BRAIN Quotes

Scientists, musicians, poets, comedians, writers, advertisers...they allhave thoughts about the brain. Take your pick from these quotes. You mayagree with some of the quotes - you may disagree with others. All of themshould make you think!

Aesop (from Aesop's Fables, The Fox and the Mask)
A Fox entered the house of an actor and, rummaging through allhis properties, came upon a Mask, an admirable imitation of a human head.He placed his paws on it and said, "What a beautiful head! Yet it is ofno value, as it entirely lacks brains."
William F. Allman (from Apprentices of Wonder. Inside the NeuralNetwork Revolution, 1989)
The brain is a monstrous, beautiful mess. Its billions of nervecells - called neurons - lie in a tangled web that displays cognitivepowers far exceeding any of the silicon machines we have built to mimicit.
Susan Allport (from Explorers of the Black Box. The Search for theCellular Basis of Memory., 1986)
Most of us have spent some time wondering how our brain works. Brainscientists spend their entire lives pondering it, looking for a way een tobegin asking the question, How does the brain generate mind? The brain,after all, is so complex an organ and can be approached from so manydifferent directions using so many different techniques and experimentalanimals that studying it is a little like entering a blizzard, the Casbah,a dense forest. It's easy enough to find a way in - an interestingphenomenon to study - but also very easy to get lost.
Aristotle (from De motu animalium, 4th century B.C.)
The seat of the soul and the control of voluntary movement - in fact,of nervous functions in general, - are to be sought in the heart. Thebrain is an organ of minor importance.
Aristotle
And of course, the brain is not responsible for any of the sensationsat all. The correct view is that the seat and source of sensation is theregion of the heart.
Isaac Asimov (from the forewood to The Three-Pound Universe byJ. Hooper and D. Teresi, 1986)
The human brain, then, is the most complicated organization of matterthat we know.
L. Frank Baum (the "Scarecrow" in The Wonderful Wizard ofOz)
No, indeed; I don't know anything. You see, I am stuffed, so I have no brains at all.
Leonardo Bianchi (from The Mechanism of the Brain and the Functionof the Frontal Lobes, 1922)
The brain is the great factory of thought. To it are directed all theforces of nature, forces which, for thousands of years, have beenexpending themselves upon it and impressing on it a slow and continuousmotion of evolution.
Erma Bombeck
Anybody who watches three games of football in a row should bedeclared brain dead.
Ambrose Bierce
Brain: an apparatus with which we think that we think.

Mind, n. A mysterious form of matter secreted by the brain.
Lord Brain (from Science and Man, 1966 and yes,that is his real name)
Just as brain development has greatly increased the range and scope ofperception (that is, the receptive side of its activities) so it hasenhanced the range and power of man's control over hisenvironment.
Paul Broca (as quoted by von Bonin in 1950)
There are in the human mind a group of faculties and in the braingroups of convolutions, and the facts assembled by science so far allowto state, as I said before, that the great regions of the nindcorrespond to the great regions of the brain.
Richard D. Broadwell (from Neuroscience, Memory and the Brain, 1995)
We sit on the threshold of important new advances inneuroscience that will yield increased understanding of how thebrain functions and of more effective treatments to heal braindisorders and diseases. How the brain behaves in health anddisease may well be the most important question in our lifetime.
Helen Gurley Brown
Beauty can't amuse you, but brainwork -- reading, writing, thinking --can.
Elizabeth Barrett Browning
Children use the fist until they are of age to use the brain.
Burma Shave roadside advertisement
Don't lose
Your head
To gain a minute
You need your head
Your brains are in it.
George Bush (from Presidential Proclamation 6158, July 17,1990)
I, George Bush, President of the United States of America, do herebyproclaim the decade beginning January 1, 1990, as the Decade of the Brain.I call upon all public officials and the people of the United States toobserve that decade with appropriate programs, ceremonies, andactivities.
Santiago Ramon y Cajal
As long as our brain is a mystery, the universe, the reflection of thestructure of the brain will also be a mystery.
Santiago Ramon y Cajal
The brain is a world consisting of a number of unexplored continentsand great stretches of unknown territory.
Pierre Cabanis (1757-1808; Traite du physique et du moral del'homme, Second Memoir)
Impressions arriving at the brain make it enter into activity, just as food falling into the stomach excites it to more abundant secretion ofgastric juice.
Edward Clarke (from Vision: A Study of False Sight, 1878)
Sleep affords the opportunity, within certain limits, for the brain toact of itself, and dreams are the result.
Apollo Creed (character played by Carl Weathers in the movieRocky, 1976)
Sports make you grunt and smell. Stay in school, use your brains. Be athinker, not a stinker.
Francis H.C. Crick (from Scientific American, September,1979)
There is no scientific study more vital to man than the study of hisown brain. Our entire view of the universe depends on it.
William Cullen (1710-1790; from Institutions of Medicine,Pt.)
Sensation and volition, so far as they are connected with corporealmotions, are functions of the brain alone...the will operating in thebrain only, by a motion begun there, and propagated along the nerves,produces the contraction of the muscles.
Joel Davis (from Mapping the Mind: The Secrets of the HumanBrain and How it Works, 1997)
The human brain is the last, and greatest, scientific frontier. It istruly an internal cosmos that lies contained within our skulls. The morethan 100 billion nerve cells and trillion supporting cells that make upyour brain and mine constitute the most elaborate structure in the knownuniverse.
William Henry Day (from Headaches; their Nature, Causes, andTreatment, 1880)
The brain cannot stand like a monument, and maintain itsintegrity.
Peter de Vries (from Comfort Me with Apples)
We know the human brain is a device to keep the ears from grating onone another.
Jose M.R. Delgado (from Physical Control of the Mind,1969)
The brain, or cerebrum, is a material entity located inside the skullwhich may be inspected, touched, weighed, and measured. It is composed ofchemicals, enzymes, and humors which may be analyzed. Its structure ischaracterized by neurons, pathways, and synapses which may be examineddirectly when they are properly magnified.
William C. Dement (from The Promise of Sleep, 1999, p.231)
Sleep deprivation is the most common brain impairment.
Daniel C. Dennett (from Consciousness Explained, 1991)
The juvenile sea squirt wanders through the sea searching for asuitable rock or hunk of coral to cling to and make its home for life. Forthis task it has a rudimentary nervous system. When it finds it's spot andtakes root, it doesn't need its brain any more so it eats it. It's ratherlike getting tenure.
Emily Dickinson
The Brain-is wider than the Sky-
For-put them side by side-
The one the other will contain
With ease-and You-beside.
The Brain is deeper than the sea -
For - hold them - Blue to Blue -
The one the other will absorb -
As Sponges - Buckets - do -
Dr. Seuss (from Oh, the places you'll go!, 1990)
You have brains in your head.
You have feet in your shoes.
You can steer yourself
any direction you choose.
Dr. Seuss
I like nonsense; it wakes up the brain cells.
John C. Eccles (from The Future of the Brain Sciences, editedby Samuel Bogoch, 1969)
A better understanding of the brain is certain to lead man to a richercomprehension both of himself, of his fellow man, and of society, and infact of the whole world with its problems.
John C. Eccles (quoted by C.C. Pfeiffer in Mental and ElementalNutrients, 1975)
The last thing that man will understand in nature is the performanceof his brain.
Gerald M. Edelman (from Neuroscience, Memory and the Brain, 1995)
A knowledge of brain science will provide one of the majorfoundations of the new age to come. That knowledge will spawncures for disease, new machines based on brain function, furtherinsights into our nature and how we know.
Albert Einstein
Reading, after a certain age, diverts the mind too much from itscreative pursuits. Any man who reads too much and uses his own brain toolittle falls into lazy habits of thinking.
Dwight D. Eisenhower (from a radio broadcast on June 3, 1957)
Dollars and guns are no substitutes for brains and will power.
Ralph Waldo Emerson

Ideas must work through the brains and arms of men, or they areno better than dreams.
Sir John Eric Ericksen, British surgeon, Surgeon-Extraordinary to Queen Victoria in 1873.
The abdomen, the chest, and the brain will forever be shut from the intrusion of the wise and humane surgeon.
Gerald D. Fischbach (from Scientific American, September,1992)
The brain immediately confronts us with its great complexity. Thehuman brain weighs only three to four pounds but contains about 100billion neurons. Although that extraordinary number is of the same orderof magnitude as the number of stars in the Milky Way, it cannot accountfor the complexity of the brain. The liver probably contains 100 millioncells, but 1,000 livers do not add up to a rich inner life.
Edward B. Foote (from Medical Common Sense, 1866)
The brain is the great receiving and distributing reservoir of vitalelectricity, just as the heart is the receiving and distributing reservoirof the blood.
Michael J. Fox, actor (quoted in People magazine, December 7,1998, p. 135; talking about his surgery for Parkinson's disease)
They did something once that slurred my speech, and I thought, "Oh,man, you're messing with my brain. It's freaking me out."
Benjamin Franklin (from Poor Richard, 1758)
A full belly makes a dull brain.
French Proverb
A brain is worth little without a tongue.
Robert Frost
The brain is a wonderful organ. It starts working the moment you get up and does not stop until you get into the office.
Michael S. Gazzaniga (from The Bisected Brain, 1970)
While there have been great technological advances n the study of thebrain, yielding enormous amounts of data on its physical and psychologicalcharacteristics, the old problem of relating mind to brain in a reasonablefashion remains unaccomplished.
Michael S. Gazzaniga (from The Mind's Past, 1998)
The human brain is generally regarded as a complex web of adaptationsbuilt into the nervous system, even though no one knows how.
Charlotte Perkins Gilman (from The Home, 1903)
The softest, freest, most pliable and changeful living substance isthe brain--the hardest and most iron-bound as well.
Richard L. Gregory (from Eye and Brain: The Psychology ofSeeing, 1966)
One of the difficulties in understanding the brain is that it is likenothing so much as a lump of porridge.
Tim Green, Stephen F. Heinemann and Jim F. Gusella (from a paper in Neuron, vol. 420, page 427, 1998)
The human brain is estimated to have about a hundred billion nervecells, two million miles of axons, and a million billion synapses, makingit the most complex structure, natural or artificial, on earth.
Pinckney J. Harman (from James Arthur Lecture on the Evolution ofthe Human Brain, 1956)
It is not unreasonable to expect that man's brain will continue tostudy itself so long as Homo sapiens shall last.
Erich Harth (from Windows on the Mind, 1982)
The brain presents two seemingly irreconcilable aspects: It is amaterial body, exhibiting all the physical properties of matter, and itpossesses a set of faculties and attributes, collectively called mind,that are not found in any other physical system.
Jimi Hendrix (from song, Purple Haze, 1967)
Purple haze was in my brain,
Lately things don't seem the same,
Actin' funny, but I don't know why,
'Scuse me while I kiss the sky.
Hippocrates (about 400 B.C.)
Men ought to know that from nothing else but the brain come joys, delights, laughter and sports, and sorrows, griefs, despondency, and lamentations.
Robert Green Ingersoll (from Liberty)
I am the inferior of any man whose rights I trample under foot. Menare not superior by reason of the accidents of race or color. They aresuperior who have the best heart - the best brain.
James I of England, James VI of Scotland (from A Counter-blaste toTobacco, 1604)
A custom loathsome to the eye, hateful to the nose, harmful to thebrain, dangerous to the lungs, and in the black, stinking fume thereofnearest resembling the horrible Stygian smoke of the pit that isbottomless.
Judith Hooper and Dick Teresi (from The Three-Pound Universe,1986)
The brain is a little saline pool that acts as a conductor, and itruns on electricity.
David H. Hubel - (1981 Nobel Prize Winner)
The brain is a tissue. It is a complicated, intricately woven tissue,like nothing else we know of in the universe, but it is composed of cells,as any tissue is. They are, to be sure, highly specialized cells, butthey function according to the laws that govern any other cells. Theirelectrical and chemical signals can be detected, recorded and interpretedand their chemicals can be identified; the connections that constitute thebrain's woven feltwork can be mapped. In short, the brain can be studied,just as the kidney can.
Robert Green Ingersoll (from Liberty)
I am the inferior of any man whose rights I trample under foot. Menare not superior by reason of the accidents of race or color. They aresuperior who have the best heart-the best brain.

William James (from The Principles of Psychology, 1890)
As the brain changes are continuous, so do all these consciousnessesmelt into each other like dissolving views. Properly they are but oneprotracted consciousness, one unbroken stream.
E. Roy John (from Mechanisms of Memory, 1967)
The brain is a marvelous mechanism. Our feelings of love and hate, ofgood and evil, our appreciation of ugliness and beauty n the world aroundus, the values toward which we aspire, the injustices which we strive tocorrect - all these mental richeswhich form the most treasured part ofllife for us are somehow generated by tthe interaction of presentexperiences with the residue of our past stored in the brain.
Barbara Jordan
Do not call for black power or green power. Call for brainpower.
Dalai Lama
This is my simple religion. There is no need for temples; no needfor complicated philosophy. Our own brain, our own heart is our temple;the philosophy is kindness.
Gary Larson (Some dinosaurs talking in "The Far Side")

The picture's pretty bleak, gentlemen... The world's climates are changing, the mammals are taking over, and we all have a brain about the size of a walnut.
Shelley Long (from a line in the television show Cheers)
If brains were money, you'd need to take out a loan to buy a cup ofcoffee.
J.R. Lowell (from A Fable for Critics, 1848?)
Most brains reflect but the crown of a hat.
Gay Gaer Luce and Julius Segal (from Sleep, 1966)
Whatever any man does he first must do in his mind, whose machinery isthe brain. The mind can do only what the brain is equipped to do, and soman must find out what kind of brain he has before he can understand hisown behavior.
Paul D. MacLean

An interest in the brain requires no justification other than acuriosity to know why we are here, what we are doing here, and where weare going.
Thomas L. Masson

No brain is stronger than its weakest think.
H. Maudsley (from The Double Brain, 1889)
Is the brain, which is notably double in structure, a double organ,'seeming parted, but yet a union in partition'?
W. Somerset Maugham

The highest activities of consiousness have their origins inphysical occurrences of the brain, just as the loveliest melodies arenot too sublime to be expressed by notes.
Member of Britain's House of Lords (quoted in NewsweekMagazine,September 11, 1999, p. 8)
The whole thing is ludicrous. What do I include? My shoe size,number of brain cells?
Dr. Leonard H. McCoy ("Bones") (from Star Trek TV series, TheMenagerie)
Blast medicine anyway! We've learned to tie into every organ in thehuman body but one. The brain! The brain is what life is allabout.
John McCrone (from The Ape That Spoke. Language and the Evolutionof the Human Mind, 1991)
The brain is designed to grab what input it can and then boil it upinto a froth of understanding.
A.A. Milne (from "The World of Pooh", Winnie-the-Poohtalking)

I have been Foolish and Deluded, and I am a Bear of No Brain atAll.
Alexander Monro II (1733-1817, from Observations of the Structureand Functions of the Nervous System, Ch. 1)
For, as the substance of the brain, like that of the other solids ofour body, is nearly incompressible, the quantity of blood within the headmust be the same, or very nearly the same, at all times, whether in healthor disease, in life or after death.
Van Morrison

If my heart could do my thinking,
would my brain begin to feel?
Vernon B. Mountcastle (from Johns Hopkins Medical Journal, vol.136, page 131, 1975)
Each of us lives within the universe - the prison - of his own brain.Projecting from it are millions of fragile sensory nerve fibers, in groupsuniquely adapted to sample the energetic states of the world around us:heat, light, force, and chemical composition. That is all we ever knowof it directly; all else is logical inference.
Louis Nizer
A man who works with his hands is a laborer; a man who works with hishands and his brain is a craftsman; but a man who works with his hands andhis brain and his heart is an artist.
Charles R. Noback (from James Arthur Lecture on the Evolution ofthe Human Brain, 1959)
The human brain is the product of a long phylogenetic history. Thepast resides in the fabric of its structural and functionalcomponents.
Joyce Carol Oats (from "The Grave Dwellers" in Love and ItsDerangements, 1970)
The brain is a muscle/
of busy hills, the struggle/
of unthought things with things/
eternally thought.
Julien Offory de La Mettrie (1709-1751; from L'Hommemachine)

The brain has muscles for thinking as the legs have muscles forwalking.
Michel de Montaigne (1533-1592)

It is good to rub and polish our brain against that of others.
Ivan Petrovich Pavlov (1849-1936; in a lecture given in 1913 andpublished in Lectures on conditionedreflexes. Twenty-five year of objective study of the higher nervousactitivy [behavior] of animals, London: Martin Lawrence, 1928, p.222.)

If we could look through the skull into the brain of a consciouslythinking person, and if the place of optimal excitability were luminous,then we should see playing over the cerebral surface, a bright spot withfantastic, waving borders constantly fluctuating in size and form,surrounded by a darkness more or less deep, covering the rest of thehemisphere.
Wilder Penfield (from The Great Issues of Conscience in ModernMedicine, 1960)
It is fair to say that science provides no method of controlling themind. Scientific work on the brain does not explain the mind-notyet.
Roger Penrose

It may well be there is something else going on in the brain that we don't have an inkling of at the moment.
Carl C. Pfeiffer (from Mental and Elemental Nutrients,1975)
Brains, like cabbages, are beautiful--but in a different way. Cabbageheads are dumb and sterile, whereas brains are personal, intelligent andvibrant.
Pablo Picasso (from Saturday Review, September 1, 1956)
If only we could pull out our brain and use only our eyes.
R.V. Pierce (from The People's Common Sense Medical Advisor inPlain English, 1917)
The brain is not, like the liver, heart and other internal organs,capable from the moment of birth of all the functions which it everdischarges; for while in common with them, it has certain duties for theexercise of which it is especially intended, its high character in man,as the organ of conscious life, the supreme instrument of hisrelations with the rest of nature, is developed only by a long andpatient training.
Pliny the Elder (23-79 A.D.)

The brain is the highest of the organs in position, and it isprotected by the vault of the head; it has no flesh or blood or refuse.It is the citadel of sense-perception.
Harry Potter (a character from the book, Harry Potter and thePrisoner of Azkaban, by J.K. Rowling, 1999)
Never trust anything that can think for itself, if you can't see whereit keeps its brain.
Pasko T. Rakic (from Great Issues for Medicine in theTwenty-First Century, Ann. N.Y. Acad. Sciences, vol. 882, p. 66, 1999)
The brain is the organ that sets us apart from any other species. Itis not the strength of our muscles or of our bones that makes usdifferent, it is our brain.
Richard M. Restak (from The Brain. The Last Frontier,1979)
Since the brain is unlike any other structure in the known universe,it seems reasonable to expect that our understanding of its functioning -if it can ever be achieved - will require approaches that are drasticallydifferent from the way we understand other physical systems.
Richard Restak (from The Brain Has A Mind of Its Own, 1991)
But if the brain is not like a computer, then what is it like? Whatkind of model can we form in regard to its functioning? I believe there'sonly one answer to that question, and perhaps it will disturb you:there is no model of the brain, nor will there ever be. That'sbecause the brain, as the constructor of all models, transcends allmodels. The brain's uniqueness stems from the fact that nowhere in theknown universe is there anything even remotely resembling it.
W. Richie Russell (from Brain Memory Learning: A Neurologist's View, 1959)
There is no clear evidence on which we can separate the mind from thebrain; they appear to develop together and to disintegratetogether.
Tom Robbins

If little else, the brain is an educational toy.
Steven Rose (from The Conscious Brain, 1973)
The brain is biology's greatest challenge. Perhaps in a sense it isthe greatest challenge for science as a whole, beyond moon landings, theultimate particles of the physicist and the depths of astronomicalspace.
Carl Sagan (from Broca's Brain, 1979)
We are an intelligent species and the use of our intelligence quiteproperly gives us pleasure. In this respect the brain is like a muscle when it is in use we feel very good. Understanding is joyous.
Carl Sagan (from The Dragons of Eden, 1977)
My fundamental premise about the brain is that its workings - what wesometimes call "mind" - are a consequence of its anatomy and physiology,and nothing more.
Daniel J. Siegel (from The Developing Mind, 1999
The number of possible "on-off" patterns of neuronal firing isimmense, estimated as a staggering ten times ten one million times (ten tothe millionth power). The brain is obviously capable of an imponderablyhuge variety of activity; the fact that it is often organized andfunctional is quite an accomplishment!
Jerry Seinfeld (from Seinfeld TV show, last episode,5/14/98)
Maybe if we lie down our brains will work.
William Shakespeare (from Hamlet)
Within the book and volume of thy brain...
William Shakespeare (from Macbeth)
Memory, the warder of the brain.
William Shakespeare (from Romeo and Juliet)
True, I talk of dreams,
Which are the children of an idle brain,
Begot of nothing but vain fantasy.
Sir Charles Sherrington (from Man on his Nature, 1940)
If it is mind that we are searching the brain, then we are supposingthe brain to be much more than a telephone-exchange. We are supposing itto be a telephone-exchange along with subscribers as well.

Sir Charles Sherrington
Swiftly the brain becomes an enchanted loom, where millions of flashing shuttles weave a dissolving pattern-always a meaningful pattern-though never an abiding one.
Sir Charles Sherrington (speaking about Santiago Ramon y Cajal)
He solved at a stroke the great question of the direction ofnerve-currents in their travel through brain and spinal cord.

Gerd Sommerhoff (from Logic of the Living Brain, 1974)
The peculiar fascination of the brain lies in the fact that there isprobably no other object of scientific enquiry about which we know at onceso much and yet understand so little.
John Philip Souza (1854-1932)
Jazz will endure, just as long as people hear it through their feetinstead of their brains.
Spanish Proverb
He who at thirty has no brains, will never purchase an estate.
Herbert Spencer (from Principles of Ethics, 1898)
Mental power cannot be got from ill-feb brains.
Roger W. Sperry (from James Arthur Lecture on the Evolution of theHuman Brain, 1964)
There probably is no more important quest in all science than theattempt to understand those very particular events in evolution by whichbrains worked out that special trick that has enabled them to add to thecosmic scheme of things: color, sound, pain, pleasure, and all the otherfacets of mental experience.
Mr. Spock (from Star Trek episode "Spock's Brain")
The knowledge to reconnect a brain does not exist yet in thegalaxy.
Jonathan Swift
Books, the children of the brain.
Frederick Tilney (from The Brain from Ape to Man, 1928
The brain is conceded to be the master organ of the body, theregulator of life, the source of human progress.
Karl Vogt
The brain secretes thought as the stomach secretes gastric juice, theliver bile, and the kidneys urine.
Kurt Vonnegut, Jr.
I was taught that the human brain was the crowning glory of evolutionso far, but I think it's a very poor scheme for survival.
W. Grey Walter (from The Living Brain, 1953)
By brain is meant, in the first instance, something more than thepink-grey jelly of the anatomist. It is, even to a scientist, the organof imagination.
James D. Watson (from Discovering the Brain, National AcademyPress, 1992)
The brain is the last and grandest biological frontier, the mostcomplex thing we have yet discovered in our universe. It containshundreds of billions of cells interlinked through trillions ofconnections. The brain boggles the mind.

Victor Frederick Weisskopf (from Knowledge and Wonder,1962)
In man's brain the impressions from outside are not merely registered;they produce concepts and ideas. They are the imprint of the externalworld upon the human brain.
Woodrow Wilson
I not only use all the brains that I have, but all that I canborrow.
Walt Whitman (from the preface to Leaves of Grass, 1855)
All beauty comes from beautiful blood and a beautiful brain.
Virgina Woolf
My own brain is to me the most unaccountable of machinery - alwaysbuzzing, humming, soaring, roaring, diving, and then buried in mud. Andwhy? What's this passion for?
Steven Wright
My girlfriend and I went on a picnic. I don't know how she did it, but she got poison ivy on the brain. When it itched, the only way she could scratch it was to think about sandpaper.
Yiddish Proverb
Borrowed brains have no value.
Yiddish Proverb
When brains are needed, brawn won't help.
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