Neurology Quotes

“In the statistical gargon used in psychology, p refers to the probability that the difference you see between two groups (of introverts and extroverts, say, or males and females) could have occurred by chance. As a general rule, psychologists report a difference between two groups as 'significant' if the probability that it could have occurred by chance is 1 in 20, or less. The possibility of getting significant results by chance is a problem in any area of research, but it's particularly acute for sex differences research. Supppose, for example, you're a neuroscientist interested in what parts of the brain are involved in mind reading. You get fifteen participants into a scanner and ask them to guess the emotion of people in photographs. Since you have both males and females in your group, you rin a quick check to ensure that the two groups' brains respond in the same way. They do. What do you do next? Most likely, you publish your results without mentioning gender at all in your report (except to note the number of male and female participants). What you don't do is publish your findings with the title "No Sex Differences in Neural Circuitry Involved in Understanding Others' Minds." This is perfectly reasonable. After all, you weren't looking for gender difference and there were only small numbers of each sex in your study. But remember that even if males and females, overall, respond the same way on a task, five percent of studies investigating this question will throw up a "significant" difference between the sexes by chance. As Hines has explained, sex is "easily assessed, routinely evaluated, and not always reported. Because it is more interesting to find a difference than to find no difference, the 19 failures to observe a difference between men and women go unreported, whereas the 1 in 20 finding of a difference is likely to be published." This contributes to the so-called file-drawer phenomenon, whereby studies that do find sex differences get published, but those that don't languish unpublished and unseen in a researcher's file drawer.”
― Cordelia Fine, Delusions of Gender: How Our Minds, Society, and Neurosexism Create Difference

“My nephew has HDADHD. High Definition Attention Deficit Disorder. He can barely pay attention, but when he does it's unbelievably clear.”
― Steven Wright

“Which do you think is more valuable to humanity?

a. Finding ways to tell humans that they have free will despite the incontrovertible fact that their actions are completely dictated by the laws of physics as instantiated in our bodies, brains and environments? That is, engaging in the honored philosophical practice of showing that our notion of "free will" can be compatible with determinism?

or

b. Telling people, based on our scientific knowledge of physics, neurology, and behavior, that our actions are predetermined rather than dictated by some ghost in our brains, and then sussing out the consequences of that conclusion and applying them to society?



Of course my answer is b).”
― Jerry A. Coyne

“The mind, it occurs to me, is an engine. There is an ambient mode in which the mind sits idling, before there is information. Some minds idle in a kind of dreading crouch, waiting to be offended. Others stand up straight, eyes slightly wide, expecting to be pleasantly surprised. Some minds, imagining the great What Is Out There, imagine it intends doom for them; others imagine there is something out there that may be suffering and in need of their help.

Which is right?

Neither.

Both.

Maybe all of our politics is simply neurology writ large. Maybe there are a finite number of idling modes. Maybe there are just two broad modes, and out of this fact comes our current division.”
― George Saunders, The Braindead Megaphone

“The spirits of the brain are directly connected to the testicles. This is why men who weary their imagination in books are less suitable for procreative functions...”
― Louis de la Forge

“Some people with Tourette's have flinging tics- sudden, seemingly motiveless urges or compulsions to throw objects..... (I see somewhat similar flinging behaviors- though not tics- in my two year old godson, now in a stage of primal antinomianism and anarchy)”
― Oliver Sacks, An Anthropologist on Mars: Seven Paradoxical Tales

“Nonconformists aren't just going against the grain; they're going against the brain. Either their brains aren't taking the easy way out to begin with, or in standing apart from their peers, these students are standing up to their biology.”
― Alexandra Robbins, The Geeks Shall Inherit the Earth: Popularity, Quirk Theory and Why Outsiders Thrive After High School

“Recently, the search for what he calls "the splinters that make up different attention problems" has taken Castellanos in a new direction. First, he explains that your brain is far less concerned with your brilliant ideas or searing emotions than with its own internal "gyroscopic busyness," which consumes 65 percent of its total energy. Every fifty seconds, its activity fluctuates, causing what he calls a "brownout." No one knows the purpose of these neurological events, but Castellanos has a thesis: the clockwork pulses enable the brain's circuits to stay "logged on" and available to communicate with one another, even when they're not being used. "Imagine you're a cabdriver on your day off," Castellanos says. "You don't need to use your workday circuits on a Sunday, but to keep those channels open, your brain sends a ping through them every minute or so. The fluctuations are the brain's investment in maintaining its circuits online.”
― Winifred Gallagher, Rapt: Attention and the Focused Life

“The human brain takes in information from other people and incorporates it with the information coming from its own senses, neuroscientist Gregory Berns has written. Many times, the group's opinion trumps the individual's before he even becomes aware of it.”
― Alexandra Robbins, The Geeks Shall Inherit the Earth: Popularity, Quirk Theory and Why Outsiders Thrive After High School

“[...] the absence of sensation can be devastating. But an absence of pain – the loudest of our sensations – sounds like a blessing, not a curse. Pain screams its way into our consciousness, blotting out everything else. The blinding sear of stubbing one’s toe, cracking one’s head, or cutting your finger, elbows all other sensations and senses out of the way, demanding immediate attention and action.”
― Guy Leschziner, Man Who Tasted Words

“The amazing flexibility of our minds seems nearly irreconcilable with the notion that our brains must be made out of fixed-rule hardware, which cannot be reprogrammed. We cannot make our neurons fire faster or slower, we cannot rewire our brains, we cannot redesign the interior of a neuron, we cannot make [any] choices about the hardware—and yet, we can control how we think.”
― Douglas R. Hofstadter, Godel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid

“Esperanza Impossible Sonnet 30

There is nothing free about your will,
All of it is conditioned to the hilt.
If you are to foster any original will,
A lot of soil you've got to till.
Perception is not observation,
Perception is prediction.
The brain doesn't care about observing,
It only puts forward a self-serving illusion.
Your will is but puppet to that illusion,
Which means you are but a puppet to evolution.
You do have the brain power to take control,
But it'll take a lot of inconvenient self-correction.
If you can do that, you shall rise as sapiens.
Or you'll just end up as compost in nature's garden.”
― Abhijit Naskar, Esperanza Impossible: 100 Sonnets of Ethics, Engineering & Existence

“Neurons can make or break the world.”
― Abhijit Naskar, Revolution Indomable

“I don't make baseless claims like - I'll remove all your fears, I'll remove all your anxieties, I'll remove all your insecurities. I am a scientist, not an influencer - which means, I am dutybound to adhere to the truth, no matter how inconvenient they are, instead of peddling comforting lies for exposure. And the truth is, if bombarding people with some fancy facts about the mind removed their worries, every household with a DSM (Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders) would be the happiest place on earth.”
― Abhijit Naskar, Vande Vasudhaivam: 100 Sonnets for Our Planetary Pueblo

“Fact is a state of matter, truth is a state of mind. Matter makes the mind - sure - but to fathom the matter behind mind in its fullest intricacies will take us millennia more.”
― Abhijit Naskar, Vande Vasudhaivam: 100 Sonnets for Our Planetary Pueblo

“Vande Vasudhaivam Sonnet 68

Don't be fooled by my attire,
You think of me a fool because
I want you to think of me a fool.
I am a behaviorist, and by behaving idiot
I study who's true, who's a tool.

I don't dress all ancient like a monk,
yet monks come to hear the words I utter.
I don't dress fancy like world leaders,
yet world leaders look to me for answer.

I don't wear the uniform of law,
yet coppers study me to be better cops.
I never got to put on a white coat,
yet white coats study me to be better docs.

I am the person beyond the paradigm,
I am but a reflection of the best of humankind.”
― Abhijit Naskar, Vande Vasudhaivam: 100 Sonnets for Our Planetary Pueblo

“Brain is the seat of the being.”
― Abhijit Naskar, Rowdy Scientist: Handbook of Humanitarian Science

“No language speaks to computers better than code,
No language speaks of matter better than physics.
No language speaks of mind better than neurology,
No language speaks pattern better than mathematics.
No language speaks of thought better than philosophy,
No language speaks of emotion better than poetry.
No language speaks of justice better than sociology,
No language speaks of behavior better than psychology.”
― Abhijit Naskar, Insan Himalayanoğlu: It's Time to Defect

“Brain used to lift the world,
is the only human brain.
All else is mindless protoplasm,
ever-consumed with greed and gain.”
― Abhijit Naskar, Insan Himalayanoğlu: It's Time to Defect

“Body cannot survive in the vacuum of space,
Mind cannot survive in the vacuum of time.
Brain cannot survive in the vacuum of skull,
So it floats about in the fluid of spine.”
― Abhijit Naskar, Tum Dunya Tek Millet: Greatest Country on Earth is Earth

“There is no spirit outside the domain of neurons.”
― Abhijit Naskar, Yaralardan Yangın Doğar: Explorers of Night are Emperors of Dawn

“The human brain, for all its sophistication, would be useless without its link to the outside world. Consider one experiment that illustrates this point. Volunteers hallucinated when they were deprived of sensory input by being blindfolded and suspended and warm water in a sensory deprivation tank. One saw charging pink and purple elephants. Another heard a chorus, still others had taste hallucinations. Our very sanity depends on a continuous flow of information from the outside.”
― Marieb Elaine N. Hoehn Katja

“What you perceive becomes your reality,
What you believe becomes your reality.
Brain weaves its own fabric of truth,
Why not weave some delectable unity!”
― Abhijit Naskar, Yaralardan Yangın Doğar: Explorers of Night are Emperors of Dawn

“The nervous system dictates what that soul attracts into her life. If your neurons are destroyed, you won't know where you are, what you want or where you want to go.”
― Vivienne Lamb, Outsmarting the Ego: The Physics of Evil

“Sometimes I don't know if it's my eyes or my memory or both.”
― Niedria Dionne Kenny

“At birth we become elements to entity, upon death the entity reverts to elements.”
― Abhijit Naskar, The Humanitarian Dictator

“At birth we become elements to entity,
upon death the entity reverts to elements.
Make sure to make your trip mean something,
more reason to transcend foolish containments.”
― Abhijit Naskar, The Humanitarian Dictator

“It is only water as long as its internal realm of two atoms of hydrogen and one atom of oxygen, remains intact. If you break that structure which we call H20, it ceases to be water. Likewise, a soul remains a soul, as long as its neural structures remain intact. If you mess with those structures, then the entire personality of the soul may get radically altered. So, to think even further, if those neural structures inside your head stop working, then the soul ceases to exist forever.”
― Abhijit Naskar, When Humans Unite: Making A World Without Borders

“Neurosonnet 2001

Neurons giveth,
neurons taketh away.
By neurons we forge self,
with neurons we fade away.

Within neurons cosmos comes to life,
within neurons worlds come to end.
Neurons are building blocks of walls,
as well as the instrument of bridges.

There is not one but two cosmos,
one made by nature, another by neurons.
We are the makers of observable reality,
shaped by hopes and biases of our own.

Neurons are the birthplace of God,
Neurons produce all ghosts and goblins.
Life is a concoction of neurochemistry,
Boon and bane are both our own making.”
― Abhijit Naskar, Neurosonnets: The Pocket Book of Consciousness

“Neurons giveth,
neurons taketh away.
By neurons we forge self,
with neurons we fade away.”
― Abhijit Naskar, Neurosonnets: The Pocket Book of Consciousness