Neuroscientists From The United States

"I can admit now, in retrospect, that when you’re a Black female and you’re the only one in a particular situation, when something happens, you don’t know whether to view it through a lens of racism or not. You can’t tell because there aren’t other people who look like you. You don’t know if what is happening to you is because of your race or not."

"I do hope they recognize that I care deeply about Trinity and trying to make it a stronger institution, that fundamentally I want to leave the place better than it was when I came. It isn’t about me; it is about a better Trinity and my hopes for higher education being better and stronger for the country."

"I have heard other women and people of color say that we feel like we have to work harder to prove that we know what we’re talking about. I got to where I am because I worked harder, I dug deeper, and I learned how to bring more people into the conversation and to see my point of view."

"My mother was executive director of the Los Angeles Girl Scout Council. She was a leader, she knew how to interact with people, and she believed deeply in higher education. She would wake me up every morning and say, ‘You can be anything you want to be.’ If you grow up with that kind of confidence, it has a profound influence on the rest of your life."

"Walter Pitts, who was companion, protege, and friend to Warren, had, for a long time, been convinced that the only way of understanding nature was by logic and logic alone .... Pitts had committed himself to logic as the key to the structure of the world in a way that no other person that [ know had ever done."

"[Depression is] common to all people with an excessively logical education who work in applied mathematics: It is a kind of pessimism resulting from an inability to believe in what people call the Principle of Induction, or the principle of the Uniformity of Nature. Since one cannot prove, or even render probable a priori, that the sun should rise tomorrow, we cannot really believe it shall."

"The movie Forrest Gump made the point that the greatest, most heroic Americans are people of extraordinary character who flicker briefly into public consciousness and are quickly forgotten... while his contemporaries Alan Turing, Ludwig Wittgenstein, and John von Neumann entered the pantheon of fame, Pitts remains a shadowy folk hero. Stories about Pitts have circulated among the cognescenti for years, but almost nothing has been written about him."

"“What the Frog’s Eye Tells the Frog’s Brain”... devastated Pitts because it showed that retinal ganglion cells were not simply acting as logical devices, thus appearing to shatter his dream that logic could be used to explain the nervous system."

"At about the time of the break with Wiener, and arguably because of it, Pitts destroyed his thesis and all of his papers, felt unable to become interested in anything new, and began a long, slow decline. He did not simply begin to drink—as befitting a man of his talents, he synthesized novel analogues of barbituates and opiates in the laboratory and experimented on himself by ingesting long-chain alcohols."

"The story is told that, at age 12, Pitts ran into the public library to hide from some bullies, found a copy of Principia Mathematica by the 20th-century philosophers Bertrand Russell and Alfred North Whitehead, and proceeded to read it cover to cover in the next few weeks. Pitts experienced a metaphysical insight that logic rules the universe, and as a corollary he felt that ego—and his ego in particular— needed to be erased in order to achieve an understanding of the world."

"Pitts was married to abstract thought... We never knew anything about his family or his feelings about us. He died mysterious, sad and remote, and not once did I find out, or even want to find out more about how he felt or what he hoped. To be interested in him as a person was to lose him as a friend. One was to be interested only in what he knew."

"He read incessantly and omnivorously, but stayed away from everyone. He read like someone waiting to die but willing to be distracted during the last hours."

"[Pitts] was in no uncertain terms the genius of our group. He was absolutely incomparable in the scholarship of chemistry, physics, of everything you could talk about history, botany, etc. When you asked him a question, you would get back a whole textbook … To him, the world was connected in a very complex and wonderful fashion."

"It was apparent to him after we had done the frog’s eye that even if logic played a part, it didn’t play the important or central part that one would have expected. It disappointed him. He would never admit it, but it seemed to add to his despair at the loss of Wiener’s friendship."

"He is the most omniverous of scientists and scholars. He has become an excellent dye chemist, a good mammalogist, he knows the sedges, mushrooms and the birds of New England. He knows neuroanatomy and neurophysiology from their original sources in Greek, Latin, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese, and German for he learns any language he needs as soon as he needs it. Things like electrical circuit theory and the practical soldering in of power, lighting, and radio circuits he does himself. In my long life, I have never seen a man so erudite or so really practical."

"Dress from the waist up."

"Ignore bureaucrats and they will ignore you."

"Next to Mozart, other kinds of music are not music at all."

"I am a scientist and educator first. I strive to promote rational, skeptical, evidence-based thought and to improve scientific literacy with every word I write and every conversation I have."

"Without a rigorous materials and methods and results section, however, the author hasn’t really earned the right to speculate on its implications, no?...pseudoscience, junk science, and anti-science are vastly different from views that use scientific fundamentals to challenge the status-quo."

"Our editorial mission is to inform readers, but also to engage them with the awe and beauty of the natural world."

"Almost any topic can be described in such a way that it connects with a personal interest or emotion of a reader. I am lucky enough to be able to produce a video series, Talk Nerdy To Me, where I attempt to do just that. I discuss topics—sometimes ones that are in the news, and sometimes ones that are evergreen in nature—in a way that invites my viewers to start their own conversations around the dinner table or water cooler. I think it’s important to break down complex scientific ideas, or translate them, without dumbing down the content."

"If we can hook a front page reader who’s perusing an article about the race for the republican nomination, the Golden Globes, or even the NFL playoffs with a snappy title and then deliver on that promise of offering an eye-opening perspective on the way the universe works, I think we’ve done what we all want to do: make a small step toward increasing the scientific literacy of the public at large."

"I was lucky to have a handful of strong female and Latina professors. I could see myself in their shoes. It’s so important that we have strong multiethnic women representing science in the media. If kids can’t see themselves in that role, they’re not going to think that’s for them."

"Any time I write a piece or produce a new video, I find myself answering challenging questions and having exciting conversations with the commenters on my posts."

"In becoming a bit more introspective as human beings I think we’re improving our relationship not only with ourselves but everyone else on this planet."

"I think that sometimes we make mistakes with early STEM education; we teach it as if it’s a series of facts. Learn this fact, learn that fact, shove it down people’s throats—instead of helping people understand that science is a method and it’s a process. Once you understand some of the interesting rules about that method and process, you can apply it to everything and anything, and it sheds new light on every single experience you have."

"Physics is a wrong tool to describe living systems."