Neuroscience Quotes

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

~ Abhijit Naskar

Neuroscience makes us connect with each other at an emotional level. It makes us make friends. It makes us dream more positively. It makes us more optimistic about ourselves and the world even in our darkest days. It makes us achieve our goal endowed with strength even through immense miseries. It allows us to attain the subjective reality of our fellow humans. Imbued with the understanding of the mind we can walk in the shoes of other people.

~ Abhijit Naskar

What you today perceive as beautiful and special, over time, becomes not so special. That’s how the human brain works.

~ Abhijit Naskar

Modern society is modern because of its mental cocktail of reasoning and compassion. Turn the compassion network in the brain off, and it will be a society of heartless robots. On the other hand, turn the reasoning network off, and it will be a society of dumb sentimental apes.

~ Abhijit Naskar

Through Neurotheology, I and my fellow scientists of twenty-first century have already taken the first step from the side of Science, to diminish the gap between Science and Religion. Now it is time for Religion to do the same.

~ Abhijit Naskar

There is certainly a universal and unconscious propensity to impose a rhythm even when one hears a series of identical sounds at constant intervals... We tend to hear the sound of a digital clock, for example, as tick-tock, tick-tock - even though it is actually tick tick, tick tick.

~ Oliver Sacks

When you say to someone “follow your heart”, it actually refers to the rhetorical representation of various emotions, that are precisely produced from neural activity of the limbic system. So, the metaphoric heart we always boast about while giving advice to our friends, is actually not anywhere near the biological organ known as heart. Rather it too, like all other elements of the human mind exists only in the brain.

~ Abhijit Naskar

Maybe the human brain is an object beyond the reach of metaphor, for the simple reason that it is the only object capable of creating metaphors to describe itself. There really is nothing else like it. The human brain creates the human mind, and then the human mind tries to underhand the human brain, however long it takes and whatever the cost.

~ Luke Dittrich

One way or another we are all biased, but still we have the modern cortical capacity to choose whether or not to let the harmful biases dictate our behavior.

~ Abhijit Naskar

Good and evil are both fundamental features of the human mind.

~ Abhijit Naskar

Every single human being is neurologically predisposed to be biased in various walks of life. It is biologically impossible to be absolutely free from all biases, nevertheless, the more a person rigorously trains the self to be rational and conscientious, the more that self becomes strong enough to keep the biases in check, never to let them run rampant over the psyche.

~ Abhijit Naskar

The human brain always concocts biases to aid in the construction of a coherent mental life, exclusively suitable for an individual’s personal needs.

~ Abhijit Naskar

Humans are not simply higher than Gods, Gods are mere mystical representations of the humans themselves.

~ Abhijit Naskar

Every living creature on this planet, has a conscious subjective perspective of the world. Even the plants may seem to us as standing indifferent to the human sufferings, but even they have their own unique mental universe. They have their own way of interacting with the environment.

~ Abhijit Naskar

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.

~ Abhijit Naskar

You know who you are and what you are capable of, because of your own personal history and the experiences you gained throughout that history.

~ Abhijit Naskar

Memory is the binding foam of our mental life.

~ Abhijit Naskar

​As the neurobiology of our species gets more and more complicated, its functional expression, which we call the mind, shall get more vivid and productive.

~ Abhijit Naskar

Each of your brains creates its own myth about the universe.

~ Abhijit Naskar

The causal, abstract, binary, holistic, and reductionist functions of the human brain all help you to process the enormous amount of information coming into our brain from the external world every day.

~ Abhijit Naskar

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.

~ Abhijit Naskar

It is pretty simple - mind is a part of life - consciousness is a part of mind - God is a part of consciousness.

~ Abhijit Naskar

It is much easier to concentrate the mind on external things, than to concentrate on the mind itself. For example, a Neuroscientist can be the smartest man (or woman) on earth in his understanding of the human mind. He may know all the neurochemical changes underlying an outrageous behavior of a person. But when he gets mad himself, very little of his own scientific intellect would actually come in handy for him to control his rage. The virtue of self-control is a skill, which requires practice, regardless of all the neurobiological expertise in the world.

~ Abhijit Naskar

All human experiences, from the feeling of love, to the presence of God emerge from various brain activity.

~ Abhijit Naskar

Meditation has also been proven scientifically to untangle and rewire the neurological pathways in the brain that make up the conditioned personality. Buddhist monks, for example, have had their brains scanned by scientists as they sat still in deep altered states of consciousness invoked by transcendental meditation and the scientists were amazed at what they beheld. The frontal lobes of the monks lit up as bright as the sun! They were in states of peace and happiness the scientists had never seen before. Meditation invokes that which is known in neuroscience as neuroplasticity; which is the loosening of the old nerve cells or hardwiring in the brain, to make space for the new to emerge. Meditation, in this sense, is a fire that burns away the old or conditioned self, in the Bhagavad Gita, this is known as the Yajna;“All karma or effects of actions are completely burned away from the liberated being who, free from attachment, with his physical mind enveloped in wisdom (the higher self), performs the true spiritual fire rite.

~ Craig Krishna

​Consciousness is simple, if you are bold enough to accept it as simple.

~ Abhijit Naskar

It's better not to hold your feelings inside too much and express them to a dear one freely, than to pay thousands of dollars to a psychiatrist for the same outburst of emotions later. Emotions are a bonding mechanism for humans. So, use ‘em, abuse ‘em and utilize ‘em.

~ Abhijit Naskar

We are but a bunch of neurons.

~ Abhijit Naskar

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.

~ Abhijit Naskar

The self is a repeatedly reconstructed biological state.

~ António R. Damásio

in simple terms, what you perceive as real, is actually a neurological reconstruction or simulation of the actual real thing. It’s not as simple as saying, we see as it is. Actually we do not ever see as it is.

~ Abhijit Naskar

Memorizing facts and then regurgitating them into carefully crafted words is not science people. It’s intellectual bulimia. Real science happens when we explore what we don’t know. The first law of understanding the human brain and the mind within, is to be an explorer.

~ Abhijit Naskar

The pattern recognition theory of mind that I articulate in this book is based on a different fundamental unit: not the neuron itself, but rather an assembly of neurons, which I estimate to number around a hundred. The wiring and synaptic strengths within each unit are relatively stable and determined genetically—that is the organization within each pattern recognition module is determined by genetic design. Learning takes place in the creation of connections between these units, not within them, and probably in the synaptic strengths of the interunit connections.

~ Ray Kurzweil

When I am fully immersed in my work of nourishing humanity, it fills my head with all kinds of feel-good chemicals, such as endorphins, serotonin and dopamine. Problems occur during the brief intervals between the finishing of one work and the beginning of another. During these intervals, my biology starts to get filled with stress hormones cortisol and adrenalin, that worsens my OCD. That is why, I can’t sit still even a day after I finish writing a book. Because if I do, my OCD begins to suffocate me inside my head. Hence, as soon as I deliver a work, I have to start working on my next scientific literature.

~ Abhijit Naskar

Reality is a construct of chemicals.

~ Abhijit Naskar

In every walk of life, you do have the freedom to choose, but that freedom is based on the perception of the world and yourself which you have gained until that moment of life.

~ Abhijit Naskar

You are not even seeing most of what's going on in the universe. On top of that, your brain filters out much of what it receives from the environment. So that what you are consciously aware of is only a fractional representation of your universe.

~ Abhijit Naskar

Even though the world hails Joan of Arc as some sort of hero, which she undoubtedly was, what pains me the most is that her pathological condition ultimately led to her demise at the age of only nineteen.

~ Abhijit Naskar

​The universe perceives itself through us, or to be more specific, through our neurons.

~ Abhijit Naskar

Pathology can indeed cause experiences of the Kingdom of God, but not all God experiences are caused by pathology.

~ Abhijit Naskar