Quotes & Sayings About Human Brains

Societies would _not_ be better off if everyone were like Mr Spock, all rationality and no emotion. Instead, a balance - a teaming up of the internal rivals - is optimal for brains ... Some balance of the emotional and rational systems is needed, and that balance may already be optimized by natural selection in human brains. — David Eagleman

Each new generation of children grows up in the new environment its parents have created, and each generation of brains becomes wired in a different way. The human mind can change radically in just a few generations. — Alison Gopnik

I knew that a group of tigers was called a streak. I knew that dolphins were carnivores. I knew that giraffes had four stomachs and that the leg muscles of a locust were a thousand times more powerful than the same weight of human muscle. I knew that white polar bears had black skin beneath their fur, and that jellyfish had no brains. I — Jodi Picoult

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

Love? Do you mean love in the way you understand it
as a human?"
"Well, not exactly, but basically the same thing. I mean,
love is love."
"A brain surgeon would tell you that a specific part of
the brain controls the ability to love. If it's damaged, people
are incapable of love, incapable of caring about others."
"So?"
"So, isn't it arrogant to think that the love generated by
our little brains is the same thing that an omnipotent being
experiences? If you were omnipotent, why would you limit
yourself to something that could be reproduced by a little
clump of neurons? — Scott Adams

God's revelation does not need the light of human genius, the polish and strength of human culture, the brilliancy of human thought, the force of human brains to adorn or enforce it; but it does demand the simplicity, the docility, humility, and faith of a child's heart. — E. M. Bounds

Gods, the pamphlets asserted, were not supernatural beings, but tenuously living things, like ethereal plants, that evolved in concert with the human species. We were simply their medium - our brains and flesh the soil in which they sprouted and grew. — Robert Charles Wilson

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

Every new form of communication brings with it a perennial angst about what it is doing to our brains. We are not the first to feel that everything is changing too quickly around us, and we won't be the last. Throughout history, communication technologies have been catalysts of societal and cultural change that upset the status quo. — Alfred Hermida

If you program a purpose into a computer program, does that constitute its will? Does it have free will, if a programmer programmed its purpose? Is that programming any different from the way we are programmed by our genes and brains? Is a programmed will a servile will? Is human will a servile will? And is not the servile will the home and source of all feelings of defilement, infection, transgression, and rage? — Kim Stanley Robinson

I was going back and reading Marconi's last book again, and there's this part that
always gets me. He points out that the amount of the universe a human can experience is
statistically, like, zero percent. You've got this huge universe, trillions of trillions of miles of empty
space between galaxies, and all a human can perceive is a little tunnel a few feet wide and a few feet
long in front of our eyes. So he says we don't really live in the universe at all, we live inside our
brains. All we can see is like a blurry little pinhole in a blindfold, and the rest is filled in by our
imagination. So whatever we think of the world, whether you think the world is cruel or good or
cold or hot or wet or dry or big or small, that comes entirely from inside your head and nowhere
else. — David Wong

Freewill.
Some have called it the greatest gift bestowed on humanity. It is our ability to control what happens to us and exactly how it happens. We are the masters of our fate and no one can foist their will on us unless we allow it.
Others say freewill is a crap myth. We have a preordained destiny and no matter what we do or how hard we fight it, life will happen to us exactly as it's meant to happen. We are only pawns to a higher power that our meager human brains can't even begin to understand or comprehend. — Sherrilyn Kenyon

The evolution of the human brain is inextricably interwoven with the expansion of culture and the emergence of language. Thus, it is no coincidence that human beings are story tellers. Through countless generations, humans have gathered to listen to stories of the hunt, the exploits of their ancestors, and morality tales of good and evil...Thus, I believe that both the urge to tell a tale and our vulnerability to being captivate by one are deeply woven into the structures of our brains — Louis Cozolino

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

Evolution is adventitious and not foresighted. Only through the deaths of an immense number of slightly maladapted organisms are we, brains and all, here today. — Carl Sagan

Before the Human Genome Project, most scientists assumed, based on our complex brains and behaviors, that humans must have around 100,000 genes; some estimates went as high as 150,000. — Sam Kean

Medical science in particular will get exponentially better, especially once computers will be powerful enough to digitally simulate entire human brains, meaning medical experiments that would normally take years can be digitally run taking only hours. — Benjamin Stone

Every human being has the ability to completely control his own mind, and with this control, obviously, every person may open his mind to the tramp thought impulses which are being released by other brains, or close the doors tightly and admit only thought impulses of his own choice. — Napoleon Hill

Whether consciousness is implanted in us by something divine, or whether it is created by the efforts of our brains, the end result is the same. We are. — Neal Shusterman

perform the equivalent of all human thought over the last ten thousand years (assumed at ten billion human brains for ten thousand years) in ten microseconds.64 If we examine the "Exponential Growth of Computing" chart (p. 70), we see that this amount of computing is estimated to be available for one thousand dollars by 2080. — Ray Kurzweil

I don't know whether we think in moving images or whether we think in still images. I have a suspicion that on our hard drive, our series within our brains, [exist] still photographs of very important moments in our lives ... That we think in terms of still images and that what the photography is doing is making direct contact with the human hard drive and recording for all time a sense of what happened. — Jon Snow

Yes, I have been forced to whittle down the facts, and to be a liar, but it is not one universe, there are millions, almost as many as the number of human eyes and brains in existence, that awake every morning. — Marcel Proust

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

Ben Skinner's brains and courage take us into the belly of the beast and expose the ugly truth of modern slavery. Instead of sensation, A Crime So Monstrous gives us desperately needed insight and analysis. This is an important book, the first deep look into America's confused relationship with human trafficking and slavery today. Skinner's balanced dissection of our government's haphazard policies will be controversial, but it can also be the foundation for a new anti-slavery agenda, one that ends the political games being played with the lives of slaves. — Kevin Bales

Finally, our new brain needs a purpose. A purpose is expressed as a series of goals. In the case of our biological brains, our goals are established by the pleasure and fear centers that we have inherited from the old brain. These primitive drives were initially set by biological evolution to foster the survival of species, but the neocortex has enabled us to sublimate them. Watson's goal was to respond to Jeopardy! queries. Another simply stated goal could be to pass the Turing test. To do so, a digital brain would need a human narrative of its own fictional story so that it can pretend to be a biological human. It would also have to dumb itself down considerably, for any system that displayed the knowledge of, say, Watson would be quickly unmasked as nonbiological. — Ray Kurzweil

As graduation loomed, I had a nagging sense that there was still far too much unresolved for me, that I wasn't done studying. I applied for a master's in English literature at Stanford and was accepted into the program. I had come to see language as an almost supernatural force, existing between people, bringing our brains, shielded in centimeter-thick skulls, into communion. A word meant something only between people, and life's meaning, its virtue, had something to do with the depth of the relationships we form. It was the relational aspect of humans - i.e., "human relationality" - that undergirded meaning. Yet somehow, this process existed in brains and bodies, subject to their own physiologic imperatives, prone to breaking and failing. There must be a way, I thought, that the language of life as experienced - of passion, of hunger, of love - bore some relationship, however convoluted, to the language of neurons, digestive tracts, and heartbeats. At Stanford, I had the good — Paul Kalanithi

If our well-being depends upon the interaction between events in our brains and events in the world, and there are better and worse ways to secure it, then some cultures will tend to produce lives that are more worth living than others; some political persuasions will be more enlightened than others; and some world views will be mistaken in ways that cause needless human misery. — Sam Harris

Despite the fact that our brains are social organs, Western science studies each individual as a single, isolated organism rather than one embedded within the human community. This way of thinking leads us in the West to search for technical and abstract answers to human problems instead of looking at day-to-day human interactions — Louis Cozolino

All we can do is pray, Ma, pray.
No, Child, these are the deeds of human beings. Planned by the brains of humans, and by the warped hearts of humans. It is to people we must speak our words. God has never sided with the defeated. — Pramoedya Ananta Toer

Human beings didn't evolve brains in order to lie around on lakes. Killing's the first thing we learned. — Orson Scott Card

Elephant, beyond the fact that their size and conformation are aesthetically more suited to the treading of this earth than our angular informity, have an average intelligence comparable to our own. Of course they are less agile and physically less adaptable than ourselves
nature having developed their bodies in one direction and their brains in another, while human beings, on the other hand, drew from Mr. Darwin's lottery of evolution both the winning ticket and the stub to match it. This, I suppose, is why we are so wonderful and can make movies and electric razors and wireless sets
and guns with which to shoot the elephant, the hare, clay pigeons, and each other. — Beryl Markham

American housewives have not had their brains shot away, nor are they schizophrenic in the clinical sense. But if ... the fundamental human drive is not the urge for pleasure or the satisfaction of biological needs, but the need to grow and to realize one's full potential, their comfortable, empty, purposeless days are indeed cause for a nameless terror. — Betty Friedan

American scientific companies are cross-breeding humans and animals and coming up with mice with fully functioning human brains. — Christine O'Donnell

If ... you are looking for a large dose of truth with some all too human foibles and faults and long nights of coffee drenched brains and frequent trips to the bathroom then this book is for you. — Leviak B. Kelly

Literature, in fact, had been concerned with virtues and vices of a perfectly healthy sort, the regular functioning of brains of a normal conformation, the practical reality of current ideas, with never a thought for morbid depravities and other-worldly aspirations; in short, the discoveries of these anaylists of human nature stopped short at the speculations good or bad, classified by the church; their efforts amounted to no more than the humdrum researches of a botanist who watches closely the expected development of ordinary flora planted in common or garden soil. — Joris-Karl Huysmans

Our eyes and brains pretty consistently like some human forms better than others. Shown photos of strangers, even babies look longer at the faces adults rank the best-looking. — Virginia Postrel

With its hundred billion nerve cells, with their hundred trillion interconnections, the human brain is the most complex phenomenon in the known universe - always, of course, excepting the interaction of some six billion such brains and their owners within the socio-technological culture of our planetary ecosystem! — Steven Rose

A Fox entered the house of an actor and, rummaging through all his properties, came upon a Mask, an admirable imitation of a human head. He placed his paws on it and said, "What a beautiful head! Yet it is of no value, as it entirely lacks brains." — Aesop

This is a universal human dream - that brains, not brawn, will rule - and the fact that America has the world's finest institutions of higher education may be our greatest single national asset. — David Ignatius

Little is known about the love lives of the undead. Really, past the brain-eating, reanimated corpse angle, not much is said for the zombie's perspective. So they ate brains - big deal! Sure, they were corpses - so what? Indeed, there was the smell, but whose fault was that?
At first glance they were brain-hungry cannibals, (Mmm, brains. Maybe with a little cilantro or a garlic rub - mashed potatoes and brainsloaf - brains pot pie - penne a la brains...) but in reality, zombies were not the mindless man-eaters or virus-addled lunatics jonesing for human flesh depicted in the movies. Just like everything in life - or rather, unlife - things were more complicated. Zombies were, until very recently, people. And with that came wants, desires, longings. Needs.
Asher had been troubled by the zombie loneliness until Brenda, the attractive corpse he'd met in a less animated state earlier, pulled him into the cemetery, threw him down on a slab and shagged him silly. — Daniel Younger

Singapore is now in the top five. Its income per person even tops oil-rich and scarcely populated Kuwait. Having realized that the country had no natural resources, the government of founding father Lee Kuan Yew directed massive investment in human capital. Kids who were eight or ten or thirteen several decades ago are now some of the most productive citizens of today's economy.

A tiny nation-state with no natural resources and a large number of people living in a relatively small physical space has managed to outearn a country with some of the largest oil deposits ever found. That is the power of investing in and nurturing young brains.

Education alone may not be enough to guarantee economic success. There are other success factors that matter, like good governance, rule of law, and access to trading routes and partners. But if you were challenged to assemble a prosperous society from scratch, education would be the first building block you'd want to develop. — John Wood

The idea that we're "wired for story" is more than a catchy phrase. Neuroeconomist Paul Zak has found that hearing a story - a narrative with a beginning, middle, and end - causes our brains to release cortisol and oxytocin. These chemicals trigger the uniquely human abilities to connect, empathize, and make meaning. Story is literally in our DNA. — Brene Brown

You need to understand how human beings bring together their brains and enable their ideas to combine and recombine, to meet and, indeed, to mate. In other words, you need to understand how ideas have sex. — Matt Ridley

Every victory of man over man has in itself a taste of defeat ... There is no essential difference between the various human groups, creatures whose bones and brains and members are the same; and every damage we do there is a form of mutilation, as if the fingers of the left hand were to be cut off by the right. — Freya Stark

If the blonds and blue-eyed people die out, the human race will become increasingly dense ... Blond hair actually bestows intelligence. In the case of fair people, less nourishment is driven into the eyes and hair; it remains instead in the brain and endows it with intelligence. Brown- and dark-haired people drive the substances into their eyes and hair that the fair people retain in their brains. — Rudolf Steiner

There are something like 18 billion cells in the brain alone. There are no two brains alike; there are no two hands alike; there are no two human beings alike. You can take your instructions and your guidance from others, but you must find your own path. — Joseph Campbell

Sadly, history shows us that people literally scrambled their children's brains with heavy exposure to screens at young ages. Developing primate brains are wired to interact with others in a real environment, learning the enormous range of human behaviours from copying the people they love and trust, not staring mindlessly at images. — EXO Books

So sanctification isn't something we lean back on, as much as it's something we lean into. Rather than being an action only God can do, all by Himself (the way justification and adoption are), sanctification is an endeavor He undertakes in full cooperation and partnership with us. It requires us to exert what you might call "grace-driven effort" - made possible only by the merciful initiative of God, of course, and yet fully employing our human brains, brawn, and body parts as we go. — Matt Chandler

Sometimes people don't get sick from bacteria or a virus- -living organisms alien to the human body- -but from the human brain itself. Our brains can be our worst enemy, our cruelest opponent. — Buket Uzuner

[Speaking about chickens in their living quarters:]

'About that - seems one of them has caught fire, Master.'

'It's smouldering, and too brainless to care. If we wait we can dine on roast chicken for breakfastt. And which one laid that egg?'

'Hmm, a most gravid mystery indeed.'

'You may find this amusing right now, Bugg, but you are the one who will be sleeping down there. They'll peck your eyes out, you know. Evil has been bred into them, generation after generation, until their tiny black bean brains are condensed knots of malice-'

'You display unexpected familiarity with hens, Master.'

'I had a tutor who was a human version.' (p 274) — Steven Erikson

In The Story you will see that the two mice do better when they are faced with change because they keep things simple, while the two Littlepeople's complex brains and human emotions complicate things. It is not that mice are smarter. We all know people are more intelligent than mice. However, as you watch what the four characters do, and realize both the mice and the Littlepeople represent parts of ourselves-the simple and the complex - you can see it would be to our advantage to do the simple things that work when things change. In — Spencer Johnson

Tlaloci's head exploded in a shower of brains and bone. The pieces rained down on me, and the body fell to one side, obsidian blade scraping along the stone floor as the hand convulsed around the hilt. I stared across the cave and saw Olaf standing at the foot of the stone steps. He was still standing in his shooting stance, one-handed, gun still pointed at where the priest had been standing. He blinked, and I watched the concentration leave his face, watched something close to human spill across his face. He started walking towards me, gun at his side. The other hand held a knife, bloody to the hilt. I was wiping Tlaloci's brains off my face when Olaf came to stand in front of me. "I never thought I'd say this, but damn I'm glad to see you." He actually smiled. "I saved your life." That made me smile. "I know." Ramirez — Laurell K. Hamilton

The value of a human being depends on the quality of information held in his or her brain. Depending on whether that information is positive or negative, destructive or constructive, loving or hateful, the direction and destiny of the person's life will be determined. But the most important point, which we must never forget, is that no piece of information is more important than the soul. Even the gods and religions that make up our faith traditions are merely information that has been received into our brains from birth. That information did not create our souls. — Ilchi Lee

We must develop as quickly as possible technologies that make possible a direct connection between brain and computer, so that artificial brains contribute to human intelligence rather than opposing it. — Stephen Hawking

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

There is more information in one thimble of reality
than can be understood by a galaxy of human brains. It is
beyond the human brain to understand the world and its
environment, so the brain compensates by creating simplified
illusions that act as a replacement for understanding. — Scott Adams

Presumably there are energies, to which each human is sensitive, that we cannot yet detect by means of our instruments. Built into our brains and our bodies are very sensitive tuneable receivers for energies that we do not yet know about in our science but that each one of us can detect under the proper circumstances and the proper state of mind. We can tune our nervous systems and bodies to receive these energies. We can also tune our brains and bodies to transmit these energies. — John C. Lilly

Turned and ran down another. They remembered the corridors that held no cheese and quickly went into new areas. Sniff would smell out the general direction of the cheese, using his great nose, and Scurry would race ahead. They got lost, as you might expect, went off in the wrong direction and often bumped into walls. But after a while, they found their way. Like the mice, the two Littlepeople, Hem and Haw, also used their ability to think and learn from their past experiences. However, they relied on their complex brains to develop more sophisticated methods of finding Cheese. Sometimes they did well, but at other times their powerful human beliefs and emotions took over and clouded the way they looked at things. It made life in the Maze more complicated and challenging. Nonetheless, Sniff, Scurry, Hem and Haw all discovered, in their own way, what they were looking for. They each found their own kind of cheese one day at the end of one of the corridors in Cheese Station — Spencer Johnson

Just about every adult human being back then had a brain weighing about three kilogrammes! There was no end to the evil schemes that a thought machine that oversized couldn't imagine and execute.
So I raise this question, although there is nobody around to answer it: Can it be doubted that three-kilogramme brains were once nearly fatal defects in the evolution of the human race? — Kurt Vonnegut

And I'll go even further and say that mathematics, this art of abstract pattern-making - even more than storytelling, painting, or music - is our most quintessentially human art form. This is what our brains do, whether we like it or not. We are biochemical pattern-recognition machines and mathematics is nothing less than the distilled essence of who we are. — Paul Lockhart

I say human beings have purposeful brains beyond acting like flocks of scared pigeons. — Janny Wurts

As the video game designer and writer James Wallis puts it, Human beings like stories. Our brains have a natural affinity not only for enjoying narratives and learning from them but also for creating them. In the same way that your mind sees an abstract pattern and resolves it into a face, your imagination sees a pattern of events and resolves it into a story. — Jonathan Gottschall

Evolution has geared the human stress response to last about thirty seconds. It's enough time to facilitate fight or flight. Evolution has not adapted our brains or bodies to handle weeks or months of prolonged stress. — David Amerland

Music is the effort we make to explain to ourselves how our brains work. We listen to Bach transfixed because this is listening to a human mind. — Lewis Thomas

Possibly this is some demonstration of how amazing the human brain is, adjusting and readjusting reality, plugging up potential crazy with a handy coping mechanism. As for myself, I think it demonstrates that the human brain is made of recycled monkey bits and pure, unadulterated stupid. — Rachel Sharp

But civilized human beings are alarmingly ignorant of the fact that they are continuous with their natural surroundings. It is as necessary to have air, water, plants, insects, birds, fish, and mammals as it is to have brains, hearts, lungs, and stomachs. The former are our external organs in the same way that the latter are our internal organs. If then, we can no more live without the things outside than without those inside, the plain inference is that the words "I" and "myself " must include both sides. The sun, the earth, and the forests are just as much features of your own body as your brain. Erosion of the soil is as much a personal disease as leprosy, and many "growing communities" are as disastrous as cancer. — Alan W. Watts

Going for the brain.
[He chuckles.] We talk about it today as if it is some feat of magic, like holy water or a silver bullet, but why wouldn't destruction of the brain be the only way to annihilate these creatures? Isn't it the only way to annihilate us as well?
You mean human beings?
[He nods.] Isn't that all we are? Just a brain kept alive by a complex and vulnerable machine we call the body? The brain cannot survive if just one part of the machine is destroyed or even deprived of such necessities as food or oxygen. That is the only measurable difference between us and "The Undead." Their brains do not require a support system to survive, so it is necessary to attack the organ itself. — Max Brooks

The human brain runs first-class simulation software. Our eyes don't present to our brains a faithful photograph of what is out there, or an accurate movie of what is going on through time. Our brains construct a continuously updated model: updated by coded pulses chattering along the optic nerve, but constructed nevertheless. Optical illusions are vivid reminders of this.47 A major class of illusions, of which the Necker Cube is an example, arise because the sense data that the brain receives are compatible with two alternative models of reality. The brain, having no basis for choosing between them, alternates, and we experience a series of flips from one internal model to the other. The picture we are looking at appears, almost literally, to flip over and become something else. — Richard Dawkins

Your brain may give birth to any technology, but other brains will decide whether the technology thrives. The number of possible technologies is infinite, and only a few pass this test of affinity with human nature. — Robert Wright

He knows that in the whole history of the race of men no single great and high and beneficent thing was ever done for the souls and bodies, the hearts and the brains, of the children of this world, but a Mugwump started it and Mugwumps carried it to victory. And their names are the stateliest in history: Washington, Garrison, Galileo, Luther, Christ. Loyalty to petrified opinions never yet broke a chain or freed a human soul in this world--and never will. — Mark Twain

The capitalists are the brains of civilization, because they supply the entire fabric of which all education, enlightenment and human progress consists. — Napoleon Hill

Leaving aside the mysteries and the inequities of human talent, brains, taste, and reputations, the matter of art in photography may come down to this: it is the capture and projection of the delights of seeing; it is the defining of observation full and felt. — Walker Evans

The fallibility of human brains is in nothing more obvious than in proof reading. — George Eliot

All through my life I never did believe in human measurement. Numbers, time, inches, feet. All are just ploys for cutting nature down to size. I know the grand scheme of the world is beyond our brains to fathom, so I don't try, just let it in. — Louise Erdrich

I maintain that the human mystery is incredibly demeaned by scientific reductionism, with its claim in promissory materialism to account eventually for all of the spiritual world in terms of patterns of neuronal activity. This belief must be classed as a superstition ... we have to recognize that we are spiritual beings with souls existing in a spiritual world as well as material beings with bodies and brains existing in a material world. — John C. Eccles

As all clocks need winding, so all human brains and bodies need to be wound up by sleeping. — Julia McNair Wright

What else should you be? Human beings didn't evolve brains in order to lie around on lakes. Killing's the first thing we learned. And a good thing we did, or we'd be dead, and the tigers would own the earth. — Orson Scott Card

Because we are human we have a long childhood, and one of the jobs of that childhood is to sculpt our brains. We have years
about twelve of them
to draw outlines of the shape we want our sculpted brain to take. Some of the parts must be sculpted at critical times. One cannot, after all, carve out toes unless he knows where the foot will go. We need tools to do some of the fine work. The tools are our childhood experiences. And I'm convinced that one of those experiences must be children's books. And they must be experienced within the early years of our long childhood. — E.L. Konigsburg

We are neither just brains floating around nor just hearts bouncing about. — Ravi Zacharias

The eye were no more than sense organs. The brain was no more than a central switchboard, encased in bone and removed from the working surface of the body. It was the hands that were the working surface, the hands that felt and manipulated the universe. Human beings thought with their hands. It was their hands that were the answer of curiosity, that felt and pinched and turned and lifted and hefted. There were animals that had brains of respectable size, but they had no hands and that made all the difference. — Isaac Asimov

Enslavement was not merely the antiseptic borrowing of labor -- it is not so easy to get a human being to commit their body against its own elemental interest. And so enslavement must be casual wrath and random manglings, the gashing of heads and brains blown out over the river as the body seeks to escape. It must be rape so regular as to be industrial. — Ta-Nehisi Coates

Many people think that the theory of the selfish gene says that "animals try to spread their genes." That misstates the facts and it misstates the theory. Animals, including most people, know nothing about genetics and care even less. People love their children not because they want to spread their genes (consciously or unconsciously) but because they can't help it. That love makes them try to keep their children warm, fed, and safe. What is selfish is not the real motives of the person but the metaphorical motives of the genes that built the person. Genes "try" to spread themselves by wiring animals' brains so the animals love their kin and try to keep warm, fed, and safe. — Steven Pinker

At age three, if you have a still-growing brain, it's a human behavior. In chimps, by age three, the brain is formed over 90 percent. That's why they can cope with their environment very easily after birth - faster than us, anyway. But in humans, we continue to grow our brains. That's why we need care from our parents. — Zeresenay Alemseged

The strain of constant adaptation to so many fearful events and discoveries is already too much to bear with sanity; one has to keep pretending to slip successfully into the new mould; a time will come when the tailored and camouflaged mind breaks beneath the burden; the stick insect in our brains no longer cares to resemble a twig on the same habitual human tree in the mere hope that it may survive extinction. — Janet Frame

In this century, not only has science changed the world faster than ever, but in new and different ways. Targeted drugs, genetic modification, artificial intelligence, perhaps even implants into our brains - may change human beings themselves. — Martin Rees

Choice is the key, because human beings are the only creatures who can choose to evolve, who can shape their destiny. Furthermore, we have been given the gift of "self-awareness," which allows us to step back into our true selves to observe and use our brains to create the world we wish to live in. — Deepak Chopra

Most guys my age are boring human beings. They sit in bars, get drunk, and then go home to tell their kids the way to rule their lives, while they're absolutely stewed out of their brains. — Ozzy Osbourne

There is the vanity training, the obedience training, the self-effacement training, the deference training, the dependency training, the passivity training, the rivalry training, the stupidity training, the placation training. How am I to put this together with my human life, my intellectual life, my solitude, my transcendence, my brains, and my fearful, fearful ambition? I failed miserably and thought it was my own fault. You can't unite woman and human any more than you can unite matter and anti-matter; they are designed to not to be stable together and they make just as big an explosion inside the head of the unfortunate girl who believes in both. — Joanna Russ

It is not brains or intelligence that is needed to cope with the problems with Plato and Aristotle and all of their successors to the present have failed to confront. What is needed is a readiness to undervalue the world altogether. This is only possible for a Christian ... All technologies and all cultures, ancient and modern, are part of our immediate expanse. There is hope in this diversity since it creates vast new possibilities of detachment and amusement at human gullibility and self-deception. There is no harm in reminding ourselves from time to time that the "Prince of this World" is a great P.R. man, a great salesman of new hardware and software, a great electric engineer, and a great master of the media. It is his master stroke to be not only environmental but invisible for the environmental is invincibly persuasive when ignored. — Marshall McLuhan

When women understand that governments and religions are human inventions; that Bibles, prayer-books, catechisms, and encyclical letters are all emanations from the brains of man, they will no longer be oppressed by the injunctions that come to them with the divine authority of *Thus sayeth the Lord.* — Elizabeth Cady Stanton

We're physical objects, we think of ourselves as these kind of free-floating brains, but the brain is such a little part. It's way smaller than we like to think. We think we're these important human beings. We're not animals or anything. But what did we come out of? What are we made out of? We're made of the same stuff as out there. — Melissa Holbrook Pierson

The brain does much more than recollect. It compares, synthesizes, analyzes, generates abstractions. We must figure out much more than our genes can know. That is why the brain library is some ten thousand times larger than the gene library. Our passion for learning, evident in the behaviour of every toddler, is the tool for our survival. Emotions and ritualized behaviour patterns are built deeply into us. They are part of our humanity. But they are not characteristically human. Many other animals have feelings. What distinguishes our species is thought. The cerebral cortex is a liberation. We need no longer be trapped in the genetically inherited behaviour patterns of lizards and baboons. We are, each of us, largerly responsible for what gets put into 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. — Carl Sagan

The brain of the modern human is no longer capable of understanding reality directly. It used to be that a person lived, looked toward the horizon, howled at the moon, and formed his conceptions, however biased, based on his own experiences and observations. There used to be this thing called independent learning. Not anymore. They crystallize our brains like ice from water. Imagine how slowly, starting in childhood, your brain is crystallized for you, forming your conception of reality. We could even determine a unit of currency for all humanity, 'the value of one concept.' Everyone would have their own change purse, so to speak, and the coins in it, though of various values, quantities, styles, and metals, would all be from a single mint. — Elizaveta Mikhailichenko

Neuroeconomist Paul Zak has found that hearing a story - a narrative with a beginning, middle, and end - causes our brains to release cortisol and oxytocin. These chemicals trigger the uniquely human abilities to connect, empathize, and make meaning. — Brene Brown

The television screen, so unlike the movie screen, sharply reduced human beings, revealed them as small, trivial, flat, in two banal dimensions, drained of color. Wasn't there something reassuring about it!
that human beings were in fact merely images of a kind registered in one another's eyes and brains, phenomena composed of microscopic flickering dots like atoms. They were atoms
nothing more. A quick switch of the dial and they disappeared and who could lament the loss? — Joyce Carol Oates

There is no physical law precluding particles from being organised in ways that perform even more advanced computations than the arrangements of particles in human brains. — Stephen Hawking

We all were silent for a reason, maybe our hearts were talking to us, and it is a human behavior whenever someone is in a crisis or something great is happening, our hearts speaks to us. More and more, only that time because we are too obsessed to use our brains after every work every day that listening to heart becomes secondary — Shaikh Ashraf

The parts of the brain corresponding to the limbic system (thought to respond only to more visceral, immediate rewards) were activated only when the decision involved comparing a reward today with one in the future. In contrast, the lateral prefrontal cortex (a more "calculating" part of the brain) responded with a similar intensity to all decisions, regardless of the timing of the options. Brains that work like this would produce a lot of failed good intentions. And indeed, we do see a lot of those, from New Year's resolutions to gym memberships that lie unused. — Abhijit V. Banerjee

As we cannot afford to squander our natural resources of minerals, food, and beauty, so we cannot afford to discard any human resources of brains, skills, and initiative, even though it is women who possess them ... a woman is just as much an ordinary human being as a man, with the same individual preferences, and with just as much right to the tastes and preferences of an individual. — Dorothy L. Sayers

It has actually been suggested that warfare may have been the principle evolutionary pressure that created the huge gap between the human brain and that of our closest living relatives, the anthropoid apes. Whole groups of hominids with inferior brains could not win wars and were therefore exterminated. — Jane Goodall