Quotes by Neuroscientists - Page 16

You may be James the American, or Mary the British, or anything else, but before all that, you are a human.
Abhijit Naskar
The world needs teachers – teachers who have broken their own shackles of indoctrination – teachers who can go beyond the narrow-mindedness of the society. A handful of these young, brave and zealous teachers in every nation, shall be enough to rekindle the spark of pure knowledge in the entire species.
Abhijit Naskar
Christ was an ordinary man who upon the attainment of absolute divinity or Nirvana or Samadhi became a better version of himself. Such an experience of divine ecstasy neurologically transformed him into a great teacher for humanity filled with love, kindness and divinity.
Abhijit Naskar
​The universe perceives itself through us, or to be more specific, through our neurons.
Abhijit Naskar
If we ask a random orthodox religious person, what is the best religion, he or she would proudly claim his or her own religion to be the best. A Christian would say Christianity is the best, a Muslim would say Islam is the best, a Jewish would say Judaism is the best and a Hindu would say Hinduism is the best. It takes a lot of mental exercise to get rid of such biases.
Abhijit Naskar
Keep in mind my friend, if an answer is not rational, then it is not an answer, but a delusion.
Abhijit Naskar
​Blind faith may be healthy for the individual mind, but it is not religion.
Abhijit Naskar
It does not matter whatsoever, what the people around you think you can or cannot do. What really matters is what you think about your capabilities.
Abhijit Naskar
The ultimate goal of humanity is knowledge.
Abhijit Naskar
Come out, O lions, and shake off the ancient mysticism and prejudices.
Abhijit Naskar
Force your kids to pursue success and they shall be drowned into the abyss of characterlessness, but let them pursue excellence and they shall rise as glorious Gods.
Abhijit Naskar
Are you a kind of person who likes to keep all your emotions hidden from the people around you! Do you prefer restraining your feelings a little too much! In that case, you must know that too much emotional suppression can have catastrophic impact over your body.
Abhijit Naskar
Religious literature from all around the world have an abundance of philosophical teachings as well, which in fact, prove quite helpful to humanity. But a rational human being must examine every single word from the scriptures before accepting it. Otherwise, it would only lead to religious bulimia, which in turn would bring chaos down on earth.
Abhijit Naskar
Some days of my vagabond life I read Arthur Schopenhauer and others Friedrich Nietzsche. I was a humble learner – an empty vessel - at the feet of the legends of human history. I was a seeker of truth, travelling through time while quenching my thirst for knowledge. And a humble learner of today becomes a strong leader of tomorrow.
Abhijit Naskar
That afternoon She listened to the grievances of the dead from two warring nations. Both sides had suffered, both sides had legitimate grievances, both pled their cases earnestly. She covered Her ears and moaned in misery. She knew Her humans were multidimensional and She could no longer live under the rigid architecture of Her youthful choices.
David Eagleman
What is natural, needs to be looked upon, scrutinized and reshaped by each generation of the world, to make it compatible with the path of progress of a civilized society.
Abhijit Naskar
Have faith in yourself. Have faith in the human first, then God if you want.
Abhijit Naskar
Mark you, no Krishna can clear your eyes and make you look with a broader vision upon life in your march upward and onward, until the Self within you morphs into Krishna – until the Self morphs into Buddha – until the Self turns into Christ.
Abhijit Naskar
Love can literally transform a human being. It can make us do either heroic or evil deeds. It is the best inspiration ever.
Abhijit Naskar
Polygamy is a luxury of the cave-people, and monogamy is an existential responsibility of the civilized society.
Abhijit Naskar
Do not listen to a single soul, but your own inner voice. Foster your will and make it as wild as possible. Dive deep into the mysterious fathoms of the universe and accomplish your purpose by hook or by crook, even if it means going down to the bottom of the ocean to meet your doom.
Abhijit Naskar
winning or losing an agonist encounter has a dramatic impact on future aggressive behavior. Winners are more likely to initiate attacks against unknown opponents, whereas losers are more circumspect and likely to retreat from unfamiliar conspecifics, adopting an opportunistic strategy, picking and choosing their fights. In the worst case scenario, animals socially subjugated by constant threat and attack from dominant conspecifics develop a submissive phenotype, showing little or no aggressive behavior, essentially eliminating themselves from the gene pool.
Randy J. Nelson
As Gazzaniga put it, "these findings all suggest that the interpretive mechanism of the left hemisphere is always hard at work, seeking the meaning of events. It is constantly looking for order and reasons, even when there is none - which leads it continually to make mistakes.
David Eagleman
Know yourself as you are – particles of start-dust moving through the eternal ocean of time, trying to make whatever little difference you can.
Abhijit Naskar
The religion I am talking about here is plain everyday humanism. That’s exactly what the person named Jesus attempted to spread, but due to innate psychological reasons, his pupils ended up constructing yet another orthodox circle with its own distinct beliefs, ideals and fantasies.
Abhijit Naskar
Misery teaches you the value of joy. It reveals to you the gravitas of human life.
Abhijit Naskar
Knowledge shall set the mind free.
Abhijit Naskar
I realized the universe had consumed my whole entity with its divine sensation of eternal bliss. All I could consciously perceive in that state of mind was absolute oneness. I felt being one with the banyan tree, under which I was sitting. I felt one with the corns in the field. I felt one with the sky and the clouds in it. As if everything was me, and I was everything. I didn’t have any perception of time or space. All that there was, was an all- pervading eternity – a state of non-dualism.
Abhijit Naskar
We are but a bunch of neurons.
Abhijit Naskar
In order to attain extraordinary greatness, first you need to be drowned in the deepest fathoms of helplessness, misery and heartache.
Abhijit Naskar
The realistic goal to be attained through spiritual practice is not some permanent state of enlightenment that admits of no further efforts, but a capacity to be free in this moment, in the midst of whatever is happening. If you can do that, you have already solved most of the problems you will encounter in life.
Sam Harris
There is no doubt that the United States has much to atone for, both domestically and abroad...To produce this horrible confection at home, start with our genocidal treatment of the Native Americans, add a couple hundred years of slavery, along with our denial of entry to Jewish refugees fleeing the death camps of the Third Reich, stir in our collusion with a long list of modern despots and our subsequent disregard for their appalling human rights records, add our bombing of Cambodia and the Pentagon Papers to taste, and then top with our recent refusals to sign the Kyoto protocol for greenhouse emissions, to support any ban on land mines, and to submit ourselves to the rulings of the International Criminal Court. The result should smell of death, hypocrisy, and fresh brimstone.
Sam Harris
Whether in the name of Just War, Witch-Hunt or the Inquisition, at various points of history for various poppycock reasons the cross had been the weapon of mass destruction in the hands of the orthodox church.
Abhijit Naskar
Become loving and become courageous. Become the inspiration which you seek outside. Bring the metaphorical heart of your limbic system in sync with the analytical powerhouse of the prefrontal cortex. From your mind shall rise the inspiration. From your mind shall rise the love. From your mind shall rise the greatest education of all.
Abhijit Naskar
in human males, testosterone appears to promote behavior intended to dominate other people. This behavior can be expressed aggressively, even violently, as well as nonaggressively. Testosterone levels, even a single baseline measurement, correlate well with dominance behavior, that is, testosterone not only affects dominance behavior but also responds to it.
Randy J. Nelson
Give me your soul and I will give you a unified humanity replete with courage, conscience and compassion.
Abhijit Naskar
Polygamy is about sex, whereas monogamy is about love.
Abhijit Naskar
Once the lotus of your inner divinity gets full-blown and you reach the mental state where all the religious giants of human history experienced the all-encompassing sense of godliness, the exuberance of the human mind turns infinite.
Abhijit Naskar
I'm the Ted Bundy of string theory.
Sam Harris
Ambiguity begets participation.
Daniel J. Levitin
Human you are, and your religion, Humanism.
Abhijit Naskar
It is always, first Self, then everything else.
Abhijit Naskar
The female brain itself is a highly intuitive emotion-processing machine, which when put to practice in the progress of the society, would do much more than any man can with all his analytical perspectives.
Abhijit Naskar
Accepting evil is worse than committing evil. You must – I repeat – you must, as a human being, stand up on the side of humanism, against barbarian inhumanism, for it is your action, that shall determine whether your children shall live in a world of peace and harmony or a world of chaos and discriminations.
Abhijit Naskar
It is an utter insult towards the fascinating neurons of your cerebral cortex, to believe anybody’s words blindly, even if that person is a Scientist or a Philosopher. So, I urge to you, that you must exercise your own reasoning and judgment (that’s what your cerebral cortex is for; to be specific the frontal lobes) at all times.
Abhijit Naskar
To explain God after merely reading the scriptures is like explaining the city of New York after seeing it only in a map.
Abhijit Naskar
Sentiments that glorify humanity know no racial distinction.
Abhijit Naskar
Love opens the most impossible gates in the world.
Abhijit Naskar
An honest man, armed with all the knowledge available to us now, could only state that in some sense, the origin of life appears at the moment to be almost a miracle, so many are the conditions which would have had to have been satisfied to get it going.
Francis Crick
Soul is nothing but the functional expression of protoplasmic activity in the brain.
Abhijit Naskar
How can a three-pound mass of jelly that you can hold in your palm imagine angels, contemplate the meaning of infinity, and even question its own place in the cosmos? Especially awe inspiring is the fact that any single brain, including yours, is made up of atoms that were forged in the hearts of countless, far-flung stars billions of years ago. These particles drifted for eons and light-years until gravity and change brought them together here, now. These atoms now form a conglomerate- your brain- that can not only ponder the very stars that gave it birth but can also think about its own ability to think and wonder about its own ability to wonder. With the arrival of humans, it has been said, the universe has suddenly become conscious of itself. This, truly, it the greatest mystery of all.
V.S. Ramachandran
Anxiety, in short, is a conscious feeling. It can arise in a bottom-up way, driven by activity in defensive circuits or from higher processes that conceptualize worry, either about an uncertain future or about existence itself.
Joseph E. Ledoux
The more you learn the biology behind your every action, emotion and behavior, the better you become at accepting others the way they are.
Abhijit Naskar
We the humans are too tiny to know something so grand as an Eternal Driving Force behind the Universe. Ultimately what would really matter in the development of our species as a whole is, we the humans serving humanity.
Abhijit Naskar
Tell them a lie big enough, they'll worship you as a sage. Tell them a truth big enough and they'll mock you.
Abhijit Naskar
Religion is the Self revealing secrets of the Self to the Self.
Abhijit Naskar
It is not easy to convey, unless one has experienced it, the dramatic feeling of sudden enlightenment that floods the mind when the right idea finally clicks into place. One immediately sees how many previously puzzling facts are neatly explained by the new hypothesis. One could kick oneself for not having the idea earlier, it now seems so obvious. Yet before, everything was in a fog.
Francis Crick
What evidence could possibly be put forward to show that one could have acted differently in the past?
Sam Harris
She wished she had cancer instead. She'd trade Alzheimer's for cancer in a heartbeat. She felt ashamed for wishing this, and it was certainly a pointless bargaining, but she permitted herself the fantasy anyway. With cancer, she'd have something to fight. There was surgery, radiation, and chemotherapy. There was the chance that she could win. Her family and the community at Harvard would rally behind her battle and consider it noble. And even if it defeated her in the end, she'd be able to look them knowingly in the eye and say good-bye before she left.
Lisa Genova
Human nature is a combination of modern conscience and ancient primitiveness. As the creation of the human mind in a state of transcendence, all scriptures are also a fusion of human conscience and gruesome primitiveness.
Abhijit Naskar