What is Mind? Quotes

“It is not about whether you have free will, rather it is about whether you have enough experience to make the best possible wilful decision in the current moment of life.”
― Abhijit Naskar, What is Mind?

“The lessons of relationship that our primordial ancestors learned are deeply encoded in the genetics of our neurobiological circuits of love. They are present from the moment we are born and activated at puberty by the cocktail of neurochemicals. It’s an elegant synchronized system. At first our brain weighs a potential partner, and if the person fits our ancestral wish list, we get a spike in the release of sex chemicals that makes us dizzy with a rush of unavoidable infatuation. It’s the first step down the primeval path of pair-bonding.”
― Abhijit Naskar, What is Mind?

“In the beginning of our love lives, it is the beastly instinct of sexual attraction that drives us all. The butterflies in your stomach simply signal your mind that the person in front of you would make a fantastic mate to make babies with. Without this primeval drive, you won’t ever fall for anyone in your entire lifetime. The very attraction you feel towards a person in a romantic way, is a mental manifestation of a subconscious desire to mate with that person.”
― Abhijit Naskar, What is Mind?

“Every living creature on this planet, has a conscious subjective perspective of the world. Even the plants may seem to us as standing indifferent to the human sufferings, but even they have their own unique mental universe. They have their own way of interacting with the environment.”
― Abhijit Naskar, What is Mind?

“Lack of insight into each other’s private qualia of God, results in a never-ending argument between two people with vastly different conceptions of the term God.”
― Abhijit Naskar, What is Mind?

“Sex becomes less and less pleasurable in a relationship over time. Your brain gets habituated to the sensual stimulation from your specific partner as you are exposed to it repeatedly. It doesn’t mean that the love is gone from the relationship. Love still exists beyond the barriers of time, in the form of attachment, which becomes independent of sexual intimacy after the euphoric stage of mad love.”
― Abhijit Naskar, What is Mind?

“​Everything that makes you, you, is a biologically existential expression of your entire brain.”
― Abhijit Naskar, What is Mind?

“​Each one of us is a miniature version of the infinite universe out there.”
― Abhijit Naskar, What is Mind?

“It's like we act as a mirror for the environment, or to a broader aspect, the universe.”
― Abhijit Naskar, What is Mind?

“Every living creature on this planet, has a conscious subjective perspective of the world. The plants may seem to us as standing indifferent to the human sufferings, but even they have their own unique mental universe. They have their own way of interacting with the environment.”
― Abhijit Naskar, What is Mind?

“Imagine yourself having a fight with your romantic partner. The tension of the situation makes your limbic system run at full throttle and you become flooded with stress hormones like cortisol and adrenalin. The high levels of these chemicals suddenly make you so damn angry, that you burst out in front of your partner saying, “I wish you die, so that I can have some peace in my life”. Given the stress of the situation through highly active limbic system, your PFC loses its freedom to take the right decision and you burst out with foul language in front of your partner, that may ruin your relationship. In simple terms due to your mental instability, you lost your free will to make the right decision.
But when the conversation is over, and you relax for a while, your stress hormone levels come down to normal, and you regain your usual cheerful state of mind. Immediately, your PFC starts analyzing the explosive conversation you had with your partner. Healthy activity of the entire frontal lobes, especially the PFC suddenly overwhelms you with a feeling of guilt. Your brain makes you realize, that you have done something devilish. As a result, now you find yourself making the willful decision of apologizing to your partner and making up to him or her, no matter how much effort it takes, because your PFC comes up the solution that it is the healthiest thing to do for your personal life.
From this you can see, that what you call free will is something that is not consistent. It changes based on your mental health. Mental instability or illness, truly cripples your free will. And the healthier your frontal lobes are, the better you can take good decisions. And the most effective way to keep your frontal lobes healthy is to practice some kind of meditation.”
― Abhijit Naskar, What is Mind?

“You know what is the most complicated feature of human nature? It is the term complication itself. We are never satisfied with keeping things simple. We always tend to exaggerate even the simplest phenomenon of this planet.”
― Abhijit Naskar, What is Mind?

“Current research in any field of Science has not yet reached the point where we could start exploring the existential question regarding God as a Supreme Entity driving causality in the universe. However, as modern Neuroscience progresses further and gets more advanced, we shall get to dive deeper into the physiological processes underneath the Qualia of God in human mind. What we have seen so far through our studies in Neurotheology, is that it is not God himself/herself/itself, rather it is people’s perception of God that influences the human life. The Qualia of God impact all aspects of human life by altering the body chemistry at a cellular level.”
― Abhijit Naskar, What is Mind?

“Genes come together to construct a magnificent life-form, while neurons come together to form our Illusion of Consciousness.”
― Abhijit Naskar, What is Mind?

“When you say to someone “follow your heart”, it actually refers to the rhetorical representation of various emotions, that are precisely produced from neural activity of the limbic system. So, the metaphoric heart we always boast about while giving advice to our friends, is actually not anywhere near the biological organ known as heart. Rather it too, like all other elements of the human mind exists only in the brain.”
― Abhijit Naskar, What is Mind?

“Current research in any field of Science has not yet reached the point where we could start exploring the existential question regarding God as a Supreme Entity driving causality in the universe. However, as modern Neuroscience progresses further and gets more advanced, we shall get to dive deeper into the physiological processes underneath the Qualia of God in human mind.”
― Abhijit Naskar, What is Mind?

“The more emotional you are in a situation, the more memories you’ll have of that situation in the long run.”
― Abhijit Naskar, What is Mind?

“Biology is run by intricate cellular mechanisms. Cellular mechanisms are run by Nature. Thus, the more we attempt to understand Nature, the more we get closer to our existential properties.”
― Abhijit Naskar, What is Mind?

“Spirituality, sexuality and curiosity are the three pillars of Modern Human Consciousness.”
― Abhijit Naskar, What is Mind?

“Reality is a construct of the neurons.”
― Abhijit Naskar, What is Mind?

“We are who we are because of what we learn and what we remember.”
― Abhijit Naskar, What is Mind?

“Everything in your mental life proceeds in proper neurological order. If you could have sufficient insight into all the inner and outer parts of your mental life, along with remembrance and intelligence enough to consider all the circumstances and take them into account, you would be a true prophet and visualize the future in the present as in a mirror.”
― Abhijit Naskar, What is Mind?

“At a cellular level of the human mind, Islamophobia is not really a matter of social stigma, rather it is a natural biological fear response of the general human mind, conditioned through countless pairings between terrorist attacks (unconditioned stimulus) and their apparent association with Islam (conditioned stimulus). Hence, Islamophobia cannot be eradicated completely, unless that pairing is severed and thereafter the conditioned stimulus of Islam is paired with something optimistic such as the heartwarming works of the 13th century Persian Muslim poet Jalal ad-Din Muhammad Rumi.”
― Abhijit Naskar, What is Mind?

“Males of all species are made for wooing females, and females typically choose among their suitors. If you take a closer look, you can observe such behavior all around you. The beautiful bird chirping outside your window. It’s a mating call. That pretty little bird is trying to attract a potential mate, so that it can propagate its genes. Why does the peacock have such beautiful feathers? It is to attract a healthy female. He as well is trying to propagate his genes. Even we humans, are not much different from the rest of the animal kingdom when it comes to attracting potential mates. When women dress up for their night out at the club, they are doing so to look attractive. This is a subconscious evolutionary desire to attract as many potential mates as possible.... While women tend to grab attention with their looks, men on the other hand, tend to attract as many potential females as possible, by showing off their resources. When a man shows off with his fancy car, expensive gold watch and suit, or flexes his muscles and brags about how many credit cards he owns, he’s doing so to make himself desirable by healthy women, in order to propagate his genes. It is all in the pursuit of reproduction.”
― Abhijit Naskar, What is Mind?

“Let’s talk about mankind’s most adored emotion – Love. However, love itself is not a single emotion, rather a blend of many. It is such an enchanting sensation, that it has been inspiring artists, scientists, philosophers and thinkers for ages. Albert Einstein said, “any man who can drive safely while kissing a pretty girl is simply not giving the kiss the attention it deserves”. Geniuses around the world came up with various creations under the spell of love. Schrodinger’s Wave Equation, Hawking’s Hawking Radiation, Tagore’s songs, Rumi’s poems, are just a few among the plethora of scientific and philosophical literature created under the enigmatic and warm influence of love. So, technically it is totally worth being crazy in love.”
― Abhijit Naskar, What is Mind?

“From the perspective of a general human being – a non-scientist, the most valuable element of the human mental life, is Emotion – a tiny portion of our conscious mental world. We humans as a species crave for emotional stimulation. And in many cases, as it happens, we are actually slaves to our emotions.”
― Abhijit Naskar, What is Mind?

“Consciousness is simply the brain’s neural response to its surrounding environmental stimuli. Hence when the neural circuits malfunction, Consciousness tends to malfunction as well.”
― Abhijit Naskar, What is Mind?

“Freedom of will is born from the neurons. And that freedom allows you to sometimes make even the worst decisions ever in your life. And by making the worst decision, you simply learn what would be the better decision in future.”
― Abhijit Naskar, What is Mind?

“Quantum Mechanics can indeed be extremely complex to grasp, but when we talk about Consciousness, with decades of rigorous studies on the human brain we have realized that actually, there is no other phenomenon in the entire universe that is simpler than the majestic phenomenon of Consciousness.
'If you think you have a solution to the problem of consciousness, you haven’t understood the problem.' This age-old metaphysical and philosophical argument is strictly not true. If you are sufficiently clear-sighted enough, you can realize the problem itself was a matter of the past when we didn’t have insight into the neurological basis of consciousness. And today it is common knowledge in Neuroscience that, all mesmerizing features of the Human Mind, including the glorious Human Consciousness, are born from the tiny specks of jelly inside your head.”
― Abhijit Naskar, What is Mind?

“The brain becomes illogical, in the throes of new romance.”
― Abhijit Naskar, What is Mind?