Brain Quotes by Steven Pinker

the mind is a neural computer

— Steven Pinker

We can shape events in each other's brains with exquisite precision.

— Steven Pinker

Thinking is a physical process, the human brain is not exempt from evolution

— Steven Pinker

All our behaviours are a result of neurophysiological activity in the brain.

— Steven Pinker

All our behaviours are a result of neurophysiological activity in the brain. There is no reason to believe there is any magic…

— Steven Pinker

The supposedly immaterial soul, we now know, can be bisected with a knife, altered by chemicals, started or stopped by electricity, and…

— Steven Pinker

Why do people believe that there are dangerous implications of the idea that the mind is a product of the brain, that…

— Steven Pinker

Of course, genes can't pull the levers of our behavior directly. But they affect the wiring and workings of the brain, and…

— Steven Pinker

You can't hear a word and just hear it as raw sound; it always evokes an associated meaning and emotion in the…

— Steven Pinker

I don't think there was a thunderclap or a divine spark that suddenly made one species smart. You can see, in our…

— Steven Pinker

The brain is not a bag of traits. It's startlingly complex. There are few or no single genes with a consistent effect…

— Steven Pinker

A...reason we are so-so scientists is that our brains were shaped for fitness, not for truth. Sometimes truth is adaptive, but sometimes…

— Steven Pinker

It's likely that taboo words are stored in the right hemisphere of the brain. Massive left hemisphere strokes or the entire surgical…

— Steven Pinker

“If a gene could build a brain that could tell when copies of itself were sitting in another animal's gonads, it would…

— Steven Pinker

It's the old idea that the process of evolution is some push in the direction of greater complexity--in particular greater intellectual complexity.…

— Steven Pinker

The actual organization of behavior goes on the level of the individual nerve cells and their connections, and we have a hundred…

— Steven Pinker

The elegant study... is consistent with the themes of modern cognitive neuroscience . Every aspect of thought and emotion is rooted in…

— Steven Pinker

According to a recent study of the brains of identical and fraternal twins, differences in the amount of gray matter in the…

— Steven Pinker

Just as blueprints don't necessarily specify blue buildings, selfish genes don't necessarily specify selfish organisms. As we shall see, sometimes the most…

— Steven Pinker

No one knows what the nongenetic causes of individuality are. Perhaps people are shaped by modifications of genes that take place after…

— Steven Pinker

Of course genes can’t pull the levers of our behavior directly. But they affect the wiring and workings of the brain, and…

— Steven Pinker

Consciousness surely does not depend on language. Babies, many animals, and patients robbed of speech by brain damage are not insensate robots;…

— Steven Pinker

But the newest research is showing that many properties of the brain are genetically organized, and don't depend on information coming in…

— Steven Pinker

The reason I'm not a neurobiologist but a cognitive psychologist is that I think looking at brain tissue is often the wrong…

— Steven Pinker

Consciousness turns out to consist of a maelstrom of events distributed across the brain. These events compete for attention, and as one…

— Steven Pinker

The last 100 years of research into the human brain...sees the brain as an organ that works by physical principles just like…

— Steven Pinker