Every status update you read on Facebook, every tweet or text message you get from a friend, is competing for resources in your brain with important things like whether to put your savings in stocks or bonds, where you left your passport, or how best to reconcile with a close friend you just had an argument with.
No matter how closely you examine the water, glucose, and electrolyte salts in the human brain, you can't find the point where these molecules became conscious.
The walking wounded, impaired in life and dissected in death, were our primary clues to where and how parts of the brain work.
My brain is a big cluster of stuff. It moves quickly and loses focus quickly, so I need many projects to keep me stimulated - it's a luxury to be able to do lots of different things: style, write, present, DJ or just consult. It can't be any other way; I think I would shrivel up and fall asleep forever.
Recently a study proved that working from a larger, less cluttered computer screen increases concentration. I could have told them that. And yes, I write first drafts with a mechanical pencil and a yellow legal pad. There's good reason for this primitive behavior: I am a crackerjack typist. My hand moves far more quickly than my brain.
Let's detox our cluttered academic brain. That's what the poet does. People call it daydreaming, detoxing our minds and taking care of that clutter. It's being able to let in call letters from the poetry universe.
The dog, on the other hand, has few or no ideas because his brain acts in coarse fashion and because there are few connections with each single process.
I had saved a few hundred photos of dodo skeletons into my 'Creative Projects' folder - it's a repository for my brain, everything that I could possibly be interested in. Any time I have an Internet connection, there's a sluice of stuff moving into there, everything from beautiful rings to cockpit photos.
Natural selection shaped the human brain to be drawn toward aspects of nature that enhance our survival and reproduction, like verdant landscapes and docile creatures. There is no payoff to getting the warm fuzzies in the presence of rats, snakes, mosquitoes, cockroaches, herpes simplex and the rabies virus.
Our minds influence the key activity of the brain, which then influences everything; perception, cognition, thoughts and feelings, personal relationships; they're all a projection of you.
Sound in a space affects us profoundly. It changes our heart rate, breathing, hormone secretion, brain waves. It affects our emotions and our cognition.
Cognitive neuroscience is entering an exciting era in which new technologies and ideas are making it possible to study the neural basis of cognition, perception, memory and emotion at the level of networks of interacting neurons, the level at which we believe many of the important operations of the brain take place.
The reason I'm not a neurobiologist but a cognitive psychologist is that I think looking at brain tissue is often the wrong level of analysis. You have to look at a higher level of organization.
It felt like a series of coincidences and luck that I ended up getting the part in 'Trainspotting,' but it's been an incredible journey since then. Every now and then, I sit and really think about it, and it blows my mind. I have to stop because I don't want my brain to implode.
In our world of sleek flesh and collagen, Botox and liposuction, what we most fear is the dissolution of the body-mind, the death of the brain.
For me, the desire exists less to get myself a degree than to just go and have the whole college experience, and throw myself into the brain pool and see if I can swim.
I have a lot of college football players in my Brain Bank with CTE.
As a college student, what really interested me was the human brain and human intelligence.
The damage that the human body can survive these days is as awesome as it is horrible: crushing, burning, bombing, a burst blood vessel in the brain, a ruptured colon, a massive heart attack, rampaging infection. These conditions had once been uniformly fatal.
Writing this book feels like a completely different activity from writing my comic strip because it's about real life. I feel like I'm using a part of my brain that's been dormant until now.
