Neural Structure Quotes

One of the things I've come to appreciate about the brain is the importance of location. It's not just a set of interchangeable parts that you can swap in and out.

The brain has this amazing level of almost fractal complexity to it. When you start looking at any part of it in detail, you realize that it's much more complex than you thought.

And in man is a three-pound brain which, as far as we know, is the most complex and orderly arrangement of matter in the universe.

The brain is highly structured, but it is also extremely flexible. It's not a blank slate, but it isn't written in stone, either.

The patterns of activity of neurons in sensory areas can be altered by patterns of attention. Experience coupled with attention leads to physical changes in the structure and future functioning of the nervous system. This leaves us with a clear physiological fact…moment by moment we choose and sculpt how our ever-changing minds will work. We choose who we will be in the next moment in a very real sense, and these choices are left embossed in physical form in our material selves.

Language is something that springs from the biological matrix, and the neurological matrix, within us.

An illustration I use to get people to understand it is this: I'll ask major corporate audiences: Why don't you just take all your traditional beliefs about organizations, and apply them to the neurons in your brain?

It is certain that there may be extraordinary mental activity with an extremely small absolute mass of nervous matter: thus the wonderfully diversified instincts, mental powers, and affections of ants are notorious, yet their cerebral ganglia are not so large as the quarter of a small pin's head. Under this point of view, the brain of an ant is one of the most marvelous atoms of matter in the world, perhaps more so than the brain of a man.

Our subliminal mental processes operate outside awareness because they arise in these portions of our mind that are inaccessible to our conscious self; their inaccessibility is due to the architecture of the brain rather than because they have been subject to Freudian motivational forces like repression.

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.

The human brain is probably one of the most complex single objects on the face of the earth; I think it is, quite honestly.

The brain is not a bag of traits. It's startlingly complex. There are few or no single genes with a consistent effect on the mind.

We are not interested in the fact that the brain has the consistency of cold porridge.