The Brain Quotes

“The subconscious mind is the guiding force for your entire life.”
― Kevin Michel, Moving Through Parallel Worlds To Achieve Your Dreams

“When we think of coconuts or pigs, there are no coconuts or pigs in the brain.”
― Gregory Bateson, Mind and Nature: A Necessary Unity

“Dark matter and dark energy make up 96 percent of the universe. And: The sun doesn’t rise, the Earth just spins. And: When we breathe, we are breathing in the very same molecules our dead ancestors did. And: One day the sun will obliterate the Earth and all life here will be gone forever. And: Everything you know and will ever know is housed in three pounds of tissue, isolated from the world. And: Color doesn’t even really exist, it’s just how you perceive wavelengths of light; color is all in your head. Or: There are more atoms in my eye than there are stars in the known universe.”
― A.D. Aliwat, In Limbo

“We, through the cerebral cortex, add the consciousness, spirit and rationality, to this dolphin brained human body avatar. We control our destiny and this body can become a servant of our conscious will, once we learn to communicate fully with it. We are called to bridge the gap between our conscious mind and the subconscious mind.”
― Kevin Michel, Subconscious Mind Power

“The human mind is itself a miraculous machine. I am writing right now, but I have no idea how this is happening. I know that my brain is composed of a cerebrum, a cerebellum, and a medulla oblongata, but these are just words. I know that electrical impulses are involved somehow, but that is about the extent of my understanding of the mechanics. And while I at least have an intuition as to how an airplane works, I really have none with respect to my brain. Frankly, lots of what appears on my computer screen is as much a surprise to me as it is to you. I certainly never expected over my oatmeal and English muffin this morning to be writing about Bernoulli's principle today. For that matter, I have no idea why I like English muffins. But I do.”
― Evan Mandery, Q

“The brain makes up l/50th of our body mass but consumes a staggering 1/5th of the calories we burn for energy. If your brain were a car, in terms of gas mileage, it’d be a Hummer. Most of our conscious activity is happening in our prefrontal cortex, the part of our brain responsible for focus, handling short-term memory, solving problems, and moderating impulse control. It’s at the heart of what makes us human and the center for our executive control and willpower.

The “last in, first out” theory is very much at work inside our head. The most recent parts of our brain to develop are the first to suffer if there is a shortage of resources. Older, more developed areas of the brain, such as those that regulate breathing and our nervous responses, get first helpings from our blood stream and are virtually unaffected if we decide to skip a meal. The prefrontal cortex, on the other hand, feels the impact. Unfortunately, being relatively young in terms of human development, it’s the runt of the litter come feeding time.”
― Gary Keller, The One Thing: The Surprisingly Simple Truth Behind Extraordinary Results

“When we are awake we are looking through the wrong end of the telescope if transformational creativity is our goal. We take a myopic, hyperfocused, and narrow view that cannot capture the full informational cosmos on offer in the cerebrum. When awake, we see only a narrow set of all possible memory interrelationships. The opposite is true, however, when we enter the dream state and start looking through the other (correct) end of the memory-surveying telescope. Using that wide-angle dream lens, we can apprehend the full constellation of stored information and their diverse combinatorial possibilities, all in creative servitude.”
― Matthew Walker, Why We Sleep: Unlocking the Power of Sleep and Dreams

“Je montrerai comment ce peu de bruit inérieur qui n'est rien, contient tout, [...] comment un cerveau isolé du monde peut se créer un monde.”
― Rémy de Gourmont, Sixtine: Roman de la vie cérébrale

“Used with care, substances that harm neural tissue, such as alcohol, can aid intelligence: you corrode the chromium, giggly, crossword puzzle-solving parts of your mind with pain and poison, forcing the neurons to take responsibility for themselves and those around them, toughening themselves against the accelerated wear of these artificial solvents. After a night of poison. your brain wakes up in the morning saying, “No, I don't give a shit who introduced the sweet potato into North America.”
― Nicholson Baker, The Mezzanine

“After a big meal, more blood goes to the stomach, less to the brain.”
― A.D. Aliwat, In Limbo

“Large and obscure words tax mental resources too much, interrupting you from making your point and disconnecting you from your audience. That’s why simplicity in speech is valued and used by people in the most important fields, like tech and politics.”
― A.D. Aliwat, In Limbo

“For those who have trouble with a telephone number or with a name to fit a face, it is even problematical contemplating the gap between us and them, the normal and the genius. Someone once asked A. C. Aitken, professor at Edinburgh University, to make 4 divided by 47 into a decimal. After four seconds he started and gave another digit every three-quarters of a second: ‘point 08510638297872340425531914’. He stopped (after twenty-four seconds), discussed the problem for one minute, and then restarted: ‘191489’– five-second pause –‘361702127659574468 . Now that’s the repeating point. It starts again with 085. So if that’s forty-six places, I’m right.”
― John Carey, The Faber Book of Science