John Eccles Quotes

The body and dendrites of a nerve cell are specialized for the reception and integration of information which is conveyed as impulses that are fired from other nerve cells along their axons.

Natural or artificial stimulation of nerves gives rise to a process of progressive excitation in them, leading to a response in the effector organ of the nerves concerned.

We shall probably never attain the power of measuring the velocity of nervous action; for we have not the opportunity of comparing its propagation through immense space, as we have in the case of light.

Each cell sends electrical pulses to other cells, up to hundreds of times per second. If you represented each of these trillions and trillions of pulses in your brain by a single photon of light, the combined output would be blinding.

Neuroscientists talk a lot about brain circuits. In fact, the word 'circuit' is probably misleading. We do not know where most circuits begin and end. And unlike an electrical circuit, brain connections are heavily reciprocal and recursive, so that a direction of information flow can be inferred but sometimes not proven.

That a strong stimulus to such an afferent nerve, exciting most or all of its fibres, should in regard to a given muscle develop inhibition and excitation concurrently is not surprising.

Existence of an excited state is not a prerequisite for the production of inhibition; inhibition can exist apart from excitation no less than, when called forth against an excitation already in progress, it can suppress or moderate it.

We know a certain amount about neurons. You can do fMRI and watch parts of the brain light up. But what happens in the middle is poorly understood.

As an ex-programmer, I'm still just curious about how the brain functions, how that flow of information really happens.

There's that effect that is very physical, very down there at the synaptic level, which really means microscopic cellular level, but also molecular level, because all of those structures are operating on an electrochemical basis and so the changes there are very important.

Synaptic summation is the technical term used in neurophysiology for those instances in which some neuron C is fired only by a combination of neurons A and B.

Your brain is triggered to produce.

Cocoa boosts brain serotonin. Almost every single antidepressant aims at either enhancing serotonin or keeping it in the brain longer. Chocolate or cocoa does that very well.

With its billions of interconnected neurons, whose interactions change from millisecond to millisecond, the human brain is an archetypal complex system.

Studies by many labs have already started to identify specific circuits of neurons involved in normal cognitive function like memory and learning, as well as disease processes such as Parkinson's disease, depression, and autism.

All our behaviours are a result of neurophysiological activity in the brain.

Any kind of novelty or excitement drives up dopamine in the brain, and dopamine is associated with romantic love.

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.

We have to remain humble about our understanding of the brain, because even our most powerful tools remain pretty blunt instruments for decoding the brain. In fact, we still do not know how to decipher the basic language of how the brain works.

To speak, therefore, of an electric current in the nerves, is to use quite as symbolic an expression as if we compared the action of the nervous principle with light or magnetism.

The human brain has 100 billion neurons, each neuron connected to 10 thousand other neurons. Sitting on your shoulders is the most complicated object in the known universe.

It was quite difficult to find a place to do what we wanted, namely to study the neurological basis of behaviour and especially learning and memory, which we were particularly interested in.

Space and time, not proteins and neurons, hold the answer to the problem of consciousness. When we consider the nerve impulses entering the brain, we realize that they are not woven together automatically, any more than the information is inside a computer.

There are very few things in the body that nitric oxide doesn't regulate.

I think what's known about neurology is still scattered and uncertain.