The Brain Quotes

The fruit fly has roughly 150,000 neurons in the brain. ~ Michio Kaku

It's a little-known secret, and it should probably stay that way: attempting suicide usually jump-starts your brain chemistry. There must be something about taking all those pills that either floods the brain sufficiently or depletes it so completely that balance is restored. Whatever the mechanism, the result is that you emerge on the other side of the attempt with an awareness of what it means to be alive. Simple acts seem miraculous: you can stand transfixed for hours just watching the wind ruffle the tiny hairs along the top of your arm. And always, with every sensation, is the knowledge that you must have survived for a reason. You just can't doubt it anymore. You must have a purpose, or you would have died. You have the rest of your life to discover what that purpose is. And you can't wait to start looking. ~ Terri Cheney

Apology Letter from the Brain
Hey there. I'm sorry. OK? But can I say something? Look. I admit I wasn't perfect. No one is perfect. That's a fact. Speaking of facts, don't you think we all need to take a minute and decide who is right and who is wrong? Every side is different; it's just that my side seems more right. I'm not just saying that because it's my side. I think a lot of other people would agree with me, given the chance. If I upset you in some way, please know that wasn't my intention. I didn't know how sensitive you were. It's obvious I can set you off very easily. That's not an insult; it's just an observation. I think it would help if we talked about this more and argued about who was telling the truth. I would like to see you in person and tell you how the situation has affected me. I may use this opportunity to bring up other times you have hurt me in the past. If possible, I would like to hurt you back. Either way, I want to be in control. Until then, take care. And please, remember I reached out first.
I remain,
THE BRAIN

Apology Letter from the Heart
Hey there. I'm sorry. I've found it hard to tell you this, and I realize my apology may be too little or come too late. It is important for me to let you know that I am sorry for what I did or said or didn't do or say. I was wrong. I make mistakes. I HATE that I made one with you. I'm reaching out because life goes by so fast and I just don't want my one life to go by without expr ~ Amy Poehler

Wherefore the brain must be looked upon as the universal and general sensory and at the same time as the universal and general motory organ of the body and finally as the universal and general laboratory of the animal spirits and the blood or of the essential juices of life. ~ Emanuel Swedenborg

Although genius always commands admiration, character most secures respect. The former is more the product of the brain, the latter of heart-power; and in the long run it is the heart that rules in life. ~ Samuel Smiles

On the edge of dreaming when the brain lets go, when it stops its scheming, our blood runs slow... Then the heart speaks clearly of the things it knows, things it brought so dearly at the evening's glow... And a misty sunset fills the west with yellow, gold and scarlet red. The bowl of space a dawn sheds light upon our silky bed. For you I send refreshing rain to wash the past away. A quiet breeze drifts warmly across your tired face. It brings the scents from flower climbs, and leaves without a trace. With vines and newborn stars in our hair...undressed, bronzed platinum we are as summer in your golden church... Like whispers lost at sea...we soar beyond the sky of fire...in harmony within the clash of elements... Together lost and free to claim our each desire. Like leaves we float to earth, once more...forbidden passion, romantic eyes, and heated lips...two burning amber hearts released and drinking slowly mysterious champagne of heaven sweetest rest... ~ Oksana Rus

The brain forgets much, but the lower back remembers everything. ~ Robert Breault

The advice I like to give young artists, or really anybody who'll listen to me, is not to wait around for inspiration. Inspiration is for amateurs; the rest of us just show up and get to work. If you wait around for the clouds to part and a bolt of lightning to strike you in the brain, you are not going to make an awful lot of work. All the best ideas come out of the process; they come out of the work itself. Things occur to you. If you're sitting around trying to dream up a great art idea, you can sit there a long time before anything happens. But if you just get to work, something will occur to you and something else will occur to you and something else that you reject will push you in another direction. Inspiration is absolutely unnecessary and somehow deceptive. You feel like you need this great idea before you can get down to work, and I find that's almost never the case. ~ Chuck Close

A study we came across revealed that p80 is very efficient at removing mercury from contaminated water[245]. This sounds good right? Read on… If p80 is attracting mercury, we can only assume it is likely some of the mercury is being escorted to the brain. So, if we receive traces of mercury in the vaccines or are exposed to mercury from other sources, and receive a p80 containing vaccine, then a mercury-free vaccine could still potentially cause mercury accumulation in the brain. ~ James Morcan

More may have been learned about the brain and the mind in the 1990s - the so-called decade of the brain - than during the entire previous history of psychology and neuroscience. ~ Antonio Damasio

The brain is a muscle that can move the world. ~ Stephen King

It is now possible to quantify people's levels of happiness pretty accurately by asking them, by observation, and by measuring electrical activity in the brain, in degrees from terrible pain to sublime joy. ~ Polly Toynbee

Ideas not coupled with action never become bigger than the brain cells they occupied. ~ Arnold H. Glasow

Everyone should occasionally break the law in some small and delightful way, Drumknott. It's good for the hygiene of the brain. ~ Terry Pratchett

Forsooth, I no longer toil in vain,
To prove that demon pox warps the brain.
So though 'ti pity, it's not in vain
That the pox-ridden worm was slain:
For to believe in me, you all must deign. ~ Cassandra Clare

If desire did not dim the brain, nobody would ever get married, drunk, or fat. ~ Orson Scott Card

The brain is to mind as the eye is to sight. ~ Pearl Zhu

This was precisely the feature that got Pribram so excited, for it offered at last a way of understanding how memories could be distributed rather than localized in the brain. If it was possible for every portion of a piece of holographic film to contain all the information necessary to create a whole image, then it seemed equally possible for every part of the brain to contain all of the information necessary to recall a whole memory. ~ Michael Talbot

Reading is an escape, an education, a delving into the brain of another human being on such an intimate level that every nuance of thought, every snapping of synapse, every slippery desire of the author is laid open before you like, well, a book. ~ Cynthia Heimel

Autism is a neurological disorder. It's not caused by bad parenting. It's caused by, you know, abnormal development in the brain. The emotional circuits in the brain are abnormal. And there also are differences in the white matter, which is the brain's computer cables that hook up the different brain departments. ~ Temple Grandin

it seems to me that, on balance, soul/body dualism has been the enemy of compassion. For instance, the moral stigma that still surrounds disorders of mood and cognition seems largely the result of viewing the mind as distinct from the brain. When the pancreas fails to produce insulin, there is no shame in taking synthetic insulin to compensate for its lost function. ~ Sam Harris

Faith is invulnerability, it feeds on stubbornness, self motivation and an endless stream of will. His body is mortal, but the spirit of faith cannot be killed. Faith is oxygen that feeds the brain, helping him to think sensibly. ~ Musin Almat Zhumabekovich

Our sense of time's passage is rooted not in one region of the brain but results from the combined working of memory, attention, emotion, and other cerebral activities that can't be singularly localized, Time in the brain, like time outside it, is a collective activity. ~ Alan Burdick

The heart pointed to the brain and said with great disdain, "Those who live their lives in here live the lives most full of fear. ~ Ryan Lilly

The ultimate cause of human suffering is based on the internal structure of the mind. All causes of the discomfort and distress mainly come from the inner world. Given that the human brain is a necessary and sufficient cause of the human mind, in general, a person should begin with a reconfiguration of the brain if he or she wants to avoid all the sufferings in life. Remember that the brain is the ultimate cure for all suffering. ~ Elmar Hussein

A purpose in life acts like a directional signal for the brain. ~ Ilchi Lee

Music can minister to minds diseased, pluck from the memory a rooted sorrow, raze out the written troubles of the brain, and with its sweet oblivious antidote, cleanse the full bosom of all perilous stuff that weighs upon the heart. ~ William Shakespeare

You can't *discover* that the brain is a digital computer. You can only *interpret* the brain as a digital computer. ~ John Searle

The brain is like a massive LEGO set, where each of the individual pieces is quite simple (like a single LEGO piece), and all the power comes from the nearly infinite ways that these simple pieces can be recombined to do different things. ~ Michael Frank

Studying the world's oldest writing for the first time compels you to wonder about what writing is and how it came about more than five thousand years ago and what the world might have looked like without it.

Writing as I would define it serves to record language by means of an agreed set of symbols that enable a message to be played back like a wax cylinder recording.

The reader's eye runs over the signs and tells the brain how each is pronounced and the inner message springs into life. ~ Irving Finkel

The size of an investor's brain is less important than his ability to detach the brain from the emotions. ~ Robert G. Hagstrom

The best of artists hath no thought to show which the rough stone in its superfluous shell doth not include; to break the marble spell is all the hand that serves the brain can do. ~ Michelangelo

The brain secretes thought as the stomach secretes gastric juice, the liver bile, and the kidneys urine. ~ Karl Vogt

If you have just an emotion, you would not necessarily feel it. To feel an emotion, you need to represent in the brain in structures that are actually different from the structures that lead to the emotion, what is going on in the organs when you're having the emotion. ~ Antonio Damasio

In ordinary perception, the senses send an overwhelming flood of information to the brain, which the brain then filters down to a trickle it can manage for the purpose of survival in a highly competitive world. Man has become so rational, so utilitarian, that the trickle becomes most pale and thin. It is efficient, for mere survival, but it screens out the most wondrous parts of man's potential experience without his even knowing it. We're shut off from our own world. Primitive man once experienced the rich and sparkling flood of the senses fully. Children experience it for a few months-until "normal" training, conditioning, close the doors on this other world, usually for good. Somehow, the drugs opened these ancient doors. And through them modern man may at last go, and rediscover his divine birthright ... ~ Tom Wolfe

Music bypasses the brain and goes straight to the heart. I wish my life had more of it. ~ Dick Cavett

The terrible loop began on a Tuesday and didn't end until the day I saw a skullcracker swallow the brain of a bank-hired assassin. ~ Jeremy Robert Johnson

You know the head's where everything is at, the brain, eyes, mouth. That's the person. I remember being told as a kid, you cut off the head and the body dies. the body is nothing after the head is cut off ... well that's not quite true. With a girl there's a lot left in the girl's body without a head. ~ Edmund Kemper

Cult recruiting methods based on dosing victims with the brain chemicals released during capture bonding would make cults even more of a problem than they are now. ~ Keith Henson

There is a notion that existence is an illusion. Existence is not an illusion. Existence is a projection from the inner through the brain producing the outer sensory world of what is - an amazing complete mystery. ~ Barry Long

Books, the children of the brain. ~ Jonathan Swift

It's essential to tailor rehab to what impassions someone. The brain gradually learns by riveting its attention-through endless repetitions. ~ Diane Ackerman

Have you any idea what it takes to catch a ball, or raise a cup to your lips, or make immediate sense of a word, a phrase or an ambiguous sentence? We didn't, not at first. Solving maths problems is the tiniest fraction of what human intelligence does. We learned from a new angle just how wondrous a thing the brain is. A one-litre, liquid-cooled, three-dimensional computer. Unbelievable processing power, unbelievably compressed, unbelievable energy efficiency, no overheating. The whole thing running on twenty-five watts -- one dim light bulb. ~ Ian McEwan

Intellectual knowledge exists in and of the brain.
Because the brain is part of the body, which must one day expire, this collection of facts, however large and impressive, will expire as well.
Insight, however, is a function of the spirit.
Because your spirit follows you through cycle after cycle of life, death, and rebirth, you have the opportunity of cultivating insight in an ongoing fashion.
Refined over time, insight becomes pure, constant, and unwavering.
This is the beginning of immortality. ~ Lao-Tzu

In my own worst seasons I've come back from the colorless world of despair by forcing myself to look hard, for a long time, at a single glorious thing: a flame of red geranium outside my bedroom window. And then another: my daughter in a yellow dress. And another: the perfect outline of a full, dark sphere behind the crescent moon. Until I learned to be in love with my life again. Like a stroke victim retraining new parts of the brain to grasp lost skills, I have taught myself joy, over and over again(15). ~ Barbara Kingsolver

I'm a huge fan of meditation. I know lots of people assume meditation to be some Buddhist mumbo-jumbo, but it's been scientifically documented to create therapeutic changes in the brain. ~ Karen Salmansohn

The goths are beautiful, a vast depth of subcultural, aesthetic and poetic ideas, and we would identify with that as we did back in 1979. But not the post modern distortion ... the costume without the brain. ~ Peter Murphy

Reading is the first to go, my mother used to say, meaning that it was a luxury the brain dispensed with under duress. She claimed that after my father died she never again picked up anything more demanding than the morning paper. At the time I had thought that was sort of melodramatic of her, but now I found myself reading the same paragraph six times over, and I still couldn't have told you what it was about. ~ Anne Tyler

It is literally the case that learning languages makes you smarter. The neural networks in the brain strengthen as a result of language learning. ~ Michael Gove

The hey-day of a woman's life is on the shady side of fifty, when the vital forces heretofore expended in other ways are garnered in the brain, when their thoughts and sentiments flow out in broader channels, when philanthropy takes the place of family selfishness, and when from the depths of poverty and suffering the wail of humanity grows as pathetic to their ears as once was the cry of their own children. ~ Elizabeth Cady Stanton

In many professions, what used to matter most were abilities associated with the left side of the brain: linear, sequential, spreadsheet kind of faculties. Those still matter, but they're not enough. ~ Daniel H. Pink

Then there are the metabolic costs of switching itself that I wrote about earlier. Asking the brain to shift attention from one activity to another causes the prefrontal cortex and striatum to burn up oxygenated glucose, the same fuel they need to stay on task. And the kind of rapid, continual shifting we do with multitasking causes the brain to burn through fuel so quickly that we feel exhausted and disoriented after even a short time. We've literally depleted the nutrients in our brain. This leads to compromises in both cognitive and physical performance. Among other things, repeated task switching leads to anxiety, which raises levels of the stress hormone cortisol in the brain, which in turn can lead to aggressive and impulsive behaviors. By contrast, staying on task is controlled by the anterior cingulate and the striatum, and once we engage the central executive mode, staying in that state uses less energy than multitasking and actually reduces the brain's need for glucose. ~ Daniel J. Levitin

When you encourage someone, it literally changes their brain chemistry to be able to perform ... sends fuel to the brain. ~ Henry Cloud

We sit against the tiles of the bathroom wall with our legs sprawled out in front of us, passing the brain back and forth, taking small, leisurely bites and enjoying brief flashes of human experience.
'Good ... shit,' M wheezes. ~ Isaac Marion

When we look at a solid lump of iron or rock, we are 'really' looking at what is almost entirely empty space. It looks and feels solid and opaque because our sensory systems and brains find it convenient to treat it as solid and opaque. It is convenient for the brain to represent a rock as solid because we can't walk through it. 'Solid' is our way of experiencing things that we can't walk through or fall throug, because of the electromagnetic forces between atoms. 'Opaque' is the experience we have when light bounces off the surface of an object, and none of it goes through. ~ Richard Dawkins

If the brain is a prediction engine, memory is its fuel. We can argue that the only reason we need memory of the past is so we can inform the future. ~ Carmen Simon

The Heart is the engine, the Brain is the steering wheel, and the Mind is the essence of the Body. ~ Serena Jade

Studies have shown that retaining memories can be improved by getting sufficient sleep between the time of activity and a test. Neuroimaging shows that the areas of the brain that are activated during sleep are the same as those involved in learning a new task. Dreaming is perhaps useful in consolidating this new information. ~ Michio Kaku

I think; here I lie under a haystack ... The tiny space I occupy is so infinitely small in comparison with the rest of space, in which I am not, and which has nothing to do with me; and the period of time in which it is my lot to live is so petty beside the eternity in which I have not been, and shall not be ... And in this atom, this mathematical point, the blood is circulating, the brain is working and wanting something ... Isn't it loathsome? Isn't it petty? ~ Ivan Turgenev

The more we learn about AI and about how the brain works, the more amazing the brain seems. Just the sheer amount of computation it does is truly incredible, especially for a couple of pounds of meat. ~ Stuart J. Russell

Reading every day keeps the brain dead sickness away. ~ Kristy Pellegrin

Where am I getting the brain space to store these words? I'm hoping that maybe my mind has decided to clear out some old negative thoughts and sad memories and replace them with these shiny new words. ~ Elizabeth Gilbert

Sometimes a kind of glory lights up the mind of a man. It happens to nearly everyone. You can feel it growing or preparing like a fuse burning toward dynamite. It is a feeling in the stomach, a delight of the nerves, of the forearms. The skin tastes the air, and every deep-drawn breath is sweet. Its beginning has the pleasure of a great stretching yawn; it flashes in the brain and the whole world glows outside your eyes. A man may have lived all of his life in the gray, and the land and trees of him dark and somber. The events, even the important ones, may have trooped by faceless and pale. And then -the glory- so that a cricket song sweetens his ears, the smell of the earth rises chanting to his nose, and dappling light under a tree blesses his eyes. Then a man pours outward, a torrent of him, and yet he is not diminished. And I guess a man's importance in the world can be measured by the quality and number of his glories. It is a lonely thing but it relates us to the world. It is the mother of all creativeness, and it sets each man separate from all other men. ~ John Steinbeck

The only difference between image and idea is thus that in the one case, the expression of the object is confused, and in the other, it is clear. The confusion comes from this: every movement envelops in itself the infinity of the movements of the universe; and the brain receives an infinity of modifications to which only a confused thought can correspond, enveloping the infinity of clear ideas that would correspond to each detail. Clear ideas are therefore contained in the confused ideas. They are unconscious; they are perceived without being apperceived. Only their sum total is apperceived; this appears simple to us because of our ignorance of its components. ~ Jean-Paul Sartre

Time made apologies and absolution unnecessary. Time didn't really heal, it just made bad memories distant so that the brain couldn't recapture the lost pain ~ Amulya Malladi

Journeys end in lovers' meeting.' ... But the real journey - the journey of adventure itself - is frequently another matter: often gray, often loverless, often demanding from the secret soul of the adventurer spirit and inspiration, lest the blood turn cold in sick dismay, and the brain cloud under its weight of nostalgia. ~ Katherine Cecil Thurston

When looking at the brain, it is important to go beyond its structure to its function. This is because often in cognitive disorders, the structure of the brain is intact, but its function is compromised. ~ Aditi Shankardass

Fling yourself at life and let yourself feel what you do feel upon the very tick of the second; snatch the images of life that fly through the brain. If you are very frank with yourself and don't mind how ridiculous anything that comes to you may seem, you will have a chance of capturing the symbols of your direct reactions. Thus, you will, perhaps, find yourself reaching a heightened sense of awareness completely outside the realm of mundane experience. ~ Mina Loy

I had an unusually large-sized head, though this was not uncommon for a baby in the Midwest. The craniums in our part of the country were designed to leave a little extra room for the brain to grow in case one day we found ourselves exposed to something we didn't understand, like a foreign language, or a salad. ~ Michael Moore

Black! Black! Black! I am proud of being a Negro. Nor have I ever tried to beg tolerance from anyone. Superiority is not proved by color, but by the brain, by education, by willpower, by moral courage. ~ Jose Celso Barbosa

Daily life makes us all susceptible to accumulating stress, mostly due to the non-stop demands and pressures of juggling work, home and personal responsibilities. This stress revs up the nervous system, causing the brain to flood the body with hormones that trigger overreacting, irrational thinking, and even insomnia. After years of unavoidable exposure to the stress reaction with no defense, the nervous system can become severely deteriorated, leaving us defenseless against mental or physical illness and disease.iv As it happens, meditation has been proven as one of the greatest counter-stress solutions.v When practiced daily, meditation can help to restore balance and re-supply much-needed rest to your physiology. Common side effects of daily meditation are increased energy and feelings of contentedness and inner happiness.vi ~ Light Watkins

We're all inadequate," David answered. "Just think: the light from the outside world is mapped onto the retina, then further mapped onto the visual cortex, then broken apart and analyzed in other areas of the brain. At every step there's a loss of information. In the end, what we are aware of is not the outside world per se, but the image of the world projected onto our brains. Plato was anatomically right; we do see shadows on a wall. ~ Carolyn Ives Gilman

There is nothing spooky about mindfulness. It is simply a state of clear, nonjudgmental, and undistracted attention to the contents of consciousness, whether pleasant or unpleasant. Cultivating this quality of mind has been shown to reduce pain, anxiety, and depression; improve cognitive function; and even produce changes in gray matter density in regions of the brain related to learning and memory, emotional regulation, and self-awareness. ~ Sam Harris

Brain tissue requires over 22 times as much energy as an equivalent amount of muscle tissue. In a modern human, the brain uses around 16 percent of the body's energy budget despite making up just 2 percent of the body's overall mass. ~ Christopher Seddon

When I was a young person I went to the university and I learned a rational language, to think with the left side of the brain. But in the right side of the brain you have intuition and imagination. Words are not the truth; they indicate the way to go, but you need to go alone, in silence. Symbols have a language that kills the words. ~ Alejandro Jodorowsky

Whatever comes from the brain carries the hue of the place it came from, and whatever comes from the heart carries the heat and color of its birthplace. ~ Oliver Wendell Holmes

Some may be helped by images, some may not. Some require an image outside, others one inside the brain. ~ Swami Vivekananda

Priming works best when you are on autopilot, when you aren't trying to consciously introspect before choosing how to behave. When you are unsure how best to proceed, suggestions bubble up from the deep that are highly tainted by subconscious primes. In addition, your brain hates ambiguity and is willing to take shortcuts to remove it from any situation. If there is nothing else to go on, you will use what is available. When pattern recognition fails, you create patterns of your own. In the aforementioned experiments, there was nothing else for the brain to base its unconscious attitudes on, so it focused on the business items or the clean smells and ran with the ideas. The only problem was the conscious minds of the subjects didn't notice. ~ David McRaney

The brain is provided with a number of enzyme systems which serve to co-ordinate its workings. Some of these enzymes regulate the supply of glucose to the brain cells. Mescalin inhibits the production of these enzymes and thus lowers the amount of glucose available to an organ that is in constant need of sugar. When mescalin reduces the brain's normal ration of sugar what happens? Too few cases have been observed, and therefore a comprehensive answer cannot yet be given. But what happens to the majority of the few who have taken mescalin under supervision can be summarized as follows ... ~ Aldous Huxley

Look," cried Buster. "Arthur just went into the witch's house!"
"She'll probably put Arthur and D.W. into her oven, just like Hansel and Gretel," said Sue Ellen.
"Maybe she's using them for weird scientific experiments," said the Brain.
"I bet she locked them in the cellar to starve," said Buster.
"Maybe we should follow him," said Francine.
"Maybe we should call the police," said Muffy.
Everyone was too scared to move. ~ Marc Brown

I finally chalked it up to the fact that the brain is truly an extraordinary device: more extraordinary than we can even guess. ~ Eben Alexander

Gorgons and Hydras, and Chimaeras - dire stories of Celaeno and the Harpies - may reproduce themselves in the brain of superstition - but they were there before. They are transcripts, types - the archetypes are in us, and eternal. How else should the recital of that which we know in a waking sense to be false come to affect us at all? Is it that we naturally conceive terror from such objects, considered in their capacity of being able to inflict upon us bodily injury? O, least of all! These terrors are of older standing. They date beyond body - or without the body, they would have been the same ... That the kind of fear here treated is purely spiritual - that it is strong in proportion as it is objectless on earth, that it predominates in the period of our sinless infancy - are difficulties the solution of which might afford some probable insight into our ante-mundane condition, and a peep at least into the shadowland of pre-existence. ~ Charles Lamb

Look, de Mazel, you've known him for years - hasn't he been known to sleep for forty hours in two days?'

'Forty hours?'

'Certainly. He awoke at meal times, just to take nourishment, and afterwards fell again into his torpor. And Freneuse had a strange horror of sleep; there was some abnormal phenomenon associated with it, some lesion of the brain or neurotic depression.'

'The troublesome cerebral anaemia which results from excessive debauchery. Another myth! I've never believed, myself, in the supposed debauchery of that poor gentleman. Such a frail chap, with such a delicate complexion! Quite frankly, there was no scope in him for debauchery.

'Pooh! About as much as Lorenzaccio!'

'You associate him with the Medicis! Lorenzaccio was a Florentine impassioned by rancour, a man of energy slowly brooding over his vengeance, caressing it as he might caress the blade of a dagger! There is not the slightest comparison to be drawn between Lorenzaccio and that gall-green, liverish creature Freneuse. ~ Jean Lorrain

The more attention the brain pays to a given stimulus, the more elaborately the information will be encoded - and retained. ~ John Medina

He had the arrogance of the believer, but none of the humility of the deeply religious. ~ V.S. Ramachandran

Whatever happens to a baby contributes to the emotional and perceptual map of the world that its developing brain creates. As my colleague Bruce Perry explains it, the brain is formed in a "use-dependent manner."5 This is another way of describing neuroplasticity, the relatively recent discovery that neurons that "fire together, wire together." When a circuit fires repeatedly, it can become a default setting - the response most likely to occur. If you feel safe and loved, your brain becomes specialized in exploration, play, and cooperation; if you are frightened and unwanted, it specializes in managing feelings of fear and abandonment. As infants and ~ Bessel A. Van Der Kolk

There is no such thing as a disembodied mind. The mind is implanted in the brain, and the brain is implanted in the body. ~ Antonio Damasio

The communication between the brain and the heart is a two-way dialogue. ~ Mindie Kniss

The great paradox of determinism and free will, which has held the attention of the wisest of philosophers and psychologists for generations, can be phrased in more biological terms as follows: If our genes are inherited, and our environment is a train of physical events set in motion before we were born, how can there be a truly independent agent within the brain? The agent itself is created by the interaction of the genes and the environment. It would appear that our freedom is only a self delusion. ~ E. O. Wilson

The brain shuts down, and the soul watches from a distance as the body tumbles at ever-increasing speed toward doom. This is because, though instinct is good at many things, it's stupid about death. ~ Max Gladstone

There's another part of the brain that seeps dopamine, specifically just before those peak emotional moments in a song: the caudate nucleus, which is involved in the anticipation of pleasure. ~ Anonymous

The brain stays up all night telling stories while we sleep. We just call them dreams. ~ Jonathan Gottschall

I detest jokes - when somebody tells me one, I feel my IQ dropping; the brain cells start to disappear. But something is funny when the person delivering the line doesn't know it's funny or doesn't treat it as a joke. Maybe it comes from a place of truth, or it's a sort of rage against society. ~ Johnny Depp

The brain is a little saline pool that acts as a conductor, and it runs on electricity. ~ Judith Hooper

In case you haven't heard, the brain is the most important sexual organ, and my brain isn't interested in having anything to do with you. ~ Susan Elizabeth Phillips

It is the popular misconception of marriage as a mere social convention or quaint tradition invented by the brain of man which has led to the denigrating of this holy relation, the multiplication of unspeakable immorality, the common unrest between husbands and wives, and the gradual disintegration of society and civilization. For if marriage exists merely by human authority then men and women may do with it or conduct themselves in it as they please. They may redefine it, or they may abandon it altogether. But if marriage is a divine institution, then it is governed by a higher authority. It becomes, then, a matter of obedience, and the conduct of husbands and wives within marriage is a conduct for which they must give their account to God. The original institution of marriage is therefore basic to our understanding of marriage, our estimation of marriage, and our right behavior in marriage. ~ Rosaria Champagne Butterfield

It was Heraclitus, of course, who came up with the formulation that we are never able to step into the same river twice. ... The obverse of Heraclitus's maxim may be that one is never able to step out of the river the same, twice. A neuron in the brain is altered with every experience. The self, if it exists, must be a constantly evolving thing. Those coming to the banks of the Ganges or Jordan to immerse themselves do not expect to leave the same as they arrive. ~ James Attlee

The part of the brain that isn't automatic is an imagining machine, feeling all possibilities of feelings: it keeps pushing its way into this marshy, pleasant terrain. You struggle against that push, and start to feel your stomach protest. It's not so much even a type of seriousness as it is a circumstance, into which you pass by slow degrees. I've never seen this sufficiently examined. It mutates into a less-unreal reality that still seems different, somehow, than being fully present. Self hate is rarely unconditional. ~ Darin Strauss

He has inhibited discussion by designating admonition as the method of dealing with a heretic- and the first method, too, because he is not a Christian. This is so that he would not seem to require correction again and again and before two or three witnesses as though he were a Christian. He ought to be corrected for the very reason that he is not to be disputed with. In addition, this is said because a controversy over the Scriptures can, clearly, produce no other effect than help to upset either the stomach or the brain. ~ Tertullian

The brain is the most complicated organ in the universe. We have learned a lot about other human organs. We know how the heart pumps and how the kidney does what it does. To a certain degree, we have read the letters of the human genome. But the brain has 100 billion neurons. Each one of those has about 10,000 connections. ~ Francis Collins