly specialized cells, but they function according to the laws that govern any other cells. Their electrical and chemical signals can be detected, recorded and interpreted and their chemicals can be identified; the connections that constitute the brain's woven feltwork can be mapped.
In short, the brain can be studied, just as the kidney can. Can it understand the mind? Is it a giant computer, or some other kind of giant machine, or something more? Italian Proverbs Everyone thinks he has more than his share of brain. Every one gives himself credit for more brains than he has, and less money. All the brains are not in one head.
Half a brain is enough for him who says little. William James from The Principles of Psychology , As the brain changes are continuous, so do all these consciousnesses melt into each other like dissolving views. Properly they are but one protracted consciousness, one unbroken stream. Roy John from Mechanisms of Memory , The brain is a marvelous mechanism.
Our feelings of love and hate, of good and evil, our appreciation of ugliness and beauty n the world around us, the values toward which we aspire, the injustices which we strive to correct - all these mental riches which form the most treasured part of life for us are somehow generated by the interaction of present experiences with the residue of our past stored in the brain.
George Johnson from In the Palaces of Memory. How We Build the Worlds Inside Our Heads , Whenever you read a book or have a conversation, the experience causes physical changes in your brain. It's a little frightening to think that every time you walk away from an encounter, your brain has been altered, sometimes permanently. Barbara Jordan Do not call for black power or green power. Call for brain power. Carl Gustav Jung A collection of a hundred great brains makes one big fathead. Eric R.
Kandel from "The new science of mind" in Best of the Brain from Scientific American , New York: Dana Press, The brain is a complex biological organ of great computational capability that constructs our sensory experiences, regulates our thoughts and emotions, and control our actions. Kandel from The Disorderd Mind. What Unusual Brains Tell Us About Ourselves , The greatest challenge in all of science is to understand how the mysteries of human nature - as reflected in our individual experience of the world - arise from the physical matter of the brain.
Julian Paul Keenan from The Face in the Mirror , When considering the abilities and complexities of the brain, one is struck by the incredible efficiency and splendor expressed in gray and white matter. Seymour S. Kety from Scientific American , September , p. The wonder is that for most people the brain functions effectively and unceasingly for more than 60 years. Konrad Kording from Nature , July 17, The human brain produces in 30 seconds as much data as the Hubble Space Telescope has produced in its lifetime.
Wendell J. Krieg from Functional Neuroanatomy , The brain evolves further than any other organ. Beginning as the simplest sort of connecting center for the nerves, it elaborates into a surpassingly complex structure, with many levels of activity, and untold trillions of possible circuits.
Dalai Lama This is my simple religion. There is no need for temples; no need for complicated philosophy. Our own brain, our own heart is our temple; the philosophy is kindness. The world's climates are changing, the mammals are taking over, and we all have a brain about the size of a walnut. The La's from the song There She Goes , originally released in There she goes There she goes again Racing through my brain And I just can't contain This feeling that remains Primo Levi To accuse another of having weak kidneys, lungs, or heart, is not a crime; on the contrary, saying he has a weak brain is a crime.
Rodolfo Llinas in an interview with PBS Basically there are two types of animals: animals, and animals that have no brains; they are called plants. They don't need a nervous system because they don't move actively, they don't pull up their roots and run in a forest fire! Anything that moves actively requires a nervous system; otherwise it would come to a quick death.
Shelley Long from a line in the television show Cheers If brains were money, you'd need to take out a loan to buy a cup of coffee. Lowell from A Fable for Critics , ? Most brains reflect but the crown of a hat.
Gay Gaer Luce and Julius Segal from Sleep , Whatever any man does he first must do in his mind, whose machinery is the brain. The mind can do only what the brain is equipped to do, and so man must find out what kind of brain he has before he can understand his own behavior. Paul D. MacLean An interest in the brain requires no justification other than a curiosity to know why we are here, what we are doing here, and where we are going.
Thomas L. Masson No brain is stronger than its weakest think. Maudsley from The Double Brain , Is the brain, which is notably double in structure, a double organ, 'seeming parted, but yet a union in partition'? Somerset Maugham The highest activities of consciousness have their origins in physical occurrences of the brain, just as the loveliest melodies are not too sublime to be expressed by notes.
What do I include? My shoe size, number of brain cells? Leonard H. We've learned to tie into every organ in the human body but one. The brain! The brain is what life is all about.
Language and the Evolution of the Human Mind , The brain is designed to grab what input it can and then boil it up into a froth of understanding. Malcolm McDowell from Mail on Sunday , Let's not get too precious about it: actors are not heart surgeons or brain surgeons. We are just entertaining people. Conscious Minds in a Material World , Brains cause technology, society, art, science, soap operas, sin.
A remarkable set of effects for such a small chunk of coagulated atoms. Robert S. McNamara former U. Secretary of Defense Brains, like hearts, go where they are appreciated.
Paoletti, Gary M. Radke, A man paints with his brains and not with his hands, and if he cannot have his brains clear he will come to grief.
Marvin L. Minsky from Society of the Mind , Minds are simply what brains do. Minsky from Society of the Mind , The principal activities of brains are making changes in themselves. Lin-Manuel Miranda from Alexander Hamilton , Hamilton, Put a pencil to his temple, connected it to his brain And he wrote his first refrain, a testament to his pain.
Ashley Montagu quoted in Brian, D. Conversations with Nobel Scientists and Other Luminaries , New York: Plenum Press, You certainly can't tell anything from the microscopic structure of the brain whether the person was an idiot or a genius.
Michel de Montaigne It is good to rub and polish our brain against that of others. How do you define real? If you're talking about what you can feel, what you can smell, what you can taste and see, then real is simply electrical signals interpreted by your brain. Van Morrison If my heart could do my thinking, would my brain begin to feel? Anna Mary Robertson Moses A strange thing is memory, and hope; one looks backward, and the other forward; one is of today, the other of tomorrow.
Memory is history recorded in our brain, memory is a painter, it paints pictures of the past and of the day. Vernon B. Mountcastle from Johns Hopkins Medical Journal , vol. Projecting from it are millions of fragile sensory nerve fibers, in groups uniquely adapted to sample the energetic states of the world around us: heat, light, force, and chemical composition.
That is all we ever know of it directly; all else is logical inference. Martin G. Netsky from What is a brain, and who said so? Isaac Newton Pictures, propagated by motion along the fibers of the optic nerves in the brain, are the cause of vision. Louis Nizer A man who works with his hands is a laborer; a man who works with his hands and his brain is a craftsman; but a man who works with his hands and his brain and his heart is an artist. Charles R. Noback from James Arthur Lecture on the Evolution of the Human Brain , The human brain is the product of a long phylogenetic history.
The past resides in the fabric of its structural and functional components. Norwegian Proverb Ask for advice, and then use your brain. James Oberg quoted by Steven L. Julien Offory de La Mettrie ; from L'Homme machine The brain has muscles for thinking as the legs have muscles for walking. Oingo Boingo from the song Grey Matter They say you lost the ability to even think That your tiny little brain Slipped down the kitchen sink.
William Osler from Aequanimitas, With Other Addresses to Medical Students, Nurses and Practitioners of Medicine , There are only two sorts of doctors; those who practise with their brains, and those who practise with their tongues.
Ivan Petrovich Pavlov ; in a lecture given in and published in Lectures on conditioned reflexes. Twenty-five year of objective study of the higher nervous activity [behavior] of animals , London: Martin Lawrence, , p. If we could look through the skull into the brain of a consciously thinking person, and if the place of optimal excitability were luminous, then we should see playing over the cerebral surface, a bright spot with fantastic, waving borders constantly fluctuating in size and form, surrounded by a darkness more or less deep, covering the rest of the hemisphere.
Wilder Penfield from The Great Issues of Conscience in Modern Medicine , It is fair to say that science provides no method of controlling the mind. Scientific work on the brain does not explain the mind-not yet. It holds within its humming mechanism secrets that will determine the future of the human race. Wilder Penfield from Reader's Digest , Among the millions of nerve cells that clothe parts of the brain there runs a thread.
It is the thread of time, the thread that has run through each succeeding wakeful hour of the individual. Wilder Penfield and Lamar Roberts from Speech and Brain Mechanisms , My plea to educators and parents is that they should give some thought to the nature of the brain of a child, for the brain is a living mechanism, not a machine. In case of breakdown, it can substitute one of its parts for the function of another.
But it has its limitations. It is subject to inexorable change with the passage of time. Roger Penrose It may well be there is something else going on in the brain that we don't have an inkling of at the moment. Carl C. Pfeiffer from Mental and Elemental Nutrients , Brains, like cabbages, are beautiful--but in a different way. Cabbage heads are dumb and sterile, whereas brains are personal, intelligent and vibrant. Pablo Picasso from Saturday Review , September 1, If only we could pull out our brain and use only our eyes.
Pierce from The People's Common Sense Medical Advisor in Plain English , The brain is not, like the liver, heart and other internal organs, capable from the moment of birth of all the functions which it ever discharges; for while in common with them, it has certain duties for the exercise of which it is especially intended, its high character in man, as the organ of conscious life, the supreme instrument of his relations with the rest of nature, is developed only by a long and patient training.
Pliny the Elder A. The brain is the highest of the organs in position, and it is protected by the vault of the head; it has no flesh or blood or refuse. It is the citadel of sense-perception. Polish Proverb He who climbs a ladder, must have his brains in his feet. Lawrence Pool from Nature's Masterpiece. The Brain and How It Works , New York: Walker and Company, The magic of your mind -- the magic that lets you enjoy family and friends, fun and games, and do all the things you "have a mind" to do -- depends on your private computer: your brain.
Mary Pettibone Poole from A Glass Eye at a Keyhole , To repeat what others have said, requires education; to challenge it, requires brains. Michael I. Posner and Marcus E. Raichle from Images of Mind , The microscope and telescope opened up unexpectedly vast domains of scientific discovery.
A similar opportunity has now been created in the study of human cognition by the introduction of methods to visualize the brain systems involved as we think. Emerson M. Pugh as quoted by George E. Pugh, Emerson's son in G. Pasko T. Sciences, vol. It is not the strength of our muscles or of our bones that makes us different, it is our brain. From Impostor Poodles to Purple Numbers , Even though it is common knowledge, it never ceases to amaze me that all the richness of our mental life - all our feelings, our emotions, our thoughts, our ambitions, our love lives, our religious sentiments and even what each of us regards as his or her own intimate private self - is simply the activity of these little specks of jelly in our heads, in our brains.
There is nothing else. Ramachandran from an interview in Edge. Jules Renard Love is like an hourglass, with the heart filling up as the brain empties. Richard M. Restak from The Brain. The Last Frontier , Since the brain is unlike any other structure in the known universe, it seems reasonable to expect that our understanding of its functioning - if it can ever be achieved - will require approaches that are drastically different from the way we understand other physical systems.
What kind of model can we form in regard to its functioning? I believe there's only one answer to that question, and perhaps it will disturb you: there is no model of the brain, nor will there ever be. That's because the brain, as the constructor of all models, transcends all models. The brain's uniqueness stems from the fact that nowhere in the known universe is there anything even remotely resembling it.
Richie Russell from Brain Memory Learning: A Neurologist's View , There is no clear evidence on which we can separate the mind from the brain; they appear to develop together and to disintegrate together. Richie Russell from Explaining the Brain , London: Oxford University Press, Correct care and use of your brain is the key to a stimulating existence and ultimate contentment.
Look after your brain. Russian Proverb Long whiskers cannot take the place of brains. Perhaps in a sense it is the greatest challenge for science as a whole, beyond moon landings, the ultimate particles of the physicist and the depths of astronomical space.
Steven Rose from The Future of the Brain. The Promise and Perils of Tomorrow's Neuroscience , With its hundred billion nerve cells, with their hundred trillion interconnections, the human brain is the most complex phenomenon in the known universe - always, of course, excepting the interaction of some six billion such brains and their owners within the socio-technological culture of our planetary ecosystem!
In this respect the brain is like a muscle. When we think well, we feel good. Early on, the psychologist William James had suggested that the brain was perhaps not as unchanging as previously believed.
Way back in , in his book "The Principles of Psychology," he wrote, "Organic matter, especially nervous tissue, seems endowed with a very extraordinary degree of plasticity. In the s, researcher Karl Lashley found evidence of changes in neural pathways of rhesus monkeys. By the s, researchers began to explore cases in which older adults who had suffered massive strokes were able to regain functioning, demonstrating that the brain was more malleable than previously believed.
Modern researchers have also found evidence that the brain is able to rewire itself following damage. Modern research has demonstrated that the brain continues to create new neural pathways and alter existing ones in order to adapt to new experiences, learn new information, and create new memories. Thanks to modern advances in technology, researchers are able to get a never-before-possible look at the brain's inner workings. As the study of modern neuroscience flourished, a body of research has demonstrated that people are not limited to the mental abilities they are born with and that damaged brains are often quite capable of remarkable change.
Brain changes are often seen as improvements, but this is not always the case. In some instances, the brain might be influenced by psychoactive substances or pathological conditions that can lead to detrimental effects on the brain and behavior. Ever wonder what your personality type means?
Sign up to find out more in our Healthy Mind newsletter. Association of lifetime intellectual enrichment with cognitive decline in the older population. JAMA Neurol. REM sleep selectively prunes and maintains new synapses in development and learning. Nat Neurosci. Liu PZ, Nusslock R. Exercise-mediated neurogenesis in the hippocampus via BDNF.
Front Neurosci. Dynamic brains and the changing rules of neuroplasticity: implications for learning and recovery. Front Psychol. Doidge N. New York: Viking; Discovering Psychology. Hoiland E.
Brain plasticity: What is it? Chudler EH, ed. Neuroscience for Kids. University of Washington. James W. The Principles of Psychology. Classics in the History of Psychology. Green CD, ed. Kolb B, Gibb R. Brain plasticity and behaviour in the developing brain. Clarke M, Ghali L, eds.
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A CAT scan revealed a skull lined with about a millimeter thick layer of brain tissue and filled with cerebrospinal fluid. Of course the brain stem which sits at the bottom of the brain and connects to the spine was normal. Since it controls vital functions such as breathing, swallowing, digestion, eye movement and heartbeat, there can be no life without it.
But the rest of the brain is obviously capable of some remarkable feats, with one part able to compensate for deficiencies in another. In the case of the young man who Lorber investigated, the thin layer of brain cells was certainly up to the task of providing the necessary brain power.
The student had a high IQ of and had a first class honours degree in mathematics. Enter your keywords. Sign-Up Here. What to read next Why does plastic stay wet in the dishwasher whereas glass comes out dry?
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