Mozart's Brain and the Fighter Pilot Quotes

“Our perceptions take on richness and depth as a result of all the things that we learn. The eye is not a camera that objectively takes a photo of the “world out there.” Rather, what the eye sees is determined by what the brain has learned. This suggests a short mantra: learn more, see more.”
― Richard Restak, Mozart's Brain and the Fighter Pilot: Unleashing Your Brain's Potential

“The more you learn about how your brain works, the better your chances of using it most efficiently, optimizing your intellectual capabilities, and accomplishing even more in life than many people who may score higher than you on standardized intelligence tests.”
― Richard Restak, Mozart's Brain and the Fighter Pilot: Unleashing Your Brain's Potential

“While it’s true that certain brain areas are specialized (such as the centers for processing sight, sound, touch, and other qualities and properties), the largest portion of the brain, the association cortex, is devoted to establishing networks and thereby linking everything together throughout the brain. As a result of this networking, you don’t separately see, hear, taste, smell, and feel your breakfast bagel— you experience it as a unity.”
― Richard Restak, Mozart's Brain and the Fighter Pilot: Unleashing Your Brain's Potential

“No two individuals will form the same patterns because no two individuals possess identical brains or have undergone identical experiences.”
― Richard Restak, Mozart's Brain and the Fighter Pilot: Unleashing Your Brain's Potential

“Idi Amin wore reflective sunglasses so that his victims could only see their terrified expressions reflected back at them). Amin and the Mafia are associated with death, and their dark glasses or “shades” suggest the inhabitants of Hades. Used in the singular, a “shade” is a visor for shielding the eyes from strong light and, hence, a forerunner of “shades,” a colloquial term for sunglasses. But a shade is also a scientific apparatus or shutter for intercepting light passing through the camera that enabled the photographer to take the pictures”
― Richard Restak, Mozart's Brain and the Fighter Pilot: Unleashing Your Brain's Potential

“In his book Weaving the Web: The Original Design and Ultimate Destiny of the World Wide Web, Tim Berners-Lee, the inventor of the World Wide Web, emphasizes the importance of the brain in the forming of connections (the italics are mine): A piece of information is really defined only by what it’s related to, and how it’s related. There really is little else to meaning. The structure is everything. There are billions of neurons in our brains, but what are neurons? Just cells. The brain has no knowledge until connections are made between neurons. All that we know, all that we are, comes from the way our neurons are connected. Berners-Lee”
― Richard Restak, Mozart's Brain and the Fighter Pilot: Unleashing Your Brain's Potential

“Networking is a fundamental operating principle of the human brain. All knowledge within the brain is based on networking. Thus, any one piece of information can be potentially linked with any other. Indeed, creativity can be thought of as the formation of novel and original linkages. James Burke refers to this as the pinball effect. Rather than training ourselves in narrow specialties, suggests Burke, we should train ourselves “to think in a different way about knowledge and how it should be used.” Philosophers”
― Richard Restak, Mozart's Brain and the Fighter Pilot: Unleashing Your Brain's Potential

“cognition refers to the ability of our brain to attend, identify, and act. More informally, cognition refers to our thoughts, moods, inclinations, decisions, and actions. Included among the components of cognition are alertness, concentration, perceptual speed, learning, memory, problem solving, creativity, and mental endurance. Each of these components of cognition has two things in common. First, each is dependent on how well our brain is functioning. Second, each can be improved by our own efforts. In short, we can make ourselves smarter by enhancing the components of cognition. This book will provide you with methods for enhancing cognition by improving your brain’s performance. Regular”
― Richard Restak, Mozart's Brain and the Fighter Pilot: Unleashing Your Brain's Potential

“All that we are is the result of what we have thought,” according to the Dhammapada.”
― Richard Restak, Mozart's Brain and the Fighter Pilot: Unleashing Your Brain's Potential

“In computer terms, the cerebral cortex writes the software programs for actions and, after some practice on your part, the basal ganglia take over to run the programs that enable you to carry out the actions. When you learn the tango, for instance, you have to concentrate (i.e., use the cerebral cortex) to plan, learn, and get comfortable with the steps. But after some practice and experience, you’re eventually able to tango while thinking of other things because the basal ganglia are operating that system automatically. Toward”
― Richard Restak, Mozart's Brain and the Fighter Pilot: Unleashing Your Brain's Potential