Quotes by Neuroscientists - Page 10

The self, when confined into the usual wakeful state of consciousness, is human, but when enters into the transcendental state of Absolute Oneness, becomes God.
Abhijit Naskar
There are no other heaven and hell outside the human mind. Goodness is heaven, hatred is hell. Acceptance is religion, sectarianism is blasphemy. Love is holiness, discrimination is sin.
Abhijit Naskar
It is merely an accident of history that it is considered normal in our society to believe that the Creator of the universe can hear your thoughts while it is demonstrative of mental illness to believe that he is communicating with you by having the rain tap in Morse code on your bedroom window.
Sam Harris
One who knows the Self, knows God.
Abhijit Naskar
Brutality goes hand in hand with orthodoxy, be it Christian, Hindu, Muslim, Jewish, Atheistic or any other.
Abhijit Naskar
Character of any person is the aggregate of his or her conscientious tendencies - the sum total of the knacks of the civilized part of the mind.
Abhijit Naskar
Biology without selfishness, is nothing but fiction.
Abhijit Naskar
Throughout the lifetime, the entire neurobiology of a human being goes through relentless perplexing transformations. These sexually dimorphic neurobiological changes create a person’s personality. These unique makeovers of the male and female biology hold the key to a sustainable romantic relationship.
Abhijit Naskar
The scriptures are just books. It all depends on you, whether you are going to learn goodness and compassion from them, or use them to destroy your environment.
Abhijit Naskar
Humanism is not a pompous philosophy to be talked and debated about by a handful of intellectuals - it is the purest form of moral compass, which defines the civilized heart of thinking humanity.
Abhijit Naskar
Through Neurotheology, I and my fellow scientists of twenty-first century have already taken the first step from the side of Science, to diminish the gap between Science and Religion. Now it is time for Religion to do the same.
Abhijit Naskar
When the mind is without fear and prejudice, and the head is held high with the strength of reasoning, then only the brightest rays of religion can penetrate the darkest corners of the human society.
Abhijit Naskar
There is no secret in attaining God. In the path of Enlightenment, any theoretical mystery-mongering preacher that weakens the mind, should be rejected at once. Science has no secrets. The very purpose of it is to unravel the secrets of Nature and the Universe. That is why it is so beautiful. And so should be the path of Enlightenment.
Abhijit Naskar
​Belief is exclusively a matter of personal domain. It has nothing to do with reality.
Abhijit Naskar
There are three deaths. The first is when the body ceases to function. The second is when the body is consigned to the grave. The third is that moment, sometime in the future, when your name is spoken for the last time.
David Eagleman
A person’s affinity towards his or her own religious beliefs, has the same neurological qualities as of his or her emotional affinity towards the romantic partner. In fact the symptoms that follow the early euphoric phase of romantic love are often seen in religious people when their beloved religious faith is challenged.
Abhijit Naskar
Even a thousand loud lies become powerless in front of one calm truth.
Abhijit Naskar
The world doesn't need a good woman who is meekly obedient to the uncivilized social norms that advocate female inferiority. The world needs those bad women who can think for themselves, to break the primeval norms of the society that consistently drag the human civilization back to the stone-age.
Abhijit Naskar
The causal, abstract, binary, holistic, and reductionist functions of the human brain all help you to process the enormous amount of information coming into our brain from the external world every day.
Abhijit Naskar
Strength and weakness are both mental constructs. Now you choose, what's preferable for you.
Abhijit Naskar
The problem I want to talk to you about tonight is the problem of belief. What does it mean to believe? We use this word all the time, and I think behind it lurk some really extraordinary taboos and confusions. What I want to argue tonight is that how we talk about belief- how we fail to criticize or criticize the beliefs of others, has more importance to us personally, more consequence to us personally and to civilization than perhaps anything else that is in our power to influence.
Sam Harris
The existence of true religion is predicated on the practice of goodness. Goodness is Godliness. There is nothing else. Religion lies in practice, not in bookish theories.
Abhijit Naskar
Acceptance is religion, sectarianism is blasphemy.
Abhijit Naskar
To me, the rainbow was a profoundly hopeful symbol, separating the the white light of appearances into its multiple spectrum and revealing a hidden dimension. It reminded me of my belief that it was the mission of science to pierce through the layers of everyday reality and penetrate to the truth.
Candace B. Pert
Belief is indeed psychologically important for the human mind of general population, but that belief should be nicely compatible with scientific reasoning, otherwise that belief turns into prejudice, which is never beneficial to the human life.
Abhijit Naskar
A healthy marriage acts as the vessel of wellbeing and stability for both partners as well as the children.
Abhijit Naskar
Come my friend. Come and walk with me in the path ahead that awaits you with open arms – the path of humanism – the path where every pedestrian is simply a human, not a Christian, Jew, Hindu, Muslim, Atheist, Mexican, American, Canadian, British, Australian, Russian, Asian, African, European or anything else.
Abhijit Naskar
This universe is shot through with mystery. The very fact of its being, and of our own, is a mystery absolute, and the only miracle worthy of the name. The consciousness that animates us is itself central to this mystery and the ground for any experience we might wish to call 'spiritual.' No myths need be embraced for us to commune with the profundity of our circumstance. No personal God need be worshiped for us to live in awe at the beauty and immensity of creation. No tribal fictions need be rehearsed for us to realize, one fine day, that we do, in fact, love our neighbors, that our happiness is inextricable from their own, and that our interdependence demands that people everywhere be given the opportunity to flourish.
Sam Harris
If origin defines race, then we are all Africans – we are all black.
Abhijit Naskar
Bring all your power out my friend, and throw away such Gods, such doctrines, such institutions, that impede in the path of human progress.
Abhijit Naskar
Love opens the most impossible gates in the world. Feel, therefore, my would-be patriots. Do you feel? Do you feel that millions of your sisters and brothers are starving today and have been in such condition for ages? Do you feel my dear soldiers? Do you feel that the light of truth has become much scarier to the society than the darkness of ignorance? Does this not make you restless? Does this not make you sleepless? Has it not gone into your blood yet, coursing through your veins, becoming resonant with your heart-beat? Are you not yet seized with the one idea of lifting the misery from the society? Have you not been yet immersed in this idea, so much so that, you have forgotten your name, your fame, your property and even your very physical existence as a flesh and blood being? Have you done that yet? That is the very first step of the real education my friend. Your world needs heroes. Be Heroes!
Abhijit Naskar
Mind is the Alpha – Mind is the Omega.
Abhijit Naskar
Excellence doesn’t come by obeying doctrines. Excellence comes through recognizing the flaws in the prevailing doctrines of the society and throwing them away if necessary in the path of progress.
Abhijit Naskar
It's the strangest feeling at the end of pregnancy: you look down at this huge belly and try to imagine how some little person, whom you haven't even met, is going to emerge from it any day and completely change your lives. First, you wonder how this pregnancy, to which you've grown so accustomed over much of the last year, can, with barely any notice, come to an abrupt end. Then you try to fathom how this baby is ever going to come out; your bowling ball stomach seems misproportioned for what lies between it and the outside world. And only then do you realize what it all means-that the easy part, pregnancy, is almost over, and it's time to gear up for the tough stuff: childbirth!
Lise Eliot
Teach the children compassion and empathy, for all creatures are born selfish.
Abhijit Naskar
One who knows what he or she knows as well as what he or she does not know is a genius.
Abhijit Naskar
The more you keep your religious beliefs concealed from others, the lesser religious conflicts occur in the society.
Abhijit Naskar
Shred the fake mask of humility into pieces. And put on the mask of arrogance if needed.
Abhijit Naskar
In the year 2006, a person can have sufficient intellectual and material resources to build a nuclear bomb and still believe that he will get seventy-two virgins in Paradise.
Sam Harris
What a hundred caring, courageous and conscientious women can achieve in ten years, would take a thousand men a hundred years.
Abhijit Naskar
Faith and hope remove worry, anxiety, and fear. Human life becomes very painful and burdensome if a person has no one to trust and love. Then why should it bother an atheist, if a mother who just has lost her child, takes up a doll of baby Jesus or Krishna and pampers it like her own child, while in the process she actually succeeds in coping with her traumatic situation!
Abhijit Naskar
From a medical standpoint, the third and the most probable explanation is that Jesus was indeed dead, and what his disciples experienced were mere hallucinations evoked by the grief over the loss of their beloved teacher. It is clinically known as “Post-Bereavement Hallucinations Experiences” or PBHE.
Abhijit Naskar
I am the bridge that connects these two ever- separated banks of human understanding.
Abhijit Naskar
You are both the worshipper and the worshipped.
Abhijit Naskar
All our sentiments - religious, romantic or any other - are born in the neurons.
Abhijit Naskar
Salvation of human life requires disclosure of truth through reason, surpassing bigotry.
Abhijit Naskar
People often ask me, what my religion is. I tell them, I am a Christian to the Christian, a Jew to the Jew, a Muslim to the Muslim, a Hindu to the Hindu, an atheist to the atheist, but the brightest nightmare to the fundamentalist.
Abhijit Naskar
By believing in an imaginary invisible supernatural entity, humans may become good citizens. But this is not religion. This is merely an illusion of religion.
Abhijit Naskar
No text, being human creation, is free from flaws – it is the human mind that should be conscientious enough to accept their good elements and discard the bad ones.
Abhijit Naskar
Instead of reality being passively recorded by the brain, it is actively constructed by it.
David Eagleman
A rational human being of the civilized world would be like the swan that can draw the milk from a mixture of milk and water, leaving aside the water.
Abhijit Naskar
The God that humanity so keenly seeks, lives within the human biology, yet they wander hitherto searching for it.
Abhijit Naskar
Observing the medical histories of various neurological syndromes is like observing the fascinating nerve cells of the human brain in action, while they construct what we so proudly call the Human Consciousness. They remind us of the overwhelming aspects of human silliness. They remind us how such a simple natural response of the human Biology, is misinterpreted as the “last surviving mystery” of this planet.
Abhijit Naskar
Be naive and curious. That's all you need to become a scientist.
Abhijit Naskar
Sacrifice everything that is yours, to call up the humans in others.
Abhijit Naskar
Light up the radiant flame of conscience, goodwill and compassion in your heart, and go over the length and breadth of your society in the pursuit of shedding light over the whole world. And in time, you’ll become a glorious sun that will shine over the entire human population.
Abhijit Naskar
As the neo-cortex of the brain keeps getting more complex through further evolution, eventually our far away progeny will born in a world where there will be no more religion to be endowed upon them.
Abhijit Naskar
Be brave and upright. Shred the fake mask of humility into pieces. And put on the mask of arrogance if needed. Take the whole responsibility of your surrounding society on your own shoulders. If you consider yourself a human being, who cares for humanity, then, become a brave responsible citizen of the whole world. If not a big banyan tree, at least be like a mango tree under the shade of which a few people can rest. You are the architects of this beautiful world. Build it your way. And nourish it with your modern conscience.
Abhijit Naskar
You don't die when your body stops functioning. You die when your name is uttered for the last time in the world.
Abhijit Naskar
If you are financially affluent, think of adopting a kid and raise him or her right next to your biological offspring. And let your love become the proof of your parenthood, instead of your DNA.
Abhijit Naskar