Knowing about the neurobiological and evolutionary basis for social behavior can soften the arrogance and self-righteousness that often attends discussions of morality. It may help us all to think a little more carefully and rationally. — 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
I made the assumption, wrong of course, that conceptual analysis was a brief preliminary on the road to finding out about the nature of… — Patricia Churchland Copy Share Image
When philosophers try to understand consciousness, much of what they claim is not conceptual analysis at all, though it may be shopped under that… — Patricia Churchland Copy Share Image
If you give up because you announce the phenomenon cannot be explained, you are missing out. — Patricia Churchland Copy Share Image
