Steven Pinker Quotes

Your brain does not manufacture thoughts. Your thoughts shape neural networks.

Shaped a little like a loaf of French country bread, our brain is a crowded chemistry lab, bustling with nonstop neural conversations.

Phrenology is the study of the brain or how it operates, you know, the particular components that effect the nerves and the thought process, and the study of the size of the head. We just wanted to tie it into subject matters.

A profound intriguing and compelling guide to the intricacies of the human brain.

The brain is a monstrous, beautiful mess.

The brain, is the most complex thing we have yet discovered in our universe.

To know the brain...is equivalent to ascertaining the material course of thought and will, to discovering the intimate history of life in its perpetual duel with external forces.

The brain is the highest of the organs in position, and it is protected by the vault of the head; it has no flesh or blood or refuse. It is the citadel of sense-perception.

You certainly can't tell anything from the microscopic structure of the brain whether the person was an idiot or a genius.

If it is mind that we are searching the brain, then we are supposing the brain to be much more than a telephone-exchange. We are supposing it to be a telephone-exchange along with subscribers as well.

The brain happens to be a meat machine.

One can truly say that the irresistible progress of natural science since the time of Galileo has made its first halt before the study of the higher parts of the brain, the organ of the most complicated relations of the animal to the external world. And it seems, and not without reason, that now is the really critical moment for natural science; for the brain, in its highest complexity-the human brain-which created and creates natural science, itself becomes the object of this science.

The Holy Grail of neuroscience has been to understand how and where information is encoded in the brain.

The fact that a human brain of high amperage, otherwise highly efficient, may have a hole in it is surely not a secret.

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

As long as our brain is a mystery, the universe, the reflection of the structure of the brain will also be a mystery.

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

Some may be helped by images, some may not. Some require an image outside, others one inside the brain.

It is not the amount of knowledge that makes a brain. It is not even the distribution of knowledge. It is the interconnectedness.

The brain is where most people really screw up.

The possibility that empathy resides in parts of the brain so ancient that we share them with rats should give pause to anyone comparing politicians with those poor, underestimated creatures.

Within the book and volume of thy brain.

Man's brain, enlarged fortuitously, invented words in an ambitious attempt to learn how to think, only to have them usurped by his emotions. But we still try.

Many quantum physics are realizing or hypothesizing that consciousness is not a byproduct of evolution as has been suggested. Or for that matter, an expression of our brains, although it expresses itself through our brains. But consciousness is the common ground of existence that ultimately differentiates into space, time, energy, information and matter. And the same consciousness is responsible for our thoughts, for our emotions and feelings, for our behaviors, for our personal relationships, for our social interactions, for the environments that we find ourselves in, and for our biology.

"It must be inconvenient to be made of flesh," said the Scarecrow thoughtfully, "for you must sleep, and eat and drink. However, you have brains, and it is worth a lot of bother to be able to think properly."