That’s your best friend and your worst enemy – your own brain.
With some CGI, I think the brain slightly perceives that things aren’t real. There’s no gravity, the light’s not quite real, the shadows aren’t quite real.
I believe the only muscles you need in basketball are the ones in your brain.
Humans are distinguished from other species by a massive brain that enables us to imagine a future and influence it by what we do in the present. By using experience, knowledge and insight, our ancestors recognized they could anticipate dangers and opportunities and take steps to exploit advantages and avoid hazards.
I know three people who have got better after a brain tumour. I haven’t heard of anyone who’s got better from Alzheimer’s.
There is an urgent need for a radical revision of our current concepts of the nature of consciousness and its relationship to matter and the brain.
I enjoyed working with Vikram Kumar, as he is an amazing director who is full of ideas, and he tells me that he has different compartments in his brain in which he places different story ideas and works on them simultaneously.
You have to have conviction and completely question everything and anything you do. No matter how much you study, no matter how much you know, the side of your brain that has the smarts won’t necessarily help you in making art.
Misogyny is at the reptilian brain stem of a lot of right-wing politics.
A fool’s brain digests philosophy into folly, science into superstition, and art into pedantry. Hence University education.
Why do we have a brain in the first place? Not to write books, articles, or plays; not to do science or play music. Brains develop because they are an expedient way of managing life in a body.
My fingers are not as fast as my brain – which isn’t that much to type home about anyway.
Our subliminal mental processes operate outside awareness because they arise in these portions of our mind that are inaccessible to our conscious self; their inaccessibility is due to the architecture of the brain rather than because they have been subject to Freudian motivational forces like repression.
I think hopefully we’ve got enough brain cells left to decide if our music is really worth something.
I regard the brain as a computer which will stop working when its components fail. There is no heaven or afterlife for broken down computers; that is a fairy story for people afraid of the dark.
I’m not the type of guy to go so deep with the concept songs, but there’s deep thought in everything. Maybe it’s not just a repetitive hook telling you what the song is about – you have to use your brain a little bit.
John Wells let me write a couple of West Wings, which was an incredible gift. I loved it once I got past the brain injury part of it, and so I’m working on a couple of things that are far from fruition, but what I want to pursue.
And they discovered something very interesting: when it comes to walking, most of the ant’s thinking and decision-making is not in its brain at all. It’s distributed. It’s in its legs.
Here we stand in the middle of this new world with our primitive brain, attuned to the simple cave life, with terrific forces at our disposal, which we are clever enough to release, but whose consequences we cannot comprehend.
Union Square Cafe is all soul, not brain.
That brain of mine is something more than merely mortal, as time will show.
You don’t have to use aggression to squash somebody. You have to use your brain.
Kids only learn that the stove is hot when they put their finger on and they burn it. This, unfortunately, is the limitation of our precious brain.
I spent all my time on my movies worried that people were eating and that the schedule was being kept, so to have experts in those areas giving me the brain space as a writer and director is huge.
There is no such thing as a disembodied mind. The mind is implanted in the brain, and the brain is implanted in the body.
I am not afraid of dying. I have lived longer than most people in the world. What scares me is to have a body that works but a brain that is waving goodbye. If that happens, I hope I die quickly.
Don’t ask for a million dollars. Ask for the stuff that’ll get you a million dollars – your health, your brain, your sanity, wisdom. Prepare me for when I do get that million. Make sure I don’t go crazy, make sure I help my family.
I think he’s informing himself, reaching out and getting ideas and information and advice. I haven’t the slightest doubt that internally taking shape in that marvelous brain of his is a philosophy of foreign affairs. But it would be premature to say that one is fully formed.
Every meal should end with something sweet. Maybe it’s jelly on toast at breakfast, or a small piece of chocolate at dinner – but it always helps my brain bring a close to the meal.
For me, addiction exposes all of the brain mechanism under the influence of a profoundly distorted primary motivation. It’s such a window into how we function as human beings. And the patient doesn’t know that’s happening! Doesn’t believe that’s happening! That’s the fascinating part.
I had post-traumatic amnesia, five-second memory, it happens as a result of brain injury.
In the traditional modernist planning that created the suburbs, you put residential buildings in suburban neighborhoods, office spaces into brain parks and retail in shopping malls. But you fail to exploit the possibility of symbiosis or synthesis that way.
The thinnest I’ve ever been was after I had my appendix out, during the London run of The Seagull. I went down to 112 pounds and realized my brain doesn’t work when I’m that thin, so I can’t do my job. That’s why, when I came out here, I never had that whole Hollywood pressure thing.
We pretend that the brain is binary, like a computer. But it’s not. It’s completely holographic.
The press don’t like to say nice things because nice is boring. It’s much better to label me the devil. What we do is not brain surgery. We are entertainers, plain and simple, and we’re responsible to bring that money back, to make a profit.
Even by common wisdom, there seem to be both people and objects in my dream that are outside myself, but clearly they were created in myself and are part of me, they are mental constructs in my own brain.
You hear it in your brain. Whatever makes sense. Some songs work well as quartet songs, sometimes they don’t.
But the newest research is showing that many properties of the brain are genetically organized, and don’t depend on information coming in from the senses.
If the brain expects that a treatment will work, it sends healing chemicals into the bloodstream, which facilitates that. And the opposite is equally true and equally powerful: When the brain expects that a therapy will not work, it doesn’t. It’s called the ‘nocebo’ effect.
By learning about my body and making small, subtle changes, I find out what I enjoy and what is effective. I’m always finessing: adjusting my diet and my workouts. You have to figure out which exercises are fun and interesting and stimulate your brain – or else you’ll never keep at them.
You can involve yourself in electronics, computers, puzzles… there’s a lot of creativity and brain working. There’s a lot to model trains that people don’t realize.
British culture loves the image of itself in the mirror; it doesn’t want to look deep inside, behind the eyes, inside the brain, inside where those shivers and nightmares lie.
I’m a combative person, I know I am, and the greatest thing about law school was I learned to fight with my brain. I clarified something to myself. No matter how much you want to live in the white man’s world, you either live by what you believe in, or you die.
Brain power improves by brain use, just as our bodily strength grows with exercise. And there is no doubt that a large proportion of the female population, from school days to late middle age, now have very complicated lives indeed.
You look at guys with significant Alzheimer’s and dementia and the mood swings and the suicides that unfortunately NFL players have been faced with. And depression. Lou Gehrig’s disease. These are all things that have kind of been linked to the brain damage from football.
Anything that activates the joy center in the brain makes you happy, and therefore protects you. Oddly enough, that’s what they do in ‘Harry Potter’: The nurse gives the kids chocolates when they’ve been near the Dementors!
Your brain has the power to modify your pain perception.
We are a country that lacks riches. The Jewish brain, that’s what we have. Everything that we’ve had and will have in this country is the direct and clear product of higher education. If we harm this system, we will drastically decline and cease to exist.
People talk about the brain weakening as it ages. Mine feels stronger.
Mentoring is a brain to pick, an ear to listen, and a push in the right direction.
Economics is not brain surgery.
Cognitive neuroscience is entering an exciting era in which new technologies and ideas are making it possible to study the neural basis of cognition, perception, memory and emotion at the level of networks of interacting neurons, the level at which we believe many of the important operations of the brain take place.
I tweet 15 times a day to keep my brain stimulated.
