Neuronal Activity Quotes

You’re nothing but a pack of neurons.

This cell belongs to a brain, and it is my brain, the brain of me who is writing; and the cell in question, and within it the atom in question, is in charge of my writing, in a gigantic minuscule game which nobody has yet described. It is that which at this instant, issuing out of a labyrinthine tangle of yeses and nos, makes my hand run along a certain path on the paper, mark it with these volutes that are signs: a double snap, up and down, between two levels of energy, guides this hand of mine to impress on the paper this dot, here, this one.

Even though its common knowledge these days, it never ceases to amaze me that all the richness of our mental life - all our feelings, our emotions, our thoughts, our ambitions, our love life, our religious sentiments and even what each of us regards us his own intimate private self - is simply the activity of these little specks of jelly in your head, in your brain. There is nothing else.

The ideal way to study the property of different types of neurons is to control individual types of cells independently and see what happens when you alter one type of cell. Optogenetics helps to realize this goal.

In the words of the late Francis Crick...You, your joys and your sorrows, your memories and your ambitions, your sense of personal identity and free will, are in fact no more than the behavior of a vast assembly of nerve cells and their associated molecules. (13)

The most complex object in the known universe: brain, only uses 20 watts of power. It would require a nuclear power plant to energize a computer the size of a city block to mimic your brain, and your brain does it with just 20 watts. So if someone calls you a dim bulb, that's a compliment.

In any complex organism, brain formation and function must be controlled in part by genes.

When I look at the human brain I'm still in awe of it. Every single time you lift off the bone and open the durra and there it is - the human brain, the thing that gives a person a personality, that distinguishes each one of us, that there could be more than 6 billion of us here on this planet with brains that look the same, but each one being distinctly different because of what is going on in that thing. I'll never get over my awe of that.

Each cell sends electrical pulses to other cells, up to hundreds of times per second. If you represented each of these trillions and trillions of pulses in your brain by a single photon of light, the combined output would be blinding.

Everything that goes on in your whole life is a result of molecules rushing around somewhere in your brain.

I know my mind is made of matter but I need to know exactly what is the matter at it's core? Because my heart is just a muscle and simply put, it's sore.

How does the water of the brain turn into the wine of consciousness?

As a bio major, I figured "free will" meant chemicals in your brain telling you what to do, the molecules bouncing around in a way that felt like choosing but was actually the dance of little gears--neurons and hormones bubbling up into decisions like clockwork. You don't use your body; it uses you.

I maintain that the human mystery is incredibly demeaned by scientific reductionism, with its claim in promissory materialism to account eventually for all of the spiritual world in terms of patterns of neuronal activity. This belief must be classed as a superstition. ... We have to recognize that we are spiritual beings with souls existing in a spiritual world as well as material beings with bodies and brains existing in a material world.

Life is not governed by will or intention. Life is a question of nerves, and fibres, and slowly built-up cells in which thought hides itself and passion has its dreams.