Neuroscience Quotes

I work in a mix of areas and am informed by them all: child development, psycholinguistics, education, and most especially, cognitive neuroscience.

I studied neuroscience at the cellular level, so I was looking at learning and memory in the visual cortex of rats. Neuroscience mainly exposed me to a way of thinking – about experimentation, about what you believe to be true and how you could prove it – and how to approach things in a methodical manner.

Cognitive neuroscience is entering an exciting era in which new technologies and ideas are making it possible to study the neural basis of cognition, perception, memory and emotion at the level of networks of interacting neurons, the level at which we believe many of the important operations of the brain take place.

I found myself fascinated by neuroscience, attended a monthly lecture on brain science at the New York Psychoanalytic Institute, and was invited to become a member of a discussion group devoted to a new field: neuropsychoanalysis.

We want lifelong good health and an end to fearing the aging process. By combining the fruits of modern neuroscience and timeless wisdom, you can achieve those goals. That is what your brain is designed for. The key is realizing that you are the user of your brain.

I always wanted to be a scientist, I always thought I’d be a scientist, that was the narrative I was carrying around. I worked in a neuroscience lab as an undergraduate and then after, almost five years in total, but I realized I just wasn’t good at science. I didn’t have the discipline for it.

Daniel Dennett is our best current philosopher. He is the next Bertrand Russell. Unlike traditional philosophers, Dan is a student of neuroscience, linguistics, artificial intelligence, computer science, and psychology. He’s redefining and reforming the role of the philosopher.

In school, I studied psychology, linguistics, neuroscience. I understand that there is a real lack of respect for the brain.

The brain is the organ of destiny. It holds within its humming mechanism secrets that will determine the future of the human race.

It doesn’t matter whether it is chemistry or immunology or neuroscience: I just do research on what I find interesting.

Neuroscience is now a very important research area in biology. We are now understanding a lot more about brains in babies, as well as children and adults.

One of the difficulties in understanding the brain is that it is like nothing so much as a lump of porridge.

I have a neuroscience background – that’s what my doctorate is in – and I was trained to study hormones of attachment, so I definitely feel my parenting is informed by that.

I’ve always been fascinated with knowing the self. This fascination led me to submerge myself in art, study neuroscience, and later to become a psychotherapist.

The neuroscience of consciousness is not going to stop in its tracks because some philosophers guesses that project cannot be productive.

The neuroscience area – which is absolutely in its infancy – is much more important than genetics.

Advertisers are not thinking radically enough – they look for technology to lead instead of trying the neuroscience approach and thinking about what parts of the brain haven’t been activated before. These new experiences bring new capabilities to the brain.

The U.S. and Europe may have more breakthroughs in neuroscience, but you have to put that in perspective. The U.S. has 350 million people, and there are 28 countries in the European Union. Israel is third behind these countries in its neuroscience developments, but per capita, it is way ahead of everyone.

I’m a professor of neuroscience at Stanford University, and I’m kind of half-neurobiologist, half-primatologist.

For moral judgment, I think the most interesting trends in neuroscience are the ways in which judgments vary as a function of how emotionally salient the situation is.

Genetics is crude, but neuroscience goes directly to work on the brain, and the mind follows.

Well, my parents originally wanted me to become a doctor – that’s why I was in school; I was pre-med, and I graduated with a degree in psychology and a concentration in neuroscience. Really, the plan was for me to go to med school.

I can be a bit of a science geek. I tend more towards reading about brain science, neuroscience.

Exciting discoveries in neuroscience are allowing us to fit educational methods to new understandings of how the brain develops.

The Neurosciences do not exist exclusively to understand man’s nature. They also serve a social function, such as in the treatment of the cerebral diseases or when helping us to have a more pleasant and constructive life. It is a thing that one could explore well.

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.

If you want to know how to please a woman, just talk to a neuroscience major from Columbia.

Neuroscience has proven that similar areas of the brain are activated both in the person who suffers and in the one who feels empathy. Thus, empathic suffering is a true experience of suffering.

I think neuroscience is obviously very esoteric, but I think there are aspects of it that can absolutely be brought down to the level of an interested 11-, 12-, 13-year-old easily.

I contemplated a career at NIH at one point. I have a neuroscience background.

Actually, I think my view is compatible with much of the work going on now in neuroscience and psychology, where people are studying the relationship of consciousness to neural and cognitive processes without really trying to reduce it to those processes.

People try to apply directly results from the cognitive neurosciences directly to classroom practice and I have to tell you I am very skeptical about the exercise. We don’t know very much about how the brain works – we don’t even know how you remember to write your name.

When it comes to exploring the mind in the framework of cognitive neuroscience, the maximal yield of data comes from integrating what a person experiences – the first person – with what the measurements show – the third person.

My philosophy is really based on humility. I don’t think we know enough to fix either diagnostics or therapeutics. The future of psychiatry is clinical neuroscience, based on a much deeper understanding of the brain.

There’s an old rule in neuroscience that does not alter with age: use it or lose it. It is a very hopeful principle when applied to critical thought in the reading brain because it implies choice.

I am trained as a psychologist, and I think of all human issues in terms of psychology, neuroscience, genetics, and evolutionary theory.

When I read philosophy or neuroscience papers about consciousness, I don’t get the sense we’re any closer to understanding it than we were 50 years ago.

Moore’s Law-based technology is so much easier than neuroscience. The brain works in such a different way from the way a computer does.

I think it’s a natural human tendency, when you read something, you tend to read a lot of your prejudices into it. And neuroscience is like a lot of disciplines – it has fashions; things change.

When it comes to how neuroscience could help the wider public, the worst thing is when we make advances in, say, mindfulness, and then decide that everybody can potentially think their way to curing themselves or develop their own psycho-neuro-immune mechanisms for boosting cancer defenses.

I’m enormously interested to see where neuroscience can take us in understanding these complexities of the human brain and how it works, but I do think there may be limits in terms of what science can tell us about what does good and evil mean anyway, and what are those concepts about?