life on planet earth on Brain

Breathing is the bridge between the brain and the body.

I study the brain, the organ responsible for Beethoven's 5th Symphony. Bernadette studies yeast, the organism responsible for Michelob Light.

I am a brain, Watson. The rest of me is a mere appendix.

A man with so large a brain must have something in it.

The modern geography of the brain has a deliciously antiquated feel to it -- rather like a medieval map with the known world encircled by terra incognito where monsters roam.

Shaped a little like a loaf of French country bread, our brain is a crowded chemistry lab, bustling with nonstop neural conversations….Imagine the brain, that shiny mound of being, that mouse-gray par...

Our brains need to engage and make decisions again, instead of floating along the paths of least resistance.

As we begin the 21st century, the Hubble space telescope is providing us with information about as yet uncharted regions of the universe and the promise that we may learn something about the origin of...

The picture's pretty bleak, gentlemen... The world's climates are changing, the mammals are taking over, and we all have a brain about the size of a walnut.

A great deal of scientific work has also confirmed the “use it or lose it” adage: the mind grows stronger from use and from being challenged in the same way that muscles grow stronger from exercise.

Because important things go in a case. You got a skull for your brain, a plastic sleeve for your comb, and a wallet for your money.

The brain immediately confronts us with its great complexity. The human brain weighs only three to four pounds but contains about 100 billion neurons. Although that extraordinary number is of the same...

Why can’t our brains take something we intellectually know, something that seems easy, and process it into something we just get with our whole selves.

If you look at the anatomy, the structure, the function, there's nothing in the universe that's more beautiful, that's more complex, than the human brain.

An intimate acquaintance with some of the structural features of the human brain is thus seen to be not only necessary to the physician, but also to the psychologist, the educationalist, and the socia...

The brain is a wonderful organ. It starts working the moment you get up and does not stop until you get into the office.

Most of us have spent some time wondering how our brain works. Brain scientists spend their entire lives pondering it, looking for a way to begin asking the question, How does the brain generate mind?...

In proportion to our body mass, our brain is three times as large as that of our nearest relatives. This huge organ is dangerous and painful to give birth to, expensive to build and, in a resting huma...

Although we tend to think of the brain as a discrete organ - a lump of squidgy tissue - it is better to think of it as part of an elaborate network of nervous tissue that reaches out to every single p...

The brain is a monstrous, beautiful mess. Its billions of nerve cells - called neurons - lie in a tangled web that displays cognitive powers far exceeding any of the silicon machines we have built to ...

Made up of a dozen billion microscopic nerve-cell units interconnected by millions upon millions of conducting nerve-threads weaving incredibly intricate patterns, the brain, as an object of research,...

We ignore so much stuff for a simple reason: if we didn’t, we’d quickly be overwhelmed, our brains flooded until they seized up. Depending on the kind of information, it takes our brains some amount o...

Studies show we actually get a dopamine hit when we think we’re proven right. We can literally become addicted to the sensation of our rightness. “Your body does not discriminate against pleasure,” wr...

A fascinating study recently revealed differences in brain structure correlate with political orientation. The study demonstrated that greater conservatism was associated with increased gray matter vo...

The average adult brain consists of more than 10 billion neurons communicating with one another through more than 10 trillion synaptic connections. (Synaptic connections are the junctions or gaps betw...

The prefrontal cortex is responsible for the success of the human species. It enables us to learn from our mistakes and make plans. When the PFC is healthy, we behave consistently in ways that enable ...

Even though your brain makes up only about 2 percent of your body’s weight (about three pounds), it uses 20 to 30 percent of the calories you take in, as well as 20 percent or more of the oxygen and b...

In 1951, Isaiah Berlin wrote an essay about War and Peace and gave it a room-emptying title: “Leo Tolstoy’s Historical Skepticism.” Berlin’s publisher loved the essay but hated the headline, so he cha...

The brain’s reward center, which includes the production and release of dopamine, pushes us toward both making and spending money, playing video games, use or overuse of the internet, and consumption ...

What happens in the brain when we are afraid? Remember the little red metal square on the school-room wall with a piece of glass that reads, “Break in case of fire”? Just as the school has a fire alar...