Quotes About Our Brains

#1. We created computers as an extension of our brains, and now we're connecting through those computers and the Internet cloud as a way of expanding them,

Tiffany Shlain

#2. 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

#3. What do you know about women?
They smell nice, they don't like to be told they can't do something, and, when they're naked, they hold some sort of mystical power that overrides our brains and makes us do and say things that would normally be inconceivable.

Katie MacAlister

#4. Everyone I know, men and women alike, would love to see the world changed so that boys and girls, men and women are valued equally for what we contribute, despite the differences in how our brains and bodies work.

Cris Mazza

#5. Sure, our three-pound brains might be inadequate to understand the universe. But perhaps they're just good enough to build something that can.

Seth Shostak

#6. If our brains were as simple as we could understand them, than we would be so stupid that we couldn't understand them again.

Jostein Gaarder

#7. Our bodies are hanging along for the ride, but my brain is talking to your brain. And if we want to understand who we are and how we feel and perceive, we really understand what brains are.

Jeff Hawkins

#8. To paraphrase science writer John D. Barrow ... we know they are impossible and yet we can imagine them anyway. Our brains, it turns out, are not prisoners of the world we live in; we can fly free! We can, any time we like, create the impossible.

Robert Krulwich

#9. The book, I think, like the map before it, like the clock, created or help create a revolution in the human mind in the way our habits of mind and ultimately the way we use our brains.

Nicholas G. Carr

#10. Wait, no, fuck cheese. Cheese is all about spores and, and, molds and all that shit. Maybe cheese is trying to colonize our brains, too. Cheese and music duking it out for control of the human nervous system.

Michael Chabon

#11. It's as if our girls don't understand that they can be recognized for other things
their goals, their brains. Not just their bodies.

Siobhan Vivian

#12. Put tattoos all up and down our thighs, do anything our parents would despise. Take uppers, downers, blues, and reds and yellows, our brains are turning into jello.

Joan Baez

#13. No harm in listening. Alexei's a child, not a wizard. We don't lose control of our brains by listening.

Katherine Rundell

#14. Reality' is a movie generated by our brains. Because we don't realize this, we are far too confident that the stuff appearing in the movie is actually 'out there' in the world when, in fact, it's not.

Daniel Gilbert

#15. They always try to play with our minds. But that won't work with our club. We've got 20 guys without brains.

Bobby Clarke

#16. Our concern with history ... is a concern with preformed images already imprinted in our brains, images at which we keep staring while the truth lies elsewhere, away from it all, somewhere as yet undiscovered.

W.G. Sebald

#17. We need language. We need language to tell stories. We need stories to create a self. We need a self because the complexity of the chemical processes that make up our individual humanities exceeds the processing power of our brains. The self we create is a fiction.

Mohsin Hamid

#18. Evolution has ensured that our brains just aren't equipped to visualise 11 dimensions directly. However, from a purely mathematical point of view it's just as easy to think in 11 dimensions, as it is to think in three or four.

Stephen Hawking

#19. If we are not using our brains' capacity for challenge it feels to me as though it atrophies like an unused muscle.

Philippa Perry

#20. Having a Great Ambition is also a Meditation. When our efforts are focussed sincerely, even during sleep, our brains will work on it, in the form of Dreams.

Dinesh Kumar Radhakrishnan

#21. 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

#22. Being so alone and so silent for so long gave me the opportunity to see how our brains actually work. I think of that so often in my regular life, as I'm always interacting with people or with my computer or phone.

Cheryl Strayed

#23. For centuries, magicians have intuitively taken advantage of the inner workings of our brains.

Neil DeGrasse Tyson

#24. We are primates, with a third of our brains dedicated to vision, and large swaths devoted to touch, hearing, motion, and space. For us to go from "I think I understand" to "I understand," we need to see the sights and feel the motions.

Steven Pinker

#25. Our culture constantly inundates us with new information, and yet our brains capture so little of it. I can spend half a dozen hours reading a book and then have only a foggy notion of what it was about.

Joshua Foer

#26. Some people say that we only use 10% of our brains. I say that most only live 10% of their full potential in life.

Nolan R. Baum

#27. Ever since viewing screens entered the home, many observers have worried that they put our brains into a stupor. An early strain of research claimed that when we watch television, our brains mostly exhibit slow alpha waves - indicating a low level of arousal, similar to when we are daydreaming.

Hanna Rosin

#28. Left to their own devices, women would stop having sex after they have children. There's no evolutionary need for it. Our brains know it, our body knows it. Who feels sexy during the slog of motherhood, the middle-aged fat roll and the flattening butt?

Maria Semple

#29. 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

#30. Our brains are either our greatest assets or our greatest liabilities.

Robert T. Kiyosaki

#31. Evolution has programmed our brains to find two things particularly interesting, and therefore memorable: jokes and sex - and especially, it seems, jokes about sex.

Joshua Foer

#32. Even our brains shrink: at the age of thirty, the brain is a three-pound organ that barely fits inside the skull; by our seventies, gray-matter loss leaves almost an inch of spare room.

Atul Gawande

#33. Paper is to write things down that we need to remember. Our brains are used to think.

Albert Einstein

#34. Aren't we grateful for our brains, that can take this electrical impulse that comes from light energy and use it to explore our world? Aren't we grateful that we have hearts that can feel these vibrations, in order for us to allow ourselves to feel the pleasure and beauty of nature?

Louis Schwartzberg

#35. We remain convinced that this is the best defensive posture to adopt in order to minimize casualties when the Great Old Ones return from beyond the stars to eat our brains.

Charles Stross

#36. Moment by moment throughout our lifetime, our brains hum with the work of making meaning: weaving together many thousands of threads of information into all manner of thoughts, feelings, memories, and ideas.

Daniel Tammet

#37. In life and art we need to make sure that we honour that which our hearts and brains tell us is good. And we should cast a philosophic yet curious smile at that which our hearts and brains tell us otherwise.

Robert Genn

#38. He should have told us, too, that our brains become magnetised with the dominating thoughts we hold in our minds. By means with which no one is familiar, these 'magnets' attract to us the forces, the people, the circumstances of life which harmonise with the nature of our dominating thoughts.

Napoleon Hill

#39. A child has no trouble believing the unbelievable, nor does the genius or the madman. It's only you and I, with our big brains and our tiny hearts, who doubt and overthink and hesitate.

Steven Pressfield

#40. If our brains were simple enough for us to understand them, we'd be so simple that we couldn't.

Ian Stewart

#41. Our brains are obviously capable of astoundingly fast and complex calculations that happen subconsciously. We can't explain them because most of the time we hardly even realize they're happening.

Joshua Foer

#42. Our brains are dark globes lit by very distant stars.

David Mitchell

#43. We are the only species on the planet, so far as we know, to have invented a communal memory stored neither in our genes nor in our brains. The warehouse of this memory is called the library

Carl Sagan

#44. You're here covering the murders, bad girl," Jackie continued. "Adora must hate that. Sleeping in her house with your dirty little brain. ( ... ) Course before Adora took it over, we all slept over at Joya's house with our dirty little brains. Same house, different crazy lady running it.

Gillian Flynn

#45. We didn't want to worry about the formula that has been implanted into our brains - this verse/pre-chorus/chorus format. When we were writing 'The Papercut Chronicles,' we had no idea about any of that. We didn't know how to count bars or how to write what's considered a well-formatted pop song.

Travie McCoy

#46. Our brains are designed for efficiency, which sometimes expresses itself as laziness.

Tynan

#47. Though the Life Force supplies us with its own purpose, it has no other brains to work with than those it has painfully and imperfectly evolved in our heads.

George Bernard Shaw

#48. If our brains were simple enough to be understood, we wouldn't be smart enough to understand them. - ANONYMOUS

Michio Kaku

#49. With our evolved busy hands and our evolved busy brains, in an extraordinarily short period of time we've managed to alter the earth with such geologic-forcing effects that we ourselves are forces of nature. Climate change, ocean acidification, the sixth mass extinction of species.

Kate Bernheimer

#50. The enthusiasm that characterizes our time is, unlike current events, hopeful and, like all enthusiasms, playful. The energy that flashes through our electronics has leapt into most of our bloodstreams and brains.

Edward M. Hallowell

#51. Though we have been stuffing them into classrooms and cubicles for decades, our brains actually were built to survive in jungles and grasslands. A lifetime of exercise can result in a sometimes astonishing elevation in cognitive performance, compared with those who are sedentary.

John Medina

#52. Oftentimes, a truth is so big, so far beyond our understanding, that the only way we can grasp it is through a story. The creation of the whole universe is like that. How can our puny brains contain it?

Sam Torode

#53. In one century, we've added 28 years to our average life span - a change so rapid that our brains couldn't possibly have evolved to accommodate it.

Martha Beck

#54. Before a brain can register a thought, a mind must think it ... every step of the way is mind over matter ... We override our brains all the time.

Deepak Chopra

#55. What shall we do? All of us passionate girls who fear crushing the boys we love with our mouths like caverns of teeth, our mushrooming brains, and watermelon hearts?

Francesca Lia Block

#56. Our brains are not actually duplex apartments occupied by feuding neighbors, and how we bring about the complicated act of deceiving ourselves remains a mystery.

Kathryn Schulz

#57. Hell, there are probably people out there right now who consider us to be shiny people (bless their stupid, stupid hearts)and that's pretty much proof that none of our brains can be trusted to accurately measure the value of anyone, much less ourselves.

Jenny Lawson

#58. Our bodies like rhythm and our brains like melody and harmony.

Daniel Levitin

#59. This pattern of balancing between comfort and exploration of the unknown is how we build our brains,

John J. Ratey

#60. We humans are different - our brains are built not to fix memories in stone but rather to transform them, our recollections in their retelling.

Mira Bartok

#61. It turns out that the very genes that turn on in cancer cells perform vital functions in normal cells. In other words, the very genes that allow our embryos to grow or our brains to grow, our bodies to grow, if you mutate them, if you distort them, then you unleash cancer.

Siddhartha Mukherjee

#62. In the developed world, hundreds of millions of us now face the bizarre problem of surfeit. Yet our brains, instincts, and socialized behavior are still geared to an environment of lack. The result? Overwhelm - on an unprecedented scale.

Martha Beck

#63. Wisdom is a seed in our brains and it's on ourselves to improve this and develop by feeding it with the knowledge on account of experiences.

Jan Jansen

#64. The need to fit in, cooperate, and maintain long-term relationships put pressure on our early human brains to develop strategies for self-control.

Anonymous

#65. If people say the world we perceive is a 'construct' of our brains, they are saying in effect, that it results from an inveterate habit of thought. Why does it never occur to them that a habit is something you can overcome, if you set about it with enough energy?

Owen Barfield

#66. In a sense our brains are like an archive, where material is well-preserved and properly catalogued, but also dissolves, or becomes re-shelved or misplaced, or in some cases never makes it there to begin with.

Clifton Crais

#67. Why so many of us knocked us major chunks of our brains with alcohol from time to time remains an interesting mystery. It may be that we were tring to give evolution a shove in the right direction - in the direction of smaller brains.

Kurt Vonnegut

#68. What we now know is that our brains happily reconstruct memories, though we are frequently fooled into thinking that the reconstructions are seamlessly recorded recollections.

David DiSalvo

#69. However, if we wish to be compassionate with our fellow man, we must learn to engage in dispassionate analysis. In other words, thinking with our hearts, rather than our brains, is a surefire method to hurt those whom we wish to help.

Walter E. Williams

#70. There are a whole lot of reasons to be very happy that our brains are able to adapt and adapt so readily because we do strengthen and become more efficient at things we do a lot of in changed ways of thinking that we might need.

Nicholas G. Carr

#71. The truth about nature we discover with our brains. The truth about religion we discover with our hearts.

Blaise Pascal

#72. If you hear a statistic, you will make up a story to go with it, because our brains are organized on narrative. And you may very well make up a wrong story because you only have one fact, which is a statistic.

Gloria Steinem

#73. To us Germans everything is religion. What we do we do not merely with our hands and brains, but with our hearts and souls. This has often become a tragic fate for us.

Baldur Von Schirach

#74. It's not just the thought we think that matter; it's how we think them, how long we think them, and how often we think them. A thought has to be thought again and again in order for it to embed in our brains. So to fade a thought or get rid of it altogether, stop thinking it.

Toni Sorenson

#75. The arts open your heart and mind to possibilities that are limitless. They are pathways that touch upon our brains and emotions and bring sustenance to imagination. Human beings' greatest form of communication, they walk in tandem with science and play, and best describe what it is to be human.

Jacques D'Amboise

#76. Oh, the illusion of choice in the modern world - don't get me started. But don't you agree that the Internet has softened our brains and made us forget that 'choice' used to mean something different from selecting options from menus?

Lynne Truss

#77. 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

#78. When our brains constantly scan for and focus on the positive, we profit from three of the most important tools available to us: happiness, gratitude, and optimism.

Shawn Achor

#79. Stress overload makes us stupid. Solid research proves it. When we get overstressed, it creates a nasty chemical soup in our brains that makes it hard to pull out of the anxious depressive spiral.

Gail Sheehy

#80. Sometimes our brains are our own worst enemy because grace isn't logical.

Judah Smith

#81. It's a showy habit I've got," I say. "To be always quoting poetry and stuff. Some of us use our brains, and some of us use our memories.

Barbara Trapido

#82. Painting and sculpture are very archaic forms. It's the only thing left in our industrial society where an individual alone can make something with not just his own hands, but brains, imagination, heart maybe.

Philip Guston

#83. Evolutionary biologists tell us we have a "negativity bias" that makes our brains remember negative events more strongly than positive ones. So when we're feeling lost or discouraged, it can be very hard to conjure up memories and feelings of happiness and ease.

Sharon Salzberg

#84. Are we no greater than the noise we make Along one blind atomic pilgrimage Whereon by crass chance billeted we go Because our brains and bones and cartilage Will have it so?

Edwin Arlington Robinson

#85. We don't really even know how the Internet and technology are changing us, or our brains and our attention span.

Nancy Jo Sales

#86. Stories are flight simulators for our brains.

Chip Heath

#87. It is the love in our hearts that we need to act on and not the false match made by our calculating brains.

Ritu Chowdhary

#88. When we were starting our community a bunch of older Benedictine nuns said to us, "If you have any questions or want to pick our brains, please do - we've been doing community for about 1,500 years together so we've learned a few things."

Shane Claiborne

#89. Stars on our door, stars in our eyes, stars exploding in the bits of our brains where the common sense should have been

Angela Carter

#90. We watch our bodies and our brains slow down as younger bodies and brains zip past us, and we just accept it, not realizing there is a whole world offering to sharpen and improve us. We simply need to look for it.

Barbara Bradley Hagerty

#91. Our brains have this habit of quilting dreams from the fabrics of our lives. As a filmmaker, I get to do it for a living.

Peter Landesman

#92. You can say anything you want about how the brain works and people will believe you. Really, our brains are hard-wired like that.

Noah Gray-Cabey

#93. It is with regular exercise that "the mind" can keep the brain in good shape, active and in working condition! And if you are young and healthy in our brains, then the whole body is healthy and young.

Alex Right

#94. We use only 10% of our brains ... Imagine how smart we would be if we used the other 60%!

Ellen DeGeneres

#95. Most of the circuits in our brains run on automatic. The more you think a thought, the more energy goes into that circuit. Eventually it gets enough energy to run the thought automatically without us needing to put more energy into it.

Jill Bolte Taylor

#96. People fall into patterns at fast speeds, when really, to have a clear musical thought - the kind of musical thought that makes a melody work - our brains just can't think that fast. At a certain point, you're going on automatic.

John Frusciante

#97. We should make decisions in life with our hearts, not our brains, not only in music but in daily life.

Andre Rieu

#98. I am not sure our brains and our psychologies are ready for immortality.

Craig Venter

#99. The most fundamental principle of the organized mind, the one most critical to keeping us from forgetting or losing things, is to shift the burden of organizing from our brains to the external world.

Daniel J. Levitin

#100. eventually we'll be old and wrinkled. Like everybody. But we'll look a lot better if we're happy inside. If we used our brains and our talents instead of stressing over what someone else defines as 'pretty.'

Lissa Price