Neuroscience Quotes

• More may have been learned about the brain and the mind in the 1990s - the so-called decade of the brain - than during the entire previous history of psychology and neuroscience.

  

  Antonio Damasio
  • Mind
  • May
  • History

• In school, I studied psychology, linguistics, neuroscience. I understand that there is a real lack of respect for the brain.

  

  Aloe Blacc
  • Real
  • School
  • Respect

• I can be a bit of a science geek. I tend more towards reading about brain science, neuroscience.

  

  William Mapother
  • Reading
  • Brain
  • Geek

• Since then neuroscience research has shown that we possess two distinct forms of self-awareness: one that keeps track of the self across time and one that registers the self in the present moment. The first, our autobiographical self, creates connections among experiences and assembles them into a coherent story. This system is rooted in language. Our narratives change with the telling, as our perspective changes and as we incorporate new input. The other system, moment-to-moment self-awareness, is based primarily in physical sensations, but if we feel safe and are not rushed, we can find words to communicate that experience as well.

  

  Bessel van der Kolk
  • Safe
  • Sensations
  • Self-Awareness

• The neuroscience area - which is absolutely in its infancy - is much more important than genetics.

  

  Leon Kass
  • Important
  • Genetics
  • Neuroscience

• For the last century of neuroscience, lots of people have tried to control neurons using all sorts of different technologies - pharmacology (drugs), electrical pulses, and so on. But none of these technologies are precise. With optogenetics, we can aim light at a single cell, or a set of cells, and turn just that set of cells on or off.

  

  Edward Boyden
  • People
  • Different
  • Light

• What Warcollier demonstrated is compatible with what modern cognitive neuroscience has learned about how visual images are constructed by the brain. It implies that telepathic perceptions bubble up into awareness from the unconscious and are probably processed in the brain in the same way that we generate images in dreams. And thus telepathic “images” are far less certain than sensory-driven images and subject to distortion.

  

  Dean Radin
  • Dreams
  • Images
  • Distortion

• Modern neuroscience solidly supports Freud’s notion that many of our conscious thoughts are complex rationalizations for the flood of instincts, reflexes, motives, and deep-seated memories that emanate from the unconscious.

  

  Bessel van der Kolk
  • Memories
  • Supports
  • Rationalizations

• Barry L. Jacobs and colleagues from the neuroscience program at Princeton University showed that when mice ran every day on an exercise wheel, they developed more brain cells and they learned faster than sedentary controls. I believe in mice.

  

  Bernd Heinrich
  • Believe
  • Exercise
  • Learned

• Neuroscience research shows that the only way we can change the way we feel is by becoming aware of our inner experience and learning to befriend what is going inside ourselves.

  

  Bessel van der Kolk
  • Experience
  • Change
  • Research

• Those new disciplines are neuroscience, the study of how the brain supports mental processes; developmental psychopathology, the study of the impact of adverse experiences on the development of mind and brain; and interpersonal neurobiology, the study of how our behavior influences the emotions, biology, and mind-sets of those around us.

  

  Bessel van der Kolk
  • Influence
  • Development
  • Emotions

• Genetics is crude, but neuroscience goes directly to work on the brain, and the mind follows.

  

  Leon Kass
  • Mind
  • Brain
  • Neuroscience

• Trauma has shut down their inner compass and robbed them of the imagination they need to create something better. The neuroscience of selfhood and agency validates the kinds of somatic therapies that my friends Peter Levine13 and Pat Ogden14 have developed. I’ll discuss these and other sensorimotor approaches in more detail in part V, but in essence their aim is threefold.

  

  Bessel van der Kolk
  • Friends
  • Imagination
  • Trauma