Neuron Quotes

“Any man could, if he were so inclined, be the sculptor of his own brain.”
― Santiago Ramon y Cajal, Advice for a Young Investigator

“A neuron didn’t know whether it fired in response to a scent or a symphony. Brain cells weren’t intelligent; only brains were.”
― Peter Watts, Echopraxia

“Neurons giveth and neurons taketh away.”
― Abhijit Naskar, The Film Testament

“The past does not really exist -- except in the brain.”
― Tracey Shors, Everyday Trauma: Remapping the Brain's Response to Stress, Anxiety, and Painful Memories for a Better Life

“Missing the call that your positive dreams send you like a gift in a multimedia message download to your brain like a neuronic pathway trailer, is nearly =quivalent to a declined response when your dreams give you ( term I author) a 'clueprint' for action 1st, then you fail to return to respond to that dream call.
And what if those dream calls signal a time-sensitive response from you... requiring more immediate action...yet your default choice to ignore, forget, delay or lack a dream call response - are throwing off the very people, places and even actionable purposes the dream call is all about. Consider that dream call as an appointed time where your dream was meant to come to life and shine its brightest. If I were you and I could see the dream ring in...I'd put everything I know aside to answer that call with actionable priority.”
― Tracey Bond

“What we have seen does not sit comfortably with conventional views of the brain. Electrophysiology has been a powerful tool and its returns have permeated our thinking about how the brain works, but the resulting understanding is cursed by overinterpretation. Because spike activity appears to have so much capacity for encoding information, we are tempted to think it in fact conveys a huge volume of information. When we find, in the spike activity of some neuron or another, correlation between some facet and some particular external events, it is tempting to think this is the message the cell is conveying.
A message is only a message if it can be understood by its recipient. Neurons can't decipher long and complex sentences. They have a short attention span, are easily distracted, and much of the time they aren't even listening. A neuron that is quiet at a particular time is likely also to be less sensitive to an input; a cell that is very active might be saturated; and a cell recently activated might be refractory to further activation.
Spike activity is not the output of any neuron, only one of several means by which some of its chemical signals are generated. These signals are generated unreliably and erratically and are recognized imperfectly by their targets. The message carried by the spike activity of a vasopressin cell makes no sense when considered alone. The important signal is generated by a cacophony of noisy and messy cells , and the miracle that demands to be recognized is that this population response is indeed clean, refined and fit for purpose.”
― Gareth Leng, The Heart of the Brain: The Hypothalamus and Its Hormones

“This heterogeneity [of vasopressin cells] is not by design but by accident. The patterns of gene expression in any neuron are not rigidly fixed by genetic nature, they arise from the unique experience of each cell in its life from birth to adulthood. The innervation of each cell is not predetermined with precision. Axons that reach the supraoptic nucleus may be guided there by developmental cues, but which particular cells each axon contacts is an opportunistic accident. There are mistakes; developmental cues are imperfect and some axons get lost or misled and make inappropriate connections. The brain has to be robust against such imperfection; the cost of doing everything perfectly is too high.
Vasopressin cells are complex, but this does not make them clever, and the differences between cells certainly do mot make each cell uniquely clever. I am not interested in the idea that the brain does clever things because it hosts 100 billion clever machines. The wonder is that it does clever things with machines that are messy, noisy, and imperfect.”
― Gareth Leng, The Heart of the Brain: The Hypothalamus and Its Hormones

“A neuron in the human brain can never equate the human mind, but this analogy doesn't hold true for a digital mind, by virtue of its mathematical structure, it may – through evolutionary progression and provided there are no insurmountable evolvability constraints – transcend to the higher-order Syntellect. A mind is a web of patterns fully integrated as a coherent intelligent system; it is a self-generating, self-reflective, self-governing network of sentient components (that are themselves minds) that evolves, as a rule, by propagating through dimensionality and ascension to ever-higher hierarchical levels of emergent complexity. In this book, the Syntellect emergence is hypothesized to be the next meta-system transition, developmental stage for the human mind – becoming one global mind – that would constitute quintessence of the looming Cybernetic Singularity.”
― Alex M. Vikoulov, The Syntellect Hypothesis: Five Paradigms of the Mind's Evolution