The Performance Cortex Quotes

“I think science always becomes something else,” Krakauer said. "It’s become engineering, it becomes maps, it becomes statistics. It keeps being not itself. If you look at what science is, minus the math or the engineering, it’s more like the humanities. That’s the deep dark secret: Science is not its instruments.”
― Zach Schonbrun, The Performance Cortex: How Neuroscience Is Redefining Athletic Genius

“Neuroscience was becoming "this thing we all do" — go to conferences, write papers, apply for grants. It was losing its intrepidity. All the finger tapping, the feeble reaches, the cartographic expeditions in the scanner—this was not behavior. John Hughlings Jackson divined enduring wisdom about the motor system without conducting a single experiment; I could sense John Krakauer’s wheels spinning the same way, as he groped for the right track. “It’s about being intellectual rather than academic,” he said.”
― Zach Schonbrun, The Performance Cortex: How Neuroscience Is Redefining Athletic Genius