Quotes by Neuroscientists - Page 3

Mankind, not womankind, has slaughtered more humans in the name of God and Religion than for any other reason.

Abhijit Naskar

Ideally, friends are people with whom we can be our true selves, with whom we can fearlessly let our guard down. (Arguably, a close friend is someone with whom we can allow ourselves to enter the daydreaming attentional mode, with whom we can switch in and out of our different modes of attention without feeling awkward.)

Daniel J. Levitin

If I had been born in the medieval times, my subjective union with God and the Universe would have evoked the rise of another Gnostic religion. But, by the grace of Mother Nature, I am born in an era of Science and Reasoning. Hence, I have dissected my own experience of Absolute Divinity as well as the experiences of all the religious giants in my works, in order to discover the physical truth underneath these apparently supernatural experiences.

Abhijit Naskar

Religious faith as a whole induces various health benefits in the general population through complex biological processes.

Abhijit Naskar

Heroes and scholars represent the opposite extremes... The scholar struggles for the benefit of all humanity, sometimes to reduce physical effort, sometimes to reduce pain, and sometimes to postpone death, or at least render it more bearable. In contrast, the patriot sacrifices a rather substantial part of humanity for the sake of his own prestige. His statue is always erected on a pedestal of ruins and corpses... In contrast, all humanity crowns a scholar, love forms the pedestal of his statues, and his triumphs defy the desecration of time and the judgment of history.

Santiago Ramón y Cajal

Inside a jihadi brain, the neuropsychological elements of aggression and rage run rampant, due to socio-political conditions. These overwhelming mental elements of young souls, when attached to the sacred texts of the Quran, by the authoritarian groups of fundamentalists, become weapons of mass destruction in the pursuit of the exclusive supremacy of one religion over the others.

Abhijit Naskar

Meggie dropped to her knees, scrambling frantically to collect the miniature clothes before more damage was done them, then she began picking among the grass blades where she thought the pearls might have fallen. Her tears were blinding her, the grief in her heart new, for until now she had never owned anything worth grieving for.

Colleen McCullough

People have been murdered over cartoons. End of moral analysis.

Sam Harris

Prosthetics can fix physical disabilities. But no prosthetic can fix an amputated spirit. So, don't let the society devoid you from your own spirit. Be brave and upright, and delve into even the depth of doom to achieve your goal.

Abhijit Naskar

Let’s talk about mankind’s most adored emotion – Love. However, love itself is not a single emotion, rather a blend of many. It is such an enchanting sensation, that it has been inspiring artists, scientists, philosophers and thinkers for ages. Albert Einstein said, “any man who can drive safely while kissing a pretty girl is simply not giving the kiss the attention it deserves”. Geniuses around the world came up with various creations under the spell of love. Schrodinger’s Wave Equation, Hawking’s Hawking Radiation, Tagore’s songs, Rumi’s poems, are just a few among the plethora of scientific and philosophical literature created under the enigmatic and warm influence of love. So, technically it is totally worth being crazy in love.

Abhijit Naskar

I wanted to present Neuroscience to people in a way that would diminish their differences.

Abhijit Naskar

When two people fall in love, they not only give up their genuine authority over their own lives, but also, they become mutual authorities of the collective life that they build together.

Abhijit Naskar

The universe perceives itself through us, or to be more specific, through our neurons.

Abhijit Naskar

My research shows that improving the quality of education is a cost-free way to raise prosperity. it's cost-free because it reinforces so many of the other things we need to keep the virtuous cycle rolling that, ultimately, the increase in economic benefits far outstrips the cost of the investment. Education brings more people into the comfort zone of higher income, which increases trust, then causes people to demand better government, which further increases the trust, which further reduces inequality, which increases the pool of those who will get a good education.

Paul J. Zak

Atheism is not a philosophy; it is not even a view of the world; it is simply an admission of the obvious. In fact, "atheism" is a term that should not even exist. No one ever needs to identify himself as a "non-astrologer" or a "non-alchemist.

Sam Harris

This one word “Love” has revolutionized the whole planet in an evolutionary way. Without this, none of us might have been born.

Abhijit Naskar

As long as our brain is a mystery, the universe, the reflection of the structure of the brain will also be a mystery.

Santiago Ramón y Cajal

When circumstances pour the minds of some young helpless individuals with hatred and rage towards the society, and when that pain, hatred, and rage become unbearable, they turn to the scriptures as the final resort, in a pursuit to find absolution, guided by the psychopathic, misogynistic, genocidal, pestilential, megalomaniacal, sadomasochistic, capriciously malevolent, fundamentalist preachers.

Abhijit Naskar

Consciousness is the product of electrochemical signalling in the neurons of your brain. So when the brain stops functioning fully, your consciousness, or to a broader aspect your mind ceases to exist with its unique individualistic qualities. It's like the soothing flow of water. It is only water as long as its internal realm of two atoms of hydrogen and one atom of oxygen, remains intact. If you break that structure which we call H20, it ceases to be water. Likewise a soul remains a soul, as longs as its neural structures remain intact. If you mess with those structure, then the entire personality of the soul may get radically altered. So, to think even further, if those neural structures inside your head stop working, then the soul ceases to exist forever. So, as long as you have a functional brain, you exist, and the moment that brain dies you die.

Abhijit Naskar

The very first few days when you actually start having symptoms of falling for someone special, are the days of heavenly bliss and unreasonable madness. This specific “madness” is one of the most rudimentary elements of the foundation of love. Along comes “Euphoria”. It feels like you have grown wings and you can fly around without a single care in the world. Everything starts to seem beautiful and better. The sun shines a bit brighter and the birds twitter a little louder and sweeter. As if you are stuck in an enchanting dream. You get butterflies in your stomach whenever the special person casts a blazing gaze upon you. And off course you all know about the thumping of heart and dilation of pupils.

Abhijit Naskar

Call up the ever-pure, the effulgent and the ever-radiant character of true humanism in yourself and in others, and no racism shall have the power to thrive in such society even for a few seconds.

Abhijit Naskar

My question to the atheist is, do you want an atheist world or a peaceful world? And to the believer, do you want a religious world or a peaceful world? Religious orientation doesn't define peace, but the answer here may define one's true nature.

Abhijit Naskar

Education means nourishing the mind and make it develop in order to see beyond the limitations of current social perception.

Abhijit Naskar

There is no such thing as 'God given scripture', 'the messenger of God' or 'the Last Prophet'.

Abhijit Naskar

Oscar may be the world’s most glorious way of honoring your work, but the real award for a filmmaker is the contentment which you receive from making your film.

Abhijit Naskar

Only you can save yourself.

Abhijit Naskar

Masturbation and meditation both promote physical and mental wellbeing.

Abhijit Naskar

Imagine for a moment that we are nothing but the product of billions of years of molecules coming together and ratcheting up through natural selection, that we are composed only of highways of fluids and chemicals sliding along roadways within billions of dancing cells, that trillions of synaptic conversations hum in parallel, that this vast egglike fabric of micron-thin circuitry runs algorithms undreamt of in modern science, and that these neural programs give rise to our decision making, loves, desires, fears, and aspirations. To me, that understanding would be a numinous experience, better than anything ever proposed in anyone's holy text.

David Eagleman

It is generally argued that our experience of free will presents a compelling mystery: On the one hand, we can't make sense of it in scientific terms; on the other, we feel that we are the authors of our own thoughts and actions.

Sam Harris

In your daily life, you make dozens of chooses between an alternative with higher overall value and a more tempting but ultimately inferior option.

Abhijit Naskar

If you're constantly ruminating about what you just did- or what you should have done- or what you would have done if you only had the chance, you will miss your life. Ok, you will fail to connect with it. You will fail to connect with other people.

Sam Harris

Salvation not shared, is salvation wasted.

Abhijit Naskar

This is not education my friend. It is a process of manufacturing computation devices that look like Homo sapiens, and thereby falsely labeled as Education.

Abhijit Naskar

.. we are not conscious of most things until we ask ourselves questions about them

David Eagleman

The ultimate goal of humanity is knowledge.

Abhijit Naskar

No God, no messiah, no prophet can grant your wishes – it is only through your own efforts that you can make your wishes come true – it is only you who can grant your own wishes.

Abhijit Naskar

Any human action that goes against what is ordinary, is deemed as an anomaly.

Abhijit Naskar

Faith is a natural evolutionary trait of the human mind, selected by Mother Nature as an internal coping-mechanism.

Abhijit Naskar

Memory is the binding foam of our mental life.

Abhijit Naskar

The highest creed is Universal Acceptance.

Abhijit Naskar

Meditation is good for the elderly, great for adults, even greater for children, and greater still for pregnant women. So, meditate and be well.

Abhijit Naskar

The opportunity to decieve others is ever present and often tempting, and each instance of deception casts us onto some of the steepest ethical terrain we ever cross.

Sam Harris

Come out my friend. Come out from the narrow lanes of darkness. Come out into the vivacious light of the day where all the glory resides.

Abhijit Naskar

The real battle is within yourself.

Abhijit Naskar

Either you are racist or you are a human - you cannot be both.

Abhijit Naskar

Education is not the amount of information that is pushed into the brain and causes havoc there, undigested all through a lifetime. Education must be a symposium of life-building, character- making and assimilation of ideas in the pursuit of building a more harmonious, peaceful and truly civilized world.

Abhijit Naskar

By processing information from the environment through the senses, the nervous system continually evaluates risk. I have coined the term neuroception to describe how neural circuitsdistinguish whether situations or people are safe, dangerous, or life-threatening. Because of our heritage as a species, neuroception takes place in primitive parts of the brain, without our conscious awareness.

Stephen W. Porges

Things remain paranormal, as long as we scientists don't reveal the underlying physical processes.

Abhijit Naskar

You are surrounded by ignorance, savagery and fanaticism. You live in a society where everyone thinks he/she knows about everything in the whole universe. If you find yourself among those intellectual idiots, then being good and humble may give rise to doubts in your mind about your own ideas. So, you must first learn to distinguish between real and shallow intellect. Then, as a self- preservation tactic, you need to let your pretence of arrogance grow as big as a Dinosaur, so that the fake intellectuals start to realize their true inferiority in front of you.

Abhijit Naskar

The deep secret of the brain is that not only the spinal cord but the entire central nervous system works this way: internally generated activity is modulated by sensory input. In this view, the difference between being awake and being asleep is merely that the data coming in from the eyes anchors the perception. Asleep vision (dreaming) is perception that is not tied down to anything in the real world; waking perception is something like dreaming with a little more commitment to what´s in front of you. Other examples of unanchored perception are found in prisoners in pitch-park solitary confinement, or in people in sensory deprivation chambers. Both of these situations quickly lead to hallucinations.

David Eagleman

Patience triumphs over everything.

Abhijit Naskar

Instead of reality being passively recorded by the brain, it is actively constructed by it.

David Eagleman

I'm the Ted Bundy of string theory.

Sam Harris

Arise O lion-heart! Awake, O great soldier! Misery has come upon the world. It is wailing for help. It is wailing for redemption. Won’t you do anything, my friend!

Abhijit Naskar

The more a person is united within himself or herself and inwardly simple, the more and higher things he or she understands, because he or she receives the light of understanding from within.

Abhijit Naskar

Misery teaches you the value of joy. It reveals to you the gravitas of human life.

Abhijit Naskar

Religion, when realized truly, can provide an extremely accurate moral compass to the human conscience, while politics on the other hand, when utilized properly can ensure the wellbeing of the society.

Abhijit Naskar

It's in the nature of the humans and the entire animal kingdom to return blow for blow, cheating for cheating, lie for lie, to hit back with all our might. But what makes us true humans is the power to not hit back.

Abhijit Naskar

As many critics of religion have pointed out, the notion of a creator poses an immediate problem of an infinite regress. If God created the universe, what created God? To say that God, by definition, is uncreated simply begs the question. Any being capable of creating a complex world promises to be very complex himself. As the biologist Richard Dawkins has observed repeatedly, the only natural process we know of that could produce a being capable of designing things is evolution.

Sam Harris

The human has not one but two births – first, when a person is born from the mother’s womb, and second, when that person rises from the socio-culturally imposed cocoon of prejudices and ignorance.

Abhijit Naskar

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