Neuroscience Quotes

In truth, there is no such thing as an “intuitive boundary” of a sensory state. That most philosophers take such states as brain-bound is not an intuition, but a prejudice.

~ István Aranyosi

Consciousness is the product of electrochemical signalling in the neurons of your brain. So when the brain stops functioning fully, your consciousness, or to a broader aspect your mind ceases to exist with its unique individualistic qualities. It's like the soothing flow of water. It is only water as long as its internal realm of two atoms of hydrogen and one atom of oxygen, remains intact. If you break that structure which we call H20, it ceases to be water. Likewise a soul remains a soul, as longs as its neural structures remain intact. If you mess with those structure, then the entire personality of the soul may get radically altered. So, to think even further, if those neural structures inside your head stop working, then the soul ceases to exist forever. So, as long as you have a functional brain, you exist, and the moment that brain dies you die.

~ Abhijit Naskar

Perception is like painting a scenery - no matter how beautifully you paint, it will still be a painting of the scenery, not the scenery itself.

~ Abhijit Naskar

Our mistakes rewire our brain and open up new gateways of perception.

~ Abhijit Naskar

Morality does not come to this mortal world from some imaginary paradise. It rises from the neurons of mortal humans.

~ Abhijit Naskar

A healthy PFC means a healthy cognitive grip over the world with very little elements of prejudice.

~ Abhijit Naskar

Everyday conscious awareness of a human being is only the tip of an iceberg, underneath which there is a realm of relatively uncharted apparently mysterious processes, which are likely to be way more complex than the usual waking state.

~ Abhijit Naskar

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.

~ Abhijit Naskar

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

~ Abhijit Naskar

Humanity has pondered over the meaning of God since its beginning. It is one of those cognitive features that came along with the advent of modern Human Consciousness.

~ Abhijit Naskar

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.

~ Abhijit Naskar

We can tell a lot about a creature's level of consciousness by understanding their perception of death.

~ Abhijit Naskar

Science and Religion are two vividly different realms of the human mind. They work differently at the molecular level, but the purpose of both is alleviation of the mind from the darkness of ignorance.

~ Abhijit Naskar

​The human brain creates everything that you are.

~ Abhijit Naskar

The conscious events that we are aware of are physical events in their own right, just as much as the brain events observed in the lab by researchers. If we allow the mental its own existence as a category disjoint from the physical, we will never be able to get it back in.

~ William Hirstein

Now I have to say I'm a complete atheist, I have no religious views myself and no spiritual views, except very watered down humanistic spiritual views, and consciousness is just a fact of life, it's a natural fact of life.

~ David J. Chalmers

Yes, there is an outside world, and yes, there is an objective reality, but in moving through this world, we constantly apply unconscious filter mechanisms, and in doing so, we unknowingly construct our own individual world, which is our reality tunnel.

~ Thomas Metzinger

It is not about whether you have free will, rather it is about whether you have enough experience to make the best possible wilful decision in the current moment of life.

~ Abhijit Naskar

As the language areas of the left hemisphere enter their sensitive period during the middle of the second year of life, grammatical language in the left integrates with the interpersonal and prosodic elements of communication already well developed in the right. As the cortical language centers mature, words are joined together to make sentences and can be used to express increasingly complex ideas flavored with emotion. As the frontal cortex continues to expand and connect with more neural networks, memory improves and a sense of time slowly emerges and autobiographical memory begins to connect the self with places and events, within and across time. The emerging narratives begin to organize the nascent sense of self and become the bedrock of our sense of self in interpersonal and physical space

~ Louis Cozolino

Our insecurities drive us. Our fears control us. We try to hide the first and deny the second and it is exhausting us.

~ David Amerland

The illusion of self-awareness. Happy automatons, running on trivial programs. I'll bet you never guess. From the inside, how can you?

~ Vernor Vinge

Music, uniquely among the arts, is both completely abstract and profoundly emotional. It has no power to represent anything particular or external, but it has a unique power to express inner states or feelings. Music can pierce the heart directly; it needs no mediation.

~ Oliver Sacks

If our well-being depends upon the interaction between events in our brains and events in the world, and there are better and worse ways to secure it, then some cultures will tend to produce lives that are more worth living than others; some political persuasions will be more enlightened than others; and some world views will be mistaken in ways that cause needless human misery.

~ Sam Harris

Morality does not come from a book, it comes from the human mind.

~ Abhijit Naskar

our moral reasoning is plagued by two illusions. The first illusion can be called the wag-the-dog illusion: We believe that our own moral judgment (the dog) is driven by our own moral reasoning (the tail). The second illusion can be called the wag-theother-dog's-tail illusion: In a moral argument, we expect the successful rebuttal of an opponent's arguments to change the opponent's mind. Such a belief is like thinking that forcing a dog's tail to wag by moving it with your hand will make the dog happy.

~ Sam Harris

Current research in any field of Science has not yet reached the point where we could start exploring the existential question regarding God as a Supreme Entity driving causality in the universe. However, as modern Neuroscience progresses further and gets more advanced, we shall get to dive deeper into the physiological processes underneath the Qualia of God in human mind. What we have seen so far through our studies in Neurotheology, is that it is not God himself/herself/itself, rather it is people’s perception of God that influences the human life. The Qualia of God impact all aspects of human life by altering the body chemistry at a cellular level.

~ Abhijit Naskar

Everything a person is and everything he knows resides in the tangled thicket of his intertwined neurons. These fateful, tiny bridges number in the quadrillions, but they spring from just two sources: DNA and daily life. The genetic code calls some synapses into being, while experience engenders and modifies others.(148)

~ Thomas Lewis

Sometimes, humanity surprises me with all its lack of control over the primordial urges. These innate urges are the biological traits that make us similar to the rest of the animal kingdom. But the modern qualities that make us superior to all the animals are intellect and self-control.

~ Abhijit Naskar

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?

~ Abhijit Naskar

The human brain is a cultural artifact. We don't load culture into a virgin brain like software loading into a computer; rather, culture helps to wire the brain. Brains then become carriers of culture, helping to create and perpetuate it.

~ Lisa Feldman Barrett

Are you a kind of person who likes to keep all your emotions hidden from the people around you! Do you prefer restraining your feelings a little too much! In that case, you must know that too much emotional suppression can have catastrophic impact over your body.

~ Abhijit Naskar

I do not see emotions and feelings as the intangible and vaporous qualities that many presume them to be. Their subject matter is concrete, and they can be related to specific systems in body and brain, no less so than vision or speech.

~ António R. Damásio

Even though its common knowledge these days, 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 life, our religious sentiments and even what each of us regards us his own intimate private self - is simply the activity of these little specks of jelly in your head, in your brain. There is nothing else.

~ V.s. Ramachandran

The hormonal interplay inside a woman’s head creates her reality. Her hormones tell her day to day what’s important. They mold her desires and values.

~ Abhijit Naskar

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.

~ Abhijit Naskar

Taking in the good is not about putting a happy shiny face on everything, nor is it about turning away from the hard things in life. It's about nourishing well-being, contentment, and peace inside that are refuges you can always come from and return to.

~ Rick Hanson

The point is not to resist painful experiences or grasp at pleasant ones: that's a kind of craving - and craving leads to suffering. The art is to find a balance in which you remain mindful, accepting, and curious regarding difficult experiences - while also taking in supportive feelings and thoughts.

~ Rick Hanson

An inclusive narrative structure provides the executive brain with the best template and strategy for the oversight and coordination of the functions of mind. A story well told, containing conflicts and resolutions, gestures and expressions, and thoughts flavored with emotion, connects people ad integrates neural networks

~ Louis Cozolino

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.

~ Adrian Raine

Educated people, of course, know that perception, cognition, language, and emotion are rooted in the brain. But it is still tempting to think of the brain as it was shown in old educational cartoons, as a control panel with gauges and levers operated by a user — the self, the soul, the ghost, the person, the “me.” But cognitive neuroscience is showing that the self, too, is just another network of brain systems. [C]ognitive neuroscientists have not only exorcised the ghost but have shown that the brain does not even have a part that does exactly what the ghost is supposed to do: review all the facts and make a decision for the rest of the brain to carry out. Each of us feels that there is a single “I” in control. But that is an illusion that the brain works hard to produce, like the impression that our visual fields are rich in detail from edge to edge. The brain does have supervisory systems in the prefrontal lobes and anterior cingulate cortex, which can push the buttons of behavior and override habits and urges. But those systems are gadgets with specific quirks and limitations; they are not implementations of the rational free agent traditionally identified with the soul or the self.

~ Steven Pinker