Synapses In The Brain Quotes & Sayings

In the latest brain image studies, we can see real-time movies of individual interneuronal connections actually creating new synapses (connection points between neurons), so we can see our brain create our thoughts and in turn see our thoughts create our brain. — Ray Kurzweil

If you looked inside his brain at this moment you'd see all the little synapses, Catherine wheels and penny bangers and skyrockets, all firing off into space in some sparkling display of gathering momentum. I don't want to look into his brain. Looking into his eyes is bad enough. — Ellie Marney

The brain, or cerebrum, is a material entity located inside the skull which may be inspected, touched, weighed, and measured. It is composed of chemicals, enzymes, and humors which may be analyzed. Its structure is characterized by neurons, pathways, and synapses which may be examined directly when they are properly magnified. — Jose Manuel Rodriguez Delgado

I'm actually pretty scientifically interested. I have a lot of friends who are doctors, so the idea of the virus and the synapses in the brain and how the nervous system works was actually all pretty familiar to me. — Noah Emmerich

In the brain, you have connections between the neurons called synapses, and they can change. All your knowledge is stored in those synapses. You have about 1,000-trillion synapses - 10 to the 15, it's a very big number. — Geoffrey Hinton

Toward midnight he sat in the Raney Playground swings with his broken, disloyal heart continuing to pump behind his ribs. Maybe fifty feet away his daughter was in her bed, reeling, thinking it out, a thousand betrayals and loves and resentments riding the synapses between brain and heart and back again. — Anthony Doerr

The teenage zone: the stage when an adolescent's brain synapses quit firing while the rest of their body races toward adulthood. — Becky Freeman

I know the difference between sadness and depression. Clinical depression has no source from which it springs-it just is. Intractable sadness has nothing to do with synapses, or brain chemistry, or essential salts, it's born of something. It's the product of injustice and helplessness. It can be anesthetized, I suppose, but it's there, unaltered, when the medication wears off, like an intruder who has broken into your house and is still there every morning when you wake up.
Given the choice, I would rather be depressed. I've come back from depression. — Ka Hancock

I thought if I stared a little longer I could see right inside his head, to his brain, and I don't know why that turned me on so much. I wanted to witness the workings of his mind, the firing synapses, information traveling safely inside neurons to different parts of his body. A few made it to his hand, and they must have told him to keep holding mine because he didn't let go. — S. Walden

At night, my own century-old wooden floors creaked while I dreamed of her, as she looked before radiation destroyed her famously enormous hair and removed all evidence of her addiction to homemade brownies. I woke to clammy sheets and the grim reminder that Liz's soul was not, in fact, speaking to me from beyond the grave. Rationally, I knew that memory synapses of plump, frizzy Liz were bursting forth from the depths of my brain. Emotionally, I wanted Liz back with me, no matter what her form - but getting her back would require a leap of faith that the rest of me (the stuff surrounding that Liz-shaped hole) just couldn't take. — Shannon Drury

mother instilled in me a deep respect for the potential of the human brain, and that respect has deepened over the years to an attitude I can only describe as awe. Every time I open a child's head and see a brain, I marvel at the mystery: This is what makes every one of us who we are. This is what holds all our memories, all our thoughts, all our dreams. This is what makes us different from each other in millions of ways. And yet if I could expose my brain and your brain and place them side by side, you wouldn't be able to tell the difference - even though we might be very different people. That still amazes me. Inside each human brain are billions and billions of complex interconnections, neurons and synapses, which science has only barely begun to understand. When you add to that the mystery of mind — Ben Carson

It's funny, really: the older you get, the more you know about the world. The synapses in your brain fire at a higher level and quicker function, your knowledge expands. But you lose part of yourself, that part able to imagine great armies that wait for nothing more than your command; the dragon that hides under your bed that only you can see, its long emerald tail flashing in the darkness; the ghost that lives in your attic that only moans at 3:23 in the morning. When you lose that innocence, the world's hues become dark and muted, and you know that dragons aren't real. There is no army. There is no ghost in the attic. But when you're nine? When you're nine, it's all probable, it's all realistic, and even more so, it's all true. — T.J. Klune

Earthborn animals do this thing, inside their brains-- a sort of mad firing-off of synapses, controlled insanity. While they're asleep. The part of their brain that records sight or sound, it's firing off every hour or two while they sleep, even when all the sights and sounds are complete random nonsense, their brains just keep on trying to assemble it into something sensible. They try to make stories out of it. — Anonymous

Blowing up isn't always external. It's not always easy to hear or see. Synapses fire every day in my brain. Thinking is just like exploding until it eventually scars you and you can't interact with people anymore. It's like one big, final detonation. — A.S. King

I don't record (any type of genre of music) that I didn't hear in my family's living room by the time I was 10. It just is my rule that I don't break because ... I can't do it authentically ... I really think that you're just hard-wiring (synapses) in your brain up until the age of maybe 12 or 10, and there are certain things you can't learn in an authentic way after that. — Linda Ronstadt

When you're a child - and my understanding of it is very basic - but when you're a very young child, the stimuli around you prompt your brain to form synapses. Once they're there, they're there, but if they don't form by a certain age, they're not going to. — Ron Currie Jr.

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

One of Sherrington's greatest pupils, Sir John Eccles, held similar views. Eccles won a Nobel Prize for his seminal contributions to our understanding of how nerve cells communicate across synapses, or nerve junctions. In his later years, he worked toward a deeper understanding of the mechanisms mediating the interaction of mind and brain-including the elusive notion of free will. Standard neurobiology tells us that tiny vesicles in the nerve endings contain chemicals called neurotransmitters; in response to an electrical impulse, some of the vesicles release their contents, which cross the synapse and transmit the impulse to the adjoining neuron. In 1986 Eccles proposed that the probability of neurotransmitter release depended on quantum mechanical processes, which can be influenced by the intervention of the mind. This, Eccles said, provided a basis for the action of a free will. — Jeffrey M. Schwartz

The human mind is itself a miraculous machine. I am writing right now, but I have no idea how this is happening. I know that my brain is composed of a cerebrum, a cerebellum, and a medulla oblongata, but these are just words. I know that electrical impulses are involved somehow, but that is about the extent of my understanding of the mechanics. And while I at least have an intuition as to how an airplane works, I really have none with respect to my brain. Frankly, lots of what appears on my computer screen is as much a surprise to me as it is to you. I certainly never expected over my oatmeal and English muffin this morning to be writing about Bernoulli's principle today. For that matter, I have no idea why I like English muffins. But I do. — Evan Mandery

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

The complexity of the resulting signalling network in the brain is almost unimaginable: one hundred billion neurons each with one thousand synapses, producing a machine with one hundred trillion interconnections! If you started to count them at one per second you would still be counting 30 million years from now! — Michael O'Shea

The human brain is estimated to have about a hundred billion nerve cells, two million miles of axons, and a million billion synapses, making it the most complex structure, natural or artificial, on earth. — Tim Green

Even when they're asleep they're not asleep. Earthborn animals do this thing, inside their brains-a sort of mad firing-off of synapses, controlled insanity. While they're asleep. The part of their brain that records sight or sound, it's firing off every hour or two while they sleep; even when all the sights and sounds are complete random nonsense, their brains just keep on trying to assemble it into something sensible. They try to make stories out of it. It's complete random nonsense with no possible correlation to the real world, and yet they turn it into these crazy stories. And then they forget them. All that work, coming up with these stories, and when they wake up they forget almost all of them. But when they do remember, then they try to make stories about those crazy stories, trying to fit them into their real lives. — Orson Scott Card

What they used to call soul. What they used to call spirit. Indivisible, complete, that thing made of mind, distinct from body.
He thought he had one - a soul, a spirit, a nature, an essence. He thought his mind was proof of it.
If mood, facial expression, hunger pain, love of color, if everything human and happenstance came not from the soul, the core of self, but from synapses firing and electrical signals, from the stuff in the brain that could be manipulated and X-rayed, what could he say about himself with any degree of certainty? Was mind just body more refined?
He refused to believe that. — Joshua Ferris

Fanning Court. God forbid. Teddy could no longer sit in the chair. He could no longer leave the bed, no longer do anything. He was approaching the end of his twilight, entering into the final darkness. Viola imagined the synapses in her father's brain flaring and dimming like the slow death of a star. Soon Teddy would burn out completely and implode and become a black hole. Viola was hazy on the subject of astrophysics, but she liked the image. — Kate Atkinson

Thinking about him requires so little effort that she can do it while performing mindless activities. Soaping the dishes, replaiting Clare Kelley's hair, drying the dishes. The part of her brain that plays his ongoing reel is unconnected to the neurons and synapses that control things like conscious thought and logic. Ben turning to her at a party. Ben turning to her. Ben turning. What human being deserves to be the nucleus of such high esteem? Certainly not Benjamin, middle name Hal, last name Allen. Five-nine in boots. Who has a car that doesn't start on cold mornings, an unfinished screenplay, a law degree he doesn't use, a romantic's tendency to save movie stubs, and a mannered, unsmiling wife. — Marie-Helene Bertino

High energy creates more energy, more energy, more energy. It kicks off synapses, I guess. It opens up your brain and you think of one thing after another thing, after another. You can really open yourself up comedically, which is fun. — Michael Keaton

Time dims memory. But not that kind. Somewhere in a corner of the brain, one little cell never forgets. It keeps the song that, heard again, recreates the room, the person, the moment. It preserves the phrase or the laugh or the gesture that resurrects a friend long gone. It knows precisely where you were and what you were doing when you heard about Pearl Harbor if you're old enough, or Kennedy's assassination, or Martin Luther King's, or the Challenger explosion. Every detail is frozen in memory, despite all the years. It keeps the innocuous question, too. The question that sometime later, when all the synapses are working, produces the epiphany, the moment when you're driving along and you realize that finally you understand. And why did it take you so long? — Kay Mills

But then human beings only understood each other in the first place by pretending. You didn't make predictions about people by modeling the hundred trillion synapses in their brain as separate objects. Ask the best social manipulator on Earth to build you an Artificial Intelligence from scratch, and they'd just give you a dumb look. You predicted people by telling your brain to act like theirs. You put yourself in their place. If you wanted to know what an angry person would do, you activated your own brain's anger circuitry, and whatever that circuitry output, that was your prediction. What did the neural circuitry for anger actually look like inside? Who knew? The best social manipulator on Earth might not know what neurons were, and neither might the best Legilimens. — Eliezer Yudkowsky

Empathy isn't just something that happens to us - a meteor shower of synapses firing across the brain - it's also a choice we make: to pay attention, to extend ourselves. It's made of exertion, that dowdier cousin of impulse. Sometimes we care for another because we know we should, or because it's asked for, but this doesn't make our caring hollow. The act of choosing simply means we've committed ourselves to a set of behaviors greater than the sum of our individual inclinations: I will listen to his sadness, even when I'm deep in my own. To say "going through the motions" - this isn't reduction so much as acknowledgment of the effort - the labor, the motions, the dance - of getting inside another person's state of heart or mind. — Rebecca Skloot

I bailed out on social media for a while, and in short order I found I was able to sit down and read a book again. For the first time in a couple years I could read more than three pages without my brain wandering off into the ether. I drew a direct causal line between all this sort of ratta-tat-tat staccato stimulation that we get from the Internet and my growing inability to sit down and read anything that was longer than 500 words. But for me it came back because those synapses were already latent in my brain. — Ron Currie Jr.

As the brain matures, one thing that happens is the pruning of the synapses. Synaptic pruning does not occur willy-nilly; it depends largely on how any one brain pathway is used. — Robin Marantz Henig

It's inescapable: at this very moment, within the synapses of your brain, leaves are fueling thoughts of leaves. A — Hope Jahren

Richard stood transfixed for a moment or two, wiped his forehead again, and gently replaced the phone as if it were an injured hamster. His brain began to buzz gently and suck its thumb. Lots of little synapses deep inside his cerebral cortex all joined hands and started dancing around and singing nursery rhymes. — Douglas Adams

The more a sufferer concentrates on his symptoms, the deeper those symptoms are etched into his neural circuits. In the worst cases, the mind essentially trains itself to be sick. Many addictions, too, are reinforced by the strengthening of plastic pathways to the brain. Even very small doses of addictive drugs can dramatically alter the flow of neurotransmitters in a person's synapses, resulting in long-lasting alterations in brain circuitry and function. In some cases, the buildup of certain kinds of neurotransmitters, such as dopamine, a pleasure-producing cousin to adrenaline, seems to actually trigger the turning on or off particular genes, bringing even stronger cravings for the drug. The vital path turns deadly. — Nicholas Carr

There's white racist DNA running through the synapses of his or her brain tissue. They will kill their own kind, defend the enemies of their kind or anyone who is perceived to be the enemy of the milky white way of life. — Jeremiah Wright

The human brain, it has been said, is the most complexly organised structure in the universe and to appreciate this you just have to look at some numbers. The brain is made up of one hundred billion nerve cells or "neurons" which is the basic structural and functional units of the nervous system. Each neuron makes something like a thousand to ten thousand contacts with other neurons and these points of contact are called synapses where exchange of information occurs. And based on this information, someone has calculated that the number of possible permutations and combinations of brain activity, in other words the numbers of brain states, exceeds the number of elementary particles in the known universe. — V.S. Ramachandran

Mimicking the intricacies of the human brain, a neuro-inspired computer would work in a fashion similar to the way neurons and synapses communicate. It could potentially learn or develop memory. — Nayef Al-Rodhan

The structure of the human brain is enormously complex. It contains about 10 billion nerve cells (neurons), which are interlinked in a vast network through 1,000 billion junctions (synapses). The whole brain can be divided into subsections, or sub-networks, which communicate with each other in a network fashion. All this results in intricate patterns of intertwined webs, networks of nesting within larger networks. — Fritjof Capra

I know that some neurologists think that autistic kids have brain synapses so close together and firing in such quick succession that they cause hyperawareness; that one of the reasons children on the spectrum rock or stim is to help them focus instead of having all sensations bombard them at once. I think clairvoyance isn't really all that much different. In all probability, neither is mental illness. — Jodi Picoult

All evidence indicates that the neuron does not reset. The synapses do not reset. They are always different. They're changing every millisecond. Your brain today is very, very different from what it was when you were 10 years old, and yet you may have profound memories from when you were 10. — Henry Markram