Cognitive Neuroscience Quotes

“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, Musicophilia: Tales of Music and the Brain

“A flawless delusion is more appealing to the human mind than a flawed reality.”
― Abhijit Naskar, I Vicdansaadet Speaking: No Rest Till The World is Lifted

“Educated people, of course, know that perception, cognition, language, and emotion are rooted in the brain. But it is still tempting to think of the brain as it was shown in old educational cartoons, as a control panel with gauges and levers operated by a user — the self, the soul, the ghost, the person, the “me.” But cognitive neuroscience is showing that the self, too, is just another network of brain systems. [C]ognitive neuroscientists have not only exorcised the ghost but have shown that the brain does not even have a part that does exactly what the ghost is supposed to do: review all the facts and make a decision for the rest of the brain to carry out. Each of us feels that there is a single “I” in control. But that is an illusion that the brain works hard to produce, like the impression that our visual fields are rich in detail from edge to edge. The brain does have supervisory systems in the prefrontal lobes and anterior cingulate cortex, which can push the buttons of behavior and override habits and urges. But those systems are gadgets with specific quirks and limitations; they are not implementations of the rational free agent traditionally identified with the soul or the self.”
― Steven Pinker, The Blank Slate: The Modern Denial of Human Nature

“We used to believe that we were thinking beings who just happen to feel. We now know that we are feeling beings who think.”
― Antonio Damasio

“There is no reality, there is only hallucination. Reality is hallucination we agree on.”
― Abhijit Naskar, Karadeniz Chronicle: The Novel