Neurological Development Quotes

You’re nothing but a pack of neurons.

In proportion to our body mass, our brain is three times as large as that of our nearest relatives. This huge organ is dangerous and painful to give birth to, expensive to build and, in a resting human, uses about 20 per cent of the body's energy even though it is just 2 per cent of the body's weight. There must be some reason for all this evolutionary expense.

Research indicates that, as long as we keep using our brains in an active way, we continue to build neural pathways as we get older. This gives us not only the ongoing potential for creative thought, but also an additional incentive for continuing to stretch ourselves.

Neuroligacally, human beings haven't caught up with today's overstimulating environment. Getting kids out in nature can make a difference.

When a pregnancy begins, those cells begin their mitosis, and during the first three months, everything from limbs to organs to the brain and neurological system is being developed, and I never realized that would consume so much energy: it drains every bit of energy you have, and your hormonal status is changed dramatically!

In adult centers the nerve paths are something fixed, ended, immutable. Everything may die, nothing may be regenerated.

Thinking is a physical process, the human brain is not exempt from evolution

I consider the differences between man and animals in propensities, feelings, and intellectual faculties, to be the result of the same cause as that which we assign for the variations in other functions, viz. difference of organization; and that the superiority of man in rational endowments is not greater than the more exquisite, complicated, and perfectly developed structure of his brain, and particularly of his ample cerebral hemispheres, to which the rest of the animal kingdom offers no parallel, nor even any near approximation, is sufficient to account for.

If you were to open up a baby's head - and I am not for a moment suggesting that you should - you would find nothing but an enormous drool gland.

You don't know the things in your childhood that influence you. You can't possibly know them. People today try to analyze the early environment and the reasons for something that happened, but if you look at children of the same family -- children who have identical parents, go to identical schools, have an almost identical upbringing, and yet who have totally different experiences and neuroses -- you realize that what influences the children is not so much the obvious externals as their emotional experiences. Of course any psychiatrist knows that.

You’re really not right, are you? Yeah, I know. It was all the paint chips I ate as a kid. They were good, but chromosomally damaging. (Nick)

In creating the human brain, evolution has wildly overshot the mark.

The mission of DNA is to evolve nervous systems capable of deciphering the mission of DNA.

I have a 10,000-year-old brain and the boogers of a 7-year-old. That's how I describe myself.

I've always had a theory that some of us are born with nerve endings longer than our bodies

The pace at which science has progressed has been too fast for human behaviour to adapt to it. As I said we are still apes. A part of our brain is still a paleo-brain and many of the reactions come from our fight or flight instinct. As long as this part of the brain can take over control the rational part of the brain (we will face these problems).

Children use the fist until they are of age to use the brain.

In terms of brain development, musical performance is every bit as important educationally as reading or writing.

It is essential to understand our brains in some detail if we are to assess correctly our place in this vast and complicated universe we see all around us.

I was talking to my friend who's a psychologist, who says a woman's frontal cortex isn't fully developed till 25 and a man's till 28. I was almost 34 when we met; he was 39. So I wouldn't say either of us has wildly changed; I just love him more and more.

In its evolution from a more primitive nervous system, the brain, as an organ with ten or more billion neurons and many more connections between them must have changed and grown as a result of many accidents.

The newborn infant is now seen to be wired with awesome precision... This marvelous robot will be launched into the world under the care of its parents... But to what extent does the wiring of the neurons, so undeniably encoded in the genes, preordain the directions that social development will follow?

I was six years old when my parents told me that there was a small, dark jewel inside my skull, learning to be me.

We can only know in the nervous system what we have known in behavior first.

The human mind appears suddenly and inexplicably out of some unknown and unimaginable void. It passes half its known life in the mental chaos of sleep. Even when awake it is a victim of its own ill-adjustment, of disease, of age, of external suggestion, of nature's compulsions; it doubts its own sensations and trusts only in instruments and averages.