Lisa Randall Quotes

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

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

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.

Many Nobel Prizes are awaiting good research to understand and explain the many mysteries of our bodies, such as the basic mechanism of memory or imagination.

We will move from looking at correlations between brain activity and behaviour to studying how the brain causes mental states and behaviour.

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

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.

The way real memories work, from what we understand, is really complex. And it's an interconnection of different things and redundancy in the brain. So the idea of a memory existing as a little snow globe - the way we represent it in the film - is actually not scientifically accurate at all.

I read a couple of books about neuroscience and the relationship between the mind and the body.

For the longest time, neuroscientists were forced to be passive observers of brain activity.

No matter how closely you examine the water, glucose, and electrolyte salts in the human brain, you can't find the point where these molecules became conscious.

The kind of neuroscience that I do and my colleagues do is almost like the weatherman. We are always chasing storms. We want to see and measure storms - brainstorms, that is.

The human brain is an incredible pattern-matching machine.

All our behaviours are a result of neurophysiological activity in the brain. There is no reason to believe there is any magic going on.

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.

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

We're told that when we remember, the same parts of our brain light up as when we experienced the event we're remembering. Your brain lives through it again.

I don't know about you, but I find it exhilarating to see how vague psychological notions evaporate and give rise to a physical, mechanistic understanding of the mind, even if it's the mind of the fly.

I think we're all fascinated and a little mystified by how the brain works. One of the most mysterious of the physical sciences is neurological science.

I find the function of the brain incredibly fascinating, and it's like trying to crack the toughest, most complicated problem there is.

The human brain works in, so far, mysterious and wondrous ways that are completely different than the ways that computers calculate. Things like appetite or emotion, how do those function in the brain?

As someone who was basically a software engineer for many years, I became fascinated with how the brain functions and is put together and works in such a different fashion than computers do.

The thing you realize when you get into studying neuroscience, even a little bit, is that everything is connected to everything else. So it's as if the brain is trying to use everything at its disposal - what it is seeing, what it is hearing, what is the temperature, past experience.

The thing I'm most interested in is the nervous system. How do brains grow? How do genes build complicated nervous systems?

From my first published paper in 1946, my obsession has been to objectify inner experiences, to demystify the software of human existence. How? By relating changes in external behavior, systematically and lawfully, to changes in the brain.