Neuron Quotes

The human brain has 100 billion neurons, each neuron connected to 10 thousand other neurons. Sitting on your shoulders is the most complicated object in the known universe. (Michio Kaku)

The first attempts to consider the behavior of so-called "random neural nets" in a systematic way have led to a series of problems concerned with relations between the "structure" and the "function" of such nets. The "structure" of a random net is not a clearly defined topological manifold such as could be used to describe a circuit with explicitly given connections. In a random neural net, one does not speak of "this" neuron synapsing on "that" one, but rather in terms of tendencies and probabilities associated with points or regions in the net.

Anatol Rapoport

I've always liked gossip, gossip is fun, but whether you believe it or not is something else, and yet the web seems to want to believe. The web doesn't distinguish between what's playful and serious. And the speed! What is happening in the web, and all the tweeters tweeting, they become neurons. They are the neurons of the global village. Village is the right word because the village is where the gossip is taking place, it doesn't take place in the cities. A piece of information comes into that little neuron – whoop – and they've immediately got to pass it across the synaptic gap...

Terry Gilliam

Synaptic summation is the technical term used in neurophysiology for those instances in which some neuron C is fired only by a combination of neurons A and B.

Gregory Bateson

An "intellectual tradition,” as anyone with two neurons to rub together knows, is not the same thing as evidence. But theologians seem to lack that second neuron.

Jerry Coyne

A typical neuron makes about ten thousand connections to neighboring neurons. Given the billions of neurons, this means there are as many connections in a single cubic centimeter of brain tissue as there are stars in the Milky Way galaxy.

David Eagleman

If my dramatic career doesn't work out, I will go on to research and find cures for Alzheimer's or Parkinson's and other motor neuron diseases. It's a very exciting field of research. But I'd like to continue in drama, so it wouldn't be very smart of me if I blew this amazing opportunity with an inappropriate lifestyle.

Freddie Stroma

The doctor who diagnosed me with ALS, or motor neuron disease, told me that it would kill me in two or three years.

Stephen Hawking

I don't have much positive to say about motor neuron disease, but it taught me not to pity myself because others were worse off, and to get on with what I still could do. I'm happier now than before I developed the condition.

Stephen Hawking

Maybe I don't have the most common kind of motor neuron disease, which usually kills in two or three years.

Stephen Hawking

There are 100 billion neurons in the adult human brain, and each neuron makes something like 1,000 to 10,000 contacts with other neurons in the brain. Based on this, people have calculated that the number of permutations and combinations of brain activity exceeds the number of elementary particles in the universe. (Vilayanur S. Ramachandran)

Here is a neuron that fires when I reach and grab something, but it also fires when I watch Joe reaching and grabbing something. ... It's as though this neuron is adopting the other person's point of view.

Vilayanur S. Ramachandran

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