Seth Shostak Quotes

When you engage your brain, it just keeps getting fatter and richer and wonderful.

You can expand your awareness in many ways, and as you do, your brain will evolve. It will grow physically by developing new neural pathways, synaptic connections, and even new brain cells. Perhaps more importantly, it will evolve to mirror the expansion of your mind into new, creative areas.

The joy of the mind is the measure of its strength.

I certainly believe that improving our intelligence is of important national interest.

I've always been fascinated by intelligence and how our brains work, and how they can be improved.

Your brain - every brain - is a work in progress. It is 'plastic.' From the day we're born to the day we die, it continuously revises and remodels, improving or slowly declining, as a function of how we use it.

The mind is the root from which all things grow if you can understand the mind, everything else is included.

All evidence shows that we are actually getting smarter. Roughly we are getting 10 IQ points smarter every decade. The speed of innovation is also faster.

There is little evidence that our individual intelligence has improved through recorded history.

What a distressing contrast there is between the radiant intelligence of the child and the feeble mentality of the average adult.

Children take in more information than we'd like to believe.

Little boys have amazing minds.

It is not the quantity but the quality of knowledge which determines the mind's dignity.

Knowledge fills a large brain; it merely inflates a small one.

Most of our brain cells are glial cells, once thought to be mere support cells, but now understood as having a critical role in brain function. Glial cells in the human brain are markedly different from glial cells in other brains, suggesting that they may be important in the evolution of brain function.

Natural abilities can almost compensate for the want of every kind of cultivation, but no cultivation of the mind can make up for the want of natural abilities.

People haven't even begun to tap into the potential of what the mind is possible of doing. We only use a certain percentage of our brains.

Since the rise of Homo sapiens, human beings have been the smartest minds around. But very shortly - on a historical scale, that is - we can expect technology to break the upper bound on intelligence that has held for the last few tens of thousands of years.

These will vary in every human being; but knowledge is the same for every mind, and every mind may and ought to be trained to receive it.

The human mind is capable of excitement without the application of gross and violent stimulants; and he must have a very faint perception of its beauty and dignity who does not know this.

The act of learning to read added an entirely new circuit to our hominid brain's repertoire. The long developmental process of learning to read deeply changed the very structure of that circuit's connections, which rewired the brain, which transformed the nature of human thought.

Intelligence is the ability to solve problems, whereas consciousness is the ability to feel things such as pain, joy, love, and anger. Throughout history, intelligence always went hand in hand with consciousness.

The answer is pretty clear that your intelligence can actually be changed.

The narrow bandwidth of TV has made us think that we are stupider than we are.

At ten I was bright.