A Quote by Robert M. Sapolsky

On an incredibly simplistic level, you can think of depression as occurring when your cortex thinks an abstract thought and manages to convince the rest of the brain that this is as real as a physical stressor.
It used to be thought that you stopped making new neural connections in your youth and from then on your brain was fixed and it was downhill all the way. But in fact as we know from our own experience we can keep on learning and learning means changing our brain on a physical level.
We live in the Age of the Higher Brain, the cerebral cortex that has grown enormously over the last few millennia, overshadowing the ancient, instinctive lower brain. The cortex is often called the new brain, yet the old brain held sway in humans for millions of years, as it does today in most living things. The old brain can't conjure up ideas or read. But it does possess the power to feel and, above all, to be. It was the old brain that caused our forebears to sense the closeness of a mysterious presence everywhere in Nature.
The frontal cortex is an incredibly interesting part of the brain - ours is proportionately bigger and/or more complex than in any other species.
Music is a physical expression that has a physical impact upon the listener. Sound travels in waves through the air. This is not abstract. This is scientific fact. And it makes physical contact with the eardrum... and with the heart... and with the rest of the body.
When you sleep your eyes move left and right and physical movement takes trauma and moves it from your frontal lobe to the back of your brain or to another part of the brain where you can store it that memory but when you think about those things that happened, you don't associate the feeling that normally comes with it. So the problem is if you have something traumatic happen and you are not getting a good amount of rest, it will stay in your frontal lobe.
Something in the movement of fingers on the keyboard enhances thought. Fingers pull your thoughts forward. Fingers are in some way an extension of your brain, with a lot of cortex associations at their trigger. Get them going!
There is one brain organ that is optimised for understanding and articulating logical processes and that is the outer layer of the brain, called the cerebral cortex. Unlike the rest of the brain, this relatively recent evolutionary development is rather flat, only about 0.32 cm (0.12 in) thick and includes a mere 6 million neurons. This elaborately folded organ provides us with what little competence we do possess for understanding what we do and who we do it.
So, you can define emotions very simply as the process of perceiving what is going on in the organs when you are in the throws of an emotion, and that is achieved by a collection of structures, some of which are in the brain stem, and some of which are in the cerebral cortex, namely the insular cortex, which I like to mention not because I think it's the most important, it's not.
Healthy breaks can hit the reset button in your brain, restoring some of the glucose and other metabolic nutrients used up with deep thought. A healthy break is one in which you allow your brain to rest, to loosen its grip on your thoughts.
If you think about it, you can have the best CGI, but you can always tell that it is CGI. Your brain can spot that is not real even though you think it looks cool. Your brain knows the truth, so you don't jump and you don't scream. It was very important for me to expose the audience to real elements.
I think animation is a very truthful way to express your thoughts, because the process is very direct. That's what I've always liked about animation, particularly abstract animation. You go from the idea to execution, straight from your brain. It's like when you hear someone playing an instrument, and you feel the direct connection between the instrument and his brain, because the instrument becomes an extension of his arms and fingers. It's like a scanner of the brain and thought process that you can watch, or hear.
Sometimes what is 'real' because it takes place in the physical world, like 9/11, is so unreal on the level of the soul. Then other things, which in terms of the physical world seem so magical and unbelievable, on the level of the soul seem very real.
The Blue Brain project expects to have a full human-scale simulation of the cerebral cortex by 2018. I think that's a little optimistic, actually, but I do make the case that by 2029 we will have very detailed models and simulations of all the different brain regions.
Whenever you read a book or have a conversation, the experience causes physical changes in your brain. It's a little frightening to think that every time you walk away from an encounter, your brain has been altered, sometimes permanently.
At every level there are eight stages of intelligence. You have to turn your brain on to the circuits that are used at that level of intelligence. And there are ways to change the human brain to different stages. The things that change your brain are called 'drugs'.
Rest is a fine medicine. Let your stomachs rest, ye dyspeptics; let your brain rest, you wearied and worried people of business; let your limbs rest, ye children of toil!
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