Consciousness Mind Brain Quotes & Sayings

I believe consciousness is simply what it feels like to have a neocortex. — Jeff Hawkins

There is nothing spooky about mindfulness. It is simply a state of clear, nonjudgmental, and undistracted attention to the contents of consciousness, whether pleasant or unpleasant. Cultivating this quality of mind has been shown to reduce pain, anxiety, and depression; improve cognitive function; and even produce changes in gray matter density in regions of the brain related to learning and memory, emotional regulation, and self-awareness. — Sam Harris

Through this image he had a glimpse of a strange dark cavern of speculation but at once turned away from it, feeling that it was not yet the hour to enter it. But the nightshade of his friend's listlessness seemed to be diffusing in the air around him a tenuous and deadly exhalation and he found himself glancing from one casual word to another on his right or left in stolid wonder that they had been so silently emptied of instantaneous sense until every mean shop legend bound his mind like the words of a spell and his soul shrivelled up, sighing with age as he walked on in a lane among heaps of dead language. His own consciousness of language was ebbing from his brain and trickling into the very words themselves which set to band and disband themselves in wayward rhythms:
The ivy whines upon the wall
And whines and twines upon the wall
The ivy whines upon the wall
The yellow ivy on the wall
Ivy, ivy up the wall.
Did any one ever hear such drivel? — James Joyce

These dreams reminded me that, since I wished some day to become a writer, it was high time to decide what sort of books I was going to write. But as soon as I asked myself the question, and tried to discover some subject to which I could impart a philosophical significance of infinite value, my mind would stop like a clock, my consciousness would be faced with a blank, I would feel either that I was wholly devoid of talent or perhaps that some malady of the brain was hindering its development. — Marcel Proust

All human endeavors are the achievements of the little specks of jelly in your head. — Abhijit Naskar

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

People with dissociative disorders are like actors trapped in a variety of roles. They have difficulty integrating their memories, their sense of identity and aspects of their consciousness into a continuous whole. They find many parts of their experience alien, as if belonging to someone else. They cannot remember or make sense of parts of their past. — David Speigel

The quality of mind cultivated in vipassana is almost always referred to as "mindfulness," and the literature on its psychological benefits is now substantial. There is nothing spooky about mindfulness. It is simply a state of clear, nonjudgmental, and undistracted attention to the contents of consciousness, whether pleasant or unpleasant. Cultivating this quality of mind has been shown to reduce pain, anxiety, and depression; improve cognitive function; and even produce changes in gray matter density in regions of the brain related to learning and memory, emotional regulation, and self-awareness.12 — Sam Harris

I generally start each day with a cup of coffee or tea - sometimes two. This morning, it was coffee (two). Why not tea? I am in no position to know. I wanted coffee more than I wanted tea today, and I was free to have what I wanted. Did I consciously choose coffee over tea? No. The choice was made for me by events in my brain that I, as the conscious witness of my thoughts and actions, could not inspect or influence. Could I have "changed my mind" and switched to tea before the coffee drinker in me could get his bearings? Yes, but this impulse would also have been the product of unconscious causes. Why didn't it arise this morning? Why might it arise in the future? I cannot know. The intention to do one thing and not another does not originate in consciousness - rather, it appears in consciousness, as does any thought or impulse that might oppose it. — Sam Harris

A healthy PFC means a healthy cognitive grip over the world with very little elements of prejudice. — Abhijit Naskar

In sum, doubling is the psychological means by which one invokes the evil potential of the self. That evil is neither inherent in the self nor foreign to it. To live out the doubling and call forth the evil is a moral choice for which one is responsible, whatever the level of consciousness involved. — Robert Jay Lifton

Creativity comes from the spiritual realm, the collective consciousness. And the mind is in a different realm than the molecules of the brain. The brain is a receiver, not a source. — Candace Pert

The heart is a muscle. You 'know' in your limbic system. The seat of instinct. The mammalian brain. Deeper, wider, beyond logic. That is where advertising works, not in the upstart cortex. What we think of as 'mind' is only a sort of jumped-up gland, piggybacking on the reptilian brainstem and the older, mammalian mind, but our culture tricks us into recognizing it as all of consciousness. The mammalian spreads continent-wide beneath it, mute and muscular, attending its ancient agenda. And makes it buy things. — William Gibson

Consciousness is a magic of our brain and an illusion of our mind. — Debasish Mridha

When you say to someone "follow your heart", it actually refers to the rhetorical representation of various emotions, that are precisely produced from neural activity of the limbic system. So, the metaphoric heart we always boast about while giving advice to our friends, is actually not anywhere near the biological organ known as heart. Rather it too, like all other elements of the human mind exists only in the brain. — Abhijit Naskar

Everyday conscious awareness of a human being is only the tip of an iceberg, underneath which there is a realm of relatively uncharted apparently mysterious processes, which are likely to be way more complex than the usual waking state. — Abhijit Naskar

Whereas my grandfather was getting used to a much more terrifying reality. Holding my hand to keep his balance, as trees and bushes made strange, sliding movements in his peripheral vision, Lefty was confronting the possibility that consciousness was a biological accident. Though he'd never been religious, he realized now that he'd always believed in the soul, in a force of personality that survived death. But as his mind continued to waver, to short-circuit, he finally arrived at the cold-eyed conclusion, so at odds with his youthful cheerfulness, that the brain was just an organ like any other and that when it failed he would be no more. — Jeffrey Eugenides

In Buddhism there is one word for mind & heart: chitta. Chitta refers not just to thoughts and emotions in the narrow sense of arising from the brain, but also to the whole range of consciousness, vast & unimpeded. — Sharon Salzberg

The lucid dream, located as it is at a crossroads between worlds and states of consciousness, places the magician in a unique position to influence the delicate balance of consciousness and the interplay it has on matter in the waking state, and is thus an opportunity to test one's ability in the art of adjusting the mutable fabric of Maya. — Zeena Schreck

We do not perceive what is "out ther," rather we perceive what is "in here." Our senses can only inform us of their own status. They can inform us of the elesctrical status of neurons or the physical or the chemical status of the receptors. The outside world is never taken into our consciousness. The outside world is rather our own creation, psychologically synthesized from the mass of sensations that envelope us. In many respects, the ultimate question that perception must ask was stated by John Stuart Mill in 1865. He asked, "What is it we mean, or what is it which leads us to say, that the objects we perceive are external to us, and not a part of our own thoughts?" That remains, perhaps, the ultimate, unresolved perceptual puzzle. — Stanley Coren

The perception of reality is something that is constructed by the human mind based on its own needs and knacks. — Abhijit Naskar

These rare mini mind-blanks always seemed to occur when he needed perking up, creative jolts as if his brain had temporarily overclocked its processor to light-speed frequency, but with the side effect of shutting his consciousness down to protect it from overheating. That theory certainly fit the observable phenomena.
Then again, the competing theories included: he was nuts; he had a brain tumour; aliens had temporarily abducted him. — Karl Drinkwater

The consciousness of the body is more powerful than the consciousness of the mind. — Joey Lawsin

Every single decision of your life is predicated on the healthy functioning of the prefrontal cortex. Even a slight malfunction in a tiny chunk of neuron anywhere in the PFC would lead to the mental deficit in your logical decision-making. — Abhijit Naskar

We humans are the Tyrannosaurus Rex of mammals. — Abhijit Naskar

Well, what if we did this in the mind as opposed to the brain? So instead of blood vessels and dendrites, what if it was consciousness and dream production? And that would allow us to have characters that represent emotions. And that felt like, man, that's exactly what animation does best - strong, opinionated, caricatured personalities. And that just got me excited. — Pete Docter

Past and Future exist in the mind. They exist in the outside world. The mind is shaped by the physical world.

Past and future however do NOT exist within the body. Because the present moment is all that you have and will ever be able to experience from within. Presence is how you fully exist. Internal (No-mind, no-time, awareness) is how you fully exist. — Matthew Donnelly

We, through the cerebral cortex, add the consciousness, spirit and rationality, to this dolphin brained human body avatar. We control our destiny and this body can become a servant of our conscious will, once we learn to communicate fully with it. We are called to bridge the gap between our conscious mind and the subconscious mind. — Kevin Michel

In brief: consciousness is a phenomenon in the zone of evolution. This world lights up to itself only where or only inasmuch as it develops, procreates new forms. Places of stagnancy slip from consciousness; they may only appear in their interplay with places of evolution.
If this is granted it follows that consciousness and discord with one's own self are inseparably linked up, even that they must, as it were, be proportional to each other. This sounds a paradox, but the wisest of all times and peoples have testified to confirm it. Men and women for whom this world was lit in an unusually light of awareness, and who by life and word have, more than others, formed and transformed that work of art which we call humanity, testify by speech and writing or even by their lives that more than others have they been torn by the pangs of inner discord. Let this be a consolation to him who also suffers from it. Without it nothing enduring has ever been begotten. — Erwin Schrodinger

And it's a disquieting thought that not even the past is done with, even that continues to change, as if in reality there is only one time, for everything, one time for every purpose under heaven. One single second, one single landscape, in which what happens activates and deactivates what has already happened in endless chain reactions, like the processes that take place in the brain, perhaps, where cells suddenly bloom and die away, all according to the way the winds of consciousness are blowing. — Karl Ove Knausgard

As brain functioning becomes more and more integrated, consciousness - the mind - becomes more and more invincible, and then any dictate of the mind is immediately followed by the body. — Maharishi Mahesh Yogi

Have you ever looked at a map of our country, Necdet?' Green Headscarf says. 'It's a map of the human mind. We're split by water over two continents, Europe and Anatolia. We are seven per cent Europe, ninety-three per cent Asia. Conscious Thrace, unconscious, pre-conscious, sub-concious Anatolia. And Istanbul - have you ever seen a neuron, Necdet? A brain cell? The marvel is that the synapses don't touch. There is always a gap - there must a gap, otherwise consciousness would not exist. The Bosphorus is that synaptic cleft. Potential can flow across the cleft. It's the cleft that makes consciousness possible. — Ian McDonald

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

You think you're losing your mind, but do keep in mind, as long as you may, that the ability to go on thinking such a thing means it's not all gone. — Criss Jami

One of the many conditions that have to be met for a brain to become a mind, and therefore have consciousness, is 'the analog I' around which all the simultaneous inflow of sensations and stimulations are reflected and organized. — Aleksandar Hemon

Belief is not a luxury, it is a biological necessity of the mind. — Abhijit Naskar

For the mind of man alone is free to explore the lofty vastness of the cosmic infinite, to transcend ordinary consciousness, to roam the secret corridors of the brain where past and future melt into one ... And universe and individual are linked, the one mirrored in the other, and each contains the other. — Michael Moorcock

For instance, the scientific article may say, 'The radioactive phosphorus content of the cerebrum of the rat decreases to one- half in a period of two weeks.' Now what does that mean?
It means that phosphorus that is in the brain of a rat - and also in mine, and yours - is not the same phosphorus as it was two weeks ago. It means the atoms that are in the brain are being replaced: the ones that were there before have gone away.
So what is this mind of ours: what are these atoms with consciousness? Last week's potatoes! They now can remember what was going on in my mind a year ago - a mind which has long ago been replaced. To note that the thing I call my individuality is only a pattern or dance, that is what it means when one discovers how long it takes for the atoms of the brain to be replaced by other atoms. The atoms come into my brain, dance a dance, and then go out - there are always new atoms, but always doing the same dance, remembering what the dance was yesterday. — Richard Feynman

If you could observe every thought in your brain the magnitude of it's vastness would drive you insane. — Stanley Victor Paskavich

There can never be a conflict between science and religion, once you understand the spiritual knack of the human brain circuits. — Abhijit Naskar

While we tend to conceive of the operations of the mind as unified and transparent, they're actually chaotic and opaque. There's no invisible boss in the brain, no central meaner, no unitary self in command of our activities and utterances. There's no internal spectator of a Cartesian theater in our heads to applaud the march of consciousness across its stage. — Daniel Dennett

Even this abbreviated rundown of mind-brain philosophies would not be complete without what the Australian philosopher David Chalmers calls "don't-have-clue materialism." This is the default position of those who have no idea about the origins of consciousness or the mind but assert that "it must be physical, as materialism must be true," as Chalmers puts it. "Such a view is held widely, but rarely in print." One might add that many working scientists hold this view without really reflecting on the implications of it. — Jeffrey M. Schwartz

Neuroscience is fast developing the technical and conceptual wherewithal to reveal in fine, bare detail the neurobiological substrates of the mind. Perhaps it will despoil a sacred myth - the myth of selfhood and souls. And, if so, we may be wandering innocently into the opening phase of a dangerous game. Our ethics and systems of justice, our entire moral order, are founded on the notion of society as a collective of individual selves - autonomous, introspective, accountable agents. If this self-reflective, moral agent is revealed to be illusory, then what? — Paul Broks

Disintegration: literally, the loss of integrity. But if the mind can be described as one's subjective experience of the brain, then what is the self but vagrant fluorescings of neural constellations, individual states of consciousness determined by mercurial configurations of amplitude and alliance? — Brian McGreevy

Consciousness is simply the brain's neural response to its surrounding environmental stimuli. Hence when the neural circuits malfunction, Consciousness tends to malfunction as well. — Abhijit Naskar

Mind is not a product of brain rather an integral part of the soul, our eternal being. Those who understand this truth can think beyond the material reality and move to higher states of consciousness. — Thomas Vazhakunnathu

Thinking in art and morals and even mathematics is neither the reflection in consciousness of a mechanical order in the brain nor the tracing with the mind's eye of some empirical order in its object, but an endeavour to realize in thought an ideal order which would satisfy an inner demand. The nearer thought comes to its goal, the more it finds itself under constraint by that goal, and dominated in its creative effort by aesthetic or moral or logical relevance. These relations of relevance are not physical or psychological relations. They are normative relations that can enter into the mental current because that current is ... teleological. Their operation marks the presence of a different type of law, which supervenes upon physical and psychological laws when purpose takes control. — Brand Blanshard

Perhaps once we might be able to sneak a death past him. Immortal, yes, but not indestructible. I saw that when AM withdrew from my mind, and allowed me the exquisite ugliness of returning to consciousness with the feeling of that burning neon pillar still rammed deep into the soft gray brain matter. He withdrew, murmuring to hell with you. And added, brightly, but then you're there, aren't you. — Harlan Ellison

The vilest form of self-abasement and self-destruction is the subordination of your mind to the mind of another, the acceptance of an authority over your brain, the acceptance of his assertions as facts, his say-so as truth, his edicts as middle-man between your consciousness and your existence. — Ayn Rand

Without the harmonious electrochemical activity of all the brain structure, the very thing which we call "mind", would suddenly disappear from the face of earth. — Abhijit Naskar

Memorizing facts and then regurgitating them into carefully crafted words is not science people. It's intellectual bulimia. Real science happens when we explore what we don't know. The first law of understanding the human brain and the mind within, is to be an explorer. — Abhijit Naskar

Every brilliant experiment, like every great work of art, starts with an act of imagination. Unfortunately, our current culture subscribes to a very narrow definition of truth. If something can't be quantified and calculated, then it can't be true. Because this strict scientific approach has explained so much, we assume that it can explain everything. But every method, even the experimental method, has limits. Take the human mind. Scientists describe our brain in terms of its physical details; they say we are nothing but a loom of electrical cells and synaptic spaces. What science forgets is that this isn't how we experience the world. (We feel like the ghost, not like the machine.) It is ironic but true: the one reality science cannot reduce is the only reality we will ever know. This is why we need art. By expressing our actual experience, the artist reminds us that our science is incomplete, that no map of matter will ever explain the immateriality of our consciousness. — Jonah Lehrer

In modern neurotheology we examine the physical bases to spiritual, religious and mystical experiences and beliefs, that implicitly appear to reduce this rich phenomenology to only neuronal functions. So, the thing is, there was no divine intervention necessary in the evolution of spirituality and religiosity. "Human Brain is the true God of all beliefs". — Abhijit Naskar

If I ask you, are you conscious right now? You'd go right ahead and tell me - yes. That's because your conscious mind is constructing an awareness in you about everything around you. And underneath that operation of your conscious mind, there are billions of neurons working in proper harmony. — Abhijit Naskar

To make biological survival possible, Mind at Large has to be funnelled through the reducing valve of the brain and nervous system. What comes out at the other end is a measly trickle of the kind of consciousness which will help us to stay alive on the surface of this particular planet. To formulate and express the contents of this reduced awareness, man has invented and endlessly elaborated those symbol-systems and implicit philosophies which we call languages. Every individual is at once the beneficiary and the victim of the linguistic tradition into which he or she has been born
the beneficiary inasmuch as language gives access to he accumulated records of other people's experience, the victim in so far as it confirms him in the belief that reduced awareness is the only awareness and as it be-devils his sense of reality, so that he is all too apt to take his concepts for data, his words for actual things. — Aldous Huxley

The complex organic device that creates and thereafter drives consciousness, is the human brain. Consciousness evolved hand in hand with the evolution of the human brain throughout a time span of six million years. — Abhijit Naskar

If there is to be a resolution to the mystery of how mind relates to matter, it will emerge from explaining the data of the human brain in terms of these laws-laws capable of giving rise to a very different view of the causal efficacy of human consciousness. Quantum mechanics makes it feasible to describe a mind capable of exerting effects that neurons alone cannot. — Jeffrey M. Schwartz

And eventually even the brain might go. As the seat of consciousness, it was not essential; the development of electronic intelligence had proved that. The conflict between mind and machine might be resolved at last in the eternal truce of complete symbiosis ... . But — Arthur C. Clarke

There are infinite ways for your mind to torture it's self. — Stanley Victor Paskavich

I chanced the chest and the slow-beating heart. The quick compulsion of my will was rewarded. I no longer had chest nor heart. I was only a mind, a soul, a consciousness - call it what you will - incorporate in a nebulous brain that, while it still centered inside my skull, was expanded, and was continuing to expand, beyond my skull. — Jack London

The highest activities of consciousness have their origins in physical occurrences of the brain just as the loveliest melodies are not too sublime to be expressed by notes. — W. Somerset Maugham

We can tell a lot about a creature's level of consciousness by understanding their perception of death. — Abhijit Naskar

Consciousness, which is the "reflective" element of Norman's conceptual brain, handles the "higher" functions at the metaphorical tip of the very top of that complicated organ. Because consciousness pays a lot of attention to your thoughts, you tend to identify it with cognition. However, if you try to figure out exactly how you run your business or care for your family, you soon realize that you can't grasp that process just by thinking about it. As Norman puts it, "Consciousness also has a qualitative, sensory feel. If I say, 'I'm afraid,' it's not just my mind talking. My stomach also knots up. — Winifred Gallagher

We live at a time that is notable for the polemical nature of discussions about identity, consciousness, rationality, agency, memory, and feeling. 'New atheists' and reductive materialists conduct gladiatorial debates against defenders of faith and enemies of reductionism. Lots of heat is produced, but, alas, little light is shed. How marvelous it is, then, to see this fine new book by Lenn E. Goodman and Gregory Caramenico. Here is a learned, illuminating, and decidedly non-polemical treatment of the classic questions of soul, mind, and brain-an exemplary work of scholarship. — Robert P. George

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

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

Taking consciousness as a primitive rather than as an emergent property of the physical brain, Chalmers's search for a nonreductive ontology of consciousness led him to what he calls panprotopsychism. The proto reflects the possibility that the intrinsic properties of the basic entities of the physical world may be not quite mental, but that collectively they are able to constitute the mental (it is in this sense of proto that physics is "protochemical"). In this view, mind is much more fundamental to the universe than we ordinarily imagine. Panprotopsychism has the virtue of integrating mental events into the physical world. "We need psychophysical laws connecting physical processes to subjective experience," Chalmers says. "Certain aspects of quantum mechanics lend themselves very nicely to this. — Jeffrey M. Schwartz

In Savasana or in meditation, the light of the eyes is drawn towards the lotus of the heart, so that the seat of the intelligence of the head is brought into contact with the seat of the intelligence of the heart, which is called the mind. Thus one passes from the individualistic state of consciousness to the universal state of consciousness. It is the merging of the intellect of the brain with the intellect of the soul. — B.K.S. Iyengar