#neuroscience

Genetics is crude, but neuroscience goes directly to work on the brain, and the mind follows. ↗

— Leon Kass

#crude #directly #follows #genetics #goes

The neuroscience area - which is absolutely in its infancy - is much more important than genetics. ↗

— Leon Kass

#area #genetics #important #infancy #more

Music, uniquely among the arts, is both completely abstract and profoundly emotional. It has no power to represent anything particular or external, but it has a unique power to express inner states or feelings. Music can pierce the heart directly; it needs no mediation. ↗

— Oliver Sacks

#arts #feelings #music #neuroscience #art

We—each of us—are intricately, irremovably connected to the larger universe. It is our true home, and thinking that this physical world is all that matters is like shutting oneself up in a small closet and imagining that there is nothing else out beyond it. ↗

— Eben Alexander III M.D.

#neuroscience #science #spirituality #imagination

Our metaphors for the operation of the brain are frequently drawn from the production line. We think of the brain as a glorified sausage machine, taking in information from the senses, processing it and regurgitating it in a different form, as thoughts or actions. The digital computer reinforces this idea because it is quite explicitly a machine that does to information what a sausage machine does to pork. Indeed, the brain was the original inspiration and metaphor for the development of the digital computer, and early computers were often described as 'giant brains'. Unfortunately, neuroscientists have sometimes turned this analogy on its head, and based their models of brain function on the workings of the digital computer (for example by assuming that memory is separate and distinct from processing, as it is in a computer). This makes the whole metaphor dangerously self-reinforcing. ↗

— Steve Grand

#cognition #cybernetics #metaphor #neuroscience #inspirational

Given her deafness, the auditory part of the brain, deprived of its usual input, had started to generate a spontaneous activity of its own, and this took the form of musical hallucinations, mostly musical memories from her earlier life. The brain needed to stay incessantly active, and if it was not getting its usual stimulation..., it would create its own stimulation in the form of hallucinations. ↗

— Oliver Sacks

#hallucinations #music #musical-hallucinations #neuroscience #psychology

There is certainly a universal and unconscious propensity to impose a rhythm even when one hears a series of identical sounds at constant intervals... We tend to hear the sound of a digital clock, for example, as "tick-tock, tick-tock" - even though it is actually "tick tick, tick tick. ↗

— Oliver Sacks

#music #neuroscience #music

Creativity is the highest form of intelligence. Over time, after developing a more advanced creative brain, I started feeling that my college education was more so something to be ashamed of rather than something to be proud of. ↗

— Criss Jami

#ashamed #brain #college #creativity #development

There are, of course, inherent tendencies to repetition in music itself. Our poetry, our ballads, our songs are full of repetition; nursery rhymes and the little chants and songs we use to teach young children have choruses and refrains. We are attracted to repetition, even as adults; we want the stimulus and the reward again and again, and in music we get it. Perhaps, therefore, we should not be surprised, should not complain if the balance sometimes shifts too far and our musical sensitivity becomes a vulnerability. ↗

— Oliver Sacks

#hypotheses #hypothesis #music #neuroscience #psychology

The neural processes underlying that which we call creativity have nothing to do with rationality. That is to say, if we look at how the brain generates creativity, we will see that it is not a rational process at all; creativity is not born out of reasoning. ↗

— Rodolfo R. Llinás

#cognitive-psychology #creativity #neuroscience #psychology #science