Quotes by Neuroscientists - Page 15

I am merely an insignificant creature on a microscopic blue dot in the vastness of space.
Abhijit Naskar
There is no society in human history that ever suffered because its people became too reasonable.
Sam Harris
Through sexual intimacy, two human beings become one mind, body and soul wrapped up in the cocoon of their skin.
Abhijit Naskar
If you don’t allow one to become a lion, one will become a sheep. And the world is already filled with sheeps, which is the major cause of the society’s intellectual and moral downfall. For a better future to evolve, where humanism will be an all-pervading virtue and separatism will be a matter of ancient history, the world needs lions.
Abhijit Naskar
Most religious individuals do not conceive God in an anthropomorphic or angry way. Rather, in their personal psychological domain of religious or spiritual beliefs, they conceive God in more abstract, spiritual and merciful way.
Abhijit Naskar
We all have the power to influence others. It is up to us, whether we are going to abuse that power to manipulate people or use it to help them.
Abhijit Naskar
Beauty is an illusion.
Abhijit Naskar
Forget all the formal decency of tolerance, and simply love your fellow humans. And the Self within you shall attain the highest pedestal of greatness, way higher than all the book-learned preachers in the world.
Abhijit Naskar
In your daily life, you make dozens of chooses between an alternative with higher overall value and a more tempting but ultimately inferior option.
Abhijit Naskar
I dream of a planet where the science of the mind, brings the Bible, the Vedas, the Quran, and all other scriptures together and binds them with the golden twine of harmony.
Abhijit Naskar
Every single human being is neurologically predisposed to be biased in various walks of life. It is biologically impossible to be absolutely free from all biases, nevertheless, the more a person rigorously trains the self to be rational and conscientious, the more that self becomes strong enough to keep the biases in check, never to let them run rampant over the psyche.
Abhijit Naskar
I once renounced my home in Calcutta, and roamed around the villages of Bengal as a monk. But after I attained the Absolute Divine state of Unification with the Universe, I realized that the purpose of life is not renunciation of anything, but the realization of the purpose itself.
Abhijit Naskar
Playing nice" comes naturally when our neuroception detects safety and promotes physiological states that support social behavior. However, pro-social behavior will not occur when our neuroception misreads the environmental cues and triggers physiological states that support defensive strategies. After all, "playing nice" is not appropriate or adaptive behavior in dangerous or life-threatening situations. In these situations, humans - like other mammals - react with more primitive neurobiological defense systems. To create relationships, humans must subdue these defensive reactions to engage, attach, and form lasting social bonds. Humans have adaptive neurobehavioral systems for both pro-social and defensive behaviors.
Stephen W. Porges
Stop grovelling and start working.
Abhijit Naskar
One way or another we are all biased, but still we have the modern cortical capacity to choose whether or not to let the harmful biases dictate our behavior.
Abhijit Naskar
Together you are a species that grows in all aspects of life – separated you are a mere speck of dust in vast ocean of space-time capable of nothing progressive.
Abhijit Naskar
The solution you seek, can be found nowhere else but within you.
Abhijit Naskar
The influence of the Sermon on the Mount is truly past reckoning. Any rational human being with a conscientious mind is bound to be influenced by its exuberant content regardless of religious background.
Abhijit Naskar
Sex becomes less and less pleasurable in a relationship over time. Your brain gets habituated to the sensual stimulation from your specific partner as you are exposed to it repeatedly. It doesn’t mean that the love is gone from the relationship. Love still exists beyond the barriers of time, in the form of attachment, which becomes independent of sexual intimacy after the euphoric stage of mad love.
Abhijit Naskar
I love science, and it pains me to think that so many are terrified of the subject or feel that choosing science means you cannot also choose compassion, or the arts, or be awed by nature. Science is not meant to cure us of mystery, but to reinvent and reinvigorate it.
Robert M. Sapolsky
If a religion cannot help a human wherever he or she stands, it is not of much use.
Abhijit Naskar
Terrorism has nothing to do with religion, Islam or otherwise. Terrorism is born of fundamentalism not of religion.
Abhijit Naskar
It is "humanism" that should run in the veins of the thinking humanity, not a certain gender-oriented "ism". This entire book is a treatise on gender equality, and as such, it may be hailed as a work of feminism, but it is not - it is a work of humanism.
Abhijit Naskar
Education means nourishing the mind and make it develop in order to see beyond the limitations of current social perception - it means breaking the barriers of the rugged sociological system that impede in the progress of human civilization - it means trying out new things for the first time in human history and succeeding in a few while failing in some. And that is how a species grows to become more advanced.
Abhijit Naskar
We rely on faith only in the context of claims for which there is no sufficient sensory or logical evidence.
Sam Harris
Ideas matter—and philosophy is the art of thinking about them rigorously. In my view, that should be done in as public a forum as possible.
Sam Harris
Blind faith is not real religion my friend.
Abhijit Naskar
If not as a true human, let me tell you as a Biologist, color of the skin does not define an individual’s intelligence – it does not define an individual’s ambitions - it does not define an individual’s dreams – and above all, it does not define an individual’s character.
Abhijit Naskar
It is generally argued that our experience of free will presents a compelling mystery: On the one hand, we can't make sense of it in scientific terms; on the other, we feel that we are the authors of our own thoughts and actions.
Sam Harris
All the terrorism in the world that fester in the name of religion, are in fact not religious in nature, rather they are socio-political. Their roots are not religion, but socio-political condition. Religion is only used as a divine tool of authoritative justification in the search of absolution.
Abhijit Naskar
In modern neurotheology we examine the physical bases to spiritual, religious and mystical experiences and beliefs, that implicitly appear to reduce this rich phenomenology to only neuronal functions. So, the thing is, there was no divine intervention necessary in the evolution of spirituality and religiosity. “Human Brain is the true God of all beliefs”.
Abhijit Naskar
A society where feminine beauty is defined not by the human self on genuine intellectual and sentimental grounds, but by a computer software on the grounds of economic interest, is more dead than alive. It is a society of human bodies, not human beings.
Abhijit Naskar
Truth evolves incessantly. If it does not, it's no truth at all.
Abhijit Naskar
When circumstances pour the minds of some young helpless individuals with hatred and rage towards the society, and when that pain, hatred, and rage become unbearable, they turn to the scriptures as the final resort, in a pursuit to find absolution, guided by the psychopathic, misogynistic, genocidal, pestilential, megalomaniacal, sadomasochistic, capriciously malevolent, fundamentalist preachers.
Abhijit Naskar
In your usual state of consciousness, there is a separate quale experience of everything you observe. But when you transcend into the domain of absolute divinity, all your qualia get mixed up.
Abhijit Naskar
The only differences between a cult and a religion are the numbers of adherents and the degree to which they are marginalized by the rest of society.
Sam Harris
Any ape can reach for a banana, but only humans can reach for the stars.
V.S. Ramachandran
A library is more precious than a bank.
Abhijit Naskar
Give people films, they will forget after a few weeks, but give people ideas, they will assimilate them into their consciousness.
Abhijit Naskar
When emotions are expressed...all systems are united and made whole. When emotions are repressed, denied, not allowed to be whatever they may be, our network pathways get blocked, stopping the flow of the vital feel-good, unifying chemicals that run both our biology and our behavior.
Candace B. Pert
If we are to rise as real Sapiens, we must work towards spreading education among the masses.
Abhijit Naskar
God heals as well as God kills.
Abhijit Naskar
I don’t do metaphysics. Neither do I have the luxury to talk about my beliefs.
Abhijit Naskar
While believing strongly, without evidence, is considered a mark of madness or stupidity in any other area of our lives, faith in God still holds immense prestige in our society. Religion is the one area of our discourse where it is considered noble to pretend to be certain about things no human being could possibly be certain about. It is telling that this aura of nobility extends only to those faiths that still have many subscribers. Anyone caught worshipping Poseidon, even at sea, will be thought insane.
Sam Harris
Faith is a natural evolutionary trait of the human mind, selected by Mother Nature as an internal coping-mechanism.
Abhijit Naskar
I dream of a world where Science shapes the structure of a society, rather than politics.
Abhijit Naskar
Every one of the world's "great" religions utterly trivializes the immensity and beauty of the cosmos. Books like the Bible and the Koran get almost every significant fact about us and our world wrong. Every scientific domain -- from cosmology to psychology to economics -- has superseded and surpassed the wisdom of Scripture.Everything of value that people get from religion can be had more honestly, without presuming anything on insufficient evidence. The rest is self-deception, set to music.
Sam Harris
Scientific Religion is compatible with Science and in fact, they enrich each other. That's because scientific religion is simply the realization of divinity within one's heart. Therefore, Science and Scientific Religion smoothen each other's path of progress. While on the contrary, far from being compatible with Science, Theoretical Religion consistently tries to impede the development of human society. Moreover, being rigidly based on bookish doctrines, it keeps making efforts to drag the human society back to the Stone Age.I am afraid, if you don't act now, the relentless battle between Theoretical Religions will turn this beautiful planet which we call home, into a barren wasteland.
Abhijit Naskar
Your imagination, your will, your conscience – these are almighty – they make you achieve things that no human being has ever achieved in history.
Abhijit Naskar
It's been long since thinking humanity has learnt that love is a majestic creation of the brain, yet that knowledge hasn't made love be deemed any less glorious. Then why should it threaten the religious believer to learn that divinity as well is a natural creation of the brain?
Abhijit Naskar
A true religious person should not think that “my religion alone is the right path and other religions are false.” Other religions are also so many paths leading to the same domain of transcendental bliss.
Abhijit Naskar
He (Jesus) gave up his life not because of the so-called sins of humanity, but because he was too adamant to give in to orthodox monstrosity.
Abhijit Naskar
Biological instincts are the key to understanding how every single human being is wired. The marvelous interplay of various brain circuits creates our instinctual reality of the daily life. If you’re conscious about the fact that there lies a complex yet vividly beautiful brain circuit mechanism behind every single impulse of your daily emotions, then you can choose how to react upon each of those impulses. You can thus program your behavioral response in a certain situation.
Abhijit Naskar
Either you are racist or you are a human - you cannot be both.
Abhijit Naskar
Let me tell you a story. There was a student who asked his teacher, what is love? The teacher said go into the field and bring me the most beautiful flower. The student returned with no flower at hand and said, “I found the most beautiful flower in the field but I didn't pick it up for I might find a better one, but when I returned to the place, it was gone.”We always look for the best in life. When we finally see it, we take it for granted and after some time start expecting a better one, not knowing that it's the best for us.
Abhijit Naskar
The term “musalman” refers to someone with “musallam iman”, that means, a pure conscience. Thus, any individual whose conscience is pure and clear, who can think for himself or herself, is a musalman or muslim, regardless of socio-religious background. Likewise, any human being who loves the neighbor as much as his or her own family is a Christian.
Abhijit Naskar
If knowledge is not democratized, power can never be.
Steven Rose
As many critics of religion have pointed out, the notion of a creator poses an immediate problem of an infinite regress. If God created the universe, what created God? To say that God, by definition, is uncreated simply begs the question. Any being capable of creating a complex world promises to be very complex himself. As the biologist Richard Dawkins has observed repeatedly, the only natural process we know of that could produce a being capable of designing things is evolution.
Sam Harris
Change is a quintessential element of progress. Without change, progress is non-existent.
Abhijit Naskar
Imagine a world in which generations of human beings come to believe that certain films were made by God or that specific software was coded by him. Imagine a future in which millions of our descendants murder each other over rival interpretations of Star Wars or Windows 98. Could anything—anything—be more ridiculous? And yet, this would be no more ridiculous than the world we are living in.
Sam Harris