The Mind & the Brain Quotes

“we cannot know what really happens, but only what we observe to happen.”
― Jeffrey M. Schwartz, The Mind & The Brain: Neuroplasticity and the Power of Mental Force

“Again as during fetal development, synapses that underlie cognitive and other abilities stick around if they’re used but wither if they’re not. The systematic elimination of unused synapses, and thus unused circuits, presumably results in greater efficiency for the neural networks that are stimulated—the networks that support, in other words, behaviors in which the adolescent is actively engaged. Just as early childhood seems to be a time of exquisite sensitivity to the environment (remember the babies who dedicate auditory circuits only to the sounds of their native language, eliminating those for phonemes that they do not hear), so may adolescence. The teen years are, then, a second chance to consolidate circuits that are used and prune back those that are not—to hard-wire an ability to hit a curve ball, juggle numbers mentally, or turn musical notation into finger movements almost unconsciously. Says Giedd, “Teens have the power to determine their own brain development, to determine which connections survive and which don’t, [by] whether they do art, or music, or sports, or videogames.”
― Jeffrey M. Schwartz, The Mind & The Brain: Neuroplasticity and the Power of Mental Force

“[T]here is no stronger influence on human values than man's belief about his relationship to the power that shapes the universe. When medieval science connected man directly to his Creator, man saw himself as a child of the divine imbued with a will free to choose between the good and evil. When the scientific revolution converted human beings from the sparks of divine creation into not particularly special cogs in a giant impersonal machine, it eroded any rational basis for the notion of responsibility for one's actions.”
― Jeffrey M. Schwartz, The Mind & the Brain: Neuroplasticity and the Power of Mental Force

“The life we lead, in other words, leaves its mark in the form of enduring changes in the complex circuitry of the brain-footprints of the experiences we have had, the actions we have taken. This is neuroplasticity. As Mike Merzenich asserted, the mechanisms of neuroplasticity "account for cortical contributions to our idiosyncratic behavioral abilities and, in extension, for the geniuses, the fools, and the idiot savants among us.”
― Jeffrey M. Schwartz, The Mind & the Brain: Neuroplasticity and the Power of Mental Force

“To refrain from an act is no less an act than to commit one.”
― Jeffrey M. Schwartz, The Mind & the Brain: Neuroplasticity and the Power of Mental Force

“By exerting its will, Descartes declared, the immaterial human mind could cause the material human machine to move. This bears repeating, for it is an idea that, more than any other, has thrown a stumbling block across the path of philosophers who have attempted to argue that the mind is immaterial: for how could something immaterial act efficaciously on something as fully tangible as a body? Immaterial mental substance is so ontologically different-that is, such a different sort of thing-from the body it affects that getting the twain to meet has been exceedingly difficult. To be sure, Descartes tried. He argued that the mental substance of the mind interacts with the matter of the brain through the pineal gland, the organ he believed was moved directly by the human soul. The interaction allowed the material brain to be physically directed by the immaterial mind through what Descartes called "animal spirits"-basically a kind of hydraulic fluid.”
― Jeffrey M. Schwartz, The Mind & the Brain: Neuroplasticity and the Power of Mental Force

“Consciousness is more than perceiving and knowing; it is knowing that you know.”
― Jeffrey M. Schwartz, The Mind & The Brain: Neuroplasticity and the Power of Mental Force

“When I endeavor to examine my own conduct…I divide myself as it were into two persons; and that I, the examiner and judge, represent a different character from the other I, the person whose conduct is examined into and judged of. The first is the spectator…. The second is the agent, the person whom I properly call myself, and of whose conduct, under the character of a spectator, I was endeavoring to form some opinion. It was in this way, Smith concluded, that “we suppose ourselves the spectators of our own behaviour.” The change of perspective accomplished by the impartial spectator is far from easy, however: Smith clearly recognized the “fatiguing exertions” it required.”
― Jeffrey M. Schwartz, The Mind & The Brain: Neuroplasticity and the Power of Mental Force

“Each connection that neuroscientists forged between a neurochemical and a behavior, or at least a propensity toward a behavior, seemed to deal another blow to the notion of an efficacious will.”
― Jeffrey M. Schwartz, The Mind & the Brain: Neuroplasticity and the Power of Mental Force

“Freud elevated unconscious processes to the throne of the mind, imbuing them with the power to guide our every thought and deed, and to a significant extent writing free will out of the picture.
Decades later, neuroscience has linked genetic mechanisms to neuronal circuits coursing with a multiplicity of neurotransmitters to argue that the brain is a machine whose behavior is predestined, or at least determined, in such a way as seemingly to leave no room for the will. It is not merely that will is not free, in the modern scientific view; not merely that it is constrained, a captive of material forces. It is, more radically, that the will, a manifestation of the mind, does not even exist, because a mind independent of brain does not exist.”
― Jeffrey M. Schwartz, The Mind & the Brain: Neuroplasticity and the Power of Mental Force

“One of Sherrington's greatest pupils, Sir John Eccles, held similar views. Eccles won a Nobel Prize for his seminal contributions to our understanding of how nerve cells communicate across synapses, or nerve junctions. In his later years, he worked toward a deeper understanding of the mechanisms mediating the interaction of mind and brain-including the elusive notion of free will. Standard neurobiology tells us that tiny vesicles in the nerve endings contain chemicals called neurotransmitters; in response to an electrical impulse, some of the vesicles release their contents, which cross the synapse and transmit the impulse to the adjoining neuron. In 1986 Eccles proposed that the probability of neurotransmitter release depended on quantum mechanical processes, which can be influenced by the intervention of the mind. This, Eccles said, provided a basis for the action of a free will.”
― Jeffrey M. Schwartz, The Mind & the Brain: Neuroplasticity and the Power of Mental Force

“Charles Sherrington, the founder of modern neurophysiology, contended in 1947 that brain processes alone cannot account for the full range of subjective mental phenomena, including conscious free will. "That our being should consist of two fundamental elements offers, I suppose, no greater inherent improbability than that it should rest on one only," he wrote.”
― Jeffrey M. Schwartz, The Mind & the Brain: Neuroplasticity and the Power of Mental Force

“The important thing in science is not so much to obtain new facts as to discover new ways of thinking about them. —Sir William Lawrence Bragg”
― Jeffrey M. Schwartz, The Mind & The Brain: Neuroplasticity and the Power of Mental Force

“[...] But although Taub had no trouble questioning the received wisdom in neuroscience and harbored no doubts that he, an outsider from the lowly field of behavioral psychology, had the right to question neuroscience 'facts' dating back a century, it never dawned on him that using what were then (regrettably) not uncommon laboratory procedures would earn him a singular distinction: the first scientist ever charged with animal cruelty.”
― Jeffrey M. Schwartz, The Mind & the Brain: Neuroplasticity and the Power of Mental Force

“One of the most striking aspects of OCD urges is that, except in the most severe cases, they are what is called ego-dystonic: they seem apart from, and at odds with, one’s intrinsic sense of self.”
― Jeffrey M. Schwartz, The Mind & The Brain: Neuroplasticity and the Power of Mental Force

“In 1986 Eccles proposed that the probability of neurotransmitter release depended on quantum mechanical processes, which can be influenced by the intervention of the mind. This, Eccles said, provided a basis for the action of a free will.”
― Jeffrey M. Schwartz, The Mind & The Brain: Neuroplasticity and the Power of Mental Force

“That one body may act upon another at a distance, through a vacuum, without the mediation of anything else…is to me so great an absurdity that I believe no man who has…any competent faculty of thinking can ever fall into it. Gravity must be caused by an agent…but whether this agent be material or immaterial is a question I have left to…my readers.”
― Jeffrey M. Schwartz, The Mind & The Brain: Neuroplasticity and the Power of Mental Force

“But this conflict between science and moral philosophy vanishes like fog in the light of dawn if, instead of continuing to apply to minds and brains a theory of matter and reality that has been superseded—that is, classical physics—we adopt the most accurate theory of the world advanced so far: quantum theory. In quantum theory, matter and consciousness do not stare at each other across an unbridgeable divide. Rather, they are connected by well-defined and exhaustively tested mathematical rules. “Quantum theory,” says Henry Stapp, “rehabilitates the basic premise of moral philosophy. It entails that certain actions that a person can take are influenced by his stream of consciousness, which is not strictly controlled by any known law of nature.” A quantum theory of mind, incorporating the discoveries of nonlocality and the Quantum Zeno Effect, offers the hope of mending the breach between science and moral philosophy. It states definitively that real, active, causally efficacious mind operates in the material world.”
― Jeffrey M. Schwartz, The Mind & The Brain: Neuroplasticity and the Power of Mental Force

“Cartesian dualism served science well, at first: by ceding matters of the spirit to men of the cloth, it got the Church off the back of science, which for centuries afterward was perceived as less of a threat to religion’s domain than it would otherwise have been (pace, Galileo). But Cartesian dualism was a disaster for moral philosophy, setting in motion a process that ultimately reduced human beings to automatons.”
― Jeffrey M. Schwartz, The Mind & The Brain: Neuroplasticity and the Power of Mental Force

“The discovery that the mind can change the brain, momentous as it is both for our image of ourselves and for such practical matters as helping stroke patients, is only the beginning. Finally, after a generation or more in which biological materialism has had neuroscience—indeed, all the life sciences—in a chokehold, we may at last be breaking free. It is said that philosophy is an esoteric, ivory-tower pursuit with no relevance to the world we live in or the way we live. Would that that had been so for the prejudice in favor of biological materialism and its central image, Man the Machine. But biological materialism did, and does, have real-world consequences. We feel its reach every time a pharmaceutical company tells us that, to cure shyness (or “social phobia”), we need only reach for a little pill; every time we fall prey to depression, or anxiety, or inability to sustain attention, and are soothed with the advice that we merely have to get our neurochemicals back into balance to enjoy full mental health. Biological materialism is nothing if not appealing. We need not address the emotional or spiritual causes of our sadness to have the cloud of depression lift; we need not question the way we teach our children before we can rid them of attention deficit disorder. I do not disparage the astounding advances in our understanding of the biochemical and even genetic roots of behavior and illness. Some of those discoveries have been made by my closest friends. But those findings are not the whole story.”
― Jeffrey M. Schwartz, The Mind & The Brain: Neuroplasticity and the Power of Mental Force

“Cerebral conditions may determine the nature of what’s thrown into our minds, but we have the power to choose which aspects of that experience to focus on. The brain may determine the content of our experience, but mind chooses which aspect of that experience receives attention. To repeat: “Volitional effort is effort of attention,” James said. And attention—holding before the mind that which, if left to itself, would slip out of consciousness—is the essential achievement of will. This is why effort of attention is, it seems to me, the essential core of any moral act.”
― Jeffrey M. Schwartz, The Mind & The Brain: Neuroplasticity and the Power of Mental Force

“Our will, our volition, our karma, constitutes the essential core of the active part of mental experience. It is the most important, if not the only important, active part of consciousness. We generally think of will as being expressed in the behaviors we exhibit: whether we choose this path or that one, whether we make this decision or that. Even when will is viewed introspectively, we often conceptualize it in terms of an externally pursued goal. But I think the truly important manifestation of will, the one from which our decisions and behaviors flow, is the choice we make about the quality and direction of attentional focus. Mindful or unmindful, wise or unwise—no choice we make is more basic, or important, than this one.”
― Jeffrey M. Schwartz, The Mind & The Brain: Neuroplasticity and the Power of Mental Force

“For quantum theory elegantly explains how our actions are shaped by our will, and our will by our attention, which is not strictly controlled by any known law of nature.”
― Jeffrey M. Schwartz, The Mind & The Brain: Neuroplasticity and the Power of Mental Force

“For the stroke victim, the OCD patient, and the depressive, intense effort is required to bring about the requisite Refocusing of attention—a refocusing that will, in turn, sculpt anew the ever-changing brain. The patient generates the mental energy necessary to sustain mindfulness and so activate, strengthen, and stabilize the healthy circuitry through the exertion of willful effort. This effort generates mental force. This force, in its turn, produces plastic and enduring changes in the brain and hence the mind. Intention is made causally efficacious through attention.”
― Jeffrey M. Schwartz, The Mind & The Brain: Neuroplasticity and the Power of Mental Force

“Let’s take the example of a person suffering from OCD. In this case, one possible brain state corresponds to “Wash your hands again.” Another is, “Don’t wash—go to the garden.” By expending mental effort—or, as I think of it, unleashing mental force—the person can focus attention on this second idea. Doing so, as we saw, brings into play the Quantum Zeno Effect. As a result, the idea—whose physical embodiment is a physical brain state—“Go to the garden” is held in place longer than classical theory predicts. The triumphant idea can then make the body move, and through associated neuroplastic changes, alter the brain’s circuitry. This will change the brain in ways that will increase the probability of the “Go to the garden” brain state arising again. (See schematic on Chapter 10.)”
― Jeffrey M. Schwartz, The Mind & The Brain: Neuroplasticity and the Power of Mental Force

“The more Stapp thought about it, the more he believed that attention picks out one possibility from the cloud of possibilities being thrown up for consideration by the brain. In this case, the choice is which of the superpositions will be the target of our attentional focus. Putting a question to nature, the initial step in collapsing the wave function from a sea of potentialities into one actuality, is then akin to asking, Shall this particular mental event occur? Effortfully attending to one of the possibilities is equivalent to increasing the rate at which these questions to nature are posed. Through the Quantum Zeno Effect, repeatedly and rapidly posing that question affects the behavior of the observed system—namely, the brain. When the mind chooses one of the many possibilities to attend to, it partially freezes into being those patterns of neuronal expression that correspond to the experience of an answer “yes” to the question, Will I do this?”
― Jeffrey M. Schwartz, The Mind & The Brain: Neuroplasticity and the Power of Mental Force

“This, Henry thought, provided the opening through which attention could give rise to volition. In the brain, the flow of calcium ions within nerve terminals is subject to the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle. There is a probability associated with whether the calcium ions will trigger the release of neurotransmitter from a terminal vesicle—a probability, that is, and not a certainty. There is, then, also a probability but not a certainty that this neuron will transmit the signal to the next one in the circuit, without which the signal dies without leading to an action. Quantum theory represents these probabilities by means of a superposition of states. Just as an excited atom exists as a superposition of the states “Decay” and “Don’t decay,” so a synapse exists as a superposition of the states “Release neurotransmitter” and “Don’t release neurotransmitter.” This superposition corresponds to a superposition of different possible courses of action: if the “Release neurotransmitter” state comes out on top, then neuronal transmission takes place and the thought that this neuron helps generate is born. If the “Don’t release neurotransmitter” state wins, then the thought dies before it is even born. By choosing whether and/or how to focus on the various possible states, the mind influences which one of them comes into being.”
― Jeffrey M. Schwartz, The Mind & The Brain: Neuroplasticity and the Power of Mental Force

“In the buzz of cerebral activity inside the brain, our subjective sense tells us that there arise countless choices, some of them barely breaking through to consciousness. If only for an instant, we hold in our mind a representation of those possible future states—washing our hands or walking into the garden to do battle with the weeds. Those representations have real, physical correlates in different brain states. As researchers such as Stephen Kosslyn of Harvard University have shown, mental imagery activates the same regions of the brain that actual perception does. Thus thinking about washing one’s hands, for instance, activates some of the same critical brain structures that actual washing activates, especially at those critical moments when the patient forms the mental image of standing at the sink and washing. “The intended action is represented…as a mental image of the intended action, and as a corresponding representation in the brain,” says Stapp. In a quantum brain, all the constituents that make up a thought—the diffusion of calcium ions, the propagation of electrons, the release of neurotransmitter—exist as quantum superpositions. Thus the brain itself is characterized by a whole slew of quantum superpositions of possible brain events. The result is a buzzing confusion of alternatives, a more complex version of Schrödinger’s alternative (alive or dead) cats. The alternative that persists longer in attention is the one that is caught by a sequence of rapid consents that activates the Quantum Zeno Effect.”
― Jeffrey M. Schwartz, The Mind & The Brain: Neuroplasticity and the Power of Mental Force

“Mindfulness and mental effort would then be understood as a way of using attention to control brain state by means of the Quantum Zeno Effect.”
― Jeffrey M. Schwartz, The Mind & The Brain: Neuroplasticity and the Power of Mental Force

“It was clear to Stapp, at least in principle, that Quantum Zeno might allow repeated acts of attention—which are, after all, observations by the mind of one strand of thought among the many competing for prominence in the brain—to affect quantum aspects of the brain. “I saw that if the mind puts to nature, in rapid succession, the same repeated question, ‘shall I attend to this idea?’ then the brain would tend to keep attention focused on that idea,” Stapp says. “This is precisely the Quantum Zeno Effect. The mere mental act of rapidly attending would influence the brain’s activity in the way Jeff was suggesting.” The power of the mind’s questioning (“Shall I pay attention to this idea?”) to strengthen one idea rather than another so decisively that the privileged idea silences all the others and emerges as the one we focus on—well, this seemed to be an attractive mechanism that would not only account for my results with OCD patients but also fit with everyone’s experience that focusing attention helps prevent the mind from wandering. Recall that Mike Merzenich had found that only attended stimuli have the power to alter the cortical map, expanding the region that processes the stimuli an animal focuses on. And recall Alvaro Pascual-Leone’s finding that the effort of directed attention alone can produce cortical changes comparable to those generated by physical practice at the piano. It seemed at least possible that it was my OCD patients’ efforts at attention, in the step we called Refocusing, that caused the brain changes we detected on PET scans.”
― Jeffrey M. Schwartz, The Mind & The Brain: Neuroplasticity and the Power of Mental Force