Arthur Koestler Quotes

In proportion to our body mass, our brain is three times as large as that of our nearest relatives. This huge organ is dangerous and painful to give birth to, expensive to build and, in a resting human, uses about 20 per cent of the body's energy even though it is just 2 per cent of the body's weight. There must be some reason for all this evolutionary expense.

If our brains were simple enough to be understood, we wouldn't be smart enough to understand them.

The brain weighs only three pounds, yet it is the most complex object in the solar system.

The human brain became large by natural selection (who knows why, but presumably for good cause). Yet surely most "things" now done by our brains, and essential both to our cultures and to our very survival, are epiphenomena of the computing power of this machine, not genetically grounded Darwinian entities created specifically by natural selection for their current function.

It is imperfection - not perfection - that is the end result of the program written into that formidably complex engine that is the human brain, and of the influences exerted upon us by the environment and whoever takes care of us during the long years of our physical, psychological and intellectual development.

When I look at the human brain I'm still in awe of it. Every single time you lift off the bone and open the durra and there it is - the human brain, the thing that gives a person a personality, that distinguishes each one of us, that there could be more than 6 billion of us here on this planet with brains that look the same, but each one being distinctly different because of what is going on in that thing. I'll never get over my awe of that.

The human brain, then, is the most complicated organization of matter that we know.

Thinking is a physical process, the human brain is not exempt from evolution

Overall, the human brain is the most complex object known in the universe - known, that is, to itself.

I don't think there was a thunderclap or a divine spark that suddenly made one species smart. You can see, in our ancestors, there was a gradual expansion of the brain; there was an expansion of the complexity of tools.

I was taught that the human brain was the crowning glory of evolution so far, but I think it's a very poor scheme for survival.

Neuroscience is by far the most exciting branch of science because the brain is the most fascinating object in the universe. Every human brain is different - the brain makes each human unique and defines who he or she is.

When it comes to brains, size matters. It's not all that matters, of course. Whales and dolphins have brains that are larger than humans', but few of the flippered and fluked set win tenure at Stanford. Our brains are the largest in proportion to body size, and they're also highly sophisticated.

In our skulls, we carry around 3 pounds of slimy, wet, greyish tissue, corrugated like crumpled toilet paper. You wouldn't think, to look at the unappetizing lump, that it was some of the most powerful stuff in the known universe.

When we talk about the brain, it is anything but unidimensional or simplistic or reductionistic.

The early development of the human brain is extremely important for setting the table, if you will, for potential future accomplishment.

If little else, the brain is an educational toy.

Why do we have a brain in the first place? Not to write books, articles, or plays; not to do science or play music. Brains develop because they are an expedient way of managing life in a body.

The evolution of the brain not only overshot the needs of prehistoric man, it is the only example of evolution providing a species with an organ which it does not know how to use.

After many years of research on how the human brain learns to read, I came to an unsettlingly simple conclusion: We humans were never born to read.

The brain is the black box: the final frontier.

Our brains are way, way more complex than any computer we know how to make. They're way more creative. The input's pretty good, but the output is constrained by our tongues and jaws moving and us typing.

The brain can process two million bits of information per second. It remembers everything you've ever seen, everything you've ever heard.

One of the most impressive features of brains - and especially human brains - is the flexibility to learn almost any kind of task that comes its way.

With all its technical sophistication, the photographic camera remains a coarse device compared to the human hand and brain.