William Wordsworth Quotes

Consciousness is the smallest player in the operations of the brain.

We were alone. Where, I could not say, hardly imagine. All was black, and such a dense black that, after some minutes, my eyes had not been able to discern even the faintest glimmer.

Men ought to know that from the brain and from the brain only arise our pleasures, joys, laughter, and jests as well as our sorrows, pains, griefs and tears. ... It is the same thing which makes us mad or delirious, inspires us with dread and fear, whether by night or by day, brings us sleeplessness, inopportune mistakes, aimless anxieties, absent-mindedness and acts that are contrary to habit.

Brain: an apparatus with which we think that we think. Mind, n. A mysterious form of matter secreted by the brain.

The brain is a mystery; it has been and still will be. How does the brain produce thoughts? That is the central question and we have still no answer to it.

What does it mean, exactly, for a given system to be a 'neural correlate of consciousness'?

Anyway, there is a lot of really interesting work going on in the neuroscience and psychology of consciousness, and I would love to see philosophers become more closely involved with this.

Brain: an apparatus with which we think we think.

Independent of what is happening around you in the outside world, humans constantly have internal activity in the brain.

Everybody agrees that the brain is a remarkable machine. It's capable of generating an enormous number of phenomena, some of them very obvious and some of them less obvious. But I think that in the end there are going to be some very basic explanations for many things: emotions, awareness, consciousness, attention, perception, recognition.

Thinking no longer means anymore than checking at each moment whether one can indeed think.

Sometimes, I believe I actually see the wheels in my brain turning.

It is amazing how many thoughts can race through your head in a minute.

One day we shall certainly 'reduce' thought experimentally to molecular and chemical motions in the brain; but does that exhaust the essence of thought?

Listen, no part of me is more definitive of who I am than my brain.

The brain runs its show incognito.

The brain is not, and cannot be, the sole or complete organ of thought and feeling.

I'm not sure if I could tell the difference—between just staring into space and thinking. We're usually thinking all the time, aren't we? Not that we live in order to think, but the opposite isn't true either—that we think in order to live. I believe, contrary to Descartes, that we sometimes think in order not to be. Staring into space might unintentionally have the opposite effect.

I can state with complete assurance that for each of us our brains form the material basis of our experiences and memories, our imaginations, our dreams.

Mind is memory, not intelligence.

Minds are simply what brains do.

Even though its common knowledge these days, it never ceases to amaze me that all the richness of our mental life - all our feelings, our emotions, our thoughts, our ambitions, our love life, our religious sentiments and even what each of us regards us his own intimate private self - is simply the activity of these little specks of jelly in your head, in your brain. There is nothing else.

Keep thinking. You can hear our brains rattling around inside us, like the littler Russian dolls.

Every morning we awaken from sleep and from our dreams and enter the state we call wakefulness. A continuous stream of thoughts, most of them repetitive, characterizes the normal wakeful state.