Brain And Behavior Quotes & Sayings

It is the popular misconception of marriage as a mere social convention or quaint tradition invented by the brain of man which has led to the denigrating of this holy relation, the multiplication of unspeakable immorality, the common unrest between husbands and wives, and the gradual disintegration of society and civilization. For if marriage exists merely by human authority then men and women may do with it or conduct themselves in it as they please. They may redefine it, or they may abandon it altogether. But if marriage is a divine institution, then it is governed by a higher authority. It becomes, then, a matter of obedience, and the conduct of husbands and wives within marriage is a conduct for which they must give their account to God. The original institution of marriage is therefore basic to our understanding of marriage, our estimation of marriage, and our right behavior in marriage. — Rosaria Champagne Butterfield

To draw for a moment from an entirely different corner of my life, that part of me still attached to the biological sciences, there is ample evidence that animals - rats and monkeys, for example - that are forced into a subordinate status within their social systems adapt their brain chemistry accordingly, becoming 'depressed' in humanlike ways. Their behavior is anxious and withdrawn; the level of serotonin (the neurotransmitter boosted by some antidepressants) declines in their brains. And - what is especially relevant here - they avoid fighting even in self-defense ... My guess is that the indignities imposed on so many low-wage workers - the drug tests, the constant surveillance, being 'reamed out' by managers - are part of what keeps wages low. If you're made to feel unworthy enough, you may come to think that what you're paid is what you are actually worth. — Barbara Ehrenreich

Individual organ of human brain makes individual decision for working of brain and driving behavior in humans. — Santosh Kalwar

The neocortex is not like a computer, parallel or otherwise. Instead of computing answers to problems the neocortex uses stored memories to solve problems and produce behavior. — Jeff Hawkins

The genes hold culture on a leash. The leash is very long, but inevitably values will be constrained in accordance with their effects on the human gene pool. The brain is a product of evolution. Human behavior-like the deepest capacities for emotional respone which drive and guide it-is the circuitous technique by which human genetic material has been and will be kept intact. — E. O. Wilson

By comparison, the Integrated Human model of human nature, in addition to the two elements of our previous model, includes: A conscious analytic system, known as the slow brain (where logic resides) A subconscious intuitive system, or fast brain The full range of motivational drives (of which the drive to acquire is only one) Basic ideas of moral behavior, or moral intuitions Distinguishing characteristics, or personality traits Together, these elements of our nature provide all of the fundamental functions necessary for living life as a complete, Integrated Human - and they are the springboard for the development of leadership character. As our research data has shown, the ability to leverage all of these areas influence leadership's ability to achieve positive organizational outcomes. — Fred Kiel

I was reading this story about these people who suffered from brain injuries, and then their behavior changed kind of drastically afterward, and I just said to myself, 'There's no way that that can possibly be true.' — Sam Kean

Manchester United could have any goalkeeper in the world. I was a 23-year-old kid from New Jersey who, from an early age, had to cope with Tourette's Syndrome, a brain disorder that can trigger speech and facial tics, vocal outbursts and obsessive compulsive behavior. — Tim Howard

They found that some emotionally involved brain structures were highly activated by the choice of immediate or near-term rewards. These areas were associated with impulsive behavior, including drug addiction. In contrast, when participants opted for longer-term rewards with higher return, lateral areas of the cortex involved in higher cognition and deliberation were more active.18 And the higher the activity in these lateral areas, the more the participant was willing to defer gratification. — David Eagleman

Dr. Jaak Panksepp told me. "If you don't recognize that the brain creates psychological responses, then neuroscience becomes a highly impoverished discipline. And that's where the battle is right now. Many neuroscientists believe that mental states are irrelevant for what the brain does. This is a Galileo-type battle, and it will not be won very easily because you have generations and generations of scholars, even in psychology, who have swallowed hook, line, and sinker the notion - the Skinnerian notion - that mentality is irrelevant in the control of behavior."3 Dr. — Gabor Mate

I wanted to kill the me underneath. That fact haunted my days and nights. When you realize you hate yourself so much, when you realize that you cannot stand who you are, and this deep spite has been the motivation behind your behavior for many years, your brain can't quite deal with it. It will try very hard to avoid that realization; it will try, in a last-ditch effort to keep your remaining parts alive, to remake the rest of you. This is, I believe, different from the suicidal wish of those who are in so much pain that death feels like relief, different from the suicide I would later attempt, trying to escape that pain. This is a wish to murder yourself; the connotation of kill is too mild. This is a belief that you deserve slow torture, violent death. — Marya Hornbacher

The Ego, as noted, is simply the content of your PSM [Phenomenal Self Model] at this moment (your bodily sensations, your emotional state, your perceptions, memories, acts of will, thoughts). But it can become the Ego only because you are constitutionally unable to realize that all this is just the content of a simulation in your brain. It is not reality itself but an image of reality - and a very special one indeed. The Ego is a transparent mental image: You - the physical person as a whole - look right through it. You do not see it. You see with it. The Ego is a tool for controlling and planning your behavior and for understanding the behavior of others — Thomas Metzinger

Male rats don't experience the hormonal changes that trigger maternal behavior in female rats. They never normally participate in infant care. Yet put a baby rat in a cage with a male adult and after a few days he will be caring for the baby almost as if he were its mother. He'll pick it up, nestle it close to him as a nursing female would, keep the baby rat clean and comforted, and even build a comfy nest for it.29 The parenting circuits are there in the male brain, even in a species in which paternal care doesn't normally exist.30 If a male rat, without even the aid of a William Sears baby-care manual, can be inspired to parent then I would suggest that the prospects for human fathers are pretty good. — Cordelia Fine

While our behavior is still significantly controlled by our genetic inheritance, we have, through our brains, a much richer opportunity to blaze new behavioral and cultural pathways on short timescales. — Carl Sagan

Whatever their conscious motives, these men cannot know why they are as they are. As sickening as I find their behavior, I have to admit that if I were to trade places with one of these men, atom for atom, I would be him: There is no extra part of me that could decide to see the world differently or to resist the impulse to victimize other people. Even if you believe that every human being harbors an immortal soul, the problem of responsibility remains: I cannot take credit for the fact that I do not have the soul of psychopath. If I had truly been in Komisarjevsky's shoes on July 23,2007 - that is, if I had his genes and life experience and identical brain (or soul) in an identical state - I would have acted exactly as he did. There is simply no intellectually respectable position from which to deny this. — Sam Harris

When you repeat a behavior over time, your brain learns to automate the process. It's more energy efficient to automatically do something than to manually weigh your options and decide to act the same way every time. When you make a decision very quickly, it is probably from habit, even if you think you're actively deciding. In a way, you made the decision a while ago. — Stephen Guise

As we have likely recognized by now, no two snowflakes, trees, or animals are alike. No two people are the same, either. Everything has its own Inner Nature. Unlike other forms of life, though, people are easily led away from what's right for them, because people have Brain, and Brain can be fooled. Inner Nature, when relied on, cannot be fooled. But many people do not look at it or listen to it, and consequently do not understand themselves very much. Having little understanding of themselves, they have little respect for themselves, and are therefore easily influenced by others.
But rather than be carried along by circumstances and manipulated by those who can see the weaknesses and behavior tendencies that we ignore, we can work with our own characteristics and be in control of our own lives. The Way of Self-Reliance starts with recognizing who we are, what we've got to work with, and what works best for us. — Benjamin Hoff

We've surpassed ourselves now, we're exploring terrain beyond the limits of merely human understanding. Sometimes its contours, even in conventional space, are just too intricate for our brains to track; other times its very axes extend into dimensions inconceivable to minds built to fuck and fight on some prehistoric grassland. So many things constrain us, from so many directions. The most altruistic and sustainable philosophies fail before the brute brain-stem imperative of self-interest. Subtle and elegant equations predict the behavior of the quantum world, but none can explain it. After four thousand years we can't even prove that reality exists beyond the mind of the first-person dreamer. We have such need of intellects greater than our own. But we're not very good at building them. — Peter Watts

The human brain works by identifying patterns. It uses information from the past to understand what is happening in the present and to anticipate the future. This strategy works elegantly in most situations. But we inevitably see patterns where they don't exist. In other words, we are slow to recognize exceptions. There is also the peer-pressure factor. All of us have been in situations that looked ominous, and they almost always turn out to be innocuous. If we behave otherwise, we risk social embarrassment by overreacting. So we err on the side of underreacting. — Amanda Ripley

Faith is unlearning this senseless worries and misguided beliefs that keep us captive. It is far more complex than simply modifying behavior. Faith is rewiring the human brain. We are literally upgrading our minds by downloading the mind of Christ. — Mark Batterson

When possible, the brain makes a behavior into a habit, which saves effort and therefore gives us more capacity to deal with complex, novel, or urgent matters. — Gretchen Rubin

evidence from functional magnetic resonance imaging showing that patients with BPD have hyperactivity in the limbic areas of the brain, especially the amygdala, and hypoactivity in the prefrontal cortex [and] in complex interaction with childhood trauma common among borderline patients, can result in the . . . behavior recognized as the symptoms of BPD: impulsive aggression, lack of affective control, and a profound mistrust born out of early disruption in the development of emotional attachment.8 Obviously, psychological theories for BPD — Cathy Wiseman

I am a soul, and I have a body. We don't learn about people by studying their bodies. We learn about people by finding out how they feel, what they think, what they're passionate about, what their worldview is, and so forth.
...So my conclusion is that there's more to me than my conscious life and my body. In fact, I am a 'self,' or an 'I,' that cannot be seen or touched unless I manifest myself through my behavior or my talk. I have free will because I am a 'self,' or a soul, and I'm not just a brain. ~J.P. Moreland, PHD~ — Lee Strobel

A meme (rhymes with dream) is a unit of information (a catchphrase, a concept, a tune, a notion of fashion, philosophy or politics) that leaps from brain to brain. Memes compete with one another for replication, and are passed down through a population much the same way genes pass through a species. Potent memes can change minds, alter behavior, catalyze collective mindshifts and transform cultures. Which is why meme warfare has become the geopolitical battle of our information age. Whoever has the memes has the power. — Kalle Lasn

Speaking of a future at most only decades away, an experimenter in intelligence control asserted, I foresee a time when we shall have the means and therefore, inevitably, the temptation to manipulate the behavior and intellectual functioning of all the people through environmental and biochemical manipulation of the brain. — Zbigniew Brzezinski

Freud elevated unconscious processes to the throne of the mind, imbuing them with the power to guide our every thought and deed, and to a significant extent writing free will out of the picture.
Decades later, neuroscience has linked genetic mechanisms to neuronal circuits coursing with a multiplicity of neurotransmitters to argue that the brain is a machine whose behavior is predestined, or at least determined, in such a way as seemingly to leave no room for the will. It is not merely that will is not free, in the modern scientific view; not merely that it is constrained, a captive of material forces. It is, more radically, that the will, a manifestation of the mind, does not even exist, because a mind independent of brain does not exist. — Jeffrey M. Schwartz

The human brain is the only object in the known universe that can predict its own future and tell its on fortune. The fact that we can make disastrous decisions even as we foresee their consequences is the great, unsolved mystery of human behavior. When you hold your fate in your hands, why would you ever make a fist? — Daniel Gilbert

MacLean has shown that the R-complex plays an important role in aggressive behavior, territoriality, ritual and the establishment of social hierarchies. Despite occasional welcome exceptions, this seems to me to characterize a great deal of modern human bureaucratic and political behavior. — Carl Sagan

It seems that once again people engage in a search for evidence that is biased toward confirmation. Asked to assess the similarity of two entities, people pay more attention to the ways in which they are similar than to the ways in which they differ. Asked to assess dissimilarity, they become more concerned with differences than with similarities. In other words, when testing a hypothesis of similarity, people look for evidence of similarity rather than dissimilarity, and when testing a hypothesis of dissimilarity, they do the opposite. The relationship one perceives between two entities, then, can vary with the precise form of the question that is asked — Thomas Gilovich

This is the hallmark of a robust biological system: political parties can perish in a tragic accident and the society will still run, sometimes with little more than a hiccup to the system. It may be that for every strange clinical case in which brain damage leads to a bizarre change in behavior or perception, there are hundreds of cases in which parts of the brain are damaged with no detectable clinical sign. — David Eagleman

When a male vole repeatedly mates with a female, a hormone called vasopressin is released in his brain. The vasopressin binds to receptors in a part of the brain called the nucleus accumbens, and the binding mediates a pleasurable feeling that becomes associated with that female. This locks in the monogamy, which is known as pair-bonding. If you block this hormone, the pair-bonding goes away. Amazingly, when researchers crank up the levels of vasopressin with genetic techniques, they can shift polygamous species to monogamous behavior.38 — David Eagleman

What Positive Input Does Promotes overall balance, or homeostasis. Moves easily through the system, without obstruction or blockages. Generates new neural pathways. Promotes the production of new brain cells. Improves gene expression. Allows every cell to function normally, without anomalies or aberrant behavior. Supports the immune system, increasing resistance to disease. Counteracts the effects over time of entropy and aging. Increases a sense of wellbeing: The person feels healthy, vibrant, and alive. — Deepak Chopra

Much more plausible is the computer-based explanation that dreams are a spillover from the unconscious processing of the day's experience, from the brain's decision on how much of the daily events temporarily stored in a kind of buffer to emplace in long-term memory... The American psychiatrist Ernest Hartmann of Tufts University has provided
anecdotal but reasonably persuasive evidence that people who are engaged in intellectual activities during the day, especially unfamiliar intellectual activities, require more sleep at night, while, by and large, those engaged in mainly repetitive and intellectually unchallenging tasks are able to do with much less sleep. — Carl Sagan

At first the brain weighs a potential partner, and if the partner fits our ancestral wish list, we get a spike in the release of sex chemicals that makes us dizzy with a rush of unavoidable infatuation. It's the first step down the primeval path of pair-bonding. — Abhijit Naskar

The purpose of all of this (left hemisphere's way of choosing denial or repression over considering an anomaly) is to impose stability on behavior and to prevent vacillation because indecisiveness doesn't serve any purpose. Any decision, so long as it is probably correct, is better than no decision at all. A perpetually fickle general will never win a war. — V.S. Ramachandran

A powerful AI system tasked with ensuring your safety might imprison you at home. If you asked for happiness, it might hook you up to a life support and ceaselessly stimulate your brain's pleasure centers. If you don't provide the AI with a very big library of preferred behaviors or an ironclad means for it to deduce what behavior you prefer, you'll be stuck with whatever it comes up with. And since it's a highly complex system, you may never understand it well enough to make sure you've got it right. — James Barrat

Science has proven that sin has the power to change us for the worse. In a healthy brain, rational thought can override impulsive behavior. Not so in a brain affected by addiction. This is how Satan steals our ability to choose wisely. Addiction costs us the ability to exercise our agency. — Toni Sorenson

Perhaps most excitingly, we are uncovering the brain basis of our behaviors - normal, abnormal and in-between. We are mapping a neurobiology of what makes us us. — Robert M. Sapolsky

When split-brain patients fabricate verbal (left hemisphere based) explanations for behaviors that were produced by the right hemisphere, the left hemisphere is generating explanations of behaviors produced by nonconscious systems and does so in the maintenance of a sense of self. That is, our behavior is an important way we come to know who we are. This is the essence of Gazzaniga's interpreter theory of consciousness (see Chapter 6). — Joseph E. Ledoux

Although a child's brain has reached 90 percent of its full size by age six, it's far from fully developed, and there are specific parts of the brain that have the furthest to go. It is the newest brain region, the prefrontal cortex, responsible for executive functioning - including voluntary attention and metacognition - that still has years of growth ahead. Your child's behavior will be marked by impulsiveness and inconsistency for quite some time to come. — Anonymous

Institutions are "stable, valued, recurring patterns of behavior," as Huntington put it, the most important function of which is to facilitate collective action. Without some set of clear and relatively stable rules, human beings would have to renegotiate their interactions at every turn. Such rules are often culturally determined and vary across different societies and eras, but the capacity to create and adhere to them is genetically hard-wired into the human brain. A natural tendency to conformism helps give institutions inertia and is what has allowed human societies to achieve levels of social cooperation unmatched by any other animal species. — Anonymous

We all must determine what types of anatomical castanets vest in our central core. For aught we know, we still tend to think of ourselves as a complete and fixed product. In reality, analogous to an unfinished paper, working from the inside out, we are retooling ourselves every day whether we recognize the minor or major tinkering taking place or not. In a neurological sense, the brain is constantly working to build and rebuild itself. In a psychological sense, every day the human mind is altering who we are. We constantly take in new information that modifies and enhances our understanding of the world and our place in the environment. Every day we are using the sense of self and our accumulated knowledge to adapt to our world and modify our thinking and behavior. — Kilroy J. Oldster

To diagnose and treat a brain disorder accurately, it would be necessary to look at the brain directly. Looking at behavior alone can miss a vital piece of the puzzle and provide an incomplete, or even a misleading, picture of the child's problems. — Aditi Shankardass

Philosophy and Psychology

The latter is study of researched human brain and behavior

The former is the behavior after studying the human brain. — Bhavik Sarkhedi

My brain has always been my enemy, and I've spent much of the past decade warring against it, with therapy and razor blades and bad behavior, with precision-guided prescriptions that targeted specific regions. — Pete Wentz

When we can communicate from the inside out, we're talking directly to the part of the brain that controls behavior, and then we allow people to rationalize it with the tangible things we say and do. This is where gut decisions come from. — Simon Sinek

Although neuroplasticity provides an escape from genetic determinism, a loophole for free thought and free will, it also imposes its own form of determinism on our behavior. As particular circuits in our brain strengthen through the repetition of a physical or mental activity, they begin to transform that activity into a habit. The paradox of neuroplasticity, observes Doidge, is that, for all the mental flexibility it grants us, it can end up locking us into "rigid behaviors."33 The chemically triggered synapses that link our neurons program us, in effect, to want to keep exercising the circuits they've formed. Once we've wired new circuitry in our brain, Doidge writes, "we long to keep it activated. — Nicholas Carr

I'm a voyeur. I say that with no embarrassment. If I could have a superpower, being invisible would be it, no question. I'm fascinated by human behavior; observing people and seeing how much story gets told without a lot of dialogue, and how much our brain fills in. — Thomas Schlamme

Humans can be as good as they can be bad. Because goodness and evil both are biological traits of the mind. — Abhijit Naskar

The objective psychologist, hoping to get at the physiological side of behavior, is apt to plunge immediately into neurology trying to correlate brain activity with modes of experience ... The result in many cases only accentuates the gap between the total experience as studied by the psychologist and neural activity as analyzed by the neurologist. — Roger Wolcott Sperry

Sydney, and I think you already know - " I try to hide my grin, gesturing to Swarley who continues to give a rude sniffing to Dr. Abbott's crotch.
"Swarley. Yes, I've been seeing him since he was just a pup." Swarley's magnetic attraction to a certain crotch is distracting. Although he's not my dog, and I'm sure Dr. Abbott is used to it, I feel the need to explain his behavior.
"He must think you have a big piece of meat in there."
The words come out of my mouth and my brain - that apparently has a two-second delay - catches up as I turn crimson
... Swarley has diarrhea of the ass and I have diarrhea of the mouth. — Jewel E. Ann

Humanism is not a single character. It is a magnificent blend of various emotional and behavioral traits that are unique to the human mind. — Abhijit Naskar

We don't have that for the most part it is learned behavior and so the first part is we have to understand why people are behaving the way they are. Behavior is a result so we have to understand that before there is a result something is going on in here in the brain. — John Assaraf

In adaptive terms, belief has been extraordinarily useful. It is, after all, by believing various propositions about the world that we predict events and consider the likely consequences of our actions. Beliefs are principles of action: whatever they may be at the level of the brain, they are processes by which our understanding (and misunderstanding) of the world is represented and made available to guide our behavior. — Sam Harris

When and why do we attribute a person's behavior to brain disease, and when and why do we not do so? Briefly, the answer is that we often attribute bad behavior to disease (to excuse the agent);never attribute good behavior to disease (lest we deprive the agent of credit); and typically attribute good behavior to free will and insist bad behavior called mental illness is a "no fault" act of nature. — Thomas Szasz

Not all addictions are rooted in abuse or trauma, but I do believe they can all be traced to painful experience. A hurt is at the centre of all addictive behaviours. It is present in the gambler, the Internet addict, the compulsive shopper and the workaholic. The wound may not be as deep and the ache not as excruciating, and it may even be entirely hidden - but it's there. As we'll see, the effects of early stress or adverse experiences directly shape both the psychology and the neurobiology of addiction in the brain. — Gabor Mate

Bad information is a disease that attacks the brain. It messes with your head, making you do things that you shouldn't, causing you to make wrong decisions. Just as a potent virus co-opts your cells' machinery, bad information can co-opt your behavior. It can alter the way you interact with the world and, as a result, it can change the world. — Charles Seife

Psychologists usually try to help people use insight and understanding to manage their behavior. However, neuroscience research shows that very few psychological problems are the result of defects in understanding; most originate in pressures from deeper regions in the brain that drive our perception and attention. When the alarm bell of the emotional brain keeps signaling that you are in danger, no amount of insight will silence it. — Bessel A. Van Der Kolk

Of course genes can't pull the levers of our behavior directly. But they affect the wiring and workings of the brain, and the brain is the seat of our drives, temperaments and patterns of thought. Each of us is dealt a unique hand of tastes and aptitudes, like curiosity, ambition, empathy, a thirst for novelty or for security, a comfort level with the social or the mechanical or the abstract. Some opportunities we come across click with our constitutions and set us along a path in life. — Steven Pinker

Isn't it interesting that emotionally abusive personalities always expect their victim to feel guilt for them so that they can feel sorry for themselves? They live in a constant torture by the demons of fear and regret, and the less they assume responsibility for their own behavior and words, the greater the legion that eventually possesses their soul and leads them to hell before they reach it. A normal communication is a luxury for such individuals, for their spirit is now a hostage to the torture of ignorance, the separation between their brain and their soul. The only thing they can do is manipulate and provoke, because they're being distracted by their new hosts towards pushing away the ones that could take them out of the water where they have chosen to drown themselves when giving up on trust, empathy, compassion and love. No one can save them because they have not clearly stated that they want to be saved. And each human is responsible for his own fate. — Robin Sacredfire

A lot of the demonstrations that I do, when I get inside people's minds, is understanding human behavior and understanding how people think and getting their patterns down so I know how to create the illusion that I get inside their brain. — Criss Angel

You should prepare to follow the program for 90 days. Why? Because behavioral research indicates that it takes 90 days to prepare for change, build a new behavior, become confident in the face of high-risk triggers, and move past the likelihood of relapse. Brain research also suggests that it takes a few months of practicing a new behavior to create permanent change. — John C. Norcross

Every one of you sitting here today is carrying at least 500 measurable chemicals in your body that were never in anybody's body before the 1920s ... We have dusted the globe with man-made chemicals that can undermine the development of the brain and behavior, and the endocrine, immune and reproductive systems, vital systems that assure perpetuity ... Everyone is exposed. — Theo Colborn

What distinguishes our species is thought. The cerebral cortex is in a way a liberation. We need no longer be trapped in the genetically inherited behavior patterns of lizards and baboons: territoriality and aggression and dominance hierarchies. We are each of us largely responsible for what gets put in to our brains. For what as adults we wind up caring for and knowing about. No longer at the mercy of the reptile brain we can change ourselves. Think of the possibilities. — Carl Sagan

When he heard laughter, before he could think or feel anything, his heart would already be beating like he'd sprinted twenty yards. As the beating slowly normalized he'd think of how his heart, unlike him, was safely contained, away from the world, behind bone and inside skin, held by muscles and arteries in its place, carefully off-center, as if to artfully assert itself as source and creator, having grown the chest to hide in and to muffle and absorb - and, later, after innovating the brain and face and limbs, to convert into productive behavior - its uncontrollable, indefensible, unexplainable, embarrassing squeezing of itself. — Tao Lin

...doctors advised intensive talk therapy, even electroshock treatment. Some gay men were castrated against their will, a procedure that removed their testicles and deadened the sex drive. Others were lobotomized, a medical practice that destroyed the connections between the frontal lobes and the thalamus of the brain, deadening just about all aspects of behavior. — Ann Bausum

And become so open minded my brain falls out? Make so many excuses for people's bad behavior that I become spineless? No thanks. I have no desire to cherish each person's bullshit and call it a beautiful snowflake. I will not make excuses for all the ways they treat the people around them like garbage. — Penny Reid

Most of the time, according to the results of the study, Roy is smart, decent, reasonable, kind, and trustworthy. His frontal lobes are fully functioning, and he is in control of his behavior. But when he's in a state of sexual arousal and the reptilian brain takes over, he becomes unrecognizable to himself. — Dan Ariely

Recently a study proved that working from a larger, less cluttered computer screen increases concentration. I could have told them that. And yes, I write first drafts with a mechanical pencil and a yellow legal pad. There's good reason for this primitive behavior: I am a crackerjack typist. My hand moves far more quickly than my brain. — Stacy Schiff

People who wrote novels about universities hardly ever got them right. Max had spent his short working life untenured, but still he'd managed to be a charming magnet wherever he taught, and Amy had surfeited on faculty gossip and professorial antics and the general behavior of academics, who were as a whole no more brilliant or Machiavellian than travel agents. They tended toward shabbier clothes and manners, and of course there was the occasional storied eccentric or truly original mind, but most college campuses - especially the older ones - functioned less as brain trusts than as wildlife preserves, housing and protecting people who wouldn't last a week in GenPop. — Jincy Willett

Khoruts gave me a memorable example of how behavior can be covertly manipulated by microorganisms. The parasite Toxoplasma infects rats but needs to make its way into a cat's gut to reproduce. The parasite's strategy for achieving this goal is to alter the rat brain such that the rodent is now attracted to cat urine. Rat walks right up to cat, gets killed, eaten. If you saw the events unfold, Khoruts continued, you'd scratch your head and go, What is wrong with that rat? Then he smiled. Do you think Republicans have different flora? — Mary Roach

Introspection makes our conscious motives and strategies transparent to us, while we have no sure means of deciphering them in others. Yet we never genuinely know our true selves. We remain largely ignorant of the actual unconscious determinants of our behavior, and therefore we cannot accurately predict what our behavior will be in circumstances beyond the safety zone of our past experience. The Greek motto "Know thyself," when applied to the minute details of our behavior, remains an inaccessible ideal. Our "self" is just a database that gets filled in through our social experiences, in the same format with which we attempt to understand other minds, and therefore it is just as likely to include glaring gaps, misunderstandings, and delusions. — Stanislas Dehaene

The brain can only assume its proper behavior when consciousness is doing what it is designed for: not writhing and whirling to get out of present experience, but being effortlessly aware of it. — Alan W. Watts

The mind of the polyglot is a very particular thing, and scientists are only beginning to look closely at how acquiring a second language influences learning, behavior and the very structure of the brain itself. — Jeffrey Kluger

Of all the chemical transmitter substances sloshing around in your brain, it appears that dopamine may be the most directly related to the neural correlates of belief. Dopamine, in fact, is critical in association learning and the reward system of the brain that Skinner discovered through his process of operant conditioning, whereby any behavior that is reinforced tends to be repeated. A reinforcement is, by definition, something that is rewarding to the organism; that is to say, it makes the brain direct the body to repeat the behavior in order to get another positive reward. — Michael Shermer

People followed him not because of his idea of a changed America. People followed him because of their idea of a changed America. The part of the brain that influences our behavior and decisions does not have the capacity for language. We have trouble saying clearly, in emotional terms, why we do what we do, and offer rationalizations that, though valid and true, are not powerful enough to inspire others. — Simon Sinek

No matter how hard we try to reduce everything to deterministic brain chemistry, no matter how hard we try to reduce behavior to the sort of herd instinct that is captured in big data, no matter how hard we strive to replace sin with nonmoral words, like "mistake" or "error" or "weakness," the most essential parts of life are matters of individual responsibility and moral choice: whether to be brave or cowardly, honest or deceitful, — David Brooks

Some people say, therefore, that violence and war are inevitable. I say rubbish: Our brains are fully capable of controlling instinctive behavior. — Jane Goodall

Contemporary philosophers are facing problems that were unthinkable only one century ago, such as whether space and time are mutually Independent, whether there is objective chance or only uncertainty, whether physics can explain chemical change, whether our behavior is fully determined by our genomes, whether ideation can change the brain, or whether either the economy or ideas are the ultimate roots of the social. — Mario Bunge