Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
I think what a life in science really teaches you is the vastness of our ignorance.
Some people like very predictable melodies, and others prefer the less likely notes.
What we find is that our brains have colossal things happening in them all the time.
As an undergraduate I majored in British and American literature at Rice University.
I am particularly interested in Alzheimer's disease and have been for some time now.
Evolution doesn't just look for things that are fun; if it did, we'd know how to fly.
Music has got to be useful for survival, or we would have gotten rid of it years ago.
In terms of the brain, you can in a crude way think of the human brain as a computer.
Because vision appears so effortless, we are like fish challenged to understand water.
Visual cortex is fundamentally a machine whose job is to generate a model of the world.
Neuroscience over the next 50 years is going to introduce things that are mind-blowing.
I didn't want to spend my life contributing to the development of more atomic weaponry.
The processing capacity of the conscious mind has been estimated at 120 bits per second.
Death... The moment, sometime in the future, when your name is spoken for the last time.
Every atom in your body is the same quark in different places at the same moment in time.
I think the first decade of this century is going to be remembered as a time of extremism.
It may well be our brains are wired up to be slightly more optimistic than they should be.
Instead of reality being passively recorded by the brain, it is actively constructed by it.
Remember that politics, colonialism, imperialism and war also originate in the human brain.
Humans have discovered that they cannot stop Death, but at least they can spit in his drink.
I'm a scientist. We don't talk about the spirit. Soul is a four letter word in our tradition.
If you ever feel lazy or dull, take heart: you're the busiest, brightest thing on the planet.
When scientific conversations cease, then dogma rather than knowledge begins to rule the day.
You should only go into science if you really have a yearning to make scientific discoveries.
We believe we're seeing the world just fine until it's called to our attention that we're not.
The fact is all of the most highly successful scientists I know work practically all the time.
No other species lives with regret over past events, or makes deliberate plans for future ones.
The obvious rule of efficiency is you don't want to spend more time organizing than it's worth.
I've always been interested in peak performance, why some people do better in life than others.
My philosophy is that we should ask the most important question that's capable of being solved.
I like a world where each of us has the tools to be able to make able to make our own decisions.
If you don't get a good night's sleep, the events of the day are not properly encoded in memory.
We are not the ones driving the boat of our behavior, at least not nearly as much as we believe.
I call myself a Possibilian: I'm open to...ideas that we don't have any way of testing right now.
There is a looming chasm between what your brain knows and what your mind is capable of accessing.
If our brains were simple enough to be understood, we wouldn't be smart enough to understand them.
We're making more and more decisions every day. I think a lot of us feel overloaded by the process.
Another possibility is that evolution selected creativity in general as a marker of sexual fitness.
Our ability to perceive the world around us seems so effortless that we tend to take it for granted.
We don't really understand most of what's happening in the cosmos. Is there any afterlife? Who knows.
Everybody knows the power of deadlines - and we all hate them. But their effectiveness is undeniable.
Everything we think and feel (and keep thinking and feeling) creates, deep within, the brain we have.
Even today no computer can understand language as well as a three-year-old or see as well as a mouse.
If you're a thinking person, the liver is interesting, but nothing is more intriguing than the brain.
When a language advances and adds a third term to its lexicon for color, the third term is always red.
Information overload refers to the notion that we're trying to take in more than the brain can handle.
All creation necessarily ends in this: Creators, powerless, fleeing from the things they have wrought.
Everything that creates itself upon the backs of smaller scales will by those same scales be consumed.
In order to understand one person speaking to us, we need to process 60 bits of information per second.
What music is better able to do than language is to represent the complexity of human emotional states.