American Neuroscientist Quotes

Sam Harris

Roger Wolcott Sperry

George Wald

Robert Sapolsky

Jill Bolte Taylor

William Grey Walter

Solomon H. Snyder

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

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

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.

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.

The brain, to be sure, is indeed the physical embodiment of the mind, the organ through which the mind finds expression and through which it acts in the world.

Jeffrey M. Schwartz

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.

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

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

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.

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

When confronted with information streaming from the eyes, the brain will interpret this information in the quickest and most efficient way possible. Time is energy. The longer the brain spends performing some calculation, the more energy it consumes. Considering the brain runs on about 40 watts of power (a lightbulb!), it doesn't have a lot of energy to spare.

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

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.

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