Neuroscientist Quotes

Santiago Ramón y Cajal

Francis Crick

Rita Levi-Montalcini

Otto Loewi

Sam Harris

Roger Wolcott Sperry

George Wald

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

The axis cylinders of all nerve fibers (motor, secretory, sensitive and sensory, conducting centrifugally or centripetally) have been proved to proceed directly from the cells. A connection with a fiber network, or an origin from such a network, does not take place.

Heinrich Wilhelm Gottfried

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

A drug is a substance which, if injected into a rabbit, produces a paper.

Unhappily for the physiologist, the subjects of the principal department of his science, that of animal physiology, are sentient beings; and every experiment, every new or unusual situation of such a being, is necessarily attended by pain or suffering of a bodily or mental kind.

Marshall Hall (physiologist)

The study of the causes of things must be preceded by the study of things caused.

John Hughlings Jackson

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

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.

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.

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

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

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

William Grey Walter

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

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

Nayef Al-Rodhan

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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.

I believe that excessive admiration for the work of great minds is one of the most unfortunate preoccupations of intellectual youth — along with a conviction that certain problems cannot be attacked, let alone solved, because of one's relatively limited abilities.

Santiago Ramón y Cajal