Mind

"Paying attention acknowledges that we have something to learn from intelligences other than our own. Listening, standing witness, creates an openness to the world in which the boundaries between us can dissolve in a raindrop."

"School children and students who love God should never say: “For my part I like mathematics”; “I like French”; “I like Greek.” They should learn to like all these subjects, because all of them develop that faculty of attention which, directed towards God, is the very substance of prayer."

"Why do you look at the speck of sawdust in your brother’s eye and pay no attention to the plank in your own eye?"

"From hence in my opinion arises that common prejudice against metaphysical reasonings of all kinds, even amongst those, who profess themselves scholars, and have a just value for every other part of literature. By metaphysical reasonings, they do not understand those on any particular branch of science, but every kind of argument, which is any way abstruse, and requires some attention to be comprehended. We have so often lost our labour in such researches, that we commonly reject them without hesitation, and resolve, if we must for ever be a prey to errors and delusions, that they shall at least be natural and entertaining. And indeed nothing but the most determined scepticism, along with a great degree of indolence, can justify this aversion to metaphysics. For if truth be at all within the reach of human capacity, ‘tis certain it must lie very deep and abstruse; and to hope we shall arrive at it without pains, while the greatest geniuses have failed with the utmost pains, must certainly be esteemed sufficiently vain and presumptuous. I pretend to no such advantage in the philosophy I am going to unfold, and would esteem it a strong presumption against it, were it so very easy and obvious."

"I would like to develop a reductionist approach to the problem of attention by focusing on how place cells... create an enduring spatial map only when an organism is paying attention to its surroundings."

"Paying attention is a form of reciprocity with the living world, receiving the gifts with open eyes and open heart."

"We may confer a benefit, not only on ourselves, but on others, by diverting attention from the exciting circumstances of the present day—from the disheartening eccentricities of a literature which meanders in a thousand frivolous directions—to the calm regions where the inner man, self-examined, submits himself to moral treatment."

"A teacher comes, they say, when you are ready. And if you ignore its presence, it will speak to you more loudly. But you have to be quiet to hear."

"If we have no aptitude or natural taste for geometry this does not mean that our faculty for attention will not be developed by wrestling with a problem or studying a theorem. On the contrary it is almost an advantage. ... Without our knowing or feeling it, this apparently barren effort has brought more light into the soul. ... Every time that a human being succeeds in making an effort of attention with the sole idea of increasing his grasp of truth, he acquires a greater aptitude for grasping it, even if his effort produces no visible fruit."

"Wherefore a monk's whole attention should thus be fixed on one point, and the rise and circle of all his thoughts be vigorously restricted to it; viz., to the recollection of God, as when a man, who is anxious to raise on high a vault of a round arch, must constantly draw a line round from its exact centre, and in accordance with the sure standard it gives discover by the laws of building all the evenness and roundness required...."

"Intellectual culture consists, not chiefly, as many are apt to think, in accumulating information, though this is important, but in building up a force of thought which may be turned at will on any subjects on which we are called to pass judgment. This force is manifested in the concentration of the attention, in accurate, penetrating observation, in reducing complex subjects to their elements, in diving beneath the effect to the cause, in detecting the more subtle differences and resemblances of things, in reading the future in the present, and especially in rising from particular facts to general laws or universal truths."

"No man is in any degree fit for either business or conversation, who does not command his attention to the present object, be it what it will. When I see a man absent in mind, I choose to be absent in body; for it is almost impossible for me to stay in the room, as I cannot stand inattention and awkwardness."

"With curious art the brain, too finely wrought, Preys on herself, and is destroy'd by thought: Constant attention wears the active mind, Blots out our powers, and leaves a blank behind."

"In some developing tissues, a mass of identical cells somehow differentiates into many types. ...The mechanism behind this process appears to have evolved early on, and is highly conserved... At first this intimate mixture of fates seems puzzling, but there is a relatively easy way to achieve it: instruct each cell 'Be different from your neighbors.' This mechanism is known as lateral inhibition. An example is the nervous system. Since nerve cells form networks with long thin connections, and their ability to function depends on this geometry... when a cell develops into a nerve cell, it sends signals to nearby cells telling them not to do the same."

"We are what we are, ... because our brains are basically chemical machines rather than electrical ones."

"Octopuses have hundreds of suckers, each one equipped with its own ganglion with thousands of neurons. These 'mini-brains' are interconnected, making for a widely distributed nervous system. That is why a severed octopus arm may crawl on its own and even pick up food."

"Every neuron, ... contains about a million pumps—each one is a slight bump on the cell membrane—and every pump can swap about 200 sodium ions for 130 potassium ions every second."

"Life and consciousness are the two great mysteries. Actually, their substrates are the inanimate. And how do you get from neurons shooting around in the brain to the thought that pops up in your head and mine? There's something deeply mysterious about that. And if you're not struck by the mystery, I think you haven't thought about it."

"When you read a book, the neurons in your brain fire overtime, deciding what the characters are wearing, how they're standing, and what it feels like the first time they kiss. No one shows you. The words make suggestions. Your brain paints the pictures."

"Neurons do not just fire and not fire . . . they must be capable of passing on much more subtle information than yes or no. They are not just hammers hitting the next nail, either more frequently or less so. They are, to complete this analogy, a carpenter’s kit, with screwdrivers, pliers, pincers, mallets—and hammers. . . . Each neural impulse is transformed along the way, and nowhere else than at the synapses."

"The brain is the most complicated organ in the universe. We have learned a lot about other human organs. We know how the heart pumps and how the kidney does what it does. To a certain degree, we have read the letters of the human genome. But the brain has 100 billion neurons. Each one of those has about 10,000 connections."

"A typical neuron makes about ten thousand connections to neighboring neurons. Given the billions of neurons, this means there are as many connections in a single cubic centimeter of brain tissue as there are stars in the Milky Way galaxy."

"Your brain is built of cells called neurons and glia - hundreds of billions of them. Each one of these cells is as complicated as a city."

"When you learn a new skill ... you are training your neurons to connect in a new way. . . . The more you use your brain, the more efficient it will become."

"There is no question, then, that RNA presents a filing system perfectly capable of handling any load of learning and memory which the human being is likely to put upon it—and a billion times more than that quantity, too."

"Love is indeed, at root, the product of the firings of neurons and release of hormones."

"An illustration I use to get people to understand it is this: I'll ask major corporate audiences: Why don't you just take all your traditional beliefs about organizations, and apply them to the neurons in your brain?"

"Artificial intelligence is growing up fast, as are robots whose facial expressions can elicit empathy and make your mirror neurons quiver."

"A healthy, mature human being of normal intelligence may have upwards of 20 million RNA molecules [thought to serve as a ‘filing system’ for memory] in each neuron. . . . An RNA molecule made up of merely 25 links could have any one of a million billion different combinations, . . . In fact, every RNA molecule contains many hundreds of units—not merely 25."

"The possession of a reliable musical memory is valuable to all musicians, is important to some and is an absolute necessity to others. The composer who can retain his own musical ideas, wherever and whenever they may occur to him, without the use of his cuff or a scrap of paper, may well rejoice in his independence of material aids. The critic who is able when placed face to face with the first performance of a novelty to hold in his mind's ear the subject matter of importance as the work develops will be in a position to write an intelligent account of what he has heard."

"Nervousness in playing from memory in public is largely a result of the mental defect of lack of concentration, when it is not directly caused by a run-down physical condition."

"Piano music may be memorized in three ways: by ear, by visual memory, either of the notes on the printed page or the notes on the keyboard, and by finger memory or reflex action."

"All the business of war, and indeed all the business of life, is to endeavour to find out what you don't know by what you do; that's what I called "guessing what was at the other side of the hill.""

"The power to guess the unseen from the seen, to trace the implication of things, to judge the whole piece by the pattern, the condition of feeling life, in general, so completely that you are well on your way to knowing any particular corner of it — this cluster of gifts may almost be said to constitute experience, and they occur in country and in town, and in the most differing stages of education."

"There is no effective difference between guessing a variable that is not random, but for which information is partial or deficient (...), and a random one (...). In this sense, guessing (what I don't know, but what someone else may know) and predicting (what has not taken place yet) are the same thing."

"The golden guess Is morning-star to the full round of truth."

"I never guess. It is a shocking habit — destructive to the logical faculty."

"Let us suppose that an ichthyologist is exploring the life of the ocean. He casts a net into the water and brings up a fishy assortment. Surveying his catch, he proceeds in the usual manner of a scientist to systematise what it reveals. He arrives at two generalisations: No sea-creature is less than two inches long. (2) All sea-creatures have gills. These are both true of his catch, and he assumes tentatively that they will remain true however often he repeats it. In applying this analogy, the catch stands for the body of knowledge which constitutes physical science, and the net for the sensory and intellectual equipment which we use in obtaining it. The casting of the net corresponds to observation; for knowledge which has not been or could not be obtained by observation is not admitted into physical science. An onlooker may object that the first generalisation is wrong. "There are plenty of sea-creatures under two inches long, only your net is not adapted to catch them." The icthyologist dismisses this objection contemptuously. "Anything uncatchable by my net is ipso facto outside the scope of icthyological knowledge. In short, "what my net can't catch isn't fish." Or — to translate the analogy — "If you are not simply guessing, you are claiming a knowledge of the physical universe discovered in some other way than by the methods of physical science, and admittedly unverifiable by such methods. You are a metaphysician. Bah!""

"Sometimes we make guesses because we wish, with our limited knowledge, to say as much as we can about some situation. Really, any generalization is in the nature of a guess. Any physical theory is a kind of guesswork. There are good guesses and there are bad guesses. The theory of probability is a system for making better guesses. The language of probability allows us to speak quantitatively about some situation which may be highly variable, but which does have some consistent average behavior."

"My guessing game is strong Way too real to be wrong"

"Introspection is silent observation, overthinking is loud conclusion."

"When I look in the mirror, I am slightly reminded of self-portraits by Durer and by Rembrandt, because they both show a degree of introspection. I see some element of disappointment; I see a sense of humour, but also something that is faintly ridiculous; and I see somebody who is frightened of being found out and thought lightweight."

"Yom Kippur, the Day of Atonement, is the holy of holies of Jewish time. It is that rarest of phenomena, a Jewish festival without food. Instead it is a day of fasting and prayer, introspection and self-judgment when, collectively and repeatedly, we confess our sins and pray to be written into God's Book of Life."

"When one intends to move or when one intends to speak, one should first examine one’s own mind and then act appropriately with composure. When one sees one’s mind to be attached or repulsed, then one should neither act nor speak, but remain still like a piece of wood. When my mind is haughty, sarcastic, full of conceit and arrogance, ridiculing, evasive and deceitful, when it is inclined to boast, or when it is contemptuous of others, abusive, and irritable, then I should remain still like a piece of wood. When my mind is averse to the interests of others and seeks my own self-interest, or when it wishes to speak out of a desire for an audience, then I will remain still like a piece of wood. When it is impatient, indolent, timid, impudent, garrulous, or biased in my own favor, then I will remain still like a piece of wood."

"Wouldst thou other men know, look thou within thine own heart."

"We tend to treat our own introspections as something of a gold standard in assessing...whether judgments have been tainted by bias. By contrast we treat the introspections of other actors as merely another source of plausible hypothesis – to be accepted or rejected as a function of their plausibility in light of what we know.... We refer to this asymmetry as the introspection illusion because the faith people have in the validity of their own introspections is misplaced. Although people cannot report accurately on the contents of their thoughts...the psychological processes and the true determinants of their behavior are often inaccessible to introspection."

"Introspection is the process of self-examination. It occurs naturally over the life span, although some people are naturally more introspective than others. Some theorists in the field of psychology have historically seen introspection as a trait, an element of the personality itself'"

"Introspection is a devouring monster. You have to feed it with much material, much experience, many people, many places, many loves, many creations, and then it ceases feeding on you."

"I can't as yet "know myself," as the inscription at Delphi enjoins, and so long as that ignorance remains it seems to me ridiculous to inquire about extraneous matters."

"You want to read a book? That requires introspection. It requires time away from people and time away from the constant need to communicate and to connect."