Neuroscientist Quotes

I am a futurist, projecting trends in science into the next decades and century, but ironically my two daughters - one is a neuroscientist and the other is a pastry chef - tell me that my taste in music is positively prehistoric. ~ Michio Kaku

We study humans to give them a healthier and happier life. ~ Abhijit Naskar

- I'm a Neuroscientist.
- What's that? What do you study?
- I study your brain! ~ Vardan Hambardzumyan

The work of neuroscientist Antonio Damasio offers insight into the origins of this guilt. Damasio describes two levels of experiencing pain. The first is a physical response to a painful stimulus. The second, a far more complex reaction, is an emotion associated with pain. This is an internal representation of the physical. ~ Sherry Turkle

If only for a day, I got to be "Dr. Harris, Neuroscientist" again ... It felt nice. ~ Jose N Harris

A major push is under way to figure out the molecular basis of those "critical" or "sensitive" periods, to figure out how the brain changes as certain learning abilities come and go. In some, if not all, of those mammals that have the alternating stripes in the visual cortex known as ocular dominance columns, those columns can be adjusted early in development, but not in adulthood. A juvenile monkey that has one eye covered for an extended period of time can gradually readjust its brain wiring to favor the open eye; an adult monkey cannot adjust its wiring. At the end of a critical period, a set of sticky sugar-protein hybrids known as proteoglycans condenses into a tight net around the dendrites and cell bodies of some of the relevant neurons, and in so doing those proteoglycans appear to impede axons that would otherwise be wriggling around as part of the process of readjusting the ocular dominance columns; no wriggling, no learning. In a 2002 study with rats, Italian neuroscientist Tommaso Pizzorusso and his colleagues dissolved the excess proteoglycans with an antiproteoglycan enzyme known as "chABC," and in so doing managed to reopen the critical period. After the chABC treatment, even adult rats could recalibrate their ocular dominance columns. ChABC probably won't help us learn second languages anytime soon, but its antiproteoglycan function may have important medical implications in the not-too-distant future. Another 2002 study, also with rats, showed that chABC can ~ Gary F. Marcus

said Paul Howard-Jones, the British neuroscientist who leads the University of Bristol's NeuroEducational Research Network, games will become central to schools. "I think in thirty years' time, we will marvel that we ever tried to deliver a curriculum without gaming. ~ Greg Toppo

We are commanded to associate with, pray and worship with fellow believers, plus it's medically indicated. Neuroscientist John Cacioppo concluded that people who don't associate regularly with other people are more prone to illness, obesity and feelings of helplessness. (Loneliness: Human Nature and the Need for Social Connection). ~ John Price

Dr. Mark Crisplin, a Portland, Oregon, ER doctor, reviewed the original EEG readings of a number of patients claimed by the scientists as being flatlined or "dead" and discovered that this was not at all the case. "What they showed was slowing, attenuation, and other changes, but only a minority of patients had a flat line, and it [dying] took longer than 10 seconds. The curious thing was that even a little blood flow in some patients was enough to keep EEGs normal." In fact, most cardiac patients were given CPR, which by definition delivers some oxygen to the brain (that's the whole point of doing it). Crisplin concluded: "By the definitions presented in the Lancet paper, nobody experienced clinical death. No doctor would ever declare a patient in the middle of a code 99 dead, much less brain dead. Having your heart stop for 2 to 10 minutes and being promptly resuscitated doesn't make you 'clinically dead.' It only means your heart isn't beating and you may not be conscious."31 Again, since our normal experience is of stimuli coming into the brain from the outside, when one part of the brain abnormally generates these illusions, another part of the brain - quite possibly the left-hemisphere interpreter described by neuroscientist Michael Gazzaniga - interprets them as external events. Hence, the abnormal is interpreted as supernormal or paranormal. ~ Michael Shermer

A few years ago, Tor Wager, a neuroscientist at Columbia University, wanted to figure out why placebos were so effective. His experiment was brutally straightforward: he gave college students electric shocks while they were stuck in an fMRI machine. (The subjects were well compensated, at least by undergraduate standards.) ~ Jonah Lehrer

Nobel Prize-winning neuroscientist Eric Kandel says we are who we are because of what we learn and what we remember. Who am I, then, if my memory is impaired? ~ Mira Bartok

Neuroscientist David Comings drew out the larger implications of such hallucinations for the relationship between our rational and spiritual brains:
The psychedelic drugs like DMT often produce a sensation of "contact," of being in the presence of and interaction with a non-human being. Highly intelligent and sophisticated test subjects who knew these feelings were drug-induced nevertheless insisted the contact had really happened. The temporal lobe-limbic system's emotional tape recorder sometimes cannot distinguish between externally generated real events and internally generated non-real experience thus providing a system in which the rational brain and the spiritual brain are not necessarily in conflict. ~ Michael Shermer

how does it feel,' wonders the neuroscientist Christof Koch, 'to bhe the mute hemisphere, permanently encased in one skull in the company of a dominant sibling that does all the talking? ~ Ian Leslie

Daniel Levitin has more insights per page than any other neuroscientist I know. The organized Mind is smart, important, and, as always, exquisitely written. ~ Daniel Gilbert

It might weigh little over a kilogram but, taken on its own scale, the brain is unimaginably vast. One cubic millimetre contains between twenty and twenty-five thousand neurons. It has eighty-six billion of these cells, and each one is complex as a city and is in contact with ten thousand other neurons just like it. Within just one cubic centimetre of brain tissue, there is the same number of connections as there are stars in the Milky Way. Your brain contains a hundred trillion of them. Information in the form of electricity and chemicals flows around these paths in great forking trails and in circuits and feedback loops and fantastical storms of activity tat bloom to life speeds of up to a hundred and twenty metres per second. According to the neuroscientist V. S. Ramachandran, 'The number of permutations and combinations of activity that are theoretically possible exceeds the number of elementary particles in the universe.' And yet, he continues, 'We know so little about it that even a child's questions should be seriously entertained. ~ Will Storr

The first proponent of cortical memory networks on a major scale was neither a neuroscientist nor a computer scientist but .. a Viennes economist: Friedrich von Hayek (1899-1992). A man of exceptionally broad knowledge and profound insight into the operation of complex systems, Hayek applied such insight with remarkable success to economics (Nobel Prize, 1974), sociology, political science, jurisprudence, evolutionary theory, psychology, and brain science (Hayek, 1952). ~ Joaquin Fuster

Daniel Siegel, a neuroscientist who has extensively studied interpersonal bonds, emotion, and self-regulation, writes of attunement (Siegel 2007, 290): "[S]uch resonant states feel good as we feel 'felt' by another, no longer alone but in connection. This is the heart of empathic relationship, as we sense a clear image of our mind in the mind of another. ~ Carolyn Daitch

As neuroscientist Antonio Damasio reminds us, humans are not either thinking machines or feeling machines, but rather feeling machines that think. ~ Brene Brown

Its true that we learn a lot from science about how we function but there's a danger in thinking knowledge of how we function is the full account of what we are. If you're a chemist who is really interested in the optical properties of certain pigments you could analyse the Mona Lisa and describe it completely but you would never have mentioned the face, which is the meaning of this thing. In that way a neuroscientist can put together an enormously impressively picture of the brain but he would not have described what goes on when we react to another person. ~ Roger Scruton

Memory is not set in stone. Any neuroscientist will tell you that. The more you remember something, especially if it's emotionally charged, the more you will reinforce the pathways connecting the neurons. Simply put, the more you think about it, the more you feel it, the stronger the memory. ~ Kamal Ravikant

My cerebral cortex, the gray matter that MIT neuroscientist Steven Pinker likens to 'a large sheet of two-dimensional tissue that has been wadded up to fit inside the spherical skull,' is riddled instead of whole. ~ Floyd Skloot

A distinguished cognitive neuroscientist confessed to me that, because of his religious upbringing, he could not get rid of psychoneural dualism. The idea that one ceases to be after death was too painful to him. ~ Mario Bunge

Researchers have discovered that adolescents do not walk around with a defect that prevents them from properly assessing risk. B. J. Casey, a neuroscientist at Weill Medical College of Cornell University, notes that it's just the opposite: adolescents overestimate risk, at least when it comes to situations involving their own mortality. The real problem is that they assign a greater value to the reward they will get from taking that risk than adults do. It turns out that dopamine, the hormone that signals pleasure, is never so explosively active in human beings as it is during puberty. Never over the course of our lives will we feel anything quite so intensely, or quite so exultantly, again. ~ Jennifer Senior

Sometimes when you're listening to a neuroscientist, they have a tendency to use a particular type of jargon that works in their world perfectly but that would lose the average layman. ~ Pharrell Williams