Thomas R. Insel Quotes

Scientists have made extraordinary advances in understanding the brain and its disorders.

Antonio Damasio is a distinguished neuroscientist with a flair for writing about science and an enthusiasm for philosophizing.

I read a lot of nonfiction - especially books about the brain.

I'm so interested in the brain. I read true crime.

I decided, as a medical student, to devote myself to a study of the brain.

There is no such thing as a disembodied mind. The mind is implanted in the brain, and the brain is implanted in the body.

The boundary between neurology and psychiatry is becoming increasingly blurred, and it's only a matter of time before psychiatry becomes just another branch of neurology.

The brain is the cornerstone of virtually every facet of our lives. I wish we knew more.

In school, I studied psychology, linguistics, neuroscience. I understand that there is a real lack of respect for the brain.

The brain is hugely complicated, and because it is so complicated, it requires multidisciplinary research.

I had always wanted to become a neurologist, which is one of the most demanding vocations in medicine. Where do you stop, after all, with the brain? How does it function? What are its limits? The work seems unending.

I'm tremendously optimistic about the future of my discipline, yet understanding the brain is so difficult that we neuroscientists need help.

I really enjoyed my degree, for me it was the best course you can do. To be able to study the brain and nervous system and the mind with a scientific approach is just incredible! Its philosophical, psychological and biological, three very interesting areas to me.

To find better means of fixing the brain, we first need to achieve something more fundamental. We must understand how it works.

I was interested in big unknowns, and the brain is one of the biggest, so building tools that allow us to regard the brain as a big electrical circuit appealed to me.

People have wanted to look inside the human mind, the human brain, for thousands of years.

This is what I do. I look at brains. I'm fascinated by it. I can spend hours doing it. In fact, if I want to relax, that's one way I can relax.

Today, you have neuroscientists working on a genetic, behavioural or cognitive level, and then you have informaticians, chemists and mathematicians. They all have their own understanding of how the brain functions and is structured. How do you get them all around the same table?

You can't imagine how much detail we know about brains. There were 28,000 people who went to the neuroscience conference this year, and every one of them is doing research in brains. A lot of data. But there's no theory. There's a little, wimpy box on top there.

I'm delighted the world is becoming more mentally literate. A few decades ago, if you mentioned the word 'brain,' no one was interested. Now, nearly every magazine on the planet is featuring the brain. One of my original goals, on one level, was to make myself unnecessary.

Genetics is crude, but neuroscience goes directly to work on the brain, and the mind follows.

I don't believe in psychology.

I do what I do merrily out of curiosity because I want to know how the brain works. That will get me up early in the morning and keep me going all day long.

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.

The adage that fact is stranger than fiction seems to be especially true for the workings of the brain.