Quotes by Neuroscientists - Page 4

Consciousness is our gateway to experience: It enables us to recognize Van Gogh’s starry skies, be enraptured by Beethoven’s Fifth, and stand in awe of a snowcapped mountain. Yet consciousness is subjective, personal, and famously difficult to examine.
Daniel Bor
​Let the lotus of your character be full-blown and the results will follow.
Abhijit Naskar
Any nation that does not learn to place women on the same pedestal of respect and dignity as men, will never in a thousand years attain greatness.
Abhijit Naskar
Love begins with the stage of subconscious primitive lust and attraction. I’m saying primitive because at this very early stage there is really no difference between primitive man and modern man.
Abhijit Naskar
The human brain always concocts biases to aid in the construction of a coherent mental life, exclusively suitable for an individual’s personal needs.
Abhijit Naskar
The entire idea of sin, is based on books of the dead people. It is a sociological invention founded on textual fanaticism.
Abhijit Naskar
Shallow intellect is worse than ignorance. Ignorance can be treated with knowledge, but shallow intellect, that is illusion of knowledge, is untreatable and quite dangerous to the progress and wellbeing of humanity.
Abhijit Naskar
There is no religion better than love, no color better than the color of happiness and no language better than the language of compassion.
Abhijit Naskar
Be skeptic, be doubtful, be rebellious towards every single dogma of the society. Only then there will be hope of progress for humanity.
Abhijit Naskar
The representation of women in the society, especially through mass media has been the most delusional act ever done on the grounds of human existence.
Abhijit Naskar
When phobia starts to build up in the psyche of thinking humanity against a part of its own kind, there is nothing more primordial and gruesome than that, especially when we are talking about a species that is supposedly the most intelligent one on Earth. Phobias recorded in DSM do not make a person lesser human, but Islamophobia does indeed define whether a person is really a thinking and sentient sapiens or an ignorant caveman.
Abhijit Naskar
The opportunity to deceive others is ever present and often tempting, and each instance casts us onto some of the steepest ethical terrain we ever cross. Few of us are murderers or thieves, but we have all been liars. And many of us will be unable to get safely into our beds tonight without having told several lies over the course of the day.What does this say about us and about the life we are making with one another?
Sam Harris
The hormonal interplay inside a woman’s head creates her reality. Her hormones tell her day to day what’s important. They mold her desires and values.
Abhijit Naskar
Cheating in relationship is a sign of self-regulation failure. When it happens ones, it is a mistake. When it happens twice, it is unfortunate. But when it happens thrice or more, it is a pattern indicating primitive, uncivilized inhuman behavior.
Abhijit Naskar
The Kingdom of God is, in reality, the mental kingdom of a conscientious, compassionate and courageous human.
Abhijit Naskar
WE ALMOST NEVER think of the present, and when we do, it is only to see what light it throws on our plans for the future.
António R. Damásio
It is also worth noting that one can obtain a Ph.D. in any branch of science for no other purpose than to make cynical use of scientific language in an effort to rationalize the glaring inadequacies of tbe Bible. A handful of Christians appear to have done this; some have even obtained their degrees from reputable universities. No doubt, others will follow in their footsteps. While such people are technically "scientists," they are not behaving like scientists. They simply are not engaged in an honest inquiry into the nature of the universe. And their proclamations about God and the failures of Darwinism do not in the least signify that there is a legitimate scientific controversy about evolution.
Sam Harris
Either you are homophobic or you are a human - you cannot be both.
Abhijit Naskar
This concept of the afterlife really functions as a substitute for wisdom. It functions as a substitute for really absorbing our predicament, which is that everyone is going to die; there are circumstances that are just catastrophically unfair; evil sometimes wins and injustice sometimes wins, and that the only justice we are going to find in the world is the justice we make.We have an ethical responsibility to absorb this, really down to the soles of our feet. And this notion of an afterlife, of how it's all going to work out and its all part of god's plan, is a way of shirking that responsibility.
Sam Harris
It is only when you are confident about your own self, that the society begins to hail you the way you want.
Abhijit Naskar
In the non-dual state, God, soul and universe are essentially one absolute system which is all-pervading, uncreated, self-luminous and eternal.
Abhijit Naskar
Worse than any severe mental illness, is the illness of bigotry.
Abhijit Naskar
The mystical non-sense of afterlife indeed gives solace to the mind in times of weakness, but why should the mind let its weakness be the fuel for primitiveness in the first place!
Abhijit Naskar
If poverty defines greatness, then become the poorest person on earth, in terms of weakness and bigotry. And if wealth defines glory, then become the wealthiest person on earth, in terms of courage, confidence and reasoning.
Abhijit Naskar
Man’s earliest prereligious fear of the natural forces gradually became religious in nature and got personalized and spiritualized. Eventually he learnt to say 'God works in a mysterious way'.
Abhijit Naskar
The point is, being a Christian does not mean hating or belittling the non-Christians. Being a Muslim does not mean hating or belittling the non-Muslims. Being an Atheist does not mean hating or belittling the religious people. In a civilized society, diversity in religious orientation should be the reason for celebration, not the cause for hatred and differentiation.
Abhijit Naskar
Everything that humans have achieved until now, were once merely an imagination in someone’s head.
Abhijit Naskar
Know the One - the Self, and you'll know the All.
Abhijit Naskar
Be excellent in your own terms. Do not look for approval from a single soul on this planet. Respect yourself and in time the whole world will respect you.
Abhijit Naskar
No Bible, Quran or Veda can give you religion.
Abhijit Naskar
Don't judge people by their profession, otherwise you'll end up with more enemies than friends.
Abhijit Naskar
All creation necessarily ends in this: Creators, powerless, fleeing from the things they have wrought.
David Eagleman
Harmony is not a luxury, it is an existential necessity of the species. And to achieve it, if a hundred Bibles have to be sacrificed, then be it. But for no Bible, Quran or Gita, can harmony be compromised.
Abhijit Naskar
You can reach the roof of your house by stone stairs, by wooden stairs, by bamboo steps or by a rope. Likewise, there are diverse ways of experiencing the Absolute Divinity – the Ultimate Oneness. In fact, in that blissful state of oneness, you and God are one and the same thing.
Abhijit Naskar
Energy drinks like Red Bull may give you wings for the moment, but in time it takes away your basic physical and mental wellness and leads to disastrous psychiatric and physiological conditions.
Abhijit Naskar
A child who goes to school and shares his or her lunch with the classmates, is a billion times greater and more religious than all the book-learned priests, imams, rabbis and pundits in the world combined.
Abhijit Naskar
Failures make character, not success.
Abhijit Naskar
Civilized are not those who never make mistakes – civilized are those who learn from their mistakes instead of trying to justify them.
Abhijit Naskar
In Islam, it is the "moderate" who is left to split hairs,because the basic thrust of the doctrine is undeniable: convert, sub-jugate, or kill unbelievers; kill apostates; and conquer the world.
Sam Harris
A religious individual may most gloriously carry out his or her own rituals, as a part of his or her cultural identity, but the moment, that person starts to build a wall of separation between the self and the rest of humanity, coaxed by the textual commands of a scripture, the healthy religiousness turns into dangerous fundamentalism, which is a threat to both the self and the society.
Abhijit Naskar
Spirituality is to Religion, what Love is to Marriage. Spirituality is an emotional state of the mind, just like Love, while Religion on the other hand, is a social construct, quite like Marriage.
Abhijit Naskar
From all aspects of human perception, you truly are your brain.
Abhijit Naskar
Come out my friend. Come out from the narrow lanes of darkness. Come out into the vivacious light of the day where all the glory resides.
Abhijit Naskar
Faith in God is optional, but faith in the self – in the spirit within, is imperative. Have faith in yourself. Have faith in the human first, then God if you want.
Abhijit Naskar
forming the "hydrogen bond"... is dynamic, with the exchange occurring in a few billionths of a billionth of a second. Since water molecules can "lose" two hydrogen atoms and "win" two by way of their oxygen atom, they are on average regrouped in fours, and the network of water, whether in our glass or in our cells is tetrahedral. All the same, this arrangement is not perfect in liquid water (otherwise the water would be a solid crystal), and locally there are many defects in the network. Although the motif of four water molecules is the most common in "linear" hydrogen bonds, the water molecule sometimes has a "forked tongue" with bifurcated liaisons, which creates arrangements of three or five, or even two or six molecules. This variability prevents water from being structured over a great distance and enables it to remain in a liquid state at the ambient temperature.
Denis Le Bihan
Christ attained the ultimate spiritual oneness through prayer and devotion, Moses and Mohammed through prayer, Buddha and all the Indian sages through intense meditation and so did I. And so can you.
Abhijit Naskar
Until you can leave the matter of forgiveness to God, you will not have acquired true humility.
Colleen McCullough
If you want to be drunk, become drunk with an idea.
Abhijit Naskar
There is nothing passive about mindfulness. One might even say that it expresses a specific kind of passion—a passion for discerning what is subjectively real in every moment. It is a mode of cognition that is, above all, undistracted, accepting, and (ultimately) nonconceptual. Being mindful is not a matter of thinking more clearly about experience; it is the act of experiencing more clearly, including the arising of thoughts themselves. Mindfulness is a vivid awareness of whatever is appearing in one’s mind or body—thoughts, sensations, moods—without grasping at the pleasant or recoiling from the unpleasant.
Sam Harris
No Lord Almighty created the humans out of personal will. Creationism is simply a myth created by the weak and ignorant humans out of a psychological need to have a sense of eternal security.
Abhijit Naskar
Other than the substantial physiological impact of prayer/meditation, there is another much simpler mind-body intervention that helps all religious and spiritual individuals in all walks of life, regardless of whether they pray regularly or not. It is commonly known as faith.
Abhijit Naskar
Jesus Christ, from Nazareth was a glorious man in human history – a man filled with love, compassion and purity of conscience.
Abhijit Naskar
You are modern humans of the civilized world. And modern humans rise beyond all laws and superstitions of the society. They help their fellow beings to rise from the ashes of ignorance, illusion and fear.
Abhijit Naskar
Whether you call yourself a Christian, a Jew, a Muslim, a Hindu or an Atheist, if you have kindness in your heart and compassion in your act, you are on the right path of religion.
Abhijit Naskar
Education means breaking free from the manacles of limitations put forward by primitive ignorance.
Abhijit Naskar
Can you imagine, somebody telling you, your love for your dearly beloved is a sin! Can you imagine, somebody telling you, women are inferior to men, and are meant only serve the men! Can you imagine, somebody telling you, a man can have multiple wives, and yet be deemed civilized! Here that somebody is a fundamentalist ape - a theoretical pest from the stone-age, that somehow managed to survive even amidst all the rise of reasoning and intellect.
Abhijit Naskar
[I]t is difficult to imagine a set of beliefs more suggestive of mental illness than those that lie at the heart of many of our religious traditions.
Sam Harris
If someone doesn't value evidence, what evidence are you going to provide to prove that they should value it? If someone doesn’t value logic, what logical argument could you provide to show the importance of logic?
Sam Harris
What is the point of being humans, if our actions scream with more bestiality than humanity!
Abhijit Naskar
Discriminations suit animals, not humans. And yet, the unfortunate reality is, it is the humans that discriminate each other on the grounds of imaginary labels, not the animals. This way, animals are more civilized than humans.
Abhijit Naskar