Quotes Tagged "neuroscience"

The world needs psychological singularity, that is oneness among humans, not some pompous biotechnological singularity.

Mystics would tell you, you are not your body - materialists would tell you, you are only your body - whereas the existential fact of human life is that, you are not your body - you are not your mind - you are nothing - for there is nothing constant about you at any given moment that you can say that you are that - your mind is constantly changing - your body is constantly changing - you as a bio-psychological creature are constantly evolving - if there is anything that's constant about you, it's change itself - therefore, what you really are, is an eternal force of change.

When you hear “Neuroscience” you would probably be thinking about the study of the nervous system. And that’s exactly how the field began its journey into scientific investigation. But I wanted to do something with it, which no other scientist or philosopher had done before. I began moulding the soft clay of Neuroscience with the ingredients of my own philosophy to prepare the actual science of self-realization.

The Lord is in you and only in you. Without the human mind to construct an over-exaggerated idea of the Lord, there is no actual Lord of humanity except for humanity itself.

The divinity you seek, lies in the exuberant realm of protoplasm inside your own skull.

How can a three-pound mass of jelly that you can hold in your palm imagine angels, contemplate the meaning of infinity, and even question its own place in the cosmos? Especially awe inspiring is the fact that any single brain, including yours, is made up of atoms that were forged in the hearts of countless, far-flung stars billions of years ago. These particles drifted for eons and light-years until gravity and change brought them together here, now. These atoms now form a conglomerate- your brain- that can not only ponder the very stars that gave it birth but can also think about its own ability to think and wonder about its own ability to wonder. With the arrival of humans, it has been said, the universe has suddenly become conscious of itself. This, truly, it the greatest mystery of all.

Any man could, if he were so inclined, be the sculptor of his own brain.

The neural processes underlying that which we call creativity have nothing to do with rationality. That is to say, if we look at how the brain generates creativity, we will see that it is not a rational process at all; creativity is not born out of reasoning.

Given her deafness, the auditory part of the brain, deprived of its usual input, had started to generate a spontaneous activity of its own, and this took the form of musical hallucinations, mostly musical memories from her earlier life. The brain needed to stay incessantly active, and if it was not getting its usual stimulation..., it would create its own stimulation in the form of hallucinations.

There are, of course, inherent tendencies to repetition in music itself. Our poetry, our ballads, our songs are full of repetition; nursery rhymes and the little chants and songs we use to teach young children have choruses and refrains. We are attracted to repetition, even as adults; we want the stimulus and the reward again and again, and in music we get it. Perhaps, therefore, we should not be surprised, should not complain if the balance sometimes shifts too far and our musical sensitivity becomes a vulnerability.

In brief, neuroscience is, to me, a science of systems in which first-order and local explanatory schemata are needed but not sufficient. Reductionism, by its nature, takes away the distributed interactions that underlie the global properties of systems. Theoretical approaches provide different means to simplify. We must thus learn to understand, rather than avoid complexity: simplicity and complexity often characterize less the object of study than our understanding of it. Maybe one day, neuroscience textbooks will finally start slimming down

If we can see the scientific viewpoint as one way of perceiving rather than as offering the only or superior truth, then we can learn from these discoveries without shifting into a more mechanical viewpoint ourselves.

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