Maryanne Wolf Quotes

In the human mind, the number of possible connections that can be made between neurons greatly exceeds the number of atoms in the universe.

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

The human brain has 100 billion neurons, each neuron connected to 10 thousand other neurons. Sitting on your shoulders is the most complicated object in the known universe.

Space and time, not proteins and neurons, hold the answer to the problem of consciousness. When we consider the nerve impulses entering the brain, we realize that they are not woven together automatically, any more than the information is inside a computer.

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.

We know a certain amount about neurons. You can do fMRI and watch parts of the brain light up. But what happens in the middle is poorly understood.

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

In the brain, you have connections between the neurons called synapses, and they can change. All your knowledge is stored in those synapses.

Neuroplasticity research showed that the brain changes its very structure with each different activity it performs, perfecting its circuits so it is better suited to the task at hand.

We have about 100 million cells interconnected in our brains. They communicate with one another through electrical signals.

In my view, while the single neuron is the basic anatomical and information processing-signaling unit of the brain, it is not capable of generating behaviors and, ultimately, thinking. Instead, the true functional unit of the central nervous system is a population of neurons, or neural ensembles or cell assemblies.

A single neuron in the brain is an incredibly complex machine that even today we don't understand. A single 'neuron' in a neural network is an incredibly simple mathematical function that captures a minuscule fraction of the complexity of a biological neuron.

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 connections in the brain fade away unless used. We know that early stimulation of children leads to higher cognitive scores.

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.

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

Your brain is built of cells called neurons and glia - hundreds of billions of them. Each one of these cells is as complicated as a city.

Cognitive neuroscience is entering an exciting era in which new technologies and ideas are making it possible to study the neural basis of cognition, perception, memory and emotion at the level of networks of interacting neurons, the level at which we believe many of the important operations of the brain take place.

With its billions of interconnected neurons, whose interactions change from millisecond to millisecond, the human brain is an archetypal complex system.

The actual organization of behavior goes on the level of the individual nerve cells and their connections, and we have a hundred billion nerve cells, probably a hundred trillion connections. It's just mind-boggling to think of all the different ways in which they're arranged in a baby's head.

Now, we used to think the brain was like a computer. But now, we realize that's not true. There's no programming of the brain. There's no Windows. And we think the brain is more like a large corporation. Because think of the unconscious mind. In a corporation, you have subdivisions which operate independently of the main office.

The human brain is an incredible pattern-matching machine.

Many cognitive psychologists see the brain as a computer. But every single brain is absolutely individual, both in its development and in the way it encounters the world.

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

One of the ultimate challenges for biology is to understand the brain's processing of unconscious and conscious perception, emotion, and empathy.