Michael Merzenich famous quotes

The patterns of activity of neurons in sensory areas can be altered by patterns of attention. Experience coupled with attention leads to physical changes in the structure and future functioning of the nervous system. This leaves us with a clear physiological fact…moment by moment we choose and sculpt how our ever-changing minds will work. We choose who we will be in the next moment in a very real sense, and these choices are left embossed in physical form in our material selves.
-- Michael Merzenich

#Real #Self #Choices

Rather marvelously, the older brain only permits change when it judges that change to be important, rewarding or good for it.
-- Michael Merzenich

#Judging #Brain #Important

The Internet is just one of those things that contemporary humans can spend millions of 'practice' events at, that the average human a thousand years ago had absolutely no exposure to. Our brains are massively remodeled by this exposure-but so, too, by reading, by television, by video games, by modern electronics, by contemporary music, by contemporary 'tools,' etc.
-- Michael Merzenich

#Reading #Average #Years

To learn is to change how you think.
-- Michael Merzenich

#Thinking

If a brain is exercised properly, anyone can grow intelligence, at any age, and potentially by a lot. Or you can just let your brain idle - and watch it slowly, inexorably, go to seed like a sedentary body.
-- Michael Merzenich

#Brain #Age #Body

Your brain - every brain - is a work in progress. It is 'plastic.' From the day we're born to the day we die, it continuously revises and remodels, improving or slowly declining, as a function of how we use it.
-- Michael Merzenich

#Brain #Progress #Use

Learning a new skill can change hundreds of millions of cortical connections.
-- Michael Merzenich

#Skills #Connections #New Skills

My mantra: Brainless exercise is a lost opportunity for improvement.
-- Michael Merzenich

#Exercise #Opportunity #Improvement

The artist draws a picture of a rose very nicely with all attention and artistic sense, and yet it does not become as perfect as the real rose. If that is the real fact, how can we say that the real rose has taken its shape without Intelligence behind the beauty?

Those who can bring themselves to renounce wealth, position and power accruing from a social system based on violence and putting a premium on acquisitiveness, and to identify themselves in some real fashion with the struggle of the masses toward the light, may help in a measure - more, doubtless, by life than by words - to devise a more excellent way, a technique of social progress less crude, brutal, costly and slow than mankind has yet evolved.

I'd rather feel something for real than pretend it's not what it is.

I don't really want to write fiction at all. I don't see why fiction is necessary when we have real life already confusing enough.

I was once naïve enough to ask the late Duke of Devonshire why he liked the town of Eastbourne. He replied with a self-deprecating shrug that one of the things he liked was that he owned it.

Happiness is attained, not through self-interest, but through unconditional fidelity in endless love of eternal light.

You always have to make positive choices as an actor, even when you're playing someone who may not be doing the best things.

We have to always hope in humanity that people will make the right choices.

Acquaintance I would have, but when it depends; not on number, but the choice of friends.

I think the British audience might be more open-minded with some of my imagery and weird choices.