Neuroscience Quotes

All deities are external manifestation of humanity's internal divinity.

~ Abhijit Naskar

Our entire neurobiology acts as a giant input-output system, that receives information from the outside world, processes that information and makes a person react accordingly.

~ Abhijit Naskar

Fairytales are healthy for the children. As they grow up, the magical thinking wears off, but the fairytale-induced creative brain circuits stay forever.

~ Abhijit Naskar

Healthy brains create a healthy society.

~ Abhijit Naskar

Humanism is not a single character. It is a magnificent blend of various emotional and behavioral traits that are unique to the human mind.

~ Abhijit Naskar

For a man, the optimal evolutionary strategy is to disseminate his genes as widely as possible, given his few minutes (or, alas, seconds) of investment in each encounter. It all makes simple evolutionary sense, since a woman invests a good deal of time and effort -a nine month long, risky, strenuous pregnancy, in each offspring. Naturally she has to be very discerning in her choice of sexual partners.

~ Abhijit Naskar

When you're anxious, don't immediately trust your automatic thoughts because oftentimes these thoughts are irrational. Thoughts are not facts. They're just thoughts and sometimes don't need to be given so much importance.

~ John Tsilimparis

When a monkey loses a banana to a rival, he feels bad, but he doesn't expand the problem by thinking about it over and over. He looks for another banana. He ends up feeling rewarded rather than harmed. Humans use their extra neurons to construct theories about bananas and end up constructing pain.

~ Loretta Graziano Breuning

From a social psychological standpoint, the selfie phenomenon seems to stem from two basic human motives. The first is to attract attention from other people. Because people’s positive social outcomes in life require that others know them, people are motivated to get and maintain social attention. By posting selfies, people can keep themselves in other people’s minds. In addition, like all photographs that are posted on line, selfies are used to convey a particular impression of oneself. Through the clothes one wears, one’s expression, staging of the physical setting, and the style of the photo, people can convey a particular public image of themselves, presumably one that they think will garner social rewards.

~ Mark R. Leary

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 a narrative, storytelling species. Revealing our own histories, and understanding those of others can really help us appreciate the humanity in all of our fellow individuals.

~ Stephen P. Hinshaw

You know very well what the right choice is, yet you keep making the wrong one.

~ Richard O'connor

... [O]ne of the most influential approaches to thinking about memory in recent years, known as connectionism, has abandoned the idea that a memory is an activated picture of a past event. Connectionist or neural network models are based on the principle that the brain stores engrams by increasing the strength of connections between different neurons that participate in encoding an experience. When we encode an experience, connections between active neurons become stronger, and this specific pattern of brain activity constitutes the engram. Later, as we try to remember the experience, a retrieval cue will induce another pattern of activity in the brain. If this pattern is similar enough to a previously encoded pattern, remembering will occur. The memory in a neural network model is not simply an activated engram, however. It is a unique pattern that emerges from the pooled contributions of the cue and the engram. A neural network combines information in the present environment with patterns that have been stored in the past, and the resulting mixture of the two is what the network remembers... When we remember, we complete a pattern with the best match available in memory; we do not shine a spotlight on a stored picture.

~ Daniel L. Schacter

Thus, the memories that people reported contained little information about the event they were trying to recall (the speaker's tone of voice) but were greatly influenced by the properties of the retrieval cue that we gave them (the positive or negative facial expression).

~ Daniel L. Schacter

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.

~ V.s. Ramachandran

Jumping to conclusions is efficient if the conclusions are likely to be correct and the costs of an occasional mistake acceptable. Jumping to conclusions is risky when the situation is unfamiliar, the stakes are high and there is no time to collect more information.

~ Daniel Kahneman

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.

~ Abhijit Naskar

If you could have sufficient insight into all the inner and outer parts of your mental life, along with remembrance and intelligence enough to consider all the circumstances and take them into account, you would be a true prophet and visualize the future in the present as in a mirror.

~ Abhijit Naskar

Any thought sequence that minimizes anxiety would get reinforced over time. The sequence would be maintained during the person’s development and would be provoked in contexts where refutation of the belief might occur. So, any kind of refutation of a person’s religious beliefs makes the beliefs only stronger.

~ Abhijit Naskar

It is the finding of neuroscience, in fact, that belief is at least in part a matter of emotion. Whatever we believe to be true lights up areas of our brain responsible for self-identification and the processing of feelings and sentiments. If we believe something, then, the object of our belief becomes an emotionally potent aspect of our own self-image. There is some common sense to this, too: the most passionate of believers and the most strident of New Atheists are palpably, visibly fired up and ready to defend their positions.

~ Steve Volk

When people have trouble with their emotions – a bout of anxiety or depression, say, or seasonal gloominess - they often want science to pinpoint an offending neurotransmitter in the way that a witness picks the perp out of a lineup. Is it excessive norepinephrine, too little dopamine, errant estrogen? The answer is apt to dissatisfy: no single suspect can be fingered with confidence because the question itself attributes a fallacious simplicity to the brain.(91)

~ Thomas Lewis

Masturbation and meditation both promote physical and mental wellbeing.

~ Abhijit Naskar

Masturbating is no more sinful than praying or meditating.

~ Abhijit Naskar

A prayer/meditation a day, keeps the Doctor away.

~ Abhijit Naskar

Meditation is good for the elderly, great for adults, even greater for children, and greater still for pregnant women. So, meditate and be well.

~ Abhijit Naskar

Within your mind, there are hardly any lines at all. All its contents flow into each other, sensations becoming thoughts, feelings, desires, actions, and more sensations. This stream of consciousness correlates with a cascade of fleeting neural assemblies, each assembly dispersing into the next one[.]

~ Rick Hanson

The apparent wall between your body and the world is more like a picket fence. And between your mind and the world, it's like a line painted on the sidewalk.

~ Rick Hanson

Thus, on a functional level, your meditation triggers the corresponding neurobiological networks that are responsible for eliciting health effects.

~ Abhijit Naskar

Neurons giveth and neurons taketh away.

~ Abhijit Naskar

A healthy brain leads to a healthy you.

~ Abhijit Naskar

Through the sacred verses filled with violence and self-righteousness, the minds of the angry individuals find a way to get rid of all their misery. At that unstable state of consciousness, they are drawn to the description of the Holy War. They visualize a glimmer of hope. They feel absolutely immersed in it. Finally when they emerge as holy warriors, they are no longer humans, from the emotional perspective. They emerge as wild beasts, neurologically almost unable to feel human emotions, like empathy, love, kindness and compassion. Consequently the whole world faces the wrath of the most primitive of all human elements in the name of God’s judgment.

~ Abhijit Naskar

​God is hardwired within the neural circuitry.

~ Abhijit Naskar

Everything in your mental life proceeds in proper neurological order. If you could have sufficient insight into all the inner and outer parts of your mental life, along with remembrance and intelligence enough to consider all the circumstances and take them into account, you would be a true prophet and visualize the future in the present as in a mirror.

~ Abhijit Naskar

We are who we are because of what we learn and what we remember.

~ Abhijit Naskar

The more emotional you are in a situation, the more memories you’ll have of that situation in the long run.

~ Abhijit Naskar

...education is the ability to retrieve information at will and analyze it. But you can't have higher-level learning- you can't analyze-without retrieving information.' And you can't retrieve information without putting the information in there in the first place. The dichotomy between learning and memorizing is false, Matthews contends. You can't learn without memorizing, and if done right, you can't memorize without learning.

~ Joshua Foer

Most of Jesus’ life is told through the four Gospels of the New Testament, known as the Canonical gospels, written by Matthew, Mark, Luke and John. These are not biographies in the modern sense but accounts with allegorical intent. They are written to engender faith in Jesus as the Messiah and the incarnation of God, and not to provide factual data about Jesus’s life. This left the door of exaggeration open. And through that door all kinds of mystical non-sense crept in and made place right alongside the good philosophical teachings of Jesus.

~ Abhijit Naskar

All states of consciousness, no matter how mystical, ecstatic or divine, are gloriously born through the protoplasmic activity of the brain.

~ Abhijit Naskar

All endeavors, heroic or monstrous, scientific or philosophical, rise from the electrochemical functioning of the mind, that takes place relentlessly in the little specks of protoplasm inside the head. These specks of jelly inside the brain, known as the neurons, determine our identity, personality and everything that we are.

~ Abhijit Naskar

No Scripture comes from any Supreme Creator.

~ Abhijit Naskar