Brain Quotes - page 92
But if we ask where precisely in the brain that point of view is located, the simple assumptions that work so well on larger scales of space and time break down. It is now quite clear that there is no single point in the brain where all information funnels in, and this fact has some far from obvious consequences.
Daniel Dennett
Earlier this week, I wrote about the health-care bill, specifically John McCain's return to D.C. to vote on it. I wrote about how this return, following his diagnosis of brain cancer, allowed him the opportunity to be the hero who delivers us from the evil that is a health-care bill that will take health care away from millions of Americans. Then he got back to D.C. and voted to allow the bill to move forward. It was a strange move, and the latest in what has appeared to be a series of heel turns for McCain. But last night, he actually goddamn mavericked and-sorry, Drew-it was pretty damn great.
John McCain
But is this wonder the real thing? At first glance, it wouldn't seem to be: a transcendence that's chemically induced must surely be fake. Artificial Paradises was what Charles Baudelaire called his 1860 book about his experiences with hashish, and that sounds about right. Yet what if it turns out that the neurochemistry of transcendence is no different whether you smoke marijuana, meditate or enter a hypnotic trance by way of chanting, fasting, or prayer? What if in every one of these endeavors, the brain is simply prompted to produce large quantities of cannabinoids, thereby suspending short-term memory and allowing us to experience the present deeply?...From a brain's point of view, the distinction between a natural and an artificial high may be meaningless.
Michael Pollan
Hark! hark! – What mean those yells – those cries?
His chain some furious madman breaks!
He comes! I see his glaring eyes!
Now! now! my dungeon bars he shakes.
Help! Help! He's gone! Oh! fearful woe,
Such screams to hear – such sights to see!
My brain! my brain! – I know, I know
I am not mad, but soon shall be.
Matthew Lewis (writer)
The '60s was really stupid ... It was a type of merchandising, Americans had this hideous weakness, they had this desire to be OK, fun guys and gals, and they haven't come to terms with the reality of the situation: we were not created equal. Some people can do carpentry, some people can do mathematics, some people are brain surgeons and some people are winos and that's the way it is, and we're not all the same. This concept of one world-ism, everything blended and smoothed out to this mediocre norm that everybody downgrades themselves to be is stupid. The '60s was merchandised to the public at large... My pet theory about the '60s is that there is a sinister plot behind it... The lessons learnt in the '60s about merchandising stupidity to the American public on a large scale have been used over and over again since that time.
Frank Zappa
The brains of the people are the most productive of all soils, and cultivated very unequally... There is more class favouritism here than in almost anything... A highly educated community is a community that enriches the whole of the land... One of the things that Liberalism has to see to is that education, opportunities and facilities for the development of the brain and intellect of the best should be without regard to their origin.
David Lloyd George
Even though I had long been taught that the genes of the brain are the governors of behavior, the absolute masters of our fate, our work showed that, in the brain as in bacteria, genes are also servants of the environment. ...An environmental stimulus... activates modulatory interneurons that release serotonin. The serotonin acts on the sensory neuron to increase cyclic AMP and to cause protein kinase A and MAP kinase to move to the nucleus and activate CREB. The activation of CREB, in turn, leads to the expression of genes that changes the function and the structure of the cell.
Eric Kandel
What it is, only God knows. In terms of matter I suppose the thing Ammi described would be called a gas, but this gas obeyed the laws that are not of our cosmos. This was no fruit of such worlds and suns as shine on the telescopes and photographic plates of our observatories. This was no breath from the skies whose motions and dimensions our astronomers measure or deem too vast to measure. It was just a colour out of space - a frightful messenger from unformed realms of infinity beyond all Nature as we know it; from realms whose mere existence stuns the brain and numbs us with the black extra-cosmic gulfs it throws open before our frenzied eyes.
H. P. Lovecraft
There are, without doubt, great possibilities in the serious exploitation of the astronomical tale; as a few semi-classics like "The War of the Worlds", "The Last and First Men", "Station X", "The Red Brain", and Clark Ashton Smith's best work prove. But the pioneers must be prepared to labour without financial return, professional recognition, or the encouragement of a reading majority whose taste has been seriously warped by the rubbish it has devoured. Fortunately sincere artistic creation is its own incentive and reward, so that despite all obstacles we need not despair of the future of a fresh literary form whose present lack of development leaves all the more room for brilliant and fruitful experimentation.
H. P. Lovecraft
He [Cruyff] was pretty intelligent, too! A real football brain. He had superb control, he was inventive and he could perform magic with a ball to get himself out of trouble instinctively. He got a lot of goals, and although he was so skilful, he didn't show off – he played to the strengths of the players around him. This side would really keep hold of the ball.
Johan Cruyff
Cruyff the player was gloriously impudent, a slight and graceful genius who proved that brain could outmanoeuvre brawn. Watching his Netherlands dart and thrust their way around Uruguay or Argentina in 1974, or seeing his Ajax outwit Juventus in the European Cup final in 1973, was to see a devastating puppet-master toying with lumbering opponents. Cruyff the coach, Cruyff the manager, was able to retain that sense of the joy of the game, the importance of beauty and, what's harder, to convey that sense to his players. There has never been such a great player who was also such a great manager. In that he stands utterly unique.
Johan Cruyff
I need to object, and that is that, Senator, you insist on separating therapeutic cloning and embryonic stem cells. However, in my own case, I require re-myelination of nerves. That means replacing the conductive coat of fat, myelin, that allows electricity to come down, currents from the brain to the central nervous system for function. At the moment, only embryonic stem cells have the potential to do that, and experiments are being done now in larger animals demonstrating that.
Christopher Reeve
The short-term-memory part of your mind-the part that tends to hold all of the incomplete, undecided, and unorganized "stuff”-functions much like RAM on a personal computer. Your conscious mind, like the computer screen, is a focusing tool, not a storage place. You can think about only two or three things at once. But the incomplete items are still being stored in the short-term-memory space. And as with RAM, there's limited capacity; there's only so much "stuff” you can store in there and still have that part of your brain function at a high level. Most people walk around with their RAM bursting at the seams. They're constantly distracted, their focus disturbed by their own internal mental overload.
David Allen (author)
First, we must be very clear that you and the speaker are treating life not as a problem but as a tremendous movement. If your brain is trained to solve problems, then you will treat this movement as a problem to be solved. Is it possible to look at life with all its questions, with all its issues, which is tremendously complex, to look at it not as a problem, but to observe it clearly, without bias, without coming to some conclusion which will then dictate your observation? You have to observe this vast movement of life, not only your own particular life, but the life of all humanity, the life of the earth, the life of the trees, the life of the whole world - look at it, observe it, move with it, but if you treat it as a problem, then you will create more problems.
Jiddu Krishnamurti
Rather than plug a piece of hardware into our gray matter, how much more elegant to extract some brain cells, plop them into a Petri dish, and graft on various sorts of gelatinous computing goo. Slug it all back into the skull and watch it run on blood sugar, the way a human brain's supposed to.
William Gibson
I will point out a curious, inveterate, and widespread illusion - the illusion that our earthly bodies are a kind of norm of humanity, so that ethereal bodies, if such there be, must correspond to them in shape and size.
When we take a physical view of a human being in his highest form of development, he is seen to consist essentially of a thinking brain, the brain itself, among its manifold functions, being a transformer whereby intelligent will power is enabled to react on matter. To communicate with the external world, the brain requires organs by which it can be transported from place to place, and other organs by means of which energy is supplied to replace that expended in the exercise of its own special functions.
William Crookes
