Anil Seth Quotes
Best 13 30-Second Brain Quotes by Anil Seth
30-Second Brain Quotes
“Although certain brain regions decline faster than others, we lose on average approximately 10 per cent of our grey and white matter every decade of our adult lives. Mirroring this, our powers of reasoning, as measured by non-verbal IQ tests, peaks in our early 20s and declines steadily after this.”
“Breathe. Shrink that amygdala, enhance that prefrontal cortex. There is no downside to meditation. Om.”
“Feelings provide the basis for human reason – brain-damaged patients left devoid of emotion struggle to make the most elementary decisions.”
“Imagination is a powerful, particularly human, skill. But instead of having specialized neural hardware, it is entirely reliant on our existing sensory regions.”
“Locating a cup of coffee involves linking visual information with information about the current posture of the body, which involves highly specialized mechanisms in the brain.”
“Long-term meditators also appear somewhat protected from dementia, which makes sense given that meditation causes brain regions linked to complex thought and memory to grow instead of shrink.”
“Meditation even reduces the need for sleep. Due to its stress-reducing properties, meditation is increasingly being used as a clinical tool, relieving symptoms of chronic pain, depression, anxiety, schizophrenia and other conditions.”
“One recent lab-based training paradigm that has shown some promise, however, involves the tricky task of keeping in mind two different streams of information simultaneously. Not only did performance increase dramatically over the weeks of training on this fiendish exercise, but so did IQ, particularly for those who started in the lower IQ range.”
“The brain tries to figure out the true colour of a surface independent of the lighting conditions; so seeing colour isn’t just detecting wavelengths of light.”
“The first few years in life are critical for learning a first language. Feral children without exposure to language fail to develop full linguistic abilities. They can learn many words, but their syntax never reaches a normal level. Second languages learned during the critical period are processed in the same regions of Broca’s area and Wernicke’s area as the first language, while different regions of Broca’s area are used for a second language learned after puberty.”
“Unlike brain training, meditation is increasingly being shown to have profound effects on thought, emotions and the brain. For instance, long-term meditators have a shrunken amygdala, a brain region associated with anxiety or fear, and an enlarged prefrontal cortex, associated with our highest forms of cognitive processing and intelligence.”
“We feel afraid because our body is preparing to act in a particular way, not vice versa. Although controversial, this idea has stood the test of time; it is now widely accepted that emotions are deeply dependent on how the brain and body respond to each other, and the search is now on for the brain mechanisms involved. One key region is the amygdala.”
“When we make a movement, our brain predicts the sensory consequences of the movement so that we experience the movement, as self-caused. If these predictions go awry, the brain may falsely attribute control to some external source, leading to a ‘delusion of control’. Recently, the theory has been extended to explain perceptual hallucinations, using the idea that perceptions are also based on predictions. This implies that schizophrenics, unlike most, should be able to tickle themselves, which turns out to be true.”
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“A small extra gain is generally not worth the substantial risk the deal will break up.”