Short circuit thing Quotes

“The fact that early languages, no matter how many there are, utilize the same streams implies that the brain doesn't have a native language. The brain can only reflect the fact that a set of neural circuits was built and activated for a certain period of time. Nor does the brain care if those neural circuits map onto things that the rest of the world calls languages or dialects. It really cares only about what activates those circuits. Thus, the brain patters that typify language use across skill levels can be mapped.Brain imaging technology monitors the intensity of oxygen use around the brain - higher oxygen use represents higher energy use by cells burning glucose. The deeply engrained language circuits will create dim MRI images, because they are working efficiently, requiring less glucose overall. More recently acquired languages, as well as those used less frequently, would make neural circuits shine more brightly, because they require more brain cells, thus more glucose.”

“Recently, the search for what he calls "the splinters that make up different attention problems" has taken Castellanos in a new direction. First, he explains that your brain is far less concerned with your brilliant ideas or searing emotions than with its own internal "gyroscopic busyness," which consumes 65 percent of its total energy. Every fifty seconds, its activity fluctuates, causing what he calls a "brownout." No one knows the purpose of these neurological events, but Castellanos has a thesis: the clockwork pulses enable the brain's circuits to stay "logged on" and available to communicate with one another, even when they're not being used. "Imagine you're a cabdriver on your day off," Castellanos says. "You don't need to use your workday circuits on a Sunday, but to keep those channels open, your brain sends a ping through them every minute or so. The fluctuations are the brain's investment in maintaining its circuits online.”

“Something was wrong with the devices themselves. Digging deep into the internal structure of the circuit boards with powerful microscopes, Simon's team had discovered broken and incorrect connections, electronic dead-ends, short circuits, and nonsensical pathways.”

“Maybe it's a green thing or a wolf thing or a short-circuit thing. I don’t seem to know anything.”

“My first project was to build an ionization gauge control circuit for Professor Edgar Everhart's Cockcroft-Walton accelerator. In those days, vacuum tubes were the active components in electronic circuits. I can still recall the warm orange glow of the vacuum tube filaments and the cool blue glow of the thyratron tubes.”

“The healthiest way I know how to move through an emotion effectively is to surrender completely to that emotion when its loop of physiology comes over me. I simply resign to the loop and let it run its course for 90 seconds. Just like children, emotions heal when they are heard and validated. Over time, the intensity and frequency of these circuits usually abate. ...Paying attention to which array of circuits we are concurrently running provides us with tremendous insight into how our minds are fundamentally wired...”

“Biological instincts are the key to understanding how every single human being is wired. The marvelous interplay of various brain circuits creates our instinctual reality of the daily life. If you’re conscious about the fact that there lies a complex yet vividly beautiful brain circuit mechanism behind every single impulse of your daily emotions, then you can choose how to react upon each of those impulses. You can thus program your behavioral response in a certain situation.”

“The information superhighways will have the same effect as our present superhighways or motorways. They will cancel out the landscape, lay waste to the territory and abolish real distances. What is merely physical and geographical in the case of our motorways will assume its full dimensions in the electronic field with the abolition of mental distances and the absolute shrinkage of time. All short circuits (and the establishment of this planetary hyper-space is tantamount to one immense short circuit) produce electric shocks. What we see emerging here is no longer merely territorial desert, but social desert, employment desert, the body itself being laid waste by the very concentration of information. A kind of Big Crunch, contemporaneous with the Big Bang of the financial markets and the information networks. We are merely at the dawning of the process, but the waste and the wastelands are already growing much faster than the computerization process itself.”

“There was a space program before there was integrated circuits.”