Quotes by Neuroscientists - Page 20

Religions began as realization of the self, but ended up being retaliation against each other.
Abhijit Naskar
Whatever may be the position of science, whatever may be the position of philosophy, as long as there is such a thing as death in the world, as long as there is such a thing as weakness in the human heart, as long as the human heart sheds a drop of tear in weakness, there shall be a faith in God and divinity.
Abhijit Naskar
Meditation is a secular practice, not a religious practice.
Abhijit Naskar
I am not a teacher of humanity, I am merely servant of humanity.
Abhijit Naskar
If only one generation takes action in raising their children as humans, rather than raising boys and girls, the future human civilization shall get rid of the sinister phenomenon of misogyny sooner than you can imagine.
Abhijit Naskar
Searching for truth without skepticism, is like having sex without a genital.
Abhijit Naskar
What I'm asking you to entertain is that there is nothing we need to believe on insufficient evidence in order to have deeply ethical and spiritual lives.
Sam Harris
She liked being reminded of butterflies. She remembered being six or seven and crying over the fates of the butterflies in her yard after learning that they lived for only a few days. Her mother had comforted her and told her not to be sad for the butterflies, that just because their lives were short didn't mean they were tragic. Watching them flying in the warm sun among the daisies in their garden, her mother had said to her, see, they have a beautiful life. Alice liked remembering that.
Lisa Genova
All I’m arguing for really is that we should have a conversation where the best ideas really thrive, where there’s no taboo against criticizing bad ideas, and where everyone who shows up, in order to get their ideas entertained, has to meet some obvious burdens of intellectual rigor and self-criticism and honesty—and when people fail to do that, we are free to stop listening to them. What religion has had up until this moment is a different set of rules that apply only to it, which is you have to respect my religious certainty even though I’m telling you I arrived at it irrationally.
Sam Harris
The purpose of education should be character-building.
Abhijit Naskar
Usually the term phobia refers to the psychological fear of the human mind from something that poses a threat. But when a species starts using the term fear against a biological portion of itself, there is nothing more demeaning than this.
Abhijit Naskar
Pathology can indeed cause experiences of the Kingdom of God, but not all God experiences are caused by pathology.
Abhijit Naskar
Dr. Murray made it clear to me before I left that a woman who enhoys the Act is as loose as a harlot. God gives pleasure in it only to husbands. Women are the source of evil and temptation, therefore women are to blame when men fall into fleshly error. It was Eve who seduced Adam, Eve who entered into league with the serpent, who was the Devil in disguise. So the only pleasure women are allowed is in their children.
Colleen McCullough
A newcomer to a city should first look for a suitable room for resting at night. After securing the room and keeping the luggage there, he or she may go out for sightseeing. Otherwise it'll be a lot of suffering to find a place to rest in the darkness of the night. Similarly, upon securing the eternal resting place in Self, one can freely roam around doing his or her daily works.
Abhijit Naskar
My experience of that liberation, what Buddha had called Nirvana, set me off in the path of scientific investigation of that Oneness, the thing people call, meeting with God. And that meeting triggered an unquenchable thirst in me to develop a proper scientific method to understand and further explore that apparently bizarre domain of Universal Consciousness.
Abhijit Naskar
The human body is not necessarily a human being.
Abhijit Naskar
As long as our brain is a mystery, the universe, the reflection of the structure of the brain will also be a mystery.
Santiago Ramón y Cajal
If you want to be drunk, become drunk with an idea. If you want pleasure, have pleasure from the pursuit of your passion. If you want to be indoctrinated, then be so by the natural law of humanism.
Abhijit Naskar
Your world needs you. So, use your education to become endowed with muscles of iron and nerves of steel. Do not exploit the means of education to become a man or a woman. Use it to become a human being, in the pursuit of excellence.
Abhijit Naskar
Humanity has pondered over the meaning of God since its beginning. It is one of those cognitive features that came along with the advent of modern Human Consciousness.
Abhijit Naskar
​As the neurobiology of our species gets more and more complicated, its functional expression, which we call the mind, shall get more vivid and productive.
Abhijit Naskar
Through the sacred verses filled with violence and self-righteousness, the minds of the angry individuals find a way to get rid of all their misery. At that unstable state of consciousness, they are drawn to the description of the Holy War. They visualize a glimmer of hope. They feel absolutely immersed in it. Finally when they emerge as holy warriors, they are no longer humans, from the emotional perspective. They emerge as wild beasts, neurologically almost unable to feel human emotions, like empathy, love, kindness and compassion. Consequently the whole world faces the wrath of the most primitive of all human elements in the name of God’s judgment.
Abhijit Naskar
This is not Education. It is a process of manufacturing computation devices that look like Homo sapiens.
Abhijit Naskar
​I wanted to present Neuroscience to people in a way that would diminish their differences.
Abhijit Naskar
Get rid of your useless ceremonials and be educated like your ancient ancestors – Aryabhatta, Brahmagupta, Susruta and others. Make education your purpose of life and spread it among the masses.
Abhijit Naskar
According to the most common interpretation of biblical prophecy, Jesus will return only after things have gone horribly awry. Imagine the consequences if any significant component of the U.S. government believed that the world was about to end and that its ending would be glorious. The fact that nearly half of the American population apparently believes this should be considered a moral and intellectual emergency.
Sam Harris
Holiness in the purest form is independent of all textual doctrines, all churches and all institutions.
Abhijit Naskar
.. we are not conscious of most things until we ask ourselves questions about them
David Eagleman
Any book that spreads weakness in the heart of one gender, and authoritarianism in the other, must be burnt to ashes.
Abhijit Naskar
Peace first, sophistication later. Harmony first, luxury later.
Abhijit Naskar
Good and evil are both within us. And when our primitive ancestors humanized these natural qualities of the mind, they got two completely opposite supernatural characters. One was the merciful lord almighty and the other was the wicked devil.
Abhijit Naskar
We were the only two people in the entire airport who lost total track of time, for we were consumed by space-time at that present moment. Time was irrelevant to our existence, for we didn’t want to exist outside the tight and glorious knots of each other’s arms. Time is basically an illusion created by the mind to aid in our sense of temporal presence in the vast ocean of space. Without the neurons to create a virtual perception of the past and the future based on all our experiences, there is no actual existence of the past and the future. All that there is, is the present.
Abhijit Naskar
Time is basically an illusion created by the mind to aid in our sense of temporal presence in the vast ocean of space. Without the neurons to create a virtual perception of the past and the future based on all our experiences, there is no actual existence of the past and the future. All that there is, is the present.
Abhijit Naskar
The agonizing flames of misery can turn the human heart inside your skull into a breeding ground for virtues.
Abhijit Naskar
More than Captain America your kids need Amelia Earhart – more than Ant Man, they need Abraham Lincoln - more than Green Arrow they need Gandhi – more than Iron Man they need Isaac Newton.
Abhijit Naskar
Rain, rain, rain. Like a benediction from some vast inscrutable hand, long withheld, finally given. The blessed, wonderful rain. For rain meant grass, and grass was life.
Colleen McCullough
What we do in every other area of our lives (other than religion), is, rather than respect somebody's beliefs, we evaluate their reasons.
Sam Harris
The argument against faith is all based upon the rigorous analysis of the scriptures, and not upon the objective observation of the actual individual sensation of faith. Historical experiences of the Kingdom of God gave rise to all the scriptures in the world, but the scriptures themselves don’t account for the actual globally prevalent psychological element of faith or divinity in the human mind. Faith is a natural evolutionary trait of the human mind, selected by Mother Nature as an internal coping-mechanism.
Abhijit Naskar
The Kingdom of God is an earthly experience which manifests in an unearthly manner.
Abhijit Naskar
even if Noam Chomsky were right about everything, the Islamic doctrines related to martyrdom, jihad, blasphemy, apostasy, the rights of women and homosexuals, etc. would still present huge problems for the emergence of a global civil society (and these are problems quite unlike those presented by similar tenets in other faiths, for reasons that I have explained at length elsewhere and touch on only briefly here). And any way in which I might be biased or blinded by “the religion of the state,” or any other form of cultural indoctrination, has absolutely no relevance to the plight of Shiites who have their mosques, weddings, and funerals bombed by Sunni extremists, or to victims of rape who are beaten, imprisoned, or even killed as “adulteresses” throughout the Muslim world. I hope it goes without saying that the Afghan girls who even now are risking their lives by merely learning to read would not be best compensated for their struggles by being handed copies of Chomsky’s books enumerating the sins of the West
Sam Harris
The dangerous enemies of your species are fundamentalism, intolerance, separatism, extremism, hostility and prejudicial fear, be it religious, atheistic or political.
Abhijit Naskar
Human brain is structured to avoid any kind of refutation of one's religious beliefs.
Abhijit Naskar
If you don’t act now, the day is not far, that this beautiful planet of yours, which you call home, shall be turned into a dry barren wasteland by the blood-sucking fundamentalists.
Abhijit Naskar
As Carl Jung put it, “In each of us there is another whom we do not know.” As Pink Floyd sang, “There’s someone in my head, but it’s not me.
David Eagleman
The brain is heavily influenced by genes. But from birth through young adulthood, the part of the human brain that most defines us (frontal cortex) is less a product of the genes with which you started life than of what life has thrown at you. Because it is the least constrained by genes and most sculpted by experience. This must be so, to be the supremely complex social species that we are. Ironically, it seems that the genetic program of human brain development has evolved to, as much as possible, free the frontal cortext from genes.
Robert M. Sapolsky
Becoming a part of a movement doesn't help anybody think clearly.
Sam Harris
Only if the humans could make a little effort from the bottom of their heart to discard their affinity with religious dogmas, and embrace their inner divinity, the world would become a true peaceful paradise with zero conflicts on the basis of religious orientation.
Abhijit Naskar
The book from which to learn religion, is your own mind.
Abhijit Naskar
Each time we check a Twitter feed or Facebook update, we encounter something novel and feel more connected socially (in a kind of weird impersonal cyber way) and get another dollop of reward hormones. But remember, it is the dumb, novelty-seeking portion of the brain driving the limbic system that induces this feeling of pleasure, not the planning, scheduling, higher-level thought centers in the prefrontal cortex. Make no mistake: E-mail, Facebook, and Twitter checking constitute a neural addiction
Daniel J. Levitin
One who does not believe in the self is an atheist. If you believe in yourself, then you are the most religious person on earth.
Abhijit Naskar
When you are wise, peace shall follow.
Abhijit Naskar
Plato, Socrates, Aristotle and many more great minds laid the groundwork for the development of modern science. Over the foundation of philosophy, history witnessed the daring ventures of human excellence by both philosophical and scientific geniuses, such as Leonardo-da-Vinci, Copernicus, Galileo, Kepler, Bacon, Darwin, Newton and so on. And the chain of reaction they triggered with their extraordinarily abnormal thinking, given their surrounding ignorance and fundamentalism, resulted into the evolution of our modern science.
Abhijit Naskar
You can be in Downward Dog, hating every second of it. Or you can be in this pose, peaceful and nonreactive, breathing calmly. Either way, you’re in this pose. You decide the quality of your experience. Be the thermostat, not the temperature.
Lisa Genova
I do not hail myself as an atheist, for I am not an atheist. In fact, I have met God, felt God and even lived in God, same as the prophets of human history. But mark you, humanism cannot be compromised because of some doctrines presented as God’s command. In the domain of transcendence, all commands received by the mind, are created by the mind itself. They manifest as divine revelations, but in reality, they are revelations rising from the mind itself. And as such, they have potential to be both good and evil.
Abhijit Naskar
It has always been science versus fundamentalism, not science versus religion.
Abhijit Naskar
Only those who live for others become immortal, and the rest simply perish within a few weeks , or alas days, after their mortal demise.
Abhijit Naskar
Religion is an experience, not a bunch of doctrines.
Abhijit Naskar
All the bloodsheds in human history have been caused by men, not women.
Abhijit Naskar
Experience, derived from scientific investigation, led to all the scientific literature in history. Likewise, experience, derived from religious transcendence, led to all the religious scriptures in history. It's never the other way around.
Abhijit Naskar
Sexual thoughts float through a man’s brain many times a day, while on the contrary a woman has them only one to four times a day.
Abhijit Naskar