21 Quotes by Miguel Nicolelis

Essentially, all expressions of human nature ever produced, from a caveman's paintings to Mozart's symphonies and Einstein's view of the universe, emerge from the same source: the relentless dynamic toil of large populations of interconnected neurons.

The brain needs to have a story; it needs to have a logical screenplay telling where we're coming from and what we're going to.

A lot of people thought the sense of self was hard-wired, but it's not at all. It can be changed very quickly, and that's very intriguing.

It's not telepathy. It's not the Borg. But we created a new central nervous system made of two brains.

It's the first time an exoskeleton has been controlled by brain activity and offered feedback to the patients. Doing a demonstration in a stadium is something very much outside our routine in robotics. It's never been done before.

Even two of humanity's most intimate possessions - a sense of self and a body image - are fluid, highly modifiable creations of the brain's mischievous deployment of electricity and a handful of chemicals. They both can change or be changed on less than a second's notice.

I have no military application in my research. You know, we are all involved into rehabilitation medicine.

In my view, while the single neuron is the basic anatomical and information processing-signaling unit of the brain, it is not capable of generating behaviors and, ultimately, thinking. Instead, the true functional unit of the central nervous system is a population of neurons, or neural ensembles or cell assemblies.

You could have all the computer chips ever in the world and you won’t create a consciousness.