«Brains»

What we find is that our brains have colossal things happening in them all the time.

David Eagleman

Most of our brain cells are glial cells, once thought to be mere support cells, but now understood as having a critical role in brain function. Glial cells in the human brain are markedly different from glial cells in other brains, suggesting that they may be important in the evolution of brain function.

Thomas R. Insel

Our brains are like bonsai trees, growing around our private versions of reality.

Sloane Crosley

Just as our brains fill in the details of an image our eyes record only roughly, so, too, do our brains employ tricks we are unaware of to fill in details about people we don’t know intimately.

Leonard Mlodinow

Our brains have the ability to reorganize themselves by forming new neural connections throughout our lives. This ability is called neuroplasticity.

Elizabeth Thornton

Like our physical bodies, our memory becomes out of shape. As children, we are constantly learning new experiences, but by the time we reach our 20s, we start to lead a more sedentary life both mentally and physically. Our lives become routine, and we stop challenging our brains, and our memory starts to suffer.

Tony Buzan

All mental hygiene is based on the core practice of doing nothing. Most of us are good at wasting time, staring at the wall while telling ourselves we should be working. We call this doing nothing, but our brains are furiously active. We think constantly, and our thinking is often rife with distress.

Martha Beck

Stress overload makes us stupid. Solid research proves it. When we get overstressed, it creates a nasty chemical soup in our brains that makes it hard to pull out of the anxious depressive spiral.

Gail Sheehy

The cause-effect sequences in our brains are just as determining, just as inescapable, as anywhere else in Nature.

Corliss Lamont

Elephants have the largest brains of any mammal on the face of the Earth. They are creative, altruistic and kind.

Ingrid Newkirk

Our brains have been designed to blur the line between self and other. It is an ancient neural circuitry that marks every mammal, from mouse to elephant.

Frans de Waal

You can’t imagine how much detail we know about brains. There were 28,000 people who went to the neuroscience conference this year, and every one of them is doing research in brains. A lot of data. But there’s no theory. There’s a little, wimpy box on top there.

Jeff Hawkins

Brains, you see, vary a lot from person to person - they vary as much as faces do.

Sam Kean

Brains are tricky and adaptable organs. For all the ’neuroplasticity’ allowing our brains to reconfigure themselves to the biases of our computers, we are just as neuroplastic in our ability to eventually recover and adapt.

Douglas Rushkoff

We need a self because the complexity of the chemical processes that make up our individual humanities exceeds the processing power of our brains.

Mohsin Hamid

Before a brain can register a thought, a mind must think it... every step of the way is mind over matter... We override our brains all the time.

Deepak Chopra

We have magnificent brains, but we use a great deal of our brilliance to keep ourselves stuck and ignorant, to keep ourselves from not shining. We are so afraid of our beauty and radiance and brilliance because it scared the adults around us when we were children.

Patricia Sun

When it comes to brains, size matters. It’s not all that matters, of course. Whales and dolphins have brains that are larger than humans’, but few of the flippered and fluked set win tenure at Stanford. Our brains are the largest in proportion to body size, and they’re also highly sophisticated.

Seth Shostak

Brains don’t really smell, but what’s amazing about the brain is that it’s almost like scrambled eggs or soft tofu, almost like a gel. The brain controls so much of what we do, but you could put your finger right through it.

Ellen Pompeo