Brain Quotes

How your brain developed during your first five years has had an enormous impact on how well you learn and cope today. Again, the most important thing to keep in mind is that you are made of cells and cells change. So even if you didn’t get the best start, you can have a fantastic finish.

~ Toni Sorenson

Understanding your own anatomy and how it functions is crucial to changing your thinking and changing your life.

~ Toni Sorenson

Physical brains are subject to the laws of physics; mental states are subject to the laws of logic. Those who think mental states are entirely physical hold a logically contradictory position. In order to think rationally about their thoughts , they must have the freedom to do so, but this freedom is unavailable if the laws of physics and chemistry are controlling their thoughts.

~ J. Warner Wallace

The supposedly immaterial soul, we now know, can be bisected with a knife, altered by chemicals, started or stopped by electricity, and extinguished by a sharp blow or by insufficient oxygen.

~ Steven Pinker

While physical states can be publicly known, mental states are only privately known. This characteristic of the mind is not shared with the brain; the properties of the brain and the mind are not identical.

~ J. Warner Wallace

We read each other through our eyes, and anatomically they are an extension of our brains. When we catch someone's eye, we look into a mind.

~ Siri Hustvedt

Language and hearing are seated in the cerebral cortex, the folded gray matter that covers the first couple of millimeters of the outer brain like wrapping paper. When one experiences silence, absent even reading, the cerebral cortex typically rests. Meanwhile, deeper and more ancient brain structures seem to be activated--the subcortical zones. People who live busy, noisy lives are rarely granted access to these areas. Silence, it appears, is not the opposite of sound. It is another world altogether, literally offering a deeper level of thought, a journey to the bedrock of the self.

~ Michael Finkel

Audition requires different neurological processes than vision, or smell. And I would suggest that we hear more than we see while we are reading.

~ Peter Mendelsund

The more you use your brain, the more brain you will have to use. —George A. Dorsey, anthropologist

~ Meg Jay

The level of intelligence has been tremendously increased, because people are thinking and communicating in terms of screens, and not in lettered books. Much of the real action is taking place in what is called cyberspace. People have learned how to boot up, activate, and transmit their brains.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.

~ Timothy Leary

Creativity is the highest form of intelligence. Over time, after developing a more advanced creative brain, I started feeling that my college education was more so something to be ashamed of rather than something to be proud of.

~ Criss Jami

The mother was holding a baby, had a stroller with what looked like twin girls around three, and had a five-year-old boy who was running around the shelves with a finger shoved up his nose. I considered warning him that if he fell, he would poke his brain out, but it struck me that losing intelligence was not something he was worried about.

~ Eileen Cook

I will use my mind, not just my regular brain lobes.

~ Peter Bognanni

As in all such technological nightmares, the principal task is to foresee what is possible; to educate use and misuse; and to prevent its organizational, bureaucratic and governmental abuse.

~ Carl Sagan

Natural selection has served as a kind of intellectual sieve, producing brains and intelligences increasingly competent to deal with the laws of nature.

~ Carl Sagan

It is precisely our plasticity, our long childhood, that prevents a slavish adherence to genetically preprogrammed behavior in human beings more than in any other species… Some substantial adjustment of the relative role of each component of the triune brain is well within our powers.

~ Carl Sagan

with rare exceptions (chiefly the social insects), mammals and birds are the only organisms to devote substantial attention to the care of their young; an evolutionary development that, through the long period of plasticity which it permits, takes advantage of the large information-processing capability of the mammalian and primate brains. Love seems to be an invention of the mammals.

~ Carl Sagan

Somewhere in the steaming jungles of the Carboniferous Period there emerged an organism that for the first time in the history of the world had more information in its brains than in its genes. It was an early reptile which, were we to come upon it in these sophisticated times, we would probably not describe as exceptionally intelligent… Much of the history of life since the Carboniferous Period can be described as the gradual (and certainly incomplete) dominance of brains over genes.

~ Carl Sagan

It is very difficult to evolve by altering the deep fabric of life, any change there is likely to be lethal. But fundamental change can be accomplished by the addition of new systems on top of old ones.

~ Carl Sagan

The brain isn't very much like a computer, although it doesn't do a bad job, considering that it's built by unskilled labor and programmed more by pure chance than anything else.

~ Joe Haldeman

Lashley also reported no apparent change in the general behavior of a rat when significant fractions—say 10 percent—of its brain were removed. But no one asked the rat of its opinion.

~ Carl Sagan

Smart thinking is to know what you think and why you think it.

~ Toni Sorenson

Our minds sometimes think best when fueled by another brain's thought. Be willing to consider what someone else thinks before you decide what you think. That way you can know what you think and why you think it.

~ Toni Sorenson

To be naive is to be unaware of how stupid and cruel other people are; but, by some definitions, ignorance is nearly the opposite of naivety in being a kind of cynicism, in being unaware of their intelligence and humanity. It seems to be a normal although unfortunate case that the great many of us consciously abhor ignorance in others yet subconsciously practice it ourselves: as naivety is apparent and well-known to inflict its damage upon oneself; whereas the alternative and the easier, ignorance, its damage upon others.

~ Criss Jami

Are there moments when our brains are not exercising?” I questioned. “That would be almost like being brain dead...

~ Vann Chow

I've got a very nice staff here. People with patience, you know, and good temper, and not too brainy, because if you have people who are brainy, they are bound to be very impatient.

~ Agatha Christie

Your brain is an accelerating gravity free zone. While Intelligence leverages it, Intellectuality erodes it!

~ Vishwanath S J

If my 'mind' don't mind, I don't mind.

~ Amit Kalantri

If you're not a smart worker, it's about how hard you work double the amount from the heart; if you're not a hard worker, it's about how smart you work but times two from the brain.

~ Criss Jami

Be careful not to appear obsessively intellectual. When intelligence fills up, it overflows a parody.

~ Criss Jami

We no longer have any time to waste, entertaining our dark side. It is time we recognize those evil elements of our internal world and start working untiringly on eradicating them.

~ Abhijit Naskar

Just for a second, think, how mysteriously vast the universe is! And you the humans exist only in a tiny fraction of that vastness. You’d realize how insignificant you are if you compare yourself with the vastness of the universe. Your universe is everything that is out there. Your little 3 pound brain has access to only a microscopic percentage of that unfathomable everything. You childishly boast your greatness as a so-called advanced species while you only see a very small strip of what’s really going on in the universe.

~ Abhijit Naskar

I am insane, does that surprise you? Ha! I think my mind is crumbling, just like crackers. If I had written five minutes earlier I would have wept, if I had written ten minutes earlier I would have told you to leave me alone, if I wait any longer I won’t write at all.

~ @ Neuroticdream Tumblr

When we think we're multitasking we're actually multiswitching. That is what the brain is very good at doing - quickly diverting its attention from one place to the next. We think we're being productive. We are, indeed, being busy. But in reality we're simply giving ourselves extra work.

~ Michael Harris

To let the brain work without sufficient material is like racing an engine. It racks itself to pieces. The sea air, sunshine, and patience, Watson—all else will come.

~ Arthur Conan Doyle

It is in the brain that the poppy is red, that the apple is odorous, that the skylark sings.

~ Oscar Wilde

Our present intricate humanly consciousness evolved after a long journey of struggle. And the beauty of natural selection is that our struggle against nature made us worthy of being rewarded with the 3 lbs. lump of highly advanced biological computer by our Mother Nature herself.

~ Abhijit Naskar

Acquiring a blissful brain and in peace, is when I think positively, the sounds around and within me become music, my movement as one of a conscious dance, my smile breaking in to an infectious laughter, my mind transcending in meditation, and my life grows and becomes a celebration!

~ Angie Karan

I felt a Funeral, in my Brain,And Mourners to and froKept treading – treading – till it seemedThat Sense was breaking through – And when they all were seated,A Service, like a Drum – Kept beating – beating – till I thoughtMy Mind was going numb – And then I heard them lift a BoxAnd creak across my SoulWith those same Boots of Lead, again,Then Space – began to toll,As all the Heavens were a Bell,And Being, but an Ear,And I, and Silence, some strange RaceWrecked, solitary, here – And then a Plank in Reason, broke,And I dropped down, and down – And hit a World, at every plunge,And Finished knowing – then –

~ Emily Dickinson

Dominion does not mean domination. We hold dominion over animals only because of our powerful and ubiquitous intellect. Not because we are morally superior. Not because we have a right to exploit those who cannot defend themselves. Let us use our brain to move toward compassion and away from cruelty, to feel empathy rather than cold indifference, to feel animals' pain in our hearts.

~ Marc Bekoff