Nature Neuroscience Quotes

Imagine for a moment that we are nothing but the product of billions of years of molecules coming together and ratcheting up through natural selection, that we are composed only of highways of fluids and chemicals sliding along roadways within billions of dancing cells, that trillions of synaptic conversations hum in parallel, that this vast egglike fabric of micron-thin circuitry runs algorithms undreamt of in modern science, and that these neural programs give rise to our decision making, loves, desires, fears, and aspirations. To me, that understanding would be a numinous experience, better than anything ever proposed in anyone's holy text.

But recently I have learned from discussions with a variety of scientists and other non-philosophers (e.g., the scientists participating with me in the Sean Carroll workshop on the future of naturalism) that they lean the other way: free will, in their view, is obviously incompatible with naturalism, with determinism, and very likely incoherent against any background, so they cheerfully insist that of course they don't have free will, couldn’t have free will, but so what? It has nothing to do with morality or the meaning of life. Their advice to me at the symposium was simple: recast my pressing question as whether naturalism (materialism, determinism, science...) has any implications for what we may call moral competence. For instance, does neuroscience show that we cannot be responsible for our choices, cannot justifiably be praised or blamed, rewarded or punished? Abandon the term 'free will' to the libertarians and other incompatibilists, who can pursue their fantasies untroubled. Note that this is not a dismissal of the important issues; it’s a proposal about which camp gets to use, and define, the term. I am beginning to appreciate the benefits of discarding the term 'free will' altogether, but that course too involves a lot of heavy lifting, if one is to avoid being misunderstood.

Now I have to say I'm a complete atheist, I have no religious views myself and no spiritual views, except very watered down humanistic spiritual views, and consciousness is just a fact of life, it's a natural fact of life.

The cause-effect sequences in our brains are just as determining, just as inescapable, as anywhere else in Nature.

The human has not one but two births – first, when a person is born from the mother’s womb, and second, when that person rises from the socio-culturally imposed cocoon of prejudices and ignorance.

Barry L. Jacobs and colleagues from the neuroscience program at Princeton University showed that when mice ran every day on an exercise wheel, they developed more brain cells and they learned faster than sedentary controls. I believe in mice.

Good and evil are both fundamental features of the human mind.

One way or another we are all biased, but still we have the modern cortical capacity to choose whether or not to let the harmful biases dictate our behavior.

It’s a remarkable fact that the people who have gone the very deepest into the mind—the sages and saints of every religious tradition—all say essentially the same thing: your fundamental nature is pure, conscious, peaceful, radiant, loving, and wise, and it is joined in mysterious ways with the ultimate underpinnings of reality, by whatever name we give That.

Fighting the Blues with Greens Here’s a statistic you probably haven’t heard: Higher consumption of vegetables may cut the odds of developing depression by as much as 62 percent.26 A review in the journal Nutritional Neuroscience concluded that, in general, eating lots of fruits and veggies may present “a non-invasive, natural, and inexpensive therapeutic means to support a healthy brain.

Understanding the physiological and neurological features of spiritual experiences should not be interpreted as an attempt to discredit their reality or explain them away. Rather, it demonstrates their physical existence as a fundamental, shared part of human nature. Spiritual experiences cannot be considered irrational, since we have seen that, given their physiological basis, experiencers' descriptions of them are perfectly rational... All human perceptions of material reality can ultimately be documented as chemical reactions in our neurobiology; all our sensations, thoughts, and memories are ultimately reducible to chemistry, yet we feel no need to deny the existence of the material world; it is not less real because our perceptions of it are biologically based... It is not rational to assume that the spiritual reality of core experiences is any less real than the more scientifically documentable material reality.

​Everything that makes you, you, is a biologically existential expression of your entire brain.

Mother Nature created God as a neurological anti-depressant sentiment, but Man tore that God apart into pieces and made citadels of differentiation out of them.

The human brain has not evolved to perceive reality, it has evolved to create an illusion of reality. That's why an exciting lie gains more attention than a boring truth.

Nothing has more power over a man than a woman's tears.

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'.

One brain’s blueprint may promote joy more readily than most; in another, pessimism reigns. Whether happiness infuses or eludes a person depends, in part, on the DNA he has chanced to receive.

Neuro-nonsense occurs when people take on board the supposed discoveries of neuroscience – all these brain images that tell us, for instance, that we’ve discovered now exactly what love is, it’s this little bit in the hippocampus, so we have no need to question what the meaning of these things is. But these images have no meaning, any more than a chemical reaction in a test-tube has a meaning. All kinds of nonsense comes into being as a result of this, the nonsense being essentially what happens when our own human nature is confiscated from us by science or pseudosciences which claim to explain us without really going into the question of what we are.

Every single human being is neurologically predisposed to be biased in various walks of life. It is biologically impossible to be absolutely free from all biases, nevertheless, the more a person rigorously trains the self to be rational and conscientious, the more that self becomes strong enough to keep the biases in check, never to let them run rampant over the psyche.

Humans are lamentably insecure creatures.

It is better to be foolish than a dilettante.

In either case genetics and neuroscience are showing that a heart of darkness cannot always be blamed on parents or society.

A flawless delusion is more appealing to the human mind than a flawed reality.

A belief has no relation to the truth, nevertheless it is a quintessential part of human existence.

Materialism represents an astonishing failure of the human intellect to see what’s right under its nose. It hides nature’s marvelous simplicity behind a veil of contrivance. Its continuing survival in face of the mounting odds of reason, evidence and direct experience requires constant and deliberate maintenance. Indeed, materialism serves powerful economic and political interests.

People hate thinking systematically about how to optimize their relationships. It is normal to hear someone say: “I will just wait for something to happen naturally” when talking about one of the most important aspects of their life while genuinely believing that this approach has reasonable odds of success. Imagine if people said the same thing about their careers. It would sound truly bizarre for someone to expect a successful career to “just happen naturally” and yet it is entirely normalized to expect that good relationships will. People pay tens of thousands of dollars to receive degrees in computer science, marketing, and neuroscience. They make tough sacrifices with the understanding that the skills and knowledge they build in these domains will dramatically affect their quality of life. Ironically, people spend very little time systematically examining mating strategies—despite the fact that a robust understanding of the subject can dramatically affect quality of life. We will happily argue that your sexual and relationship skills matter more than your career skills. If you want to be wealthy, the fastest way to become so is to marry rich. Nothing makes happiness easier than a loving, supportive relationship, while one of the best ways to ensure you are never happy is to enter or fail to recognize and escape toxic relationships. If you want to change the world, a great partner can serve as a force multiplier. A draft horse can pull 8000 pounds, while two working together can pull 24,000 pounds. When you have a partner with whom you can synergize, you gain reach and speed that neither you nor your partner could muster individually. Heck, even if you are the type of person to judge your self-worth by the number of people with whom you have slept, a solid grasp of mating strategies will help you more than a lifetime of hitting the gym (and we say this with full acknowledgment that hitting the gym absolutely helps). A great romantic relationship will even positively impact your health (a 2018 paper in Psychophysiology found that the presence of a partner in a room lowered participants’ blood pressure) and increase your lifespan (a 2019 paper in the journal Health Psychology showed individuals in happy marriages died young at a 20% lower rate). 

The two worst things you can do for yourself are focusing on past events that you can’t change or focusing on present events and comparing them with your future. One is long gone, and one has yet to happen. Neither should be your concern.

bring to mind the feeling of being with someone who loves you, while calling up heartfelt emotions such as gratitude or fondness. Next, bring empathy to the difficulties of the other person. Opening to his (even subtle) suffering, let sympathy and goodwill naturally arise. (These steps flow together in actual practice.) Then, in your mind, offer explicit wishes, such as May you not suffer.

It has been long since thinking humanity has learnt that love is a majestic creation of the brain, yet that knowledge hasn’t made love be deemed any less glorious. Then why should it threaten the religious believer to learn that divinity as well is a natural creation of the brain!

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.

All the terrorism in the world that fester in the name of religion, are in fact not religious in nature, rather they are socio-political. Their roots are not religion, but socio-political condition. Religion is only used as a divine tool of authoritative justification in the search of absolution.

Consider the following sentence: “Minkowski’s talk on the nature of time ended on time, but it seemed to drag on for a long time.” This contrived sentence attempts to capture three meanings of the word time that will be important for our goals. In order, I will refer to them as natural time, clock time, and subjective time. Intuitively

Repudiation reinforces beliefs.

All our sentiments - religious, romantic or any other - are born in the neurons.

Humanism is not a single character. It is a magnificent blend of various emotional and behavioral traits that are unique to the human mind.

​Consciousness is simple, if you are bold enough to accept it as simple.

We humans are the Tyrannosaurus Rex of mammals.

The human brain always concocts biases to aid in the construction of a coherent mental life, exclusively suitable for an individual’s personal needs.

The human mind has a primordial affinity towards ideas of miracles and mysticism, especially, in times of weakness.

Prejudice is grounded on sentiments, that's where reason must intervene, and coldness is grounded on logic, that's where warmth must prevail.

What we value so much, the altruistic “good” side of human nature, can also have a dark side. Altruism can be the back door to hell.

In everyday life of the common human, reason takes a back seat and emotions dictate all significant behavior.

The purpose of perception is not understanding but preservation.

your fundamental nature is pure, conscious, peaceful, radiant, loving, and wise, and it is joined in mysterious ways with the ultimate underpinnings of reality, by whatever name we give That. Although your true nature may be hidden momentarily by stress and worry, anger and unfulfilled longings, it still continues to exist. Knowing this can be a great comfort.

Whatever their temperament, if children are part of your life, encourage them to pause for a moment at the end of the day (or at any other natural interval, such as the last minute before the school bell) to remember what went well and think about things that make them happy (e.g., a pet, their parents’ love, a goal scored in soccer). Then have those positive feelings and thoughts sink in.

When you don’t have explanation for a certain phenomenon, as a real human, you should suspend judgement, instead of concocting supernatural explanations out of ignorance and primordial fanaticism.

There is evidence from evolutionary biology, sociology, neuroscience, and many other fields that we need to abandon our old misanthropic (and misogynist) notions for a sweeping new view of human nature.

According to neuroscience research from 2012, it is intrinsically rewarding to talk about oneself. This is perhaps why Facebook, Twitter and blogging platforms like Tumblr have been such successful products.

For Dawkins, atheism is a necessary consequence of evolution. He has argued that the religious impulse is simply an evolutionary mistake, a ‘misfiring of something useful’, it is a kind if virus, parasitic on cognitive systems naturally selected because they had enabled a species to survive. Dawkins is an extreme exponent of the scientific naturalism, originally formulated by d’Holbach, that has now become a major worldview among intellectuals. More moderate versions of this “scientism” have been articulated by Carl Sagan, Steven Weinberg, and Daniel Dennett, who have all claimed that one has to choose between science and faith. For Dennett, theology has been rendered superfluous, because biology can provide a better explanation of why people are religious. But for Dawkins, like the other “new atheists” – Sam Harris, the young American philosopher and student of neuroscience, and Christopher Hitchens, critic and journalist – religion is the cause of the problems of our world; it is the source of absolute evil and “poisons everything.” They see themselves in the vanguard of a scientific/rational movement that will eventually expunge the idea of God from human consciousness. But other atheists and scientists are wary of this approach. The American zoologist Stephen Jay Gould (1941-2002) followed Monod in his discussion of the implications of evolution. Everything in the natural world could indeed be explained by natural selection, but Gould insisted that science was not competent to decide whether God did or did not exist, because it could only work with natural explanations. Gould had no religious axe to grind; he described himself as an atheistically inclined agnostic, but pointed out that Darwin himself had denied he was an atheist and that other eminent Darwinians - Asa Gray, Charles D. Walcott, G. G. Simpson, and Theodosius Dobzhansky - had been either practicing Christians or agnostics. Atheism did not, therefore, seem to be a necessary consequence of accepting evolutionary theory, and Darwinians who held forth dogmatically on the subject were stepping beyond the limitations that were proper to science.

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.

English is my second language, My first language is love. Neuroscience is my second sense, My first sense is love. Theology is my second faith, My first faith is interfaith. Philosophy is my second nature, My first nature is to assimilate.

Meaney and colleagues, one of the most cited papers published in the prestigious journal Nature Neuroscience. They had shown previously that offspring of more “attentive” rat mothers (those that frequently nurse, groom, and lick their pups) become adults with lower glucocorticoid levels, less anxiety, better learning, and delayed brain aging. The paper showed that these changes were epigenetic—that mothering style altered the on/off switch in a gene relevant to the brain’s stress response.

People do not care about right or wrong - they don't care about truth and reasoning - they are subconsciously driven by their instinct for survival, towards confidence, charm and charisma, just like moths are drawn towards a burning candle to face their inevitable demise.

The science of Chaos teaches us that everything is interconnected, but the contemporary developments in neuroscience, getting started with the brain neurons and their multiple connections, reveal the topology of the brain, a miniature of the universal geometry of everything.

It's been long since thinking humanity has learnt that love is a majestic creation of the brain, yet that knowledge hasn't made love be deemed any less glorious. Then why should it threaten the religious believer to learn that divinity as well is a natural creation of the brain?

Nature, independent of mind, is devoid of both order and chaos – it is beyond the dualistic battle between order and chaos. We create our own order and chaos, based on our own knacks, desires, beliefs, biases and knowledge, and then we impose that order and chaos upon the reality that we create.

Why should caring for others begin with the self? There is an abundance of rather vague ideas about this issue, which I am sure neuroscience will one day resolve. Let me offer my own “hand waving” explanation by saying that advanced empathy requires both mental mirroring and mental separation. The mirroring allows the sight of another person in a particular emotional state to induce a similar state in us. We literally feel their pain, loss, delight, disgust, etc., through so-called shared representations. Neuroimaging shows that our brains are similarly activated as those of people we identify with. This is an ancient mechanism: It is automatic, starts early in life, and probably characterizes all mammals. But we go beyond this, and this is where mental separation comes in. We parse our own state from the other’s. Otherwise, we would be like the toddler who cries when she hears another cry but fails to distinguish her own distress from the other’s. How could she care for the other if she can’t even tell where her feelings are coming from? In the words of psychologist Daniel Goleman, “Self-absorption kills empathy.” The child needs to disentangle herself from the other so as to pinpoint the actual source of her feelings.

We live in the era of the “bottom line” mentality, with TED talks, sound bites, and news summaries. There is so much information to digest, we can only hope to grasp the world with compact and seemingly complete stories. We don’t want to be left dangling. We are all suckers for this information diet, and we all have come to depend on it, just like we have all succumbed to the instant gratification of texting and cell phones. And yet what separates the dilettante from the sophisticate is the appreciation that everything is not simple. The trick seems to be able to talk clearly while remaining fully aware of the underlying complexity of any story. For me it is the overwhelming realization that when trying to figure out how the brain does its masterful trick of enabling minds, we are barely at the starting line. Dig as deep as you want into human history: As long as there is a written record of thought, there is a record of humans wondering about the nature of life. It becomes obvious that all of us are just hopping into an ongoing conversation, not structuring one with a beginning, a middle, and an end. Humans may have discovered some of the constraints on the thought processes, but we have not yet been able to tell the full story.

If we are to presuppose that the universe is inherently material, that we are emergent organisms from this universe and by nature we seek and generate meaning, meaning itself becomes a substructure of the universe. To think otherwise is to dissociate ourself from the universe, which contradicts the latter belief

By nature, that mind is easily fooled by supernatural mysticism. It is extremely gullible. And no matter how much we the civilized human beings advance in the fields of modern sciences, there is always a part of us, that tries to allure us with magical nonsense, because that nonsense has been with us since the birth of humanity.

I am optimistic that the so-called hard problem of consciousness will be solved by empirical and conceptual advances - working in tandem - made in cognitive neuroscience. What is the hard problem? No-one has a clue (at the moment) how to answer the question of why the neural basis of the phenomenal feel of my experience of, for example red, is the neural basis of that particular phenomenal feel rather than a different one or none at all. There is an explanatory gap here that we do not know how to close now, but I have faith that we will someday. The hard problem is conceptually and explanatorily prior to the issue of what the nature of the self is, as can be seen in part by noting that the problem would persist even for experiences that aren't organised into selves. No doubt solving the hard problem (i.e closing the explanatory gap) will require ideas we cannot now anticipate. The mind-body problem is so singular that no appeal to the closing of past explanatory gaps justifies optimism. But I remain optimistic nonetheless.

Just sitting quietly, doing nothing at all, your brain churns through more information in thirty seconds than the Hubble Space Telescope has processed in thirty years. A morsel of cortex one cubic millimeter in size—about the size of a grain of sand—could hold two thousand terabytes of information, enough to store all the movies ever made, trailers included, or about 1.2 billion copies of this book. Altogether, the human brain is estimated to hold something on the order of two hundred exabytes of information, roughly equal to “the entire digital content of today’s world,” according to Nature Neuroscience.*1 If that is not the most extraordinary thing in the universe, then we certainly have some wonders yet to find.

It is in the nature of the human mind to give in, and hold on, to the source of solace with all the might it can muster. Life is hard and any figure that tends to ease the subjective perception of that hardship, attains a high pedestal of utmost reverence in the realm of the individual mind. It all takes place at a molecular level in the human brain with the purpose of self-preservation.

Richard and I both believe that something transcendental is involved with the mind, consciousness, and the path of awakening—call it God, Spirit, Buddha-nature, the Ground, or by no name at all. Whatever it is, by definition it’s beyond the physical universe. Since it cannot be proven one way or another, it is important—and consistent with the spirit of science—to respect it as a possibility.

For a man, the optimal evolutionary strategy is to disseminate his genes as widely as possible, given his few minutes (or, alas, seconds) of investment in each encounter. It all makes simple evolutionary sense, since a woman invests a good deal of time and effort -a nine month long, risky, strenuous pregnancy, in each offspring. Naturally she has to be very discerning in her choice of sexual partners.

Philosophy is the discipline of human thought that allows us to interpret our experience of ourselves and of the world at large, thereby giving meaning to our existence. While science constructs models of reality that predict the behavior of matter and energy, philosophy asks how those models relate to our condition as conscious entities. Without philosophy, science is merely an enabler of technology; it tells us nothing about the underlying nature of nature.

One would think that the adverse effects of, say, low socioeconomic status in childhood would occur as a result of brain development being delayed. Instead, the problem is that the early-life stress accelerates maturation of the brain, meaning that the window for brain construction being sculpted by experience closes earlier: U. Tooley, D. Bassett, and P. Mackay, “Environmental Influences on the Pace of Brain Development,” Nature Reviews Neuroscience 22 (2021): 372.

Now you know that the fascinating phenomenon of love has nothing to do with the supernatural entity known as Cupid, but everything to do with neurochemistry. Likewise, divinity is a cerebral creation, not a supernatural one. And it has been long since thinking humanity has learnt that love is a majestic creation of the brain, yet that knowledge hasn’t made love be deemed any less glorious. Then why should it threaten the religious believer to learn that divinity as well is a natural creation of the brain!

are biased toward studying individual organisms. It is often difficult for scientists to grasp the idea that individual brains do not exist in nature. As much as one may adhere to the notion of the isolated self, humans have evolved as social creatures and are constantly regulating one another’s biology. Without mutually stimulating interactions, people (and neurons for that matter) wither and die. In neurons this process is called apoptosis (programmed cell death); in humans it is called failure to thrive, depression, or dying of a broken heart.

Political economist and sociologist Max Weber famously spoke of the “disenchantment of the world,” as rationalization and science led Europe and America into modern industrial society, pushing back religion and all “magical” theories about reality. Now we are witnessing the disenchantment of the self. One of the many dangers in this process is that if we remove the magic from our image of ourselves, we may also remove it from our image of others. We could become disenchanted with one another. Our image of Homo sapiens underlies our everyday practice and culture; it shapes the way we treat one another as well as how we subjectively experience ourselves. In Western societies, the Judeo-Christian image of humankind—whether you are a believer or not—has secured a minimal moral consensus in everyday life. It has been a major factor in social cohesion. Now that the neurosciences have irrevocably dissolved the Judeo-Christian image of a human being as containing an immortal spark of the divine, we are beginning to realize that they have not substituted anything that could hold society together and provide a common ground for shared moral intuitions and values. An anthropological and ethical vacuum may well follow on the heels of neuroscientific findings. This is a dangerous situation. One potential scenario is that long before neuroscientists and philosophers have settled any of the perennial issues—for example, the nature of the self, the freedom of the will, the relationship between mind and brain, or what makes a person a person—a vulgar materialism might take hold. More and more people will start telling themselves: “I don’t understand what all these neuroexperts and consciousness philosophers are talking about, but the upshot seems pretty clear to me. The cat is out of the bag: We are gene-copying bio- robots, living out here on a lonely planet in a cold and empty physical universe. We have brains but no immortal souls, and after seventy years or so the curtain drops. There will never be an afterlife, or any kind of reward or punishment for anyone, and ultimately everyone is alone. I get the message, and you had better believe I will adjust my behavior to it. It would probably be smart not to let anybody know I’ve seen through the game.

Instincts are older, but thoughts are recent, that's why instincts are more powerful than thoughts - that's why it takes great will power to express a thought through action, while instincts come so easily. However, if we continue practicing our thoughts long enough, eventually the instincts that hold power over us will turn powerless. And this my friend, ought to be the next step of our evolution, and that's why it's no longer merely a matter of natural selection, it's what I hereby dub "sapient selection", that is the process of determining the path of our evolution ourselves.

At a cellular level of the human mind, Islamophobia is not really a matter of social stigma, rather it is a natural biological fear response of the general human mind, conditioned through countless pairings between terrorist attacks (unconditioned stimulus) and their apparent association with Islam (conditioned stimulus). Hence, Islamophobia cannot be eradicated completely, unless that pairing is severed and thereafter the conditioned stimulus of Islam is paired with something optimistic such as the heartwarming works of the 13th century Persian Muslim poet Jalal ad-Din Muhammad Rumi.

Ever since the rise of fear in the hominid psyche, one way or another, the grounds for an ever-active anti-fear mechanism was being prepared in the soft soil of consciousness by the process of natural selection. It is a process that deems survival potential as the only measure for existence. And by this measure, the anti-fear, anti-anxiety, anti-depressant mechanism, which later humans named "God", proved to be extremely effective. It delivered solace to the scared psyche of the early humans in their times of utter distress. In the midst of darkness, this one imaginative idea gave them light and hope.

Going without food for even a day increases your brain’s natural growth factors, which support the survival and growth of neurons. Evolution designed our bodies and brains to perform at their peak as hybrid vehicles. Metabolic switching between glucose and ketones is when cognition is best and degenerative diseases are kept at bay. As a recent paper in Nature Reviews Neuroscience put it: “Metabolic switching impacts multiple signaling pathways that promote neuroplasticity and resistance of the brain to injury and disease.” So how do you do it? Not by overloading on glucose or ketones, but by altering the cadence of eating and letting the body do what it was designed to do during times of food scarcity.

Why does the mind crave superstition! It's because superstition is a psychological apparatus for self-preservation. And it appears to us as truth because the only truth our brain is concerned with is the one that takes away our anxiety and aids in our survival, even if that truth happens to be just another lie our brain cooks up to maintain internal order. However, neurologically speaking, there is no such thing as a mind without superstition. Your belief that you have no superstition, is just another superstition. So, it's not about developing a mind without superstition, which is impossible, rather it is about being aware of the superstitions as much as possible, and reject those that are particularly harmful, for the self and society.

You say, you don't have any prejudice! Let's put that to test, shall we! Read the following phrases, pausing a few seconds after each. Hallelujah! ¡Viva la libertad! Shabbat Shalom! Allahu Akbar! Black Lives Matter! We're Here, We're Queer! My body, my decision! Now bring your faculty of reason into action, and think, which of the terms induced a negative emotional response in your mind? It's nothing out of the ordinary, it's just common animal nature. How your brain got conditioned to react in such a way that's a different matter. The main thing is, your brain just reacted exactly like the brain of pavlov's dog every time it heard the bell. The only difference is that, a dog doesn't have further brain capacity to question such conditioning, but a human does.

I don’t believe it too harsh to say that the history of philosophy when boiled down consists mostly of failed models of the brain. A few of the modern neurophilosophers such as Patricia Churchland and Daniel Dennett have made a splendid effort to interpret the findings of neuroscience research as these become available. They have helped others to understand, for example, the ancillary nature of morality and rational thought. Others, especially those of poststructuralist bent, are more retrograde. They doubt that the “reductionist” or “objectivist” program of the brain researchers will ever succeed in explaining the core of consciousness. Even if it has a material basis, subjectivity in this view is beyond the reach of science. To make their argument, the mysterians (as they are sometimes called) point to the qualia, the subtle, almost inexpressible feelings we experience about sensory input. For example, “red” we know from physics, but what are the deeper sensations of “redness”? So what can the scientists ever hope to tell us in larger scale about free will, or about the soul, which for religious thinkers at least is the ultimate of ineffability?

From another corner of neuroscience, we’re learning about a neurotransmitter called dopamine. Though there are more than fifty neurotransmitters (that we know of), scientists studying substance problems have given dopamine much of their attention. The brain’s reward system and pleasure centers—the areas most impacted by substance use and compulsive behaviors—have a high concentration of dopamine. Some brains have more of it than others, and some people have a capacity to enjoy a range of experiences more than others, owing to a combination of genetics and environment. The thing about dopamine is that it makes us feel really good. We tend to want more of it. It is naturally generated through ordinary, pleasurable activities like eating and sex, and it is the brain’s way of rewarding us—or nature’s way of rewarding the brain—for activities necessary to our survival, individually or as a species. It is the “mechanism by which ‘instinct’ is manifest.” Our brains arrange for dopamine levels to rise in anticipation and spike during a pleasurable activity to make sure we do it again. It helps focus our attention on all the cues that contributed to our exposure to whatever felt good (these eventually become triggers to use, as we explain later). Drugs and alcohol (and certain behaviors) turn on a gushing fire hose of dopamine in the brain, and we feel good, even euphoric. Dopamine produced by these artificial means, however, throws our pleasure and reward systems out of whack immediately. Flooding the brain repeatedly with dopamine has long-term effects and creates what’s known as tolerance—when we lose our ability to produce or absorb our own dopamine and need more and more of it artificially just to feel okay. Specifically, the brain compensates for the flood of dopamine by decreasing its own production of it or by desensitizing itself to the neurotransmitter by reducing the number of dopamine receptors, or both. The brain is just trying to keep a balance. The problem with the brain’s reduction in natural dopamine production is that when you take the substance or behavior out of the picture, there’s not enough dopamine in the brain to make you feel good. Without enough dopamine, there is no interest or pleasure. Then not only does the brain lose the pleasure associated with using, it might not be able to enjoy a sunset or a back rub, either. A lowered level of dopamine, combined with people’s longing for the rush of dopamine they got from using substances, contributes to “craving” states. Cravings are a physiological process associated with the brain’s struggle to regain its normal dopamine balance, and they can influence a decision to keep using a substance even when a person is experiencing negative consequences that matter to him and a strong desire to change. Depending on the length of time and quantities a person has been using, these craving states can be quite uncomfortable and compelling. The dopamine system can and does recover, starting as soon as we stop flooding it. But it takes time, and in the time between shutting off the artificial supply of dopamine and the brain’s rebuilding its natural resources, people tend to feel worse (before they feel better). On a deep, instinctual level, their brains are telling them that by stopping using, something is missing; something is wrong. This is a huge factor in relapse, despite good intentions and effort to change. Knowing this can help you and your loved one make it across this gap in brain reward systems.

Educated people, of course, know that perception, cognition, language, and emotion are rooted in the brain. But it is still tempting to think of the brain as it was shown in old educational cartoons, as a control panel with gauges and levers operated by a user — the self, the soul, the ghost, the person, the “me.” But cognitive neuroscience is showing that the self, too, is just another network of brain systems. [C]ognitive neuroscientists have not only exorcised the ghost but have shown that the brain does not even have a part that does exactly what the ghost is supposed to do: review all the facts and make a decision for the rest of the brain to carry out. Each of us feels that there is a single “I” in control. But that is an illusion that the brain works hard to produce, like the impression that our visual fields are rich in detail from edge to edge. The brain does have supervisory systems in the prefrontal lobes and anterior cingulate cortex, which can push the buttons of behavior and override habits and urges. But those systems are gadgets with specific quirks and limitations; they are not implementations of the rational free agent traditionally identified with the soul or the self.

Finally, Tononi argues that the neural correlate of consciousness in the human brain resembles a grid-like structure. One of the most robust findings in neuroscience is how visual, auditory, and touch perceptual spaces map in a topographic manner onto visual, auditory, and somatosensory cortices. Most excitatory pyramidal cells and inhibitory interneurons have local axons strongly connected to their immediate neighbours, with the connections probability decreasing with distance. Topographically organized cortical tissue, whether it develops naturally inside the skull or is engineered out of stem cells and grown in dishes, will have high intrinsic causal power. This tissue will feel like something, even if our intuition revels at the thought that cortical carpets, disconnected from all their inputs and outputs, can experience anything. But this is precisely what happens to each one of us when we close our eyes, go to sleep, and dream. We create a world that feels as real as the awake one, while devoid of sensory input and unable to move. Cerebral organoids or grid-like substances will not be conscious of love or hate, but of space.; of up, down, close by and far away and other spatial phenomenology distinctions. But unless provided with sophisticated motor outputs, they will be unable to do anything.

A Code of Nature must accommodate a mixture of individually different behavioral tendencies. The human race plays a mixed strategy in the game of life. People are not molecules, all alike and behaving differently only because of random interactions. People just differ, dancing to their own personal drummer. The merger of economic game theory with neuroscience promises more precise understanding of those individual differences and how they contribute to the totality of human social interactions. It's understanding those differences, Camerer says, that will make such a break with old schools of economic thought. "A lot of economic theory uses what is called the representative agent model," Camerer told me. In an economy with millions of people, everybody is clearly not going to be completely alike in behavior. Maybe 10 percent will be of some type, 14 percent another type, 6 percent something else. A real mix. "It's often really hard, mathematically, to add all that up," he said. "It's much easier to say that there's one kind of person and there's a million of them. And you can add things up rather easily." So for the sake of computational simplicity, economists would operate as though the world was populated by millions of one generic type of person, using assumptions about how that generic person would behave. "It's not that we don't think people are different—of course they are, but that wasn't the focus of analysis," Camerer said. "It was, well, let's just stick to one type of person. But I think the brain evidence, as well as genetics, is just going to force us to think about individual differences." And in a way, that is a very natural thing for economists to want to do.

It’s a remarkable fact that the people who have gone the very deepest into the mind—the sages and saints of every religious tradition—all say essentially the same thing: your fundamental nature is pure, conscious, peaceful, radiant, loving, and wise, and it is joined in mysterious ways with the ultimate underpinnings of reality, by whatever name we give That. Although your true nature may be hidden momentarily by stress and worry, anger and unfulfilled longings, it still continues to exist. Knowing this can be a great comfort.

All answers lie unmanifested in the form of neurochemicals in your head. Seek for them genuinely enough and they will naturally begin to manifest in your neurons.

Emotions when guided by conscience, can do wonders in the world of mortal humans – thoughts when guided by conscience, can manifest magnificent creativity on this planet – and behavior when guided by conscience, can transform this world into a real progressive abode of peace with the pure elements of compassion, kindness and courage flowing through the very spine of the society.

What is life - life is not merely the functional expression of protoplasmic substance - it is the functional expression of protoplasmic substance that holds unimaginable potential for growth and progress.

When Nature Neuroscience published Dias’s study on memories of smells, they put a picture of Lamarck on the cover, complete with a thatch of gray hair and a high cravat. New

That day, the great mind in neuroscience Michael A. Persinger, who is now a good friend of mine, made me realize that it was no other field of Science but Neuroscience that held the key to solving the quintessential problems of consciousness. He coaxed me into the science of the neurons and the rest as you know is history. Without Persinger, Naskar and Neuroscience would never have been linked together. Imbued with new knowledge, confidence and excessive curiosity, I officially turned my attention to one of the loftiest goals of modern science - understanding the biological nature of the human mind. That day on, I officially got into the world of Neuroscience.

Our unique evolutionary background has made us wonderfully cooperative, empathic, and loving. So why is our history so full of selfishness, cruelty, and violence? Economic and cultural factors certainly play a role. Nonetheless, across different kinds of societies—hunter-gatherer, agrarian, and industrial; communist and capitalist; Eastern and Western—in most cases the story is basically the same: loyalty and protection toward “us,” and fear and aggression toward “them.” We’ve already seen how that stance toward “us” is deep in our nature.

At some point in life, we all ask the same question: Who am I? And no one really knows the answer. The self is a slippery subject—especially when it’s the subject that is regarding itself as an object! So let’s begin by grounding this airy topic with an experiential activity—taking the body for a walk. Then we’ll investigate the nature of the self in your brain. Last, we’ll explore methods for relaxing and releasing “self-ing” in order to feel more confident, peaceful, and joined with all things. (For more on this profound matter, which reaches beyond the scope of a single chapter, see Living Dhamma by Ajahn Chah, The Book: On the Taboo Against Knowing Who You Are by Alan Watts, I Am That: Talks with Sri Nisargadatta Maharaj, or The Spiritual Teaching of Ramana Maharshi.)

On the path of awakening, it's natural to experience some upheaval, dark nights of the soul, or unnerving groundlessness when the foundation of old beliefs falls away.

God is nature’s anti-dote to misery.

The tragedy and opportunity of this moment in history are exactly the same: the natural and technical resources needed to pull us back from the brink already exist. The issue is not a lack of resources. It is a lack of will and restraint, of attention to what's truly happening, and of enlightened self-interest[.]

UCLA psychologist Shelley Taylor has discovered a stress response that differs from fight or flight. She calls it tend and befriend. “One of the most striking aspects of the human stress response is the tendency to affiliate—that is, to come together in groups to provide and receive joint protection in threatening times.” Taylor’s neuroscience research reveals that when we feel stressed, the brain’s natural response is to release chemicals that drive us to bond. This

The fundamental fact of human nature is, we are a septic tank of prehistoric biases. Sectarianism comes to us far too easily, for we are all fundamentally racist.

We Are All Racist (The Sonnet) If we are still uncomfortable to face, The roots of racism, how can we uproot racism! Unless we recognize our tendency for division, How can we ever be the cause of universalism! The fundamental fact of human nature is, We are a septic tank of prehistoric biases. Sectarianism comes to us far too easily, For we are all fundamentally racist. Cruelty is the mainspring of survival in the wild, So our brain leans more towards cruelty than kindness. Millions of years of conditioning won't vanish overnight, We must self-regulate with our newly developed conscience. The end of racism starts with the recognition of racism. We are civilized only when we recognize our uncivilization.

Modern psychology and neuroscience fail to back these bleak views. We’re preprogrammed to reach out. Empathy is an automated response over which we have limited control. We can suppress it, mentally block it, or fail to act on it, but except for a tiny percentage of humans—known as psychopaths—no one is emotionally immune to another’s situation. The fundamental yet rarely asked question is: Why did natural selection design our brains so that we’re in tune with our fellow human beings, feeling distress at their distress and pleasure at their pleasure? If exploitation of others were all that mattered, evolution should never have gotten into the empathy business.

The Conception of Reality We Are Our Memories Perception of the Outside World As we have discussed, the perception of reality that is built up in our brains is an illusory inner image that does not directly correspond to the world around us. Outside, colors do not exist; the brain constructs them through the action of electromagnetic waves that stimulate the various cones of the retina. Nor are there any sounds in nature; instead, variations in air pressure cause small filaments in the cochlea of the inner ear to vibrate, triggering nerve impulses. Both colors and sounds are illusions produced in the brain.

Evolution & Electronics (The Sonnet) I know electronic circuitry like the back of my hand, Yet it's the human mind that fascinates me most immensely. Fascination in electronics lies in new design possibility, Whereas the mind is the breeding ground of all possibility. Our engineering is puny compared to that of Mother Nature, Each day a new mystery unfolds in the vast organic kingdom. Our puny electronics work based on cold 'n rigid computation, Evolution of life in nature is predicated on plastic mutation. That's why we must never disregard nature blinded by arrogance, We may have conquered nature's mercy but we're still subordinate. The moment a lifeform starts to vilify the womb whence it came, With a single blow creator nature can flatten all our obstinance. Foster humility and wisdom, before going nuts about technology. Don't end up yet another fancy stain upon the honor of humanity.

What do you take me for! Brain scientist here! You know what it means? It means I know your deepest fantasies as well as your darkest secrets - it means I know more about you than you know about yourself. Yet have I ever belittled you? Never! You know why? Because, by knowing the worst in you I came to now the best in you. Know your worst my friend - for once you conquer your worst you'll automatically manifest your best.

Superstition is a psychological apparatus for self-preservation.