15 Quotes Tagged: Brain

with rare exceptions (chiefly the social insects), mammals and birds are the only organisms to devote substantial attention to the care of their young; an evolutionary development that, through the long period of plasticity which it permits, takes advantage of the large information-processing capability of the mammalian and primate brains. Love seems to be an invention of the mammals.

MacLean has shown that the R-complex plays an important role in aggressive behavior, territoriality, ritual and the establishment of social hierarchies. Despite occasional welcome exceptions, this seems to me to characterize a great deal of modern human bureaucratic and political behavior.

"The more you use your brain, the more brain you will have to use. " — George A. Dorsey, anthropologist

"Your brain is not designed to make you happy. Your brain has only one agenda in mind: survival. It is always watching for signs of "lack and attack." Your brain is programmed to seek out the negative — dwindling resources, destructive weather, whatever's out to hurt you. So when you switch on that radio on the way to work and get bombarded with all those reports...your brain lights up — it will now spend all day chewing over that feast of fear, worry, negativity."

Somewhere in the steaming jungles of the Carboniferous Period there emerged an organism that for the first time in the history of the world had more information in its brains than in its genes. It was an early reptile which, were we to come upon it in these sophisticated times, we would probably not describe as exceptionally intelligent… Much of the history of life since the Carboniferous Period can be described as the gradual (and certainly incomplete) dominance of brains over genes.

Those mothers with hereditary large pelvises were able to bear large-brained babies who because of their superior intelligence were able to compete successfully in adulthood with the smaller-brained offspring of mothers with smaller pelvises.

It is precisely our plasticity, our long childhood, that prevents a slavish adherence to genetically preprogrammed behavior in human beings more than in any other species… Some substantial adjustment of the relative role of each component of the triune brain is well within our powers.

I don't believe that consciousness is generated by the brain. I believe that the brain is more of a reciever of consciousness.

As in all such technological nightmares, the principal task is to foresee what is possible; to educate use and misuse; and to prevent its organizational, bureaucratic and governmental abuse.

The brain must function during the renovation […] The old parts are in charge of too many fundamental functions for them to be replaced altogether. So they wheeze along, out of-date and sometimes counterproductive, but a necessary consequence of our evolution.

What a brain is made of isn't the essential thing: it's how the brain functions. Its thought patterns, its reaction time, its ability to reason and generalise from experience. Why does the whole issue have to be drown down to the level of organic cells versus positrons?

Natural selection has served as a kind of intellectual sieve, producing brains and intelligences increasingly competent to deal with the laws of nature.

thinking is an exercise to which far too few brains are accustomed

The cerebral cortex is a liberation. We need no longer be trapped in the genetically inherited behavior patterns of lizards and baboons. We are, each of us, largely responsible for what gets put into our brains, for what, as adults, we wind up caring for and knowing about. No longer at the mercy of the reptile brain, we can change ourselves.

It is very difficult to evolve by altering the deep fabric of life; any change there is likely to be lethal. But fundamental change can be accomplished by the addition of new systems on top of old ones.