20th-century Neuroscientist Quotes

Francis Crick

Rita Levi-Montalcini

Sam Harris

Roger Wolcott Sperry

George Wald

Wilder Penfield

Vilayanur S. Ramachandran

The road is long and branching, distractions and obstacles are many, the goal is hazy and far away, pilgrims speak in many tongues. But we can look back and see progress, or look up and see some exciting peaks.

Theodore Holmes Bullock

There's a tendency when scientists are looking at data to try to validate their own idea. The best scientists try to prove themselves wrong.

Of course, if you can predict the consequences of your own experiments before they commence, your research is very likely to be boring.

Solomon H. Snyder

For the first time in three hundred years science is admitting spiritual values into its explorations.

Karl H. Pribram

The microscope and telescope opened up unexpectedly vast domains of scientific discovery. A similar opportunity has now been created in the study of human cognition by the introduction of methods to visualize the brain systems involved as we think.

It is truly amazing that, with much less neuroscientific knowledge available, Hayek's model comes closer, in some respects, to being neurophysiologically verifiable than those models developed 50 to 60 years after his.

There is first the problem of acquiring content, which is learning. There is another problem of acquiring learning skills, which is not merely learning, but learning to learn, not velocity, but acceleration. Learning to learn is one of the great inventions of living things. It is tremendously important. It makes evolution, biological as well as social, go faster. And it involves the development of the individual.

Ralph W. Gerard

Just as important as getting enough sleep is thinking about sleep in the right way. Stop thinking of sleep and naps as downtime or as a waste of time. Think of them as opportunities for memory consolidation and enhancing the brain circuits that help skill learning. Nor should you feel guilty about sleep. It's just as crucial a part of successful brain work as the actual task itself.

When we contemplate the whole globe as one great dewdrop, striped and dotted with continents and islands, flying through space with other stars all singing and shining together as one, the whole universe appears as an infinite storm of beauty.

Richard G. Morris

The tension felt in the modern world between those who look at the confluence of neuroscientific data, historical data, and other information illuminating our past and those who simply accept received wisdom as their guide in life is real and profound. Yet it may not be as divisive as one would think. It appears that all of us share the same moral networks and systems, and we all respond in similar ways to similar issues. The only thing different, then, is not our behavior but our theories about why we respond the way we do. It seems to me that understanding that our theories are the source of all our conflicts would go a long way in helping people with different belief systems to get along.

Michael Gazzaniga

Prediction is not just one of the things your brain does. It is the primary function of the neo-cortex, and the foundation of intelligence.

Although homosexual behavior is very common in the animal world, it seems to be very uncommon that individual animals have a long-lasting predisposition to engage in such behavior to the exclusion of heterosexual activities. Thus, a homosexual orientation, if one can speak of such thing in animals, seems to be a rarity.

If the cells and fibres in one human brain were all stretched out end to end, they would certainly reach to the moon and back. Yet the fact that they are not arranged end to end enabled man to go there himself. The astonishing tangle within our heads makes us what we are.

Colin Blakemore

I realized that there was a thrilling undiscovered country to be explored in the mechanisms of the mammalian nervous system. Through it, one might approach the mystery of the mind...

Wilder Penfield

The brain seems to be made up of a bewildering complexity of parts, and the cells within the parts seem to be characterized by an inscrutable complexity of form, extent, and relationships with each other.

Gordon M. Shepherd

Leaving out appraisal also would render the biological description of the phenomena of emotion vulnerable to the caricature that emotions without an appraisal phase are meaningless events. It would be more difficult to see how beautiful and amazingly intelligent emotions can be, and how powerfully they can solve problems for us.

António Damásio

In our current understanding of science, we can't find the physical gap in which to slip free will - the uncaused causer - because there seems to be no part of the machinery that does not follow in a causal relationship from the other parts.

Babies did not attract me, and I was altogether without the maternal sense so highly developed in small and adolescent girls.

Rita Levi-Montalcini

Emotions are neuropeptides attached to receptors and stimulating an electrical charge on neurons.

Here is this mass of jelly - three pound mass of jelly - that you can hold in the palm of your hand, and it can contemplate the vastness of interstellar space, it can contemplate the meaning of infinity, and it can contemplate itself contemplating the meaning of infinity.

Vilayanur S. Ramachandran

Time's a funny thing, bending, warping, stretching, and compressing, all depending on perspective.

My stroke of insight would be: peace is only a thought away, and all we have to do to access it is silence the voice of our dominating left mind.

Jill Bolte Taylor

Essentially, we humans live well enough and long enough, and are smart enough, to generate all sorts of stressful events purely in our heads.

Robert Sapolsky

The mechanism of learning is of course one of the most enthralling and baffling mysteries in the field of biology.

William Grey Walter

We must be careful, however, not to let the process of acquiring new ideas interfere with the detailed knowledge that our vehicle has assiduously collected and carefully stored in many associative connections during its lifetime. We know that this may happen in humans who are overly dedicated to the development of ideas. They tend to connect many individual cases into general categories ad then use the categories as if they were things, losing the potential for categorizing in other ways by remembering each instance.

Valentino Braitenberg