Brain Quotes

“You invest so much in it, don't you? It's what elevates you above the beasts of the field, it's what makes you special. Homo sapiens, you call yourself. Wise Man. Do you even know what it is, this consciousness you cite in your own exaltation? Do you even know what it's for?

Maybe you think it gives you free will. Maybe you've forgotten that sleepwalkers converse, drive vehicles, commit crimes and clean up afterwards, unconscious the whole time. Maybe nobody's told you that even waking souls are only slaves in denial.
Make a conscious choice. Decide to move your index finger. Too late! The electricity's already halfway down your arm. Your body began to act a full half-second before your conscious self 'chose' to, for the self chose nothing; something else set your body in motion, sent an executive summary—almost an afterthought— to the homunculus behind your eyes. That little man, that arrogant subroutine that thinks of itself as the person, mistakes correlation for causality: it reads the summary and it sees the hand move, and it thinks that one drove the other.

But it's not in charge. You're not in charge. If free will even exists, it doesn't share living space with the likes of you.
Insight, then. Wisdom. The quest for knowledge, the derivation of theorems, science and technology and all those exclusively human pursuits that must surely rest on a conscious foundation. Maybe that's what sentience would be for— if scientific breakthroughs didn't spring fully-formed from the subconscious mind, manifest themselves in dreams, as full-blown insights after a deep night's sleep. It's the most basic rule of the stymied researcher: stop thinking about the problem. Do something else. It will come to you if you just stop being conscious of it.

Every concert pianist knows that the surest way to ruin a performance is to be aware of what the fingers are doing. Every dancer and acrobat knows enough to let the mind go, let the body run itself. Every driver of any manual vehicle arrives at destinations with no recollection of the stops and turns and roads traveled in getting there. You are all sleepwalkers, whether climbing creative peaks or slogging through some mundane routine for the thousandth time. You are all sleepwalkers.
Don't even try to talk about the learning curve. Don't bother citing the months of deliberate practice that precede the unconscious performance, or the years of study and experiment leading up to the gift- wrapped Eureka moment. So what if your lessons are all learned consciously? Do you think that proves there's no other way? Heuristic software's been learning from experience for over a hundred years.

Machines master chess, cars learn to drive themselves, statistical programs face problems and design the experiments to solve them and you think that the only path to learning leads through sentience? You're Stone-age nomads, eking out some marginal existence on the veldt—denying even the possibility of agriculture, because hunting and gathering was good enough for your parents.
Do you want to know what consciousness is for? Do you want to know the only real purpose it serves? Training wheels. You can't see both aspects of the Necker Cube at once, so it lets you focus on one and dismiss the other. That's a pretty half-assed way to parse reality. You're always better off looking at more than one side of anything. Go on, try. Defocus. It's the next logical step.
Oh, but you can't. There's something in the way. And it's fighting back.”
― Peter Watts

“Through sickness I became notable.”
― Steven Magee

“Intuition is the Ghost in the Machine.”
― Anonymous Creator

“[...] Someone else's blood there. If only someone else's flesh and brain and memory. If only they could have taken her mind along to the dry-cleaner's and emptied the pockets and steamed and cleansed it and reblocked it and brought it back in the morning. If only...”
― Ray Bradbury, Fahrenheit 451

“Instead of trying to produce a programme to simulate the adult mind, why not rather try to produce one which simulates the child's? If this were then subjected to an appropriate course of education one would obtain the adult brain.”
― Alan M. Turing

“I consider my Computer as my third Brain – after my Heart and the one which seems to be in my Head.”
― Sino Melo

“It is hard to be a manager when you cannot manage your own money.”
― Steven Magee

“The brain, with it's gray matter, is the hardware. It is different from the mind, which acts like the software and memory depository.”
― Master Del Pe

“Brain at the base of the mind,
Heart at the base of existence,
Character at the base of the shoulder,
that's all you need to lead a good life.”
― Abhijit Naskar, World War Human: 100 New Earthling Sonnets

“Aggressive airplane passengers probably have a bad case of Altitude Sickness. Many people are hypoxic at airplane cruising altitude. They would be wise to visit a doctor to see if they have lung or heart damage, hypoxic blood, Sleep Apnea, Altitude Hypersensitivity or something else that is causing oxygen starvation to the brain.”
― Steven Magee

“I am at my busiest when I am doing nothing!”
― Steven Magee

“Although many of us may think of ourselves as thinking
creatures that feel, biologically we are feeling creatures that think.”
― Dr. Jill Bolte Taylor, Neuroscientist

“Mental illness is an international crisis!”
― Steven Magee

“I discovered that sometimes the best way to stop my brain from seeking an answer is to tell it I am missing part of the equation.”
― S.D.G., Naked

“Comparing the hippocampal volume of mentally healthy subjects and patients with PTSD, DDNOS, and DID, thus patients with increasing levels of dissociation, an increasingly smaller volume is observed: PTSD (primary structural dissociation), approximately -10%; DDNOS (secondary structural dissociation), approximately -15%; and DID (tertiary structural dissociation), approximately -20%. These findings are characterized by a remarkable relationship: the more severe the structural dissociation of the personality, the smaller the hippocampal volume. Furthermore, Ehling et al. (2008) found high correlations between the volume of these brain structures and psychoform and somatoform symptoms, as well as with the severity of the reported potentially traumatizing events. Correlations between the volume of these brain structures and the degree of general psychopathology and fantasy-proneness were lower or statistically nonsignificant.”
― Onno van der Hart

“It is only water as long as its internal realm of two atoms of hydrogen and one atom of oxygen, remains intact. If you break that structure which we call H20, it ceases to be water. Likewise, a soul remains a soul, as long as its neural structures remain intact. If you mess with those structures, then the entire personality of the soul may get radically altered. So, to think even further, if those neural structures inside your head stop working, then the soul ceases to exist forever.”
― Abhijit Naskar, When Humans Unite: Making A World Without Borders

“Mental health and species health are one and the same”
― Steve Biddulph

“I cannot make up my mind / because my mind
I cannot find. The wizard, I will tell him / I need a cerebellum. Hope the wizard's got for me / a reverse lobotomy.”
― GLEN NESBITT, We're Off

“Strength without mind is a weakness.”
― Tamerlan Kuzgov

“Each of them encoding someone’s pet theory as to how the brain works. It’s no surprise you spent the whole summer just getting oriented.”
― Neal Stephenson, Fall; or, Dodge in Hell

“We are not a ghost in a machine. Rather, it is as if a vortex of machine parts had come together to form an emergent ghost.”
― James Cooke PhD, Dawn of Mind: How Matter Became Conscious and Alive

“The magic of consciousness is to be found in biology, not in some abstraction of the brain that elevates it above the biological.”
― James Cooke PhD, Dawn of Mind: How Matter Became Conscious and Alive

“Reality is radio, only a tiny sliver can your brain capture.”
― Abhijit Naskar, Azad Earth Army: When The World Cries Blood

“Have you ever encountered popular illusions? Things that cause wrong impressions and are different from what they seem to be? They prove that the human brain does not see everything as they are.”
― Maria Karvouni, Reality Is Just A Possible Fantasy

“Cannabis helps the Brain like a Magnifier the Eye.”
― Sino Melo

“My Heart is my L96A1, my Brain the Trigger, my Words and Deeds the Bullets.”
― Sino Melo

“So we often use the intellectual part of the brain to fulfil the wishes of the animal part…”
― Stanislav Stodulka, ERROR: The Hidden Programs of the Human Body - Break Free from Autopilot and Redefine Conscious Living

“What I'm going to miss the most after my Death, is my special, autodidactically learned Ability to meditate – namely masterminding the Pulse of my Heart into my Lips, so that my Lips throb like a second Heart, triggering a mysterious Relaxation within my Brain and therefore in my whole Body — I call it bilabial Aortasynthesis.”
― Sino Melo

“A Psychosis in a Human is a Fight between the Brain and the Heart – sometimes even between the two Hemispheres of the Brain – and sometimes all together.”
― Sino Melo

“No human Brain will ever be able to surpass the Power of a well-developed Intuition that comes from the Heart and the Soul.”
― Sino Melo