The Ravenous Brain Quotes

“Consciousness is our gateway to experience: It enables us to recognize Van Gogh’s starry skies, be enraptured by Beethoven’s Fifth, and stand in awe of a snowcapped mountain. Yet consciousness is subjective, personal, and famously difficult to examine.”
― Daniel Bor, The Ravenous Brain: How the New Science of Consciousness Explains Our Insatiable Search for Meaning

“I’m utterly passionate about science, not just because of the wondrous, surprising, fascinating facts it reveals about the universe and our place within it but also, more abstractly, for its dogged devotion to the truth. As a romantic at heart, I like to think there is nothing more noble than this meticulous, ruthlessly honest, strangely humble goal to understand the intricacies of reality.”
― Daniel Bor, The Ravenous Brain: How the New Science of Consciousness Explains Our Insatiable Search for Meaning

“there is a pressure for genes to be selfish, but in an enlightened way, to collaborate, coordinate, and play their small part in ensuring that their host, this “survival machine,” flourishes.”
― Daniel Bor, The Ravenous Brain: How the New Science of Consciousness Explains Our Insatiable Search for Meaning

“The octopus, although an invertebrate—with no thalamus or cortex to speak of—behaves in ways that utterly belie its primitive label. It has around 500 million neurons, not too far from the numbers in a cat. But the octopus brain is decidedly unusual, with an exceptionally parallel architecture—almost always a positive quality when you are talking about brains. The majority of octopus neurons are to be found not in its brain, but in its arms. In effect, if you include the neuronal bundles in its limbs, the octopus has nine semi-independent brains, making it unique in the animal kingdom. The octopus is also a genius among ocean creatures. It has highly developed memory and attentional systems. In nature, this allows these invertebrates to take on a wide range of shapes to mimic other animals, rocks, or even plants. In the lab, octopuses can distinguish shapes and colors, navigate through a maze, open a jar with a screw-on lid, and even learn by observing the behavior of another octopus—an ability thought previously only to exist in highly social animals.”
― Daniel Bor, The Ravenous Brain: How the New Science of Consciousness Explains Our Insatiable Search for Meaning

“evolution favoring accurate information processing, almost by definition, ever since the first proto-life creatures emerged in the oceans.”
― Daniel Bor, The Ravenous Brain: How the New Science of Consciousness Explains Our Insatiable Search for Meaning

“It does seem clear that one component of the extreme popularity of irrational beliefs such as religion or alien abductions is our unerring search for structure and meaning within the constant torrent of information to which we are exposed.”
― Daniel Bor, The Ravenous Brain: How the New Science of Consciousness Explains Our Insatiable Search for Meaning