23 Quotes by Patricia Churchland

The principle chore of brains is to get the body parts where they should be in order that the organism may survive. Improvements in sensorimotor control confer an evolutionary advantage: a fancier style of representing [the world] is advantageous so long as it... enhances an organism's chances for survival. Truth, whatever that is, takes the hindmost.

If you give up because you announce the phenomenon cannot be explained, you are missing out.

I am less attracted to guesses about what cannot be done, than about making progress on a problem.

Brains are not magical; they are causal machines.

Being engaged in some way for the good of the community, whatever that community, is a factor in a meaningful life. We long to belong, and belonging and caring anchors our sense of place in the universe.

It seems that the brain has a “small world” architecture – or at least the cortex does. Everything can connect to everything else in a few synaptic steps.

Humility bids us to take ourselves as we are; we do not have to be cosmically significant to be genuinely significant.

Even philosophers who did not mind psychology, claimed the brain was irrelevant because it was the hardware, and we only need to know about the software.

Suppression of impulses that would put you in danger is obviously an important neurobiological function.