20th-century Neuroscientist Quotes

Cognitivism bridges the chasm between what the writer C. P. Snow has called the "two cultures" — the widening gap between the world view of the scientist and the humanist. The Caltech philosopher W. T. Jones has called this the crisis of contemporary culture.

Roger Wolcott Sperry

The most important thing about a name, after all, is that it remain attached to the thing it designates. One wishes that once a name had come into common use for an organism, it could be stabilized for the use of busy persons who want nothing but that each animal have a name.

Nowadays most people know what DNA is, or if they don't know it must be a dirty word, like "chemical" or "synthetic."

If we cannot find our way to a time when most of us are willing to admit that, at the very least, we are not sure whether or not God wrote some of our books, then we need only count the days to Armageddon-because God has given us far many more reasons to kill one another than to turn the other cheek.

No more would I go along with Plato in exiling the poets, who play on the limbic cortex. Not even they are powerful enough to evoke the whole of man. If we are to survive our own destruction of our world and of ourselves by our advance of culture we had better learn soon to modify our genes to make us more intelligent. It is our last chance, that by increasing our diversity we may be able to make some sort of man that can survive without an ecological niche on this our earth. We may be able to live in gas masks and eat algae and distill the ocean.
I doubt that we have time enough.

We are, I think, nearing the end of a course that left the main line of evolution to overspecialize in brain to its own undoing.
Time will tell.

Warren S. McCulloch

Vision is the process of discovering from images what is present in the world, and where it is.

Policies should take account of the emotional dimensions of human behaviour rather than assuming rational action.

Nayef Al-Rodhan