Prefrontal.org » Quotes

Quote of the Week – Pashler

prefrontal — Wed, 06 Jan 2010 02:38:48 +0000

“It’s hellishly complicated, this data analysis, and that creates great opportunity for inadvertent mischief.” – Hal Pashler (As seen in Science News)

Quote of the Week – Logothetis

admin — Wed, 09 Dec 2009 22:03:00 +0000

“fMRI is a measure of mass action. You almost have to be a professional moron to think you’re saying something profound about the neural mechanisms. You’re nowhere close to explaining what’s happening, but you have a nice framework, an excellent starting point.” ~ Nikos Logothetis (As seen in Science News)

Quote of the Week – Coggan

prefrontal — Thu, 30 Jul 2009 01:41:24 +0000

“My ignorance of science is such that if anyone mentioned copper nitrate I should think he was talking about policemen’s overtime.” – Frederick Donald Coggan

Quote of the Week – Sagan

prefrontal — Sat, 09 May 2009 19:52:28 +0000

“The truth may be puzzling. It may take some work to grapple with. It may be counterintuitive. It may contradict deeply held prejudices. It may not be consonant with what we desperately want to be true. But our preferences do not determine what’s true. We have a method, and that method helps us to reach not absolute truth, only asymptotic approaches to the truth — never there, just closer and closer, always finding vast new oceans of undiscovered possibilities. Cleverly designed experiments are the key.” – Carl Sagan, “Wonder and Skepticism”

Quote of the Week – Curie

prefrontal — Sat, 04 Apr 2009 19:28:44 +0000

“I am among those who think that science has great beauty. A scientist in his laboratory is not only a technician: he is also a child placed before natural phenomena which impress him like a fairy tale.” – Marie Curie

Quote of the Week – Gigerenzer

prefrontal — Sun, 16 Nov 2008 22:11:51 +0000

A former chairman of the Harvard Psychology department once asked me “Gerd, do you know why they love those pictures [the fMRI activity maps]?’ It is because they are like women: they are beautiful, they are expensive, and you don’t understand them” – Gerd Gigerenzer

Quote of the Week – Feynman

prefrontal — Thu, 04 Sep 2008 00:37:12 +0000

“It doesn’t matter how beautiful your theory is, it doesn’t matter how smart you are. If it doesn’t agree with experiment, it’s wrong” – Richard Feynman

Quote of the Week – Tukey

prefrontal — Mon, 18 Aug 2008 22:51:54 +0000

“The combination of some data and an aching desire for an answer does not ensure that a reasonable answer can be extracted from a given body of data.” – John W. Tukey, 1986

Quote of the Week – Fisher

prefrontal — Fri, 08 Aug 2008 16:39:03 +0000

“Modern statisticians are familiar with the notion that any finite body of data contains only a limited amount of information on any point under examination; that this limit is set by the nature of the data themselves, and cannot be increased by any amount of ingenuity expended in their statistical examination: that the statistician’s task, in fact, is limited to the extraction of the whole of the available information on any particular issue.” – R. A. Fisher

Quote of the Week – Rousseau

prefrontal — Thu, 12 Jun 2008 18:48:02 +0000

“We are born, so to speak, twice over; born into existence, and born into life; born a human being and born a man.” Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Emile, 1762

Quote of the Week – Bohr

prefrontal — Sun, 25 May 2008 02:56:50 +0000

“The very fact that knowledge is itself the basis for civilization points directly to openness as the way to overcome the present crisis.” – To the United Nations, by Niels Bohr, 1950

Quote of the Week – Planck

prefrontal — Fri, 02 May 2008 01:13:43 +0000

“An experiment is a question which science poses to Nature, and a measurement is the recording of Nature’s answer.” – Max Planck

Quote of the Week – Adams

prefrontal — Wed, 12 Dec 2007 04:27:33 +0000

Human beings, who are almost unique in having the ability to learn from the experience of others, are also remarkable for their apparent disinclination to do so. – Douglas Adams, “Last Chance to See”

Quote of the Week – Russell

prefrontal — Mon, 26 Nov 2007 19:31:15 +0000

Mathematics, rightly viewed, possesses not only truth but supreme beauty — a beauty cold and austere, like that of a sculpture, without appeal to any part of our weaker nature, without the gorgeous trapping of painting or music, yet sublimely pure, and capable of a stern perfection such as only the greatest art can show. The true spirit of delight, the exaltation, the sense of being more than man, which is the touchstone of the highest excellence, is to be found in mathematics as surely as in poetry. – Bertrand Russell

Quote of the Week – Shakespeare

prefrontal — Sat, 17 Nov 2007 03:00:50 +0000

“I would that there were no age between ten and three and twenty, or that youth would sleep out the rest. For there is nothing in between but getting wenches with child, wronging the ancientry, stealing and fighting” – Shakespeare, “Winter’s Tale”, 1565