Quotes about neurons (16 Quotes)


    I don't think there's anything unique about human intelligence. All the neurons in the brain that make up perceptions and emotions operate in a binary fashion.

    As we increased the riskiness of a target, the neurons' activity would go up in the same way the monkey's frequency of choosing that target would go up. It was amazing the degree to which the activity of these neurons paralleled the behavior of the monkeys. They looked like they were signaling, in fact, the monkeys' subjective valuation of that target.

    In regular cells, like in bone and blood, the cells divide. But brain cells do not normally divide. The great majority will not divide. The neurons you're born with are pretty much what you have at end of life.


    Neurodegenerative diseases like Huntington's disease are complex disorders that involve genetic defects and physiological changes including the death of neurons that lead to a wasting away of the brain, ... Because of their genetic and behavioral similarities with humans, transgenic nonhuman primate models will allow us to clarify the correlation between defects and neurological changes caused by neurodegenerative diseases.



    Our ability to see is one of the great evolutionary accomplishments of the human brain. We still don't know how the visual system accomplishes this marvel of information processing. Such experiments are beginning to reveal how large networks of neurons in the brain extract meaning from the eye image.

    Vision doesn't happen in the eye. It happens at multiple processing stages in the brain. We study how objects are signaled or encoded by large populations of neurons at higher-level stages in the object-processing part of the brain.


    There's a lot of data out there that will tell you that the computation that's going on here isn't based on just one neuron. The computational property is actually an emergent property of hundreds of thousands of neurons cooperating to produce the amazing processing power of the brain.

    Human embryonic stem cells give researchers reliable access to these neurons for the first time, and it will now be possible to perform experiments to unravel why these neurons die in Parkinson's.

    Learning strengthens some connections between neurons, known as synapses, and even forms new synapses. These synapses demand a lot of extra energy, though. That means that at the end of the day, you have a brain that costs you more energy, ... That's where sleep would kick in.

    Knowing that neurons are able to grow in the adult brain gives us a chance to enhance the process and explore under what conditions -- genetic, sensory or other -- we can make that happen.

    An illustration I use to get people to understand it is this: I'll ask major corporate audiences: Why don't you just take all your traditional beliefs about organizations, and apply them to the neurons in your brain?

    Children and seniors can both benefit from brainteasers because research has shown that when looking at the brain through an MRI or a CAT scan, brainteasers actually cause the neurons to fire faster, therefore increasing brain activity.




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