Best 65 quotes in «neurology quotes» category

All our sentiments - religious, romantic or any other - are born in the neurons.

A man does not consist of memory alone. He has feeling, will, sensibility, and moral being.

Biologically speaking, you are the child of Mother Nature, and neurologically speaking, you are the heirs of immortal bliss.

Brain health is not to be hailed as a habit of the rich and famous, rather it must be made a worldwide trait of human existence.

Authenticity and respect go to those who stick to their own specific field of work. For example, I am a Biologist and my work is the understanding of human nature - that's where I place all my attention. I know nothing revelatory about modern physics - I know nothing revelatory about mathematics - I know nothing revelatory about architecture - I know nothing revelatory about any field of understanding except for the ones directly related to biology. It doesn't mean that I cannot learn about other fields - I can, but every human has his or her own distinct knack, and mine is understanding humans - understanding how and why they think, what they think - how and why they feel, what they feel - how and why they behave, the way they behave - how and why they perceive, what they perceive.

All answers lie in the neurons.

Born of neurons, soul is the very essence of being - soul is the very foundation of your existence - your psychological existence, from which all your physical prowess and progress manifest.

Each day I wake up with a naive perspective of life and universe, and walk towards understanding a little more about the true nature of human perception with all its vivacious nuances and behavioral expressions.

Every part of the brain plays a crucial role in the construction of something magnificent which we call ”mind”. But if we observe closely, the mind doesn’t exactly exist as one distinct process or entity or system. It’s rather an illusion. We can understand this better if we see the mind as a nation. Think of the nation you live in. Is there really any such thing as a ”nation”! A nation is simply the collection of activities of a group of people inside an imaginary border. Likewise, mind is the collection of activities of a group of neurons inside the skull. And just like in a nation, when a few neurons malfunction, others can slowly learn to take their place. But when an entire group of neurons in a specific brain region malfunctions, it can impede in the proper functioning of the mind, just like when a huge number of people in an entire state or district stop working, it can affect the functioning of the entire nation.

Consciousness is simply the brain’s neural response to its surrounding environmental stimuli. Hence when the neural circuits malfunction, Consciousness tends to malfunction as well.

...epilepsijos metu būdavo viena stadija prieš pat priepuolį (jeigu tik priepuolis ištikdavo dar su sąmone), kada staiga, užėjus liūdesiui, dvasinei tamsai, slogumui, protarpiais tarytum įsiliepsnodavo jo smegenyse ir nepaprastai įsitempdavo iš karto visos jo gyvybinės galios. Gyvybės, sąmoningumo pojūtis beveik dešimteriopai padidėdavo tomis akimirkomis, kurios praeidavo kaip žaibas. Protas, širdis nutviksdavo nepaprasta šviesa; visas jo susijaudinimas, visos dvejonės, visas nerimas tarytum nuščiūdavo iš karto, ištirpdavo kažin kokioje aukštesnėje rimtyje, sklidinoje giedro, harmoningo džiaugsmo ir vilties, sklidinoje išminties bei galutinės priežasties. Bet tokie momentai, tie pragiedruliai tik pranašaudavo tą galutinę sekundę (niekuomet ne ilgiau nei vieną sekundę), kurią prasidėdavo pats priepuolis.

Even though it is common knowledge in our field of Neuroscience, I take immense pleasure every time I realize that our perception of the whole universe emerges from the activity of the little specks of jelly inside our skull.

​Everything that makes you, you, is a biologically existential expression of your entire brain.

Each of us is on our own trajectory – steered by our genes and our experiences – and as a result every brain has a different internal life. Brains are as unique as snowflakes.

In the statistical gargon used in psychology, p refers to the probability that the difference you see between two groups (of introverts and extroverts, say, or males and females) could have occurred by chance. As a general rule, psychologists report a difference between two groups as 'significant' if the probability that it could have occurred by chance is 1 in 20, or less. The possibility of getting significant results by chance is a problem in any area of research, but it's particularly acute for sex differences research. Supppose, for example, you're a neuroscientist interested in what parts of the brain are involved in mind reading. You get fifteen participants into a scanner and ask them to guess the emotion of people in photographs. Since you have both males and females in your group, you rin a quick check to ensure that the two groups' brains respond in the same way. They do. What do you do next? Most likely, you publish your results without mentioning gender at all in your report (except to note the number of male and female participants). What you don't do is publish your findings with the title "No Sex Differences in Neural Circuitry Involved in Understanding Others' Minds." This is perfectly reasonable. After all, you weren't looking for gender difference and there were only small numbers of each sex in your study. But remember that even if males and females, overall, respond the same way on a task, five percent of studies investigating this question will throw up a "significant" difference between the sexes by chance. As Hines has explained, sex is "easily assessed, routinely evaluated, and not always reported. Because it is more interesting to find a difference than to find no difference, the 19 failures to observe a difference between men and women go unreported, whereas the 1 in 20 finding of a difference is likely to be published." This contributes to the so-called file-drawer phenomenon, whereby studies that do find sex differences get published, but those that don't languish unpublished and unseen in a researcher's file drawer.

Genes come together to construct a magnificent life-form, while neurons come together to form our Illusion of Consciousness.

Genetics, accidents of birth or events in early childhood have left criminals' brains and bodies with measurable flaws predisposing them to committing assault, murder and other antisocial acts. .... Many offenders also have impairments in their autonomic nervous system, the system responsible for the edgy, nervous feeling that can come with emotional arousal. This leads to a fearless, risk-taking personality, perhaps to compensate for chronic under-arousal. Many convicted criminals, like the Unabomber, have slow heartbeats. It also gives them lower heart rates, which explains why heart rate is such a good predictor of criminal tendencies. The Unabomber, Ted Kaczynski, for example, had a resting heart rate of just 54 beats per minute, which put him in the bottom 3 per cent of the population.

​God is hardwired within the neural circuitry.

If I ask you, are you conscious right now? You'd go right ahead and tell me - yes. That's because your conscious mind is constructing an awareness in you about everything around you. And underneath that operation of your conscious mind, there are billions of neurons working in proper harmony.

It is difficult to overstate the importance of understanding mirror neurons and their function. They may well be central to social learning, imitation, and the cultural transmission of skills and attitudes—perhaps even of the pressed-together sound clusters we call words. By hyperdeveloping the mirror-neuron system, evolution in effect turned culture into the new genome. Armed with culture, humans could adapt to hostile new environments and figure out how to exploit formerly inaccessible or poisonous food sources in just one or two generations—instead of the hundreds or thousands of generations such adaptations would have taken to accomplish through genetic evolution. Thus culture became a significant new source of evolutionary pressure, which helped select brains that had even better mirror-neuron systems and the imitative learning associated with them. The result was one of the many self-amplifying snowball effects that culminated in Homo sapiens, the ape that looked into its own mind and saw the whole cosmos reflected inside.

It's been long since thinking humanity has learnt that love is a majestic creation of the brain, yet that knowledge hasn't made love be deemed any less glorious. Then why should it threaten the religious believer to learn that divinity as well is a natural creation of the brain?

Look, you can't think of a person like it's one thing, one 'I' that decides everything. The brain is a collective, a huge number of all these thinking modules. It doesn't make a decision, it arrives at one.

Memory is the binding foam of our mental life.

Memory is the coherence of life, that possesses all your emotions, and ambitions. Without it, your joyous as well as agonizing experiences of life won’t have any significance to you whatsoever.

Nonconformists aren't just going against the grain; they're going against the brain. Either their brains aren't taking the easy way out to begin with, or in standing apart from their peers, these students are standing up to their biology.

Our memories are not static. Each time we reach for one, we refresh and form new neuron connections, in fact changing the memory itself via our contemplation of it. Like Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle — we can observe a particle’s momentum or its position but not both simultaneously — each time we recall a particular event, we change it due to that recollection. After the mental touch, the memory is no longer the same. And this is true not just in some metaphorical sense, but in a real, tangible, physical way — the act of recall alters the neuron structures forever! And yet we eagerly recollect our favorite memories, and we just as eagerly try to forget the painful ones (and the very act of thinking of those painful memories makes them that much stronger, that much more connected and integrated into our neural memory networks).

Our tests, our approaches...are ridiculously inadequate. They only show us deficits, they do not show us powers; they only show us puzzles and schemata, when we need to see music, narrative, play, a being conducting itself spontaneously in its own natural way.

Presiding over the entire attack there will be, in du Bois Reymond's words, "a general feeling of disorder," which may be experienced in either physical or emotional terms, and tax or elude the patient's powers of description.

I guess I was sad that love was not real? Or not all that real, anyway? I guess I was sad that love could feel so real and the next minute be gone, and all because of something Abnesti was doing.

In this universe, all we perceive is a virtual reality created by the neurons.

​I wanted to present Neuroscience to people in a way that would diminish their differences.

Lithium regulates the proteins that control the body’s inner clock. This clock runs, oddly, on DNA, inside special neurons deep in the brain. Special proteins attach to people’s DNA each morning, and after a fixed time they degrade and fall off. Sunlight resets the proteins over and over, so they hold on much longer. In fact, the proteins fall off only after darkness falls—at which point the brain should “notice” the bare DNA and stop producing stimulants. This process goes awry in manic-depressives because the proteins, despite the lack of sunlight, remain bound fast to their DNA. Their brains don’t realize they should stop revving. Lithium helps cleave the proteins from DNA so people can wind down. Notice that sunlight still trumps lithium during the day and resets the proteins; it’s only when the sunlight goes away at night that lithium helps DNA shake free. Far from being sunshine in a pill, then, lithium acts as “anti-sunlight.” Neurologically, it undoes sunlight and thereby compresses the circadian clock back to twenty-four hours—preventing both the mania bubble from forming and the Black Tuesday crash into depression.

Mother Nature created God as a neurological anti-depressant sentiment, but Man tore that God apart into pieces and made citadels of differentiation out of them.

Naturalism is the least subjective reality in this human world.

Neuron is to Consciousness, what D.N.A. is to Life. Thus, Biology of Mind is to the twenty-first century, what Biology of Life was to the twentieth century.

Pathology can indeed evoke experiences of Absolute Godliness, but not all God experiences are caused by pathology. They can also occur due to disturbance in the geomagnetic field of our planet, consumption of psychedelics, excruciatingly extreme level of stress during a near- death situation, or ultimately through a natural and healthy procedure of meditation or/and prayer.

Planning. Short-term memory. Attention. At first glance, these three frontal lobe functions can seem like diverse activities that just happen to be packed into the same brain region. But on closer inspection it turns out that they are facets of the same basic phenomenon of 'restraint'. Planning restrains our brains from wandering from a chosen path of activity. Short-term memory retrains sensory cortex from moving on to different imagery. Attention constrains the kind of sensory data admitted to sensory cortex.

Self is an illusory by-product of the brain's response to the environment, with the purpose of survival of life. However, within the subjective realm of the human mind, due to higher brain capacities, the self is capable of creating its own illusory purpose, in an attempt to provide meaning in life.

The brain is provided with a number of enzyme systems which serve to co-ordinate its workings. Some of these enzymes regulate the supply of glucose to the brain cells. Mescalin inhibits the production of these enzymes and thus lowers the amount of glucose available to an organ that is in constant need of sugar. When mescalin reduces the brain’s normal ration of sugar what happens? Too few cases have been observed, and therefore a comprehensive answer cannot yet be given. But what happens to the majority of the few who have taken mescalin under supervision can be summarized as follows…

Recently, the search for what he calls "the splinters that make up different attention problems" has taken Castellanos in a new direction. First, he explains that your brain is far less concerned with your brilliant ideas or searing emotions than with its own internal "gyroscopic busyness," which consumes 65 percent of its total energy. Every fifty seconds, its activity fluctuates, causing what he calls a "brownout." No one knows the purpose of these neurological events, but Castellanos has a thesis: the clockwork pulses enable the brain's circuits to stay "logged on" and available to communicate with one another, even when they're not being used. "Imagine you're a cabdriver on your day off," Castellanos says. "You don't need to use your workday circuits on a Sunday, but to keep those channels open, your brain sends a ping through them every minute or so. The fluctuations are the brain's investment in maintaining its circuits online.

Reality is neurology, and is not absolute.

The association between the post-encephalitic syndrome and demyelination or incomplete myelination of the brain seems quite secure. And the fact that encephalitis -including that caused by vaccination- can cause demyelination has been known since the 1920's!

The human brain is the universe's most implausible science experiment.

The human brain takes in information from other people and incorporates it with the information coming from its own senses, neuroscientist Gregory Berns has written. Many times, the group's opinion trumps the individual's before he even becomes aware of it.

The human construct of the so-called reality is prone to self−deception. One way or another, we all are being deceived by our own mind. We always see what we want to see.

The neurons create who you are. They create your passions. They create your ambitions. They create your unique identity, based on experiences.

The Kingdom of God is an earthly experience which manifests in an unearthly manner.

The lessons of relationship that our primordial ancestors learned are deeply encoded in the genetics of our neurobiological circuits of love. They are present from the moment we are born and activated at puberty by the cocktail of neurochemicals. It’s an elegant synchronized system. At first our brain weighs a potential partner, and if the person fits our ancestral wish list, we get a spike in the release of sex chemicals that makes us dizzy with a rush of unavoidable infatuation. It’s the first step down the primeval path of pair-bonding.

...the [mental] organization of grammar [is] a case where complexity in the mind is not caused by learning; learning is caused by complexity in the mind.

The marvelous interplay of various brain circuits creates our instinctual reality of the daily life.