We Are Our Brains Quotes

#1. We are our brains. My brain is talking to your brain; our bodies are hanging along for the ride.

Jeff Hawkins

#2. Our brains are hardwired to think in terms of place and to associate psychic value or meaning to the places we inhabit.

Colin Dickey

#3. Our brains are wired such that it's difficult to take action until we feel at least some level of this emotional state. In fact, performance peaks under the heightened activation that comes with moderate levels of stress. As long as the stress isn't prolonged, it's harmless.

Travis Bradberry

#4. By definition, saving - for anything - requires us to not get things now so that we can get bigger ones later. That's hard. Our brains are hard wired to prefer the here and now.

Jean Chatzky

#5. Our brains are separate and independent enough from our genes to rebel against them.. we do so in a small way everytime we use contraception. There is no reason why we should not rebel in a large way too.

Richard Dawkins

#6. I assume that we are all limited by our own brains and experiences and can only understand other people and other creatures through a kind of translation that brings them closer to us.

Karen Joy Fowler

#7. Our minds have a great capacity for deception. This does not mean we are necessarily dishonest but if we are not careful, when our brains do not have answers, our minds will create them.

David W. Earle

#8. This is the most exciting part of being human. It is using our brains in the highest way. Otherwise we are just healthy animals

Edwin Land

#9. We know in one part of our brains that we are all going to die, but on some level we don't quite believe it.

Nora Ephron

#10. Our brains are no longer conditioned for reverence and awe. We cannot imagine a Second Coming that would not be cut down to size by the televised evening news, or a Last Judgment not subject to pages of holier-than-Thou second-guessing in The New York Review of Books.

John Updike

#11. The story comes around, pushing at our brains, and soon we are trying to ravel back to the beginning, trying to put families into order and make sense of things. But we start with one person, and soon another and another follows, and still another, until we are lost in the connections.

Louise Erdrich

#12. Happiness comes only when we push our brains and hearts to the farthest reaches of which we are capable.

Leo Rosten

#13. When it comes to food, we are, in essence, following an eating script that has been written into the circuits of our brains.

David Kessler

#14. A ... reason we are so-so scientists is that our brains were shaped for fitness, not for truth. Sometimes truth is adaptive, but sometimes it is not.

Steven Pinker

#15. In truth, food (within reason, don't go overboard) and beverages (non-alcoholic, we need our brains sober) are encouraged- not only because they lift the mood and help the intellect to focus, but also because it is hard to feel hostile towards someone you share bread with.

Elif Shafak

#16. Except for hydrogen, all the atoms that make each of us up - the iron in our blood, the calcium in our bones, the carbon in our brains - were manufactured in red giant stars thousands of light-years away in space and billions of years ago in time. We are, as I like to say, starstuff.

Carl Sagan

#17. Our brains are continuing to evolve, and perhaps a few tens of thousands of years from now, our descendants will walk around with five pound brains, allowing them insights that we can't imagine.

Seth Shostak

#18. There are no limits to where our brains can take us. We are, if there be a God, God's gracious creation.

John Lydon

#19. If we think of our brains as a map, those early roads are like grooves, tram tracks, easy to fall into.

Philippa Perry

#20. We read each other through our eyes, and anatomically they are an extension of our brains. When we catch someone's eye, we look into a mind.

Siri Hustvedt

#21. When we had to survive on our wits, gather and kill our food from scratch and be more at the mercy of our environment than we are today, we probably had enough challenge to keep our brains healthy.

Philippa Perry

#22. Brains are tricky and adaptable organs. For all the 'neuroplasticity' allowing our brains to reconfigure themselves to the biases of our computers, we are just as neuroplastic in our ability to eventually recover and adapt.

Douglas Rushkoff

#23. We have magnificent brains, but we use a great deal of our brilliance to keep ourselves stuck and ignorant, to keep ourselves from not shining. We are so afraid of our beauty and radiance and brilliance because it scared the adults around us when we were children.

Patricia Sun

#24. Our brains are very animal but also very strange and egotistical. We're narcissistic.

Zoe Saldana

#25. We are all far less rational in our decision-making than standard economic theory assumes. Our irrational behaviors are neither random nor senseless: they are systematic and predictable. We all make the same types of mistakes over and over, because of the basic wiring of our brains.

Dan Ariely

#26. I am convinced that not only do children need children's books to fine-tune their brains, but our civilization needs them if we are not going to unplug ourselves from our collective past.

E.L. Konigsburg

#27. It's as though our brains are configured to make a certain number of decisions per day and once we reach that limit, we can't make any more, regardless of how important they are.

Daniel J. Levitin

#28. Our brains are so conditioned through education, through religion, to think we are separate entities with separate souls and so on. We are not individuals at all. We are the result of thousands of years of human experience, human endeavor and struggle.

Jiddu Krishnamurti

#29. 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

#30. When we brand things, our brains perceive them as more special and valuable than they actually are.

Martin Lindstrom

#31. No matter which part of our brains we use, there are two things we all have in common: Our need to travel successfully through the maze of life, And the fact that 90% of our brains are water.

Stilton Jarlsberg

#32. Humankind made these religions; that our brains are capable of doing that is neither something to take too seriously - because we also make poop, and we learned to flush that the fuck down the toilet - but it's also not something to totally disregard.

Dan Harmon

#33. When we let our minds wander, we set our brains free. Our brains are most productive when there is no demand that they be reactive.

Sherry Turkle

#34. We must take care of our minds because we cannot benefit from beauty when our brains are missing.

Euripides

#35. Some people say ... that violence and war are inevitable. I say rubbish: Our brains are fully capable of controlling instinctive behavior. We're not very good at it though, are we?

Jane Goodall

#36. We have all our private terrors, our particular shadows, our secret fears. We are afraid in a fear which we cannot face, which none understands, and our hearts are torn from us, our brains unskinned like the layers of an onion, ourselves the last.

T. S. Eliot

#37. Just as our brains fill in the details of an image our eyes record only roughly, so, too, do our brains employ tricks we are unaware of to fill in details about people we don't know intimately.

Leonard Mlodinow

#38. Any model we make does not describe the universe it describes what our brains are capable of saying at this time.

Robert Anton Wilson

#39. Our brains are bombarded by something like eleven million pieces of data - that is, items in our surroundings that come at all of our senses - at once. Of that, we are able to consciously process only about forty

Anonymous

#40. Children are like the zombies I once saw in a film at Dad's. We have to do as we're told and obey like our brains have got eaten.

Kate Hamer

#41. Painting fulfills a need to be non-intellectual. There are times when we have to get our brains out in our fingers.

Ray Bradbury

#42. It is essential to understand our brains in some detail if we are to assess correctly our place in this vast and complicated universe we see all around us.

Francis Crick

#43. 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

#44. We humans are an extremely important manifestation of the replication bomb, because it is through us - through our brains, our symbolic culture and our technology - that the explosion may proceed to the next stage and reverberate through deep space.

Richard Dawkins

#45. If we are not taught about love when our brains and hearts are forming, we may never even recognize it when it stands in front of us. We may even run from it. We would miss out on the one thing that makes life worth living.

Kate McGahan

#46. We are only advancing in life, whose hearts are getting softer, our blood warmer, our brains quicker, and our spirits entering into living peace.

John Ruskin

#47. Don't we all live in our heads? Where else could we possibly exist? Our brains are the universe.

Kate DiCamillo

#48. When something bad happens to us, especially when we are young, our brains will sometimes protect us from it until we are strong enough to deal with the issue. It's not uncommon for people to completely black out an experience for years and revisit it only when they feel safe enough to face it.

Gwen Hayes

#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. We must accept the fact that it is possible we know something without knowing why we know it.

Dick Swaab

#51. Who knows if all our brains are inventing the same thing? I mean, how do we know that the thing YOUR eyes see and call "red" is the same thing that I call "red"?

Jaclyn Moriarty

#52. We can certainly go further than cats, but why should it be that our brains are somehow so suited to the universe that our brains will be able to understand the deepest workings?

Brian Greene

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

Nancy Jo Sales

#54. 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

#55. 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

#56. 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

#57. 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

#58. 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

#59. 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

#60. 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

#61. Our brains are not capable of comprehending the infinite so, instead, we ignore it and eat cheese on toast.

Jonathan Cainer

#62. 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

#63. 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

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

Albert Einstein

#65. 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

#66. 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

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

Philippa Perry

#68. 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

#69. 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

#70. 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

#71. 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

#72. Impulses in our brains are electrical sparks that tell us what we're seeing, tasting, hearing - and everything we do, all our muscle responses and movements, they're responses to electrical signals too.

Amie Kaufman

#73. The problem with people like me who are emotionally unhinged is that we think with a tsunami of bad experiences flooding our brains. We think with insecurity, and raging pain, all triggered by what has come before. We see threats to us personally lurking around corners, curves, and right angles.

Cathy Lamb

#74. We're all getting too smart. Our brains are just getting bigger and bigger, and the world dries up and dies when there's too much thought and not enough heart.

Aimee Bender

#75. We are off-loading a great deal of the processing that our neurons would normally do to an external device that then becomes an extension of our own brains, a neural enhancer.

Daniel J. Levitin

#76. We have calcium in our bones, iron in our veins, carbon in our souls, and nitrogen in our brains. 93 percent stardust, with souls made of flames, we are all just stars that have people names.

Nikita Gill

#77. What do we mean by 'crazy?' What do we mean by 'mad?' At what point is a person just different and at what point can we call it a disease and say that they are not responsible for their actions? Or are we all slaves to the chemical processes that go on in our brains?

Jo Nesbo

#78. We should be carefree with our bodies and prudish with our brains, not the contrary. How virtuous we are with our flesh, and yet the first foul thought that comes our way is invited to the depths of our soul.

Anthony Marais

#79. Knowing what to overlook is one way older adults are typically wiser than young adults. With age comes what is known as "positivity effect". We become more interested in positive information, and our brains react less strongly to what negative information we do encounter.

Meg Jay

#80. Though introverts look calm on the surface, our brains are bubbling with activity, and thus we require less external stimulation than extroverts.

Adam S. McHugh

#81. Every once in a while I don't think it's a bad idea for lawyers to remember that what goes on, at least on some level of our brains, is that we have to imagine everything coming apart ... It's what we are. Out of control, always prepared, Boy Scout control freaks.

Lawrence Joseph

#82. Are we standing in a physical location?" "I think it's a manifestation of the mind as it attempts to visually explain something our brains haven't evolved to comprehend.

Blake Crouch

#83. Therefore, reading and reacting to other people's behaviors, emotions, and attitudes have been hardwired into our brains. We are not only wired to connect, but we are also wired to attune to, resonate with, and learn from others.

Louis Cozolino

#84. We are social beings and our brains grow in a social environment.

Eric Jensen

#85. We are creatures deeply marked by our expectations. We go around with mental pictures, lodged in our brains, of how things are supposed to go. We

The School Of Life

#86. Conversely, we humans are born premature and highly dependent newborns whose brains are shaped through years of interactions with our caretakers and the environment.

Louis Cozolino

#87. Collaboration is just about finding people who are better than you at certain things and combining your powers. Like, if I'm not the strongest at playing piano, I'll work with someone who's really good at it and we'll combine both our brains to write a song.

Charlyne Yi

#88. We are living in times that demand more and more of our brains and muscles, of our nerves and physical energy. Only those who are strong and know how to keep it so, can stand the wear and tear. It pays to stop once in a while to look over our machinery and oil the parts that need it.

Adrian Peter Schmidt

#89. Whatever the difference between brilliant and average brains, we are all creative. And through practice and study we can enhance our skills and talents.

Jeff Hawkins

#90. I was upset, sad, angry - something! I needed to do something! I needed to feel myself, understand myself and this horrible world we are all trapped in, where bugs and tumors and viruses worm their way into our brains and lay their putrid eggs that hatch and eat us alive from the inside out.

Garth Stein

#91. If brains have brought us to what we are in now, I think it is time to allow our hearts to speak. When our sons are killed by the millions, let us, mothers, only try to do good by going to the kings and emperors without any other danger than a refusal.

Rosika Schwimmer

#92. 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

#93. The shock of twentieth-century technology numbed our brains and we are just beginning to notice the spiritual and social debris that our technology has strewn about us.

Neil Postman

#94. But there are thoughts we think in the forward part of our brains, and then there are those whose origins are much deeper, in the animal part, the part that remembers the terrors of the open savanna at night, the oldest part that was there before the primordial voice that spoke the words I AM.

Rick Yancey