The Brain: The Story Of You Quotes
"All the experiences in your life shape the microscopic details of your brain. Neurally speaking, who you are depends on where you’ve been."
"Your brain is a relentless shape-shifter, constantly rewriting its own circuitry."
"Because your experiences are unique, so are the vast, detailed patterns in your neural networks."
"Your identity is a moving target; it never reaches an endpoint."
"Our thoughts and dreams, our memories and experiences all arise from this strange neural material."
"If you damage a small piece of the brain, who you are is likely to change radically."
"An entire life, lavishly colored with agonies and ecstasies, took place in these three pounds."
"Humans are able to thrive in many different environments because the human brain is born remarkably unfinished."
"The process of becoming who you are is defined by carving back the possibilities that were already present."
"We are sculpted by the world we happen to drop into."
"Our brains form fewer but stronger connections."
"Children whose cries went unanswered soon learned not to cry."
"The human brain comes into the world with some amount of genetic hardwiring but allows itself to be shaped by the details of life experience."
"The brain shows an increasing response to rewards in areas related to pleasure seeking."
"Our sense of self undergoes major changes in our teenage years."
"Even in adulthood our brains continue to change."
"Everything you’ve experienced has altered the physical structure of your brain."
"Our brains and bodies change so much during our life that memory serves as the thread that makes you who you are."
"The enemy of memory isn’t time; it’s other memories."
"Our past is not a faithful record. Instead, it's a reconstruction."
"Your interpretation of physical objects has everything to do with the historical trajectory of your brain."
"The world around you, with its rich colors, textures, sounds, and scents is an illusion, a show put on for you by your brain."
"Reality is the final output of hidden neural networks."
"Your experience is the product of a period of intense and inevitable neural change."
"The brain has no access to the world outside."
"Our perception of reality has less to do with what’s happening out there, and more to do with what’s happening inside our brain."
"Conscious awareness is one of the most baffling puzzles of modern neuroscience."
"What is the relationship between our mental experience and our physical brains?"
"Reading gets even stranger when you consider this: as you read these words, their meaning flows from this sequence of symbols directly into your brain."
"Once you’ve mastered reading a script, the act gives the illusion of being effortless."
"Are you the captain of your own boat, or do your decisions and actions have more to do with massive neural machinery operating out of sight?"
"The conscious you is only the smallest part of the activity of your brain."
"Your actions, your beliefs, and your biases are all driven by networks in your brain to which you have no conscious access."
"Your brain takes care of the work behind the scenes."
"The brain was a system of complexity for which we had no equivalent, and no language to capture it."
"All I know is whether I got the coffee to my mouth or not."
"The unconscious machinery of our brains is at work all the time."
"Having lost his ability to walk automatically, Ian is highly cognizant of the miraculous coordination that most of us take for granted."
"Every step he takes requires conscious planning and constant visual monitoring of his limbs."
"Practiced skills become written into the micro-structure of the brain."
"Our brains rewrite themselves to build dedicated circuitry for the missions we practice."
"Our brains operate in a rich web of interaction with one another."
"Brains have traditionally been studied in isolation, but that approach overlooks the fact that an enormous amount of brain circuitry has to do with other brains."
"Our survival depends on quick assessments of who is friend and who is foe."
"Our brains make social judgments constantly."
"Even as babies, we come equipped with social antennae for feeling our way through the world."
"The brain comes with inborn instincts to detect who’s trustworthy, and who isn’t."
"Our social challenges become more subtle and complex as we grow."
"Autism is a neurodevelopmental disorder which affects 1% of the population."
"Often, the best way to appreciate something is to see what the world looks like when it’s missing."
"I guess I learned how to make friends with the machines before I made friends with other people."
"By twenty-one, he was a roadie for the band KISS."
"The operations are so instinctive that they’re essentially invisible."
"The experiment was meant to help the researchers gain greater knowledge about the autistic brain."
"The stimulation seems to have fundamentally changed John."
"John’s story isn’t simply about hope for new treatment techniques for autism spectrum disorder."
"Every moment of our lives, our brain circuitry decodes the emotions of others based on extremely subtle facial cues."
"Research suggests this is not simply because they adopt the same clothes or hairstyles."
"To empathize with another person is to literally feel their pain."
"Watching someone else in pain and being in pain use the same neural machinery."
"Our capacity for empathy is why stories are so absorbing and so pervasive across human culture."
"We can’t help but simulate others, connect with others, care about others."
"Your brain turns on itself and becomes the source of your worst pain and your worst torture."
"In the social exclusion scenario, a volunteer is cut out of a game of catch."
"Social pain – such as that resulting from exclusion – activates the same brain regions as physical pain."
"The pain is a mechanism that steers us toward interaction and acceptance by others."
"We bind together through links of family, friendship, work, style, sports teams, religion, culture."
"It’s not that individual selection doesn’t occur; it’s just that it doesn’t provide the complete picture."
"For every ingroup, there must exist at least one outgroup."
"The network made up reports of ethnically motivated attacks by Bosnian Muslims and Croats against the Serb people."
"Jane Elliott_: The brown-eyed people do not get to use the drinking fountain."
"That allowed the children to extract a larger lesson: systems of rules can be arbitrary."
"Education plays a key role in preventing genocide."
"Human brains are fundamentally wired to interact: we’re a splendidly social species."
"You might assume that you end at the border of your skin, but there’s a sense in which there’s no way to mark the end of you and the beginning of all those around you."
"If biological algorithms are the important part of what makes us who we are, then it’s a possibility that we will someday be able to live forever in silica."
"The uploaded copy has all your memories and believes it was you, just there, standing outside the computer, in your body."
"Uploading may not be all that different from what happens to you each night when you go to sleep."
"Maybe what you would choose for your simulation is something very much like your present life on Earth."
"Every night we fall asleep and have bizarre dreams – and while we’re there we believe those worlds entirely."
"I do not know whether I was then a man dreaming I was a butterfly, or whether I am now a butterfly dreaming that I am a man."
"There’s some me at the center trying to figure all this out. I’m thinking about this, and therefore I exist."
"Our species is just at the beginning of something, and we don’t fully know what it is."
"Science may give us the tools to transcend that evolutionary story."
"Our species is just now discovering the tools to shape our own destiny."