Brain Quotes

500+ Sourced quotes

One can imagine a computer simulation of the action of peptides in the hypothalamus that is accurate down to the last synapse. But equally one can imagine a computer simulation of the oxidation of hydrocarbons in a car engine or the action of digestive processes in a stomach when it is digesting pizza. And the simulation is no more the real thing in the case of the brain than it is in the case of the car or the stomach. Barring miracles, you could not run your car by doing a computer simulation of the oxidation of gasoline, and you could not digest pizza by running the program that simulates such digestion. It seems obvious that a simulation of cognition will similarly not produce the effects of the neurobiology of cognition.

The human brain is generally regarded as a complex web of adaptations built into the nervous system, even though no one knows how.

Michael Gazzaniga

To drink pure water from a shallow pond one should gently take the water from the surface without disturbing the pond in the least. If it is disturbed, the sediments rise up and make the whole water muddy. If you desire to be pure, have firm faith, and slowly go on with your devotional practices, without wasting your energy in useless scriptural discussions and arguments. Your little brain will otherwise be muddled.

Adron always had a thing for expensive ho's with the intelligence of backwash. You look like you actually have both a brain and a soul. (Zarina)

Sherrilyn Kenyon

It is only in some corner of the brain which we leave empty that Vice can obtain a lodging. When she knocks at your door, my son, be able to say, No room for your ladyship—pass on.

Edward Bulwer-Lytton

As it is a major component of blood, water is vital for transporting oxygen to the brain. Heaven forbid that your blood should dry out.

The quickness and flexibility of a well mind, a belief or hope that things will eventually sort themselves out-these are the resources lost to a person when the brain is ill.

Kay Redfield Jamison

My brain's dead weight, I'm tryin' to get my head straight, but I can't figure out which Spice Girl I want to impregnate.

My heart was filled with gratitude, with thankfulness, and went out in love to all the heroes, the thinkers who gave their lives for the liberty of hand and brain... to all the wise, the good, the brave of every land, whose thoughts and deeds have given freedom to the sons of men. And then I vowed to grasp the torch that they had held, and hold it high, that light might conquer darkness still.

Robert G. Ingersoll

"Reason and Instinct!" How we love to play with words that please our pride;
Our noble race's mean descent by false forged titles seek to hide! For "gift divine" I bid you read the better work of higher brain,
From Instinct diff'ering in degree as golden mine from leaden vein.

Richard Francis Burton

Write and bulletin your thoughts on paper so it would be like bulletins in your brain too.

Elia M. Ramollah

Depression is a wimp of a word for a howling tempest in the brain.

Music's evolutionary origin is established because it is present across all humans; it has been around for a long time; it involves specialized brain structures... and it is analogous to music making in other species.

Really, he could have just punched me in the stomach, because my brain refused to comprehend the words he was saying. A physical assault, it might have understood.

You know how it is with some girls. They seem to take the stuffing right out of you. I mean to say, there is something about their personality that paralyses the vocal cords and reduces the contents of the brain to cauliflower.

P. G. Wodehouse

Good judgement is through good drawing – from the nervous system to the sensory of the brain it is the combination of eurythmics, euphony and poetry, and when the good draughtsman draws, the muses come to dance. Then the imagination is given full play, and design happens. They then become the Muses.

Of what she said to me that night—no matter.
The strange thing came next day.
My brain was full of music—something she played me—;
I couldn't remember it all, but phrases of it
Wreathed and wreathed among faint memories,
Seeking for something, trying to tell me something,
Urging to restlessness: verging on grief.
I tried to play the tune, from memory,—
But memory failed: the chords and discords climbed
And found no resolution—only hung there,
And left me morbid... Where, then, had I heard it?...

Madness strips you of memory and leaves you scrabbling around on the floor of your brain for the snatches and snippets of what happened, what was said, and when.

Marya Hornbacher

We are different because our brain is wired differently. This causes us to perceive the world in different ways and have different values and priorities. Not better or worse - different.

Gu was a worrier, a neurotic curmudgeon. If he had a headache, it was a brain tumor; if it looked like rain, this year's harvest was ruined. This was his way of controlling the situation, his lifelong strategy for always coming out ahead. Now, when reality looked more dire than any of his fatalisitic predictions, he had no choice but to turn tail and charge in the opposite direction.

Cognitive introspective psychology and related cognitive science can no longer be ignored experimentally, or written off as "a science of epiphenomena", nor either as something that must, in principle, reduce eventually to neurophysiology. The events of inner experience, as emergent properties of brain processes, become themselves explanatory causal constructs in their own right, interacting at their own level with their own laws and dynamics. The whole world of inner experience (the world of the humanities) long rejected by 20th century scientific materialism, thus becomes recognized and included within the domain of science.

Roger Wolcott Sperry

Why is it so hard to keep the mind concentrated, and to live up to our good resolutions? The problem is the basically mechanical nature of our left-brain consciousness. We have a kind of robot servant who does things for us: we learn to type or drive a car, painfully and consciously, then our robot takes over, and does it far more quickly and efficiently. Because man is the most complex creature on Earth, he is forced to rely on his robot far more than other animals. The result is that, whenever he gets tired, the robot takes over. For the modern city dweller, most of his everyday living is done by the robot. This is why it takes an emergency to concentrate the mind 'wonderfully', and why we forget so quickly.

If you use conventional data compression on the [human brain's] genome, you get about 23 million bytes (a small fraction of the size of Microsoft Word), which is a level of complexity we can handle.

The truth is, the science of Nature has been already too long made only a work of the brain and the fancy: It is now high time that it should return to the plainness and soundness of observations on material and obvious things.

Habits, scientists say, emerge because the brain is constantly looking for ways to save effort.