Neurons Quotes - Page 3

• When the brain is working to remember something, similar patterns of neurons fire as they did during the perception of the original event. These networks are linked, and each time we revisit them, they become stronger and more associated. But they need the proper retrieval cues--words, smells, images-- for them to be brought back as memories

  Susannah Cahalan

  Memories, Fire, Smell

  Susannah Cahalan (2012). “Brain on Fire: My Month of Madness”, p.200, Simon and Schuster

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• 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

  Doctors, Years, Two

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• You probably think Stephen Hawking is in that wheelchair because of a motor neuron disease. But if you got as much barely-legal student poontang as The Hawkster, you'd be in a wheelchair too.

  Scott Adams

  Sex, Thinking, Disease

  Scott Adams (2007). “Stick to Drawing Comics, Monkey Brain!: Cartoonist Explains Cloning, Blouse Monsters, Voting Machines, Romance, Monkey G ods, How to Avoid Being Mistaken for a Rodent, and More”, p.364, Penguin

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• The sex that is presented to us in everyday culture feels strange to me; its images are fragments, lifeless, removed from normal experience. Real sex, the sex in our cells and in the space between our neurons, leaks out and gets into things and stains our vision and colors our lives.

  Sallie Tisdale

  Sex, Real, Cells

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• The newborn infant is now seen to be wired with awesome precision... This marvelous robot will be launched into the world under the care of its parents... But to what extent does the wiring of the neurons, so undeniably encoded in the genes, preordain the directions that social development will follow?

  E. O. Wilson

  Parent, Robots, Doe

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• Even while it's true that we are tied to our molecules and proteins and neurons - as strokes and hormones and drugs and microorganisms indisputably tell us - it does not logically follow that humans are best described only as pieces and parts.

  David Eagleman

  Drug, Molecules, Doe

  David Eagleman (2011). “Incognito: The Secret Lives of the Brain”, p.225, Vintage

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• There is a neuron in your brain that will respond only to pictures of Jennifer Aniston - provided you have had prior visual exposure to the actress. That neuron does not respond to pictures of Bill Clinton or Halle Berry. Only Jennifer. I used the story to explain the almost ridiculous plasticity of the organ. There is no such thing as Jennifer Aniston in our evolutionary history - she was born in 1969, for heaven's sake - but we are flexible enough to devote an entire cell to her if we have previously encountered her in some fashion.

  John Medina

  Fashion, Cells, Heaven

  Source: bobmorris.biz

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• Most theoretical work since the proposals of Hebb (1949) and Hayek (1952) has relied upon particular forms of dependent synaptic rules in which either pre- or postsynaptic change is contingent upon closely occurring events in both neurons taking part in the synapse.

  Gerald Edelman

  Events, Proposal, Hayek

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• If you meet somebody and are attracted to someone, and the exquisite neurons in your brain and her brain intermesh properly, then things can be wonderful. It's not like homework. You don't have to work at the relationship.

  Woody Allen

  Brain, Homework, Wonderful

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• The ability to double our biomass - not by waiting several million years and growing to be the size of an elephant - but waiting a few hundred thousand years for neurons to sprout into our brains - ones capable of having us create emotional relationships with other members of our species. We thereby double our biomass not by getting bigger, but by creating an ally.

  John Medina

  Emotional, Years, Elephants

  Source: bobmorris.biz

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• I want to travel on a train that smells like snowflakes. I want to sip in cafes that smell like comets. Under the pressure of my step, I want the streets to emit the precise odor of a diamond necklace. I want the newspapers I read to smell like the violins left in pawnshops by weeping hobos on Christmas Eve. I want to carry luggage that reeks of the neurons in Einstein's brain. I want a city's gases to smell like the golden belly hairs of the gods. And when I gaze at a televised picture of the moon, I want to detect, from a distance of 239,000 miles, the aroma of fresh mozzarella.

  Tom Robbins

  Distance, Moon, Hair

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• If you start responding to every stimulus, then you end up as a nerve gas case, quite literally. Neurons fire at once.

  Hollis Frampton

  Fire, Nerves, Ends

  Hollis Frampton, Bruce Jenkins (2009). “On the Camera Arts and Consecutive Matters: The Writings of Hollis Frampton”, p.243, MIT Press

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• The most obvious – and easiest! – way to gain perspective is to put your work away for a while.
  The truth is, we don’t know how taking a break frees up the mind, but it does: Somehow it freshens our little neurons, or perhaps it prompts the brain to create more cleverness molecules.
  If you can bear to let a short piece sit a week and a book-length work a month, do so. Longer is fine, too; some authors have abandoned manuscripts for years before unearthing them and realizing, ‘Hey, this isn’t bad,’ and renewing their energy for the project.

  Elizabeth Sims

  Book, Years, Perspective

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• The cells and fibers of the brain must carry some kind of individual identification tags, presumably cytochemical in nature, by which they are distinguished one from another almost, in many regions, to the level of the single neurons.

  Roger Wolcott Sperry

  Cells, Brain, Levels

  "Brain Wiring by Presorting Axons" by Kazunari Miyamichi and Liqun Luo, Science 325 (5940), July 31, 2009.

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• What do we mean by "knowledge" or "understanding"? And how do billions of neurons achieve them? These are complete mysteries. Admittedly, cognitive neuroscientists are still very vague about the exact meaning of words like "understand," "think," and indeed the word "meaning" itself.

  Vilayanur S. Ramachandran

  Mean, Thinking, Understanding

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• We are all now connected by the Internet, like neurons in a giant brain.

  Stephen Hawking

  Brain, Giants, Internet

  "Q&A with Stephen Hawking". Interview with Jon Swartz, www.usatoday.com. December 2, 2014.

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• Such a bandwidth! God, who may not have a brain made of neurons, or a CPU made of silicon, but if he has the powers attributed to him he must have something far more elaborately and non-randomly constructed than the largest brain or the largest computer we know.

  Richard Dawkins

  Brain, May, Computer

  "The God Delusion". Book by Richard Dawkins, 2006.

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• Consciousness is somehow a by-product of the simultaneous, high frequency firing of neurons in different parts of the brain. It's the meshing of these frequencies that generates consciousness, just as tones from individual instruments produce the rich, complex, & seamless sounds of a symphony orchestra

  Francis Crick

  Inspiration, Symphony, Brain

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• Even then, more than a year earlier, there were neurons in her head, not far from her ears, that were being strangled to death, too quietly for her to hear them. Some would argue that things were going so insiduously wrong that the neurons themselves initiated events that would lead to their own destruction. Whether it was molecular murder or cellular suicide, they were unable to warn her of what was happening before they died.

  Lisa Genova

  Suicide, Years, Events

  Lisa Genova (2011). “Lisa Genova Box Set: Still Alice and Left Neglected”, p.17, Simon and Schuster

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• Perhaps eggs are like neurons, which also are not replenished in adulthood: they know too much. Eggs must plan the party. Sperm need only to show up- wearing top hat and tails, of course.

  Natalie Angier

  Party, Eggs, Needs

  Natalie Angier (1999). “Woman: An Intimate Geography”, p.43, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

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• Whatever we call it - mind, character, soul - we like to think we possess something that is greater than the sum of our neurons and that animates us.

  Susanna Kaysen

  Character, Thinking, Soul

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• For me, consciousness is the most interesting unsolved problem of science, and, in fact, we may never know what it is about a particular arrangement of neurons that gives rise to consciousness. Our consciousness, like the air we breathe or like the passage of time, is central to our existence as intelligent beings.

  Alan Lightman

  Intelligent, Air, Giving

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• My mitochondria comprise a very large proportion of me. I cannot do the calculation, but I suppose there is almost as much of them in sheer dry bulk as there is the rest of me. Looked at in this way, I could be taken for a very large, motile colony of respiring bacteria, operating a complex system of nuclei, microtubules, and neurons for the pleasure and sustenance of their families, and running, at the moment, a typewriter.

  Lewis Thomas

  Running, Taken, Typewriters

  Lewis Thomas (1990). “A Long Line of Cells Collected Essays”

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• We are using the neurons, our identity, to constantly maintain our identity. Whether you are awake, asleep, or dreaming, this process is carried on. But, it is wearing you out.That is why I say the tragedy that is facing mankind is not AIDS or cancer, but Alzthiemer's disease.

  U.G. Krishnamurti

  Dream, Cancer, Tragedy

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• There is one brain organ that is optimised for understanding and articulating logical processes and that is the outer layer of the brain, called the cerebral cortex. Unlike the rest of the brain, this relatively recent evolutionary development is rather flat, only about 0.32 cm (0.12 in) thick and includes a mere 6 million neurons. This elaborately folded organ provides us with what little competence we do possess for understanding what we do and who we do it.

  Ray Kurzweil

  Understanding, Brain, Development

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