6 Quotes by Paul Broks

How resilient people are. If one day you woke up to find that you had been transformed into a gigantic insect, the chances are you would just get up and carry on with your new life.

When we see the brain we realize that we are, at one level, no more than meat; and, on another, no more than fiction.

From a neuroscience perspective we are all divided and discontinuous. The mental processes underlying our sense of self – feelings, thoughts, memories – are scattered through different zones of the brain. There is no special point of convergence. No cockpit of the soul. No soul-pilot. They come together in a work of fiction. A human being is a story-telling machine. The self is a story.

Cosmology and neuropsychology have absurdity in common. The raw facts are strange beyond imagination.

Our ethics and systems of justice, our entire moral order, are founded on the notion of society as a collective of individual selves – autonomous, introspective, accountable agents. If this self-reflective, moral agent is revealed to be illusory, what then?

This is the left hemisphere confabulating. It does this for all of us, every waking moment. It edits our conscious experiences, makes them comprehensible and palatable. It’s the brain’s spin-doctor.