Cortex Quotes

• Most people don't see half of what's in front of them. Your visual cortex does a shit load of imaging processing before the signal even gets to your brain, whose priorities are still checking the ancestral Savannah for dangerous predators, edible berries and climable trees. That's why a sudden cat in the night can make you jump and some people when distracted, can walk right out in front of a bus. Your brain just isn't interested in those large moving chunks of metal or the static heaps of brightly colored stuff that piles up in drifts around us. Never mind all that, says your brain, it's those silent fur-covered merchants of death you've got to watch out for.

  

  Ben Aaronovitch
  • Brain
  • Dangerous
  • Silent

• So, you can define emotions very simply as the process of perceiving what is going on in the organs when you are in the throws of an emotion, and that is achieved by a collection of structures, some of which are in the brain stem, and some of which are in the cerebral cortex, namely the insular cortex, which I like to mention not because I think it's the most important, it's not.

  

  Antonio Damasio
  • Important
  • Brain
  • Emotions

• The neuroscientist Joseph LeDoux and his colleagues have shown that the only way we can consciously access the emotional brain is through self-awareness, i.e. by activating the medial prefrontal cortex, the part of the brain that notices what is going on inside us and thus allows us to feel what we’re feeling.

  

  Bessel van der Kolk
  • Feel
  • Emotional Brain
  • Neuroscientists

• Our most surprising finding was a white spot in the left frontal lobe of the cortex, in a region called Broca’s area. In this case the change in color meant that there was a significant decrease in that part of the brain. Broca’s area is one of the speech centers of the brain, which is often affected in stroke patients when the blood supply to that region is cut off. Without a functioning Broca’s area, you cannot put your thoughts and feelings into words.

  

  Bessel van der Kolk
  • Change
  • Brain
  • Feelings

• Ordinarily the executive capacities of the prefrontal cortex enable people to observe what is going on, predict what will happen if they take a certain action, and make a conscious choice.

  

  Bessel van der Kolk
  • Action
  • Choice
  • Cortex