I had no idea what philosophy was until I went to college at UBC. I first read Hume and Plato, so naturally I was under the misapprehension that philosophers are trying to figure out what is true, and that contemporary… — Patricia Churchland Copy Share Image
Eventually I realized that for contemporary philosophers conceptual analysis per se was an end in itself. For some, it was somehow supposed to lead to the truth about these phenomena, not just to tidy things up a bit. — Patricia Churchland Copy Share Image
Studies of decision-making in the monkey, where activity of single neurons in parietal cortex is recorded, you can see a lot about the time-accuracy… — Patricia Churchland Copy Share Image
It is important to understand that while oxytocin may be the hub of the evolution of the social brain in mammals, it is part… — Patricia Churchland Copy Share Image
It seems probable that humans have been on the planet, with much the same brain, for about 250,000 years. — Patricia Churchland Copy Share Image
Remember, in the heyday of vitalism, people said that when all the data are in about cells and how they work, we will still… — Patricia Churchland Copy Share Image
Suppression of impulses that would put you in danger is obviously an important neurobiological function. — Patricia Churchland Copy Share Image
Early studies of sleep and dreaming were crucially dependent on waking subjects up during sleep to find out whether they are dreaming or not.… — Patricia Churchland Copy Share Image
When that theory is isolated from known facts, it is likely not to be productive. — Patricia Churchland Copy Share Image
I used to suspect that in the brain, time is its own representation. I now think the problem is so much more complicated. Initially… — Patricia Churchland Copy Share Image
I am less attracted to guesses about what cannot be done, than about making progress on a problem. — Patricia Churchland Copy Share Image
Analyzing a concept can (perhaps) tell you what the concept means (at least means to some philosophers), but it does not tell you anything… — Patricia Churchland Copy Share Image
Humility bids us to take ourselves as we are; we do not have to be cosmically significant to be genuinely significant. — Patricia Churchland Copy Share Image
