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927e2e2
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This is my simple religion. There is no need for temples; no need for complicated philosophy. Our own brain, our own heart is our temple; the philosophy is kindness.
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kindness
morality
life
philosophy
inspirational
temple
brain
simple
ethics
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Dalai Lama XIV |
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bb9a17e
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I would not put a thief in my mouth to steal my brains.
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drinking
brain
thief
stealing
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William Shakespeare |
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4782e1e
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From the moment I met you, your personality had the most extraordinary influence over me. I was dominated, soul brain and power.
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personality
kindred-spirits
brain
connection
power
soul
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Oscar Wilde |
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df1c761
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People listening to songs are like people reading novels: for a few minutes, for a few hours, someone else gets to come in and hijack that part of your brain that's always thinking. A good book or song kidnaps your interior voice and does all the driving. With the artist in charge you're free for a little while to leave your body and be someone else.
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books
songs
hijack
brain
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Douglas Coupland |
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11def52
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Braininess is not attractive unless combined with some signs of elegance; class.
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beauty
brain
elegance
class
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Alice Munro |
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b35a999
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Recent brain scans have shed light on how the brain simulates the future. These simulation are done mainly in the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex, the CEO of the brain, using memories of the past. On one hand, simulations of the future may produce outcomes that are desirable and pleasurable, in which case the pleasure centers of the brain light up (in the nucleus accumbens and the hypothalamus). On the other hand, these outcomes may also have a downside to them, so the orbitofrontal cortex kicks in to warn us of possible dancers. There is a struggle, then, between different parts of the brain concerning the future, which may have desirable and undesirable outcomes. Ultimately it is the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex that mediates between these and makes the final decisions. (Some neurologists have pointed out that this struggle resembles, in a crude way, the dynamics between Freud's .)
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mind
neuroscience
brain
simulation
freud
prediction
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Michio Kaku |
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f34ccaa
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"Are you all right, Sir?" asked Hezekiah. "Just fighting over old battles in my mind," said John. "It's the problem with age. You have all these rusty arguments, and no quarrel to use them in. My brain is a museum, but alas, I'm the only visitor, and even I am not terribly interested in the displays." Hezekiah laughed, but there was affection in it. "I would love nothing better than to visit there. But I'm afraid I'd be tempted to loot the place, and carry it all away with me."
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mind
brain
museum
honor
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Orson Scott Card |
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ce6fb8a
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The information. Every bit that of information that was ever in your brain. But the information is not the mind Jenna. That we've never accomplished before. What we've done with you is groundbreaking. We cracked the code. The mind is an energy that the brain produces. Think of a glass ball twirling on your fingertip. If it falls, it shatters into a million pieces. All the parts of a ball are still there, but it will never twirl with that force on your fingertip again. The brain is the same way.
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mind
memories
brain
information
pieces
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Mary E. Pearson |
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95bfcb8
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Ever been in a spelling bee as a kid? That snowy second after the announcement of the word as you sift your brain to see if you can spell it? It was like that, the blank panic.
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thoughts
anxious
blank-mind
going-blank
lost-thoughts
the-human-mind
spelling-bee
the-mind
panic-attack
brain
forgetting
panic
thinking
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Gillian Flynn |
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4a61431
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Language and hearing are seated in the cerebral cortex, the folded gray matter that covers the first couple of millimeters of the outer brain like wrapping paper. When one experiences silence, absent even reading, the cerebral cortex typically rests. Meanwhile, deeper and more ancient brain structures seem to be activated--the subcortical zones. People who live busy, noisy lives are rarely granted access to these areas. Silence, it appears, is not the opposite of sound. It is another world altogether, literally offering a deeper level of thought, a journey to the bedrock of the self.
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experiences
silence
reading
world
activated
bedrock
busy
cerebral-cortex
deeper
gray-matter
structures
subcortical
hearing
sound
brain
noisy
language
ancient
self
thought
journey
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Michael Finkel |
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e3afcf1
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-just on the verge of becoming a woman, and in these three years and almost five months, I'd reached maturity. I was older than the mountains outside. The wisdom of the attic was in my bones, etched on my brain, part of my flesh.
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wisdom
mature
older
brain
bones
maturity
flesh
mountains
teens
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V.C. Andrews |
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0bea69d
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In the economy of the body, the limbic highway takes precedence over the neural pathways. We were designed and built to feel, and there is no thought, no state of mind, that is not also a feeling state. Nobody can feel too much, though many of us work very hard at feeling too little. Feeling is frightening. Well, I find it so.
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thoughts
state-of-mind
brain
feeling
suppression
emotions
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Jeanette Winterson |
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e089b3b
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I usually like to interact with people who don't speak until it's necessary but I was intimidated by Carl's physique. I didn't feel inferior so much as incompatible. Carl existed on a plane where success was measured by physical feats. He had a brain because his body needed it, rather than the opposite. I didn't understand such people. I didn't know what they wanted, or might do.
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brain
muscle
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Max Barry |
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d8a5d67
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When we look at a solid lump of iron or rock, we are 'really' looking at what is almost entirely empty space. It looks and feels solid and opaque because our sensory systems and brains find it convenient to treat it as solid and opaque. It is convenient for the brain to represent a rock as solid because we can't walk through it. 'Solid' is our way of experiencing things that we can't walk through or fall throug, because of the electromagnetic forces between atoms. 'Opaque' is the experience we have when light bounces off the surface of an object, and none of it goes through.
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science
brain
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Richard Dawkins |
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a211830
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These computer simulations try only to duplicate the interactions between the cortex and the thalamus. Huge chunks of the brain are therefore missing. Dr. [Dharmendra] Modha understands the enormity of his project. His ambitious research has allowed him to estimate what it would take to create a working model of the entire human brain, and not just a portion or a pale version of it, complete with all parts of the neocortex and connections to the senses. He envisions using not just a single Blue Gene computer [with over a hundred thousand processors and terabytes of RAM] but thousands of them, which would fill up not just a room but an entire city block. The energy consumption would be so great that you would need a thousand-megawatt nuclear power plant to generate all the electricity. And then, to cool off this monstrous computer so it wouldn't melt, you would need to divert a river and send it through the computer circuits. It is remarkable that a gigantic, city-size computer is required to simulate a piece of human tissue that weighs three pounds, fits inside your skull, raises your body temperature by only a few degrees, uses twenty watts of power, and needs only a few hamburgers to keep it going.
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complexity
computer-simulation
brain
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Michio Kaku |
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c829b63
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The attention given to the side of the head which has received the injury, in connection with a specific reference to the side of the body nervously affected, is in itself evidence that in this case the ancient surgeon was already beginning observations on the localization of functions in the brain.
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ancient-medicine
hieroglyphic
injuries
medical-history
neuroscience
biology
brain
ancient-egypt
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James Henry Breasted |
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7665d92
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"The seat of consciousness and intelligence was from the earliest times regarded by the Egyptians as both the heart and the bowels or abdomen. Our surgeon, however, has observed the fact that injuries to the brain affect other parts of the body, especially in his experience the lower limbs. He notes the drag or shuffle of one foot, presumably the partial paralysis resulting from a cranial wound, and the ancient commentator carefully explains the meaning of the obsolete word used for "shuffle."
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ancient-medicine
neuroscience
brain
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James Henry Breasted |
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7faf2bf
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The second or third time I watched Stamets show a video of a Cordyceps doing its diabolical thing to an ant--commandeering its body, making it do its bidding, and then exploding a mushroom from its brain in order to disseminate its genes--it occurred to me that Stamets and that poor ant had rather a lot in common. Fungi haven't killed him, it's true, and he probably knows enough about their wiles to head off that fate. But it's also true that this man's life--his brain!--has been utterly taken over by fungi; he has dedicated himself to their cause, speaking for the mushrooms in the same way that Dr. Seuss's Lorax speaks for the trees. He disseminates fungal spores far and wide, helping them, whether by mail order or sheer dint of his enthusiasm, to vastly expand their range and spread their message.
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science
cordyceps
stamets
fungus
brain
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Michael Pollan |
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3b36de0
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The brain is heavily influenced by genes. But from birth through young adulthood, the part of the human brain that most defines us is less a product of the genes with which you started life than of what life has thrown at you. Because it is the last to mature, by definition the frontal cortex is the brain region least constrained by genes and most sculpted by experience. This must be so, to be the supremely complex social species that we are. Ironically, it seems that the genetic program of human brain development has evolved to, as much as possible, free the frontal cortex from genes.
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nature-vs-nurture
brain
genes
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Robert M. Sapolsky |