Unthinkable Quotes

“Our inability to understand our own minds is the price we pay for the ability to question it in the first place.”
― Helen Thomson, Unthinkable: What the World's Most Extraordinary Brains Can Teach Us About Our Own

“Back in that first lesson with Clive, I was told by my professor that 'If the brain were so simple that we could understand it, we would be so simple that we couldn't.”
― Helen Thomson, Unthinkable: What the World's Most Extraordinary Brains Can Teach Us About Our Own

“Shereshevsky’s imagination was so vivid that in one experiment, he was able to raise the temperature of one hand while lowering the temperature of the other, merely by imagining one on a stove and one on a block of ice.”
― Helen Thomson, Unthinkable: An Extraordinary Journey Through the World's Strangest Brains

“Science prides itself on explaining the parts of our life that can be measured and tested. Objectivity is, rightly so, the backbone of science. But I’d argue that subjectivity is its flesh and blood. Each is necessary but not sufficient alone.”
― Helen Thomson, Unthinkable: What the World's Most Extraordinary Brains Can Teach Us About Our Own

“if the brain were so simple that we could understand it, we would be so simple that we couldn’t.”
― Helen Thomson, Unthinkable: An Extraordinary Journey Through the World's Strangest Brains

“I have an open mind,” said Randi, after the show had aired. “But not so open my brains fall out.”
― Helen Thomson, Unthinkable: An Extraordinary Journey Through the World's Strangest Brains

“Was it a coincidence? The universe is rarely so lazy, said Sherlock Holmes.”
― Helen Thomson, Unthinkable: An Extraordinary Journey Through the World's Strangest Brains

“The American psychologist William James said in the late nineteenth century that if we remembered everything, we should on most occasions be as badly off as if we remembered nothing.”
― Helen Thomson, Unthinkable: An Extraordinary Journey Through the World's Strangest Brains

“The relationship between art and brain damage is a complex one.”
― Helen Thomson, Unthinkable: An Extraordinary Journey Through the World's Strangest Brains

“No matter how grotesque or displeasing a picture, people with depersonalization showed few signs of their body reacting. 9 Somehow their body’s automatic response to the outside world has been dialed down, and is not integrated into subjective feelings about themselves or the world around them.”
― Helen Thomson, Unthinkable: An Extraordinary Journey Through the World's Strangest Brains

“It’s a dangerous misperception among reporters, the public and policymakers that mental illness is at the root of violence.”
― Helen Thomson, Unthinkable: An Extraordinary Journey Through the World's Strangest Brains

“Our reality,” Seth once told me, “is merely a controlled hallucination, reined in by our senses.” Or, as psychologist Chris Frith once put it, “A fantasy that coincides with a reality.” 9”
― Helen Thomson, Unthinkable: An Extraordinary Journey Through the World's Strangest Brains

“The brain doesn’t tolerate inactivity,” said Oliver Sacks, when I spoke to him about this back in 2014. “It seems to respond to diminished sensory input by creating autonomous sensations of its own choosing.”
― Helen Thomson, Unthinkable: An Extraordinary Journey Through the World's Strangest Brains

“I was reminded of something Oliver Sacks once said: To truly understand someone, to get any hint of one’s depth, you need to lay aside the urge to test and get to know your subject openly, quietly, as they live and think and pursue their own life. There, he said, is where you will find something exceedingly mysterious at work.”
― Helen Thomson, Unthinkable: An Extraordinary Journey Through the World's Strangest Brains

“Patients are known only by their initials, their defining characteristics are lost, their lives go unmentioned. The subject of neurology—the owner of the brain in question—has largely become inconsequential to the science that surrounds them.”
― Helen Thomson, Unthinkable: An Extraordinary Journey Through the World's Strangest Brains

“We are by no means close to understanding the mind in its entirety. In fact, none of what we call our “higher” functions—memories, decision-making, creativity, consciousness—are close to having a satisfying explanation.”
― Helen Thomson, Unthinkable: An Extraordinary Journey Through the World's Strangest Brains

“I’m intrigued. I thought I’d heard of every kind of synesthesia, but this one was new to me. “So how many numbers and personalities are there?” I ask. “Each number is a small collection of personality traits, almost like a person,”
― Helen Thomson, Unthinkable: An Extraordinary Journey Through the World's Strangest Brains

“As well as grapheme-color synesthesia, Joel also experiences the perception of numbers when he looks at people. Not only that, but each of those numbers has a distinct personality. “So do the personalities of the numbers represent the personalities of the people?” I ask, when he brings this up.”
― Helen Thomson, Unthinkable: An Extraordinary Journey Through the World's Strangest Brains

“Zeman, on the other hand, has concentrated his career on understanding the more bizarre disorders of consciousness, such as permanent déjà vu, that can occur as a result of epilepsy,”
― Helen Thomson, Unthinkable: An Extraordinary Journey Through the World's Strangest Brains

“WHILE HUMANS BEGAN IMAGINING this scenario centuries ago—corpse-like creatures were the mainstay of the Viking afterlife, and draugrs were the undead bodies of Norse mythology—”
― Helen Thomson, Unthinkable: An Extraordinary Journey Through the World's Strangest Brains

“Aristotle declared that the heart carried out the responsibilities of the rational soul, providing life to the rest of the body. The brain was there simply as a cooling system, tempering “the heat and seething” of the heart.2”
― Helen Thomson, Unthinkable: An Extraordinary Journey Through the World's Strangest Brains

“The first mirror-touch synesthete was discovered by Sarah-Jayne Blakemore, a neuroscientist at University College London. Blakemore was delivering a lecture in which she mentioned anecdotal accounts of people who could feel other people being touched on their own bodies. At the end of the lecture, a puzzled woman in the audience came up to her and said, “Isn’t it normal to feel other people’s touch?”
― Helen Thomson, Unthinkable: An Extraordinary Journey Through the World's Strangest Brains

“It turns out that there is only one other person known to have this extraordinary, and rare, combination of synesthesia and color blindness. He is Spike Jahan and he is a student of Ramachandran. Jahan approached Ramachandran shortly after he had attended a lecture on synesthesia. He told Ramachandran that he was color blind and had trouble distinguishing reds, greens, browns and oranges. He also had number-color synesthesia. However, the colors Jahan saw in his mind were tinged with colors that he had never seen in the real world. He called them “Martian colors.”
― Helen Thomson, Unthinkable: An Extraordinary Journey Through the World's Strangest Brains

“Colors also influence other aspects of our behavior. In humans, aggression and dominance are associated with reddening of the face due to increased blood flow—perhaps that is why we refer to “seeing red” when angered. Evolutionary anthropologists at Durham University and the University of Plymouth wondered whether wearing a red shirt might exploit our innate response to the color red and so influence the outcomes of sporting contests. They studied fifty-five years’ worth of English football league results, and found that teams whose home colors were red won 2 percent more often than teams who wore blue or white, and 3 percent more often than those who wore yellow or orange.11”
― Helen Thomson, Unthinkable: An Extraordinary Journey Through the World's Strangest Brains

“There’s plenty of research suggesting that color affects us, too. Consider this simple yet remarkable social experiment, conducted in 2010 by Daniela Kayser, a psychologist at the University of Rochester, New York. Kayser wondered whether a lady in red really was more alluring, so she and her colleagues asked several men to have a conversation with a woman who was wearing either a red or green shirt. Men who spoke to the woman while she was wearing a red shirt asked her more intimate questions than those who spoke to her while she was wearing green. In another experiment, men sat closer to a woman and classed her as more attractive when she was wearing a red shirt than when she was wearing an identical shirt in other colors.10”
― Helen Thomson, Unthinkable: An Extraordinary Journey Through the World's Strangest Brains

“In fact, it seems that anyone can become a synesthete. In 2014, Daniel Bor at the University of Sussex and his colleagues managed to turn thirty-three adults into temporary synesthetes in just over a month.5 Their volunteers took part in half-hour training sessions, five days a week, in which they learned thirteen letter and color associations. By week five, many of the volunteers were reporting that they saw colored letters when they read regular black text. “When reading a sign on campus I saw all the letter E’s coloured green,” said one participant.”
― Helen Thomson, Unthinkable: An Extraordinary Journey Through the World's Strangest Brains

“When Loftus was just fourteen years old, her mother drowned in a swimming pool. On her forty-fourth birthday, Loftus attended a family gathering at which an uncle informed her that she had been the one to discover her mother’s dead body. Although she had previously remembered little about her mother’s death, suddenly memories of the incident came flooding back. A few days later, Loftus’s brother called her and told her that their uncle had made a mistake—it had actually been an aunt that had found their mother. The memories that had appeared so clear and vivid for the past few days were entirely false.”
― Helen Thomson, Unthinkable: An Extraordinary Journey Through the World's Strangest Brains

“In 1848, the twenty-five-year-old Gage was working on a railroad bed when he was distracted by some activity behind him. As he turned his head, the large rod he was using to pack powder explosives struck a rock, caused a spark and the powder exploded. The rod flew up through his jaw, traveled behind his eye, made its way through the left-hand side of his brain and shot out the other side. Despite his somewhat miraculous survival, Gage was never the same again. The once jovial, kind young man became aggressive, rude and prone to swearing at the most inappropriate times. As a toddler, Alonzo Clemons also suffered a traumatic head injury, after falling onto the bathroom floor. Left with severe learning difficulties and a low IQ, he was unable to read or write. Yet from that day on he showed an incredible ability to sculpt. He would use whatever materials he could get his hands on—Play-Doh, soap, tar—to mold a perfect image of any animal after the briefest of glances. His condition was diagnosed as acquired savant syndrome, a rare and complex disorder in which damage to the brain appears to increase people’s talent for art, memory or music. SM, as she is known to the scientific world, has been held at gunpoint and twice threatened with a knife. Yet she has never experienced an ounce of fear. In fact, she is physically incapable of such emotion. An unusual condition called Urbach-Wiethe disease has slowly calcified her amygdalae, two almond-shaped structures deep in the center of the brain that are responsible for the human fear response. Without fear, her innate curiosity sees her approach poisonous spiders without a second’s thought. She talks to muggers with little regard for her own safety. When she comes across deadly snakes in her garden, she picks them up and throws them away.”
― Helen Thomson, Unthinkable: An Extraordinary Journey Through the World's Strangest Brains