20 Quotes by Charles Scott Sherrington

Swiftly the brain becomes an enchanted loom, where millions of flashing shuttles weave a dissolving pattern-always a meaningful pattern-though never an abiding one.

If it is mind that we are searching the brain, then we are supposing the brain to be much more than a telephone-exchange. We are supposing it to be a telephone-exchange along with subscribers as well.

A rainbow every morning who would pause to look at? The wonderful which comes often or is plentifully about us is soon taken for granted. Th at is practical enough. It allows us to get on with life. But it may stultify if it cannot on occasion be thrown off . To recapture now and then childhood’s wonder, is to secure a driving force for occasional grown-up thoughts.

The brain seems a thoroughfare for nerve-action passing its way to the motor animal. It has been remarked that Life's aim is an act not a thought. To-day the dictum must be modified to admit that, often, to refrain from an act is no less an act than to commit one, because inhibition is coequally with excitation a nervous activity.

The brain is a mystery; it has been and still will be. How does the brain produce thoughts? That is the central question and we have still no answer to it.

Natural knowledge has not forgone emotion. It has simply taken for itself new ground of emotion, under impulsion from and in sacrifice to that one of its 'values', Truth.

Each waking day is a stage dominated for good or ill, comedy, farce, or tragedy, by a dramatis personae, the 'self', and so it will be until the curtain drops.

Reflex inhibition acting against a reflex titanic contraction may diminish the contraction in one or other or all of several different ways.

In some units it may suppress the motor discharge altogether, in some it may merely slow the motor discharge thus lessening the wave frequency of the contraction and so the tension.