My own brain is to me the most unaccountable of machinery - always buzzing, humming, soaring roaring diving, and then buried in mud. And why? What's this passion for?
I was working in corporate Canada and I was doing all right. But I was burnt out... Long hours, a lot of clients. I just wanted to get away. Track and field was sort of like the elimination thing. I just wanted to go and do something. Exercise my brain and my body and kind of gravitate to that.
The authority of depression is horrifying. I felt like my brain was busted and that I could never feel good again. I really thought that I was never gonna heal.
Human thinking can skip over a great deal, leap over small misunderstandings, can contain ifs and buts in untroubled corners of the mind. But the machine has no corners. Despite all the attempts to see the computer as a brain, the machine has no foreground or background.
My brain is just so busy. I'm inattentive; I'm a daydreamer: the space cadet kind.
Before MS moved in on me, I'd worked for seven years as a city lawyer, as the editor of a literary magazine, and before the age of 20, I'd also worked as a cadet journalist and as an assistant director in both film and TV. And then, after the lesions of MS, both on my spine and in my brain, I was the opposite of bionic.
Union Square Cafe is all soul, not brain.
Intuition enlightens and so links up with pure thought. They together become an intelligence which is not simply of the brain, which does not calculate, but feels and thinks.
I recently read that it's the left brain that does all that calculating, and the right brain that does the poetry. Somehow I've veered way towards the left. I've been doing it for years. Maybe I do art to balance it out.
I think of the brain as a computational device: It has a bunch of little components that perform calculations on some small aspect of the problem, and another part of the brain has to stitch it all together, like a tapestry or a quilt.
There's a popular concept of 'intelligence' as book smarts, like calculus or chess, as opposed to, say, social skills. So people say that 'it takes more than intelligence to succeed in human society.' But social skills reside in the brain, not the kidneys.
Brain extenders are anything that get information out of our heads and into the physical world: calendars, key hooks by the front door, note pads, 'to do' lists.
When I hit a block, regardless of what I am writing, what the subject matter is, or what's going on in the plot, I go back and I read Pablo Neruda's poetry. I don't actually speak Spanish, so I read it translation. But I always go back to Neruda. I don't know why, but it calms me, calms my brain.
Calories from protein affect your brain, your appetite control center, so you are more satiated and satisfied.
When the brain perceives you are no longer reproductive because your hormones are out of balance, it tries to get rid of you, and it usually activates the cancers in perimenopause.
A single neuron in the brain is an incredibly complex machine that even today we don't understand. A single 'neuron' in a neural network is an incredibly simple mathematical function that captures a minuscule fraction of the complexity of a biological neuron.
It is more important to eat some carbohydrates at breakfast, because the brain needs fuel right away, and carbohydrate is the best source.
The blue light emanating from our cell phones, our tablets and our laptops is playing havoc on our brain chemicals: our serotonin, our melatonin. It's screwing up our sleep patterns, our happiness, our appetites, our carbohydrate cravings.
Carbohydrates, whether derived from gluten-containing foods or other sources, including fruit, sweetened beverages, and starchy vegetables, are dangerous as they relate to brain health in and of themselves.
The best diet for overall health, and specifically for heart, brain, and cancer risk reduction, is a diet that's aggressively low in carbohydrates with an abundance of healthful fat, and this is the central theme of 'Grain Brain.'
