Quotes by Neuroscientists - Page 3

The distinction between diseases of "brain" and "mind," between "neurological" problems and "psychological" or "psychiatric" ones, is an unfortunate cultural inheritance that permeates society and medicine. It reflects a basic ignorance of the relation between brain and mind. Diseases of the brain are seen as tragedies visited on people who cannot be blamed for their condition, while diseases of the mind, especially those that affect conduct and emotion, are seen as social inconveniences for which sufferers have much to answer. Individuals are to be blamed for their character flaws, defective emotional modulation, and so on; lack of willpower is supposed to be the primary problem.
António R. Damásio
Meditation brings Nirvana, and Nirvana brings Buddhahood.
Abhijit Naskar
Islamophobia defines whether a person is really a thinking and sentient sapiens or an ignorant caveman.
Abhijit Naskar
The real battle is within yourself.
Abhijit Naskar
The only measure of judging a human being is through that person’s character, because character is not determined by race, religion, gender or social status. And one who recognizes this simple fact of human life behaves the same with the scientist, the janitor and the sex-worker.
Abhijit Naskar
In general, if we leave out the atheistic fraction of world population that possesses no notable optimistic or positive Qualia of God, the majority of the human species possesses a beneficial Qualia of God enriched with blissful sentiments.
Abhijit Naskar
O my mighty sisters and brothers, forget not that the ideal of humanity is the search of truth. In this pursuit, countless souls have sacrificed themselves in the past. And in this pursuit, countless more shall need to sacrifice themselves.
Abhijit Naskar
What is the meaning of life? What is our purpose on earth? These are some of the great, false questions of religion. We need not answer them, for they are badly posed, but we can live our answers all the same. At a minimum, we can create the conditions for human flourishing in this life--the only life of which any of us can be certain. That means we should not terrify our children with thoughts of hell or poison them with hatred for infidels. We should not teach our sons to consider women their future property or convince our daughters that they are property even now. And we must decline to tell our children that human history began with bloody magic and will end with bloody magic in a glorious war between the righteous and the rest.
Sam Harris
It’s better not to hold your feelings inside too much and express them to a dear one freely, than to pay thousands of dollars to a psychiatrist for the same outburst of emotions later. Emotions are a bonding mechanism for humans. So, use ‘em, abuse ‘em and utilize ‘em.
Abhijit Naskar
Never forget O Brave One, the best kind of existence is to exist for others.
Abhijit Naskar
...empathy is the driving force behind the experience of emotions in narratives (Keen, 2006; Mar et al., 2006; Oatley, 2011).
Mikkel Wallentin
The faith of religion is belief on insufficient evidence.
Sam Harris
Think of the good that Christ imparted on the society. And think of the great evil that has been done through fanaticism over one damn phrase “salvation through Christ, the Son of God.
Abhijit Naskar
The black, the white, the brown, the red, the yellow, the hetero, the homo, the trans, the poor, the rich, the literate, the illiterate, the weak, the strong – all are my sisters and brothers. My life is their life. And till the last breath in my body, I shall be serving you all with all the power in my veins. And beyond death, my ideas shall be serving you for eternity.
Abhijit Naskar
All that two lovers want, is to be one with the other in a moment of ecstasy.
Abhijit Naskar
It is all about the trade of ignorance. And India is such a bronze-age nation that is filled with these trades (astrology, palm reading, vastushashtra and others).
Abhijit Naskar
Liberals tend to understand that a person can be lucky or unlucky in all matters relevant to his success. Conservatives, however, often make a religious fetish of individualism.Many seem to have absolutely no awareness of how fortunate one must be to succeed at anything in life, no matter how hard one works. One must be lucky to be able to work. One must be lucky to be intelligent, physically healthy, and not bankrupted in middle age by the illness of a spouse.
Sam Harris
From the tiniest experience of your daily life to your grand perception of the universe, in various situations, the human brain tends to create its own myth and stories.
Abhijit Naskar
Scriptures are meant to serve humanity, not humanity to serve scriptures.
Abhijit Naskar
Emotion doesn’t arise from the dreams, rather your deepest emotion orchestrates your dream.
Abhijit Naskar
The purpose of my work is not to educate people, rather it is to enrich human life with self-awareness.
Abhijit Naskar
Heroes and scholars represent the opposite extremes... The scholar struggles for the benefit of all humanity, sometimes to reduce physical effort, sometimes to reduce pain, and sometimes to postpone death, or at least render it more bearable. In contrast, the patriot sacrifices a rather substantial part of humanity for the sake of his own prestige. His statue is always erected on a pedestal of ruins and corpses... In contrast, all humanity crowns a scholar, love forms the pedestal of his statues, and his triumphs defy the desecration of time and the judgment of history.
Santiago Ramón y Cajal
Real science begins with curiosity and madness.
Abhijit Naskar
Any idea of separation is bondage. True liberation of the mind is in non-differentiation.
Abhijit Naskar
Memory is the coherence of life, that possesses all your emotions, and ambitions. Without it, your joyous as well as agonizing experiences of life won’t have any significance to you whatsoever.
Abhijit Naskar
It's the closest place to nowhere that she can think of. And nowhere is exactly where she wants to be today.
Lisa Genova
Tell a devout Christian that his wife is cheating on him, or that frozen yogurt can make a man invisible, and he is likely to require as much evidence as anyone else, and to be persuaded only to the extent that you give it. Tell him that the book he keeps by his bed was written by an invisible deity who will punish him with fire for eternity if he fails to accept its every incredible claim about the universe, and he seems to require no evidence what so ever.
Sam Harris
A Muslim who prays five times a day and yet beats his wife at home, is no religious person. A Christian who goes to Church every Sunday, and yet never talks to his or her neighbor with a smile on the face, is no religious person. On the other hand, an outspoken atheist who most lovingly talks and listens to people of all religions without any bigotry or prejudice is a hundred times more religious than all the theoretical preachers of all religions combined.
Abhijit Naskar
The world needs the kind of religion that sets humanity free, not the kind that binds it with textual fanaticism. The world needs the kind of religion that humanizes the society, not the kind that dehumanizes it.
Abhijit Naskar
The point is, education in its truest form, is the foundation of all human endeavors. It is the most noble of all the civilized elements of human consciousness. Education enables the humans to achieve their fullest mental and physical potential in both personal and social life. The ability of being educated is what distinguishes humans from animals. You can teach a cockatoo to repeat a bunch of vocabularies, but you cannot teach it to construct a space shuttle and go to the moon.
Abhijit Naskar
The common denominator of all jokes is a path of expectation that is diverted by an unexpected twist necessitating a complete reinterpretation of all the previous facts — the punch-line…Reinterpretation alone is insufficient. The new model must be inconsequential. For example, a portly gentleman walking toward his car slips on a banana peel and falls. If he breaks his head and blood spills out, obviously you are not going to laugh. You are going to rush to the telephone and call an ambulance. But if he simply wipes off the goo from his face, looks around him, and then gets up, you start laughing. The reason is, I suggest, because now you know it’s inconsequential, no real harm has been done. I would argue that laughter is nature’s way of signaling that "it’s a false alarm." Why is this useful from an evolutionary standpoint? I suggest that the rhythmic staccato sound of laughter evolved to inform our kin who share our genes; don’t waste your precious resources on this situation; it’s a false alarm. Laughter is nature’s OK signal.
V.S. Ramachandran
Stop groveling, stop whining and start working!
Abhijit Naskar
The only thing that guarantees an open-ended collaboration among human beings, the only thing that guarantees that this project is truly open-ended, is a willingness to have our beliefs and behaviors modified by the power of conversation.
Sam Harris
If your golf instructor were to insist that you shave your head, sleep no more than four hours each night, renounce sex, and subsist on a diet of raw vegetables, you would find a new golf instructor. However, when gurus make demands of this kind, many of their students simply do as directed.
Sam Harris
We must continually remind ourselves that there is a difference between what is natural and what is actually good for us.
Sam Harris
Meggie dropped to her knees, scrambling frantically to collect the miniature clothes before more damage was done them, then she began picking among the grass blades where she thought the pearls might have fallen. Her tears were blinding her, the grief in her heart new, for until now she had never owned anything worth grieving for.
Colleen McCullough
No knowledge comes from the outside world or an imaginary supernatural paradise.
Abhijit Naskar
This one word “Love” has revolutionized the whole planet in an evolutionary way. Without this, none of us might have been born.
Abhijit Naskar
Throw away the newspapers. Discard all the useless debates and gossiping. Start working in silence. Start working on your passion. And make the news yourself.
Abhijit Naskar
​Everything that makes you, you, is a biologically existential expression of your entire brain.
Abhijit Naskar
After all, what is education, if not the unparalleled means to transcend the self- imposed physical limits of the mind and the body.
Abhijit Naskar
The problem of vindicating an omnipotent and omniscient God in the face of evil is insurmountable. Those who claim to have surmounted it, by recourse to notions of free will and other incoherencies, have merely heaped bad philosophy onto bad ethics.
Sam Harris
There is a scientific explanation behind everything. Finding it depends on whether you give in to the much simpler supernatural explanation.
Abhijit Naskar
Because vision appears so effortless, we are like fish challenged to understand water.
David Eagleman
Make films that purify the soul with the flow of rational, vigorous and compassionate thinking.
Abhijit Naskar
We no longer have any time to waste, entertaining our dark side. It is time we recognize those evil elements of our internal world and start working untiringly on eradicating them.
Abhijit Naskar
Awakening into the God state makes all the perceptual limitations of the mind disappear, just like a bucket of muddy water turns crystal-clear once poured into the ocean.
Abhijit Naskar
Sometimes, humanity surprises me with all its lack of control over the primordial urges. These innate urges are the biological traits that make us similar to the rest of the animal kingdom. But the modern qualities that make us superior to all the animals are intellect and self-control.
Abhijit Naskar
A Neuroscientist can be the smartest man (or woman) on earth in his understanding of the human mind. He may know all the neurochemical changes underlying an outrageous behavior of a person. But when he gets mad himself, very little of his own scientific intellect would actually come in handy for him to control his rage. The virtue of self-control is a skill, which requires practice, regardless of all the neurobiological expertise in the world.
Abhijit Naskar
Never confuse belief with knowledge.
Abhijit Naskar
Reality is a construct of the neurons.
Abhijit Naskar
Only a handful of individuals in human history can be truly hailed as Christians, such as Tolstoy, Gandhi, Mother Teresa, Rumi, Martin Luther King Jr. and a few others.
Abhijit Naskar
Pleasure and Pain participate equally in moulding character.
Abhijit Naskar
To a woman sexual intimacy is more a tool to get mentally close to her partner than merely a means to physical pleasure.
Abhijit Naskar
Everything in your mental life proceeds in proper neurological order. If you could have sufficient insight into all the inner and outer parts of your mental life, along with remembrance and intelligence enough to consider all the circumstances and take them into account, you would be a true prophet and visualize the future in the present as in a mirror.
Abhijit Naskar
Are you really surprised by the endurance of religion? What ideology is likely to be more durable than one that conforms, at every turn, to our powers of wishful thinking? Hope is easy; knowledge is hard. Science is the one domain in which we human beings make a truly heroic effort to counter our innate biases and wishful thinking. Science is the one endeavor in which we have developed a refined methodology for separating what a person hopes is true from what he has good reason to believe. The methodology isn't perfect, and the history of science is riddled with abject failures of scientific objectivity. But that is just the point-these have been failures of science, discovered and corrected by-what, religion? No, by good science.
Sam Harris
Realization of your inner divinity is the scientific religion of thinking humanity.
Abhijit Naskar
We biologists often use the phrase “Mother Nature” to refer to the entire system of Nature that we see around us, but it is not really an entity, and it does not have any real concern for any of its living creatures – it lives on with or without us; it is in our human psychology to impose a human-like identity upon any grand system that we encounter around us – it gives us a sense of closeness to that system and makes us feel an essential part of it. When I say, Mother Nature designed us, or programmed us, I am simply referring to the process of natural selection.
Abhijit Naskar
Stop nourishing other people’s ideas and beliefs in your life. Take up your own idea and endeavor to accomplish it.
Abhijit Naskar
It’s time that Islam should be redefined by the world based upon, the goodness of all the peace-loving Muslims, instead of the theoretical teachings of some books, be it Quran or the Hadith.
Abhijit Naskar