Neuropsychology Quotes

“In a very real sense we have two minds, one that thinks and one that feels”
― Daniel Goleman, Emotional Intelligence: Why It Can Matter More Than IQ

“Our dreams and stories may contain implicit aspects of our lives even without our awareness. In fact, storytelling may be a primary way in which we can linguistically communicate to others—as well as to ourselves—the sometimes hidden contents of our implicitly remembering minds. Stories make available perspectives on the emotional themes of our implicit memory that may otherwise be consciously unavailable to us. This may be one reason why journal writing and intimate communication with others, which are so often narrative processes, have such powerful organizing effects on the mind: They allow us to modulate our emotions and make sense of the world.”
― Daniel J. Siegel, The Developing Mind: How Relationships and the Brain Interact to Shape Who We Are

“Each of us needs periods in which our minds can focus inwardly. Solitude is an essential experience for the mind to organize its own processes and create an internal state of resonance. In such a state, the self is able to alter its constraints by directly reducing the input from interactions with others. (p. 235)”
― Daniel J. Siegel, The Developing Mind: How Relationships and the Brain Interact to Shape Who We Are

“At the most basic level, therefore, secure attachments in both childhood and adulthood are established by two individual's sharing a nonverbal focus on the energy flow (emotional states) and a verbal focus on the information-processing aspects (representational processes of memory and narrative) of mental life. The matter of the mind matters for secure attachments.”
― Daniel J. Siegel, The Developing Mind: How Relationships and the Brain Interact to Shape Who We Are

“Psychopathy is like sunlight. Overexposure can hasten one’s demise in grotesque, carcinogenic fashion. But regulated exposure at controlled and optimal levels can have a significant positive impact on well-being and quality of life.”
― Kevin Dutton, The Wisdom of Psychopaths: What Saints, Spies, and Serial Killers Can Teach Us About Success

“Internal mental experience is not the product of a photographic process. Internal reality is in fact constructed by the brain as it interacts with the environment in the present, in the context of its past experiences and expectancies of the future. At the level of perceptual categorizations, we have reached a land of mental representations quite distant from the layers of the world just inches away from their place inside the skull. This is the reason why each of us experiences a unique way of minding the world. (pp. 166-167)”
― Daniel J. Siegel, The Developing Mind: How Relationships and the Brain Interact to Shape Who We Are

“Leaving out appraisal also would render the biological description of the phenomena of emotion vulnerable to the caricature that emotions without an appraisal phase are meaningless events. It would be more difficult to see how beautiful and amazingly intelligent emotions can be, and how powerfully they can solve problems for us.”
― Antonio Damasio, Looking for Spinoza: Joy, Sorrow, and the Feeling Brain

“How dare a person tell a woman, how to dress, how to talk, how to behave! Any being who does that, is no human.”
― Abhijit Naskar, The Bengal Tigress: A Treatise on Gender Equality

“We must keep in mind that only a part of memory can be translated into the language-based packets of information people use to tell their life stories to others. Learning to be open to many layers of communication is a fundamental part of getting to know another person's life.”
― Daniel J. Siegel, The Developing Mind: How Relationships and the Brain Interact to Shape Who We Are

“...not all encounters with the world affect the mind equally. Studies have demonstrated that if the brain appraises an event as "meaningful," it will be more likely to be recalled in the future.”
― Daniel J. Siegel, The Developing Mind: How Relationships and the Brain Interact to Shape Who We Are

“Call it order, call it chaos, it’s all in the brain.”
― Abhijit Naskar, Mission Reality

“If you are learning psychology to manipulate people, you don't need lessons, you need treatment.”
― Abhijit Naskar, The Centurion Sermon: Mental Por El Mundo

“The Biochemistry Sonnet

Chemicals breed prejudice,
Chemicals breed love.
Chemicals breed hate and rage,
Chemicals breed the atoning dove.
Chemicals breed walls of divide,
Chemicals breed the bridge to unite.
Chemicals breed death and disease,
In those very chemicals we find sight.
Chemicals are us, we are the chemicals,
In this mortal world there is nothing else.
While most are run by the whim of chemicals,
Some bend chemicals at will, as true sapiens.
Chemicals are the cause, chemicals are the result.
Awareness of chemicals is awareness of the world.”
― Abhijit Naskar, Amantes Assemble: 100 Sonnets of Servant Sultans

“Neurons are the building blocks of mind.”
― Abhijit Naskar, Sin Dios Sí Hay Divinidad: The Pastor Who Never Was

“Fear resisted is fear amplified,
Fear embraced is fear relieved.
Most fears are rooted in imagination,
Observe yourself and all is revealed.”
― Abhijit Naskar, Himalayan Sonneteer: 100 Sonnets of Unsubmission

“Fear resisted is fear amplified, fear embraced is fear relieved.”
― Abhijit Naskar, Himalayan Sonneteer: 100 Sonnets of Unsubmission

“Neurons can make or break the world.”
― Abhijit Naskar, Revolution Indomable

“Time is memory.”
― Abhijit Naskar, Citizens of Peace: Beyond the Savagery of Sovereignty

“When we watch another human being making a movement, whether it is sticking out a tongue, carrying packages, swerving, dancing, eating, or clapping hands, our neurons fire in the same way, as if we ourselves were making the movement. From the brain's perspective . . . watching is pretty similar to doing. The brain has a built-in empathic and mimicking capacity. It translates what is seen through the eyes into the equivalent of doing and is structured to absorb and prepare itself for what we may not yet have mastered.”
― Susie Orbach, Bodies

“Touch is the most basic and fundamental of human experiences. Before we can suckle, before we can even see, we are enveloped by the welcoming arms of our mother. As we nestle into her body, feel the steadiness of her heartbeat, breathe her smell, we embed ourselves with her as our beacon. Her body, her voice, her skin, her touch become the way we orient ourselves as we make our personal journey through infancy, childhood and beyond. And touch is among the most crucial of these elements, not only providing us, in the case of loving touch, with a sense of security and ease in our bodies, but shaping our biology and our neurocircuitry in ways that will affect our tempers and our personalities throughout our lives.”
― Susie Orbach, Bodies

“Body cannot survive in the vacuum of space,
Mind cannot survive in the vacuum of time.
Brain cannot survive in the vacuum of skull,
So it floats about in the fluid of spine.”
― Abhijit Naskar, Tum Dunya Tek Millet: Greatest Country on Earth is Earth

“People usually revenge the younger version of themselves and not the actual aggressor.”
― Nickiesha Reid

“As a crutch, some obsessively concern themselves with the personal lives of others, as an act of denial from their own personal life.”
― Deanna L. Lawlis

“He faced me as he spoke, was oriented towards me, and yet there was something the matter—it was difficult to formulate. He faced me with his ears, I came to think, but not with his eyes. These, instead of looking, gazing, at me, ‘taking me in’, in the normal way, made sudden strange fixations—on my nose, on my right ear, down to my chin, up to my right eye—as if noting (even studying) these individual features, but not seeing my whole face, its changing expressions, ‘me’, as a whole. I am not sure that I fully realized this at the time—there was just a teasing strangeness, some failure in the normal interplay of gaze and expression. He saw me, he scanned me, and yet...”
― Oliver Sacks, The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat and Other Clinical Tales

“He recognized a portrait of Einstein because he picked up the characteristic hair and moustache; and the same thing happened with one or two other people. ‘Ach, Paul!’ he said, when shown a portrait of his brother. ‘That square jaw, those big teeth— I would know Paul anywhere!’ But was it Paul he recognized, or one or two of his features, on the basis of which he could make a reasonable guess as to the subject’s identity?”
― Oliver Sacks, The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat and Other Clinical Tales

“...he approached these faces— even of those near and dear—as if they were abstract puzzles or tests. He did not relate to them, he did not behold. No face was familiar to him, seen as a ‘thou’, being just identified as a set of features, an ‘it’. Thus, there was formal, but no trace of personal, gnosis. And with this went his indifference, or blindness, to expression. A face, to us, is a person looking out—we see, as it were, the person through his persona, his face.”
― Oliver Sacks, The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat and Other Clinical Tales

“I had stopped at a florist on my way to his apartment and bought myself an extravagant red rose for my buttonhole. Now I removed this and handed it to him. He took it like a botanist or morphologist given a specimen, not like a person given a flower. About six inches in length,’ he commented. ‘A convoluted red form with a linear green attachment.”
― Oliver Sacks, The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat and Other Clinical Tales

“It’s just like the eating,’ she explained. ‘I put his usual clothes out, in all the usual places,
and he dresses without difficulty, singing to himself. He does everything singing to himself. But if he is interrupted and loses the thread, he comes to a complete stop, doesn’t know his clothes—or his own body. He sings all the time—eating songs, dressing songs, bathing songs, everything. He can’t do anything unless he makes it a song.”
― Oliver Sacks, The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat and Other Clinical Tales

“As all fields of human knowledge depend on the functioning of the brain, there is nothing to prevent the application of neuropsychology to disciplines such as economics, aesthetics, pedagogy, theology, etc.”
― Paolo Legrenzi, Neuromania: On the limits of brain science

“There is nothing supernatural about visions - or to be more accurate, contrary to traditional belief, it's not messages from some extraterrestrial domain. Visions are indeed messages from a mysterious realm alright, but like the everyday realm of human perception, the transcendental realm as well is creation of brain chemicals. I won't go into details here, as I already did that in my early days. One of my earliest works, Autobiography of God, contains a detailed analytical account of the neurobiology of transcendental experiences. However, the question is not whether there is an explanation, the question is, is it worth explaining! Because, while sometimes the lack of explanation facilitates superstition, some things are better left unexplained - such as, love.”
― Abhijit Naskar, Visvavatan: 100 Demilitarization Sonnets