Quotes Tagged "neuroscience"

Life is a useless passion, an exciting journey of a mammal in survival mode. Each day is a miracle, a blessing unexplored and the more you immerse yourself in light, the less you will feel the darkness. There is more to life than nothingness. And cynicism. And nihilism. And selfishness. And glorious isolation. Be selfish with yourself, but live your life through your immortal acts, acts that engrain your legacy onto humanity. Transcend your fears and follow yourself into the void instead of letting yourself get eaten up by entropy and decay. Freedom is being yourself without permission. Be soft and leave a lasting impression on everybody you meet

Vulnerability is the least celebrated emotion in our society

Most people stand in the same place until it becomes dangerous to stay there. Then they act. Exceptional people act today to write their story.

Either your purpose is running your show or your process is.

Blaming others for your unhappiness is a habit that’s hard to give up because it triggers some happy chemicals. You feel important when you battle perceived injustice (serotonin), and you bond with others who feel similarly deprived (oxytocin). You get excited when you seek and find evidence that you have been denied your fair share of happiness (dopamine). You may even trigger endorphins by welcoming physical pain into your life as evidence of your deprivation. You keep building a circuit for seeking happiness by feeling wronged.

A belief is your brain’s self-maintenance mechanism.

Repudiation reinforces beliefs.

Imagine for a moment that we are nothing but the product of billions of years of molecules coming together and ratcheting up through natural selection, that we are composed only of highways of fluids and chemicals sliding along roadways within billions of dancing cells, that trillions of synaptic conversations hum in parallel, that this vast egglike fabric of micron-thin circuitry runs algorithms undreamt of in modern science, and that these neural programs give rise to our decision making, loves, desires, fears, and aspirations. To me, that understanding would be a numinous experience, better than anything ever proposed in anyone's holy text.

Nothing – I repeat – nothing can become so big an obstruction in your path that you cannot overcome it, for your brain is the most divine and most godly Turing Machine of all times, capable of deeds that humanity is yet to encounter.

You are your mind, so if you can see it, you can achieve it.

All achievements – all feats of excellence, rise from the protoplasmic realm of the brain.

An entire life, lavishly colored with ecstasies and agonies, is exclusively born from the functional expression of neurochemistry. Every time that we sob in sorrow or laugh in joy, we do so, steered by a glorious storm of hormonal interplay within the deepest parts of our mind. And with each drop of tear that we shed in our times of excruciating pain, our brain constructs majestic new cellular connections to aid in the pursuit of our passion - in the pursuit of truth.

If you change the way your brain processes an event, you change the duration of the ‘now.’ You actually change the point at which the present becomes the past.

Time is memory - where there is memory, there is time, where there is no memory, there is no time.

Time is a curious dimension - habit of the preconceived notion can easily reverse the hand of a clock, and yet the clock is still in perfect working order.

Authenticity and respect go to those who stick to their own specific field of work. For example, I am a Biologist and my work is the understanding of human nature - that's where I place all my attention. I know nothing revelatory about modern physics - I know nothing revelatory about mathematics - I know nothing revelatory about architecture - I know nothing revelatory about any field of understanding except for the ones directly related to biology. It doesn't mean that I cannot learn about other fields - I can, but every human has his or her own distinct knack, and mine is understanding humans - understanding how and why they think, what they think - how and why they feel, what they feel - how and why they behave, the way they behave - how and why they perceive, what they perceive.

Truth in the human world, is constructed, defined and then reconstructed by the human self.

When it comes to our embedded beliefs, our relative intolerance to ambiguous and contrary information leads us in many instances to ignore or less thoroughly process incoming data for its actual truth value. It is for this reason that society at large is so prone to religiosity because taking a skeptical stance is the difficult path; it is the path of greatest cognitive load. The cognitive load is high because we have to conscientiously work to continually question the information we receive and often re-program our subconscious for a subject matter that is both complex and abstract. More simply stated, it is cognitively easy for people to attribute perplexing phenomena to an abstract, all-powerful deity than it is to engage in a rigorous examination to discern potential explanatory data.

One of the things that I find especially worrisome is the propensity for people to perceive reality as dyadic, comprised of two oppositional elements. Some prominent examples are our assignment of good–evil, right–wrong, just–unjust, heaven–hell, conservative–liberal, rich–poor, us–them. I also refer to this as compartmental minimalism because of our tendency to force our understanding of reality into as few categories as possible. Essentially, by perceiving reality in this way, we intentionally and unintentionally, reduce the cognitive load. We do not want the hassle of too many details or abstractions; however, this convenience comes at a cost that goes unacknowledged. We essentially build a false reality bit-by-bit.

To improve the human condition in the human world, the humans have to rise and act out of conscience, not of delusion. And be careful not to let your focus be on taking away people’s Gods, because if you do, people won’t even let you in their lives. Let your focus be on improving human condition, and when that job begins to show results, eventually the world will get rid of the man-made Gods. Only when people truly know that there are humans willing to be next to them in times of their distress, that they can let go of their imaginary Gods. And that’s the day when human conscience will truly reign over the human world.