Brain Not Processing Quotes & Sayings

The brain's auditory cortex, for instance, processes an audio signal from your ear faster than a visual signal is processed in the visual cortex. The difference is around 40 milliseconds, which is not much, but enough to justify using a gun for starting a race, instead of a light flash. The faster audio processing speed means that sprint runners react more quickly to a bang than to a flash of light. — Jean Paul Zogby

with rare exceptions (chiefly the social insects), mammals and birds are the only organisms to devote substantial attention to the care of their young; an evolutionary development that, through the long period of plasticity which it permits, takes advantage of the large information-processing capability of the mammalian and primate brains. Love seems to be an invention of the mammals. — Carl Sagan

My brain had a difficult time processing what Dad being unfrozen meant. — Angela McPherson

There are many things we don't understand, and many ways to unlock the brain and maximize function. Don't ever let anybody tell you it can't be done. — Sally Fryer Dietz

If you know that most processing is below the level of awareness, you learn the value of sleep. You're brain is working on the problem anyway. — David Brooks

We do not need to plug a fiber optic cable into our brains in order to access the Internet. Not only can the human retina transmit data at an impressive rate of nearly 10 million bits per second, but it comes pre-packaged with a massive amount of dedicated wetware, the visual cortex, that is highly adapted to extracting meaning from this information torrent and to interfacing with other brain areas for further processing. — Nick Bostrom

In Molecules of Emotion, Pert revealed how her study of information-processing receptors on nerve cell membranes led her to discover that the same "neural" receptors were present on most, if not all, of the body's cells. Her elegant experiments established that the "mind" was not focused in the head but was distributed via signal molecules to the whole body. As importantly, her work emphasized that emotions were not only derived through a feedback of the body's environmental information. Through self-consciousness, the mind can use the brain to generate "molecules of emotion" and override the system. While proper use of consciousness can bring health to an ailing body, inappropriate unconscious control of emotions can easily make a healthy body diseased, — Bruce H. Lipton

Virtual-reality researchers have long struggled to eliminate effects that distort the brain's normal processing of visual information, and when these effects arise in equipment that augments or mediates the real world, they can be that much more disturbing. — Steve Mann

Fear and anxiety are not biologically wired. They do not erupt from a brain circuit in a prepackaged way as a fully formed conscious experience. They are a consequence of the cognitive processing of nonemotional ingredients. They come about in the brain the same way any other conscious experience comes about but have ingredients that nonemotional experiences lack.108 — Joseph E. Ledoux

Most people don't see half of what's in front of them. Your visual cortex does a shit load of imaging processing before the signal even gets to your brain, whose priorities are still checking the ancestral Savannah for dangerous predators, edible berries and climable trees. That's why a sudden cat in the night can make you jump and some people when distracted, can walk right out in front of a bus. Your brain just isn't interested in those large moving chunks of metal or the static heaps of brightly colored stuff that piles up in drifts around us. Never mind all that, says your brain, it's those silent fur-covered merchants of death you've got to watch out for. — Ben Aaronovitch

Evolutionary psychologists suggest that, just as the eye is an evolved organ for seeing, and the wing an evolved organ for flying, so the brain is a collection of organs (or 'modules') for dealing with a set of specialist data-processing needs. — Richard Dawkins

We're now recognizing that the mind, which is an energetic field of thought which you can read with EEG wires on your brain or with a new process called magnetoencephalography (MEG), which reads the field without even touching the body. So it basically says that when you're processing with your brain, you're broadcasting fields. — Bruce H. Lipton

I have trouble sleeping, at the end of the night. There's a lot of stimulus and my brain is processing a lot of different arcs and personalities. I'm always processing things, so I don't sleep. — Tatiana Maslany

Based on the above analyses, it is reasonable to expect the hardware that can emulate human-brain functionality to be available for approximately one thousand dollars by around 2020. As we will discuss in chapter 4, the software that will replicate that functionality will take about a decade longer. However, the exponential growth of the price-performance, capacity, and speed of our hardware technology will continue during that period, so by 2030 it will take a village of human brains (around one thousand) to match a thousand dollars' worth of computing. By 2050, one thousand dollars of computing will exceed the processing power of all human brains on Earth. Of course, this figure includes those brains still using only biological neurons. — Ray Kurzweil

There's a lot of real estate in our brain dedicated to facial recognition and to physics. That takes a lot of processing power out of our brain. — Jon Favreau

I know you want her back, kid. And I know that people saying things like 'there are plenty more fish in the sea' is only going to make you hurt more. And I could tell you all about the science of what your brain is going through right now. How it's processing a pain as intense as hitting a nerve in your tooth, but it can't find a source for that pain, so you kind of feel it everywhere. I could tell you that when you fall for someone, the bits of your brain that light up are the same as when you're hungry or thirsty. And I could tell you that when the person you love leaves you, you starve for them, you crave them, Heartbreak is a science, like love. So trust me when I say this: you're wounded right now, but you'll heal. — Krystal Sutherland

I damaged all the complicated bits of the brain to do with processing and emotional control. I was prey to every single emotion that swept over me and I couldn't deal with it. I had to re-learn things from scratch. — Richard Hammond

The Sketchnote Handbook is neither about sketching nor is it about note taking. It's about receiving and processing the world in a more complete and insightful way. It's a software upgrade for your brain. For those who've been shamed into thinking that drawing is either beyond them or beneath them, this book offers a whole new way of mastering the daily onslaught of information and turning it into raw material for discovery. (For those of us who've done this all our lives, the book provides a beautifully conceived and lovingly illustrated treat, and a great gift for our left-brained friends.) — Stefan G. Bucher

So when you're in REM sleep, your brain is very active, our body is quiet, but your brain is really processing a lot of things, a lot of emotions; we dream the most in REM sleep. And then you go back down in the deep stages, and so on and so forth. — Shelby Harris

Well, more or less, you just got struck by lightning."
"Wait, what?" My brain stopped processing for a prolonged moment unable to wrap around that one. How the hell had that happened? "So basically I was filled with 1.21 jiggawatts?
Can I travel through time now? — Elizabeth Sharp

In my view, while the single neuron is the basic anatomical and information processing-signaling unit of the brain, it is not capable of generating behaviors and, ultimately, thinking. Instead, the true functional unit of the central nervous system is a population of neurons, or neural ensembles or cell assemblies. — Miguel Nicolelis

I was just a few inches away from him and I can feel his breath touches my face. My head started to feel dizzy and my heart was skipping a few beats, like I was having a heart attack. My stomach does a somersault and my brain suddenly shuts down from processing.

Beneath me is the most beautiful man I've ever seen.

-Amanda — Kate Woodsen

The core idea is that for an information processing system to be conscious, it needs to be integrated into a unified whole that can't be decomposed into nearly independent parts. This means that all parts need to compute jointly with lots of information about each other-otherwise there would be more than one independent consciousness, such as in a room full of people or, perhaps, in the two brain halves of a patient whose connecting corpus callosum has been cut out. If there are fairly independent parts that are too simple, then these won't be conscious at all, like the independent pixels of a video camera. — Max Tegmark

The brain, he writes, is like Kublai Khan, the great Mongol emperor of the thirteenth century. It sits enthroned in its skull, "encased in darkness and silence," at a lofty remove from brute reality. Messengers stream in from every corner of the sensory kingdom, bringing word of distant sights, sounds, and smells. Their reports arrive at different rates, often long out of date, yet the details are all stitched together into a seamless chronology. The difference is that Kublai Khan was piecing together the past. The brain is describing the present - processing reams of disjointed data on the fly, editing everything down to an instantaneous now. How does it manage it? — Burkhard Bilger

A tired operator and an energized monitor create a problematic imbalance in the mind. As the monitor searches for forbidden content, it continuously brings to mind what it is searching for. Neuroscientists have shown that the brain is constantly processing the forbidden content just outside of conscious awareness. The result: You become primed to think, feel, or do whatever you are trying to avoid. — Kelly McGonigal

When Scripture says, "As a man thinks, so is he," it is raw truth. How we approach life and react to its vagaries determines the bulk of our character. How we love is locked into how we think about it. What angers us is triggered by how we think. It is between our ears that we decide how easily offended we will be. When it comes to harsh words from others, whether my skin absorbs like cotton or deflects like Teflon is a decision I make. All of that happens in a three-pound organ five-and-a-half inches across called my brain. In a very real sense, my world begins and ends between my ears. I don't have to be brain-dead to be brain-defeated. — Richard Foth

Maybe you've never fallen into a frozen stream. Here's what happens.
1. It is cold. So cold that the Department of Temperature Acknowledgment and Regulation in you brain gets the readings and says, "I can't deal with this. I'm out of here." It puts up the OUT TO LUNCH sign and passes all responsibility to the ...
2. Department of Pain and the Processing Thereof, which gets all this gobbledygook from the temperature department that it can't understand. "This is so not our job," it says. So it just starts hitting random buttons, filling you with strange and unpleasant sensations, and calls the ...
3. Office of Confusion and Panic, where there is always someone ready to hop on the phone the moment it rings. This office is at least willing to take some action. The Office of Confusion and Panic loves hitting buttons. — Maureen Johnson

Most people know that when we are faced with an immediate perceived "threat," adrenaline kicks in and we experience the "fight or flight syndrome".
Well, the brain also works the same at higher levels of processing. When we perceive a "crisis", even if we have time to think about it, our brain will perceive it as a "danger" or as an "opportunity". And ... we will act accordingly. And ... we will have an outcome based on that perception- danger or opportunity. I try to choose "opportunity" every time. — Jose N. Harris

It is the finding of neuroscience, in fact, that belief is at least in part a matter of emotion. Whatever we believe to be true lights up areas of our brain responsible for self-identification and the processing of feelings and sentiments. If we believe something, then, the object of our belief becomes an emotionally potent aspect of our own self-image. There is some common sense to this, too: the most passionate of believers and the most strident of New Atheists are palpably, visibly fired up and ready to defend their positions. — Steve Volk

But a human mind is a great sullen lightning-filled cloud of thoughts, all of them occupying a finite amount of brain processing time. Finding whatever the owner thinks they're thinking in the middle of the smog of prejudices, memories, worries, hopes and fears is almost impossible. — Terry Pratchett

The reason some people see the world so differently from others is that the human brain doesn't just take a picture of the external world like a camera; it is constantly interpreting and processing the information it receives. — Shawn Achor

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

The brain is its own galaxy, with more cells than stars in the Milky Way. The most powerful organ in the body, it rivals any supercomputer, processing 90,000 to 150,000 thoughts a day through billions of neurons and trillions of synaptic connections. Now that we have found a pathway to retrieving memories that before were inaccessible, we are perfecting its function too quickly. — Gwendolyn Womack

[Patricia Greenfield] concluded that "every medium develops some cognitive skills at the expense of others." Our growing use of the Net and other screen-based technologies has led to the "widespread and sophisticated development of visual-spatial skills." We can, for example, rotate objects in our minds better than we used to be able to. But our "new strengths in visual-spatial intelligence" go hand in hand with a weakening of our capacities for the kind of "deep processing" that underpins "mindful knowledge acquisition, inductive analysis, critical thinking, imagination, and reflection. — Nicholas Carr

One of the ultimate challenges for biology is to understand the brain's processing of unconscious and conscious perception, emotion, and empathy. — Eric Kandel

I thought about the relentless thought-processing, soul-devouring machine that is my brain, and wondered how on earth I was ever going to master it. Then I remembered that line from Jaws and couldn't help smiling: 'We're gonna need a bigger boat. — Elizabeth Gilbert

Reading builds a scaffold of vocabulary and word associations that facilitate learning new information.

It improves your brain processing speed for text because you have more rapid comprehension. — Peter Rogers

It's worth noting up front that I have always conceived of my mind as a digestive organ. A stomach for processing knowledge, if you will. As a looping, wrinkled mass, a human brain unmistakably looks like gray intestines, and it's within these thinking bowels that my experiences are broken down, consumed to become my life story. My thoughts occur as flavorful burps or acrid barf. The indigestible gristle and bone of my memories are expelled as these words. — Chuck Palahniuk

Love was not specified in the design of your brain; it is merely an endearing algorithm that freeloads on the leftover processing cycles. — David Eagleman

As modern-day neuroscience tells us, we are never in touch with the present, because neural information-processing itself takes time. Signals take time to travel from your sensory organs along the multiple neuronal pathways in your body to your brain, and they take time to be processed and transformed into objects, scenes, and complex situations. So, strictly speaking, what you are experiencing as the present moment is actually the past. — Thomas Metzinger

The area of the brain devoted to the reading finger of expert Braille readers was much larger than that of the nonreading finger, or of either index finger in nonreaders, Pascual-Leone found. It was a clear case of sensory input increase, with the person paying close attention, leading to an expansion of the brain region devoted to processing that input. — Jeffrey M. Schwartz

Via our left hemisphere language centers, our mind speaks to us constantly, a phenomenon I refer to as "brain chatter." It is that voice reminding you to pick up bananas on your way home and that calculating intelligence that knows when you have to do your laundry. There is vast individual variation in the speed at which our minds function. For some, our dialogue of brain chatter runs so fast that we can barely keep up with what we are thinking. Others of us think in language so slowly that it takes a long time for us to comprehend. Still others of us have a problem retaining our focus and concentration long enough to act on our thoughts. These variations in normal processing stem back to our brain cells and how each brain is intrinsically wired. — Jill Bolte Taylor

was learning to trust God enough (what a concept) to know that, like family (the Bible calls him "Father" after all), he will come through no matter what, that his love and commitment to me is deeper than how my brain happens to be processing information at any given moment, to trust that God will be with me, not despite the journey but precisely because I was trusting God enough to take it. — Peter Enns

The brain cannot multitask. Multitasking, when it comes to paying attention, is a myth. The brain naturally focuses on concepts sequentially, one at a time ... To put it bluntly, research shows that we can't multitask. We are biologically incapable of processing information-rich inputs simultaneously ... Studies show that a person who is interrupted takes 50 percent longer to accomplish a task. Not only that, he or she makes up to 50 percent more errors. — John Medina

He research on the brain does not validate that we are singularly processing input or learning with a single sensory input. — Eric Jensen

If we human beings are information processing machines, reading X's & O's and translating that information into what people oh so breathlessly call "experience", & if I had not only the information but the artistry to shape that information using the computer inside my brain, then, technically speaking, was I not having all the same experiences those other people were having? — Jennifer Egan

Conscious In psychodynamics, the adjective "conscious" takes the form of a noun and becomes "the conscious." Animals and even plants may be said to have a type of conscious. In fact, all matter has an internal and external manifestation. The internal manifestation is a rudimentary conscious. It is not really internal because this term is a spatial reference similar to in and out. In contrast, consciousness itself (consciousness without content) transcends space and time. For this reason, the conscious is not an object that can be detected and dissected in the same way that the brain can be detected and dissected. It is a manifestation of reality that is unrelated to physical matter and energy. Any system that has some kind of rudimentary, connected, and organized processing is conscious on some level. We may even say that subatomic systems, such as ones making up an atom, are rudimentarily conscious. — John G. Shobris

By 2020, most home computers will have the computing power of a human brain. That doesn't mean that they are brains, but it means that in terms of raw processing, they can process bits as fast as a brain can. So the question is, how far behind that is the development of a machine that's as smart as we are? — Seth Shostak

Just think of the opportunities we can unlock by making education as addictive as a video game. This type of experiential, addictive learning improves decision-making skills and increases the processing speed and spatial skills of the brain. When was the last time your child asked for help with a video game? — Naveen Jain

Our metaphors for the operation of the brain are frequently drawn from the production line. We think of the brain as a glorified sausage machine, taking in information from the senses, processing it and regurgitating it in a different form, as thoughts or actions. The digital computer reinforces this idea because it is quite explicitly a machine that does to information what a sausage machine does to pork. Indeed, the brain was the original inspiration and metaphor for the development of the digital computer, and early computers were often described as 'giant brains'. Unfortunately, neuroscientists have sometimes turned this analogy on its head, and based their models of brain function on the workings of the digital computer (for example by assuming that memory is separate and distinct from processing, as it is in a computer). This makes the whole metaphor dangerously self-reinforcing. — Steve Grand