“Presumably the child-brain is something like a note-book as one buys it from the stationer's. Rather little mechanism, and lots of blank sheets.”

— Alan Turing, Computing Machinery and Intelligence

Source: Computing Machinery and Intelligence (1950), p. 456.

Adopted from Wikiquote. Last update April 30, 2026. History

Help us to complete the source, original and additional information

Do you have more details about the quote "Presumably the child-brain is something like a note-book as one buys it from the stationer's. Rather little mechanism, …" by Alan Turing?

Alan Turing33

British mathematician, logician, cryptanalyst, and computer… 1912–1954

Related quotes

“Every day is a blank sheet on which to write notes of music, notes coming from the depths of the soul. A sheet on which to blow a smile, to give it life.”

Prevale (1983) Italian DJ and producer

Original: (it) Ogni giorno è un foglio bianco su cui scrivere note di musica, note provenienti dal profondo dell’anima. Un foglio su cui soffiare un sorriso, per donargli vita.
Source: prevale.net

“Even as a child, I had that sort of defense mechanism. If something was awkward, I would try to lighten it up by making people laugh. But like Chandler, I've grown up a little bit in the last eight years and become a lot more comfortable with my serious side. I feel the need to fill the silences a lot less with jokes.”

Matthew Perry (actor) (1969) American actor

Frazier Moore, Associated Press (August 22, 2002) "Perry pondering life after 'Friends'", Deseret Morning News, Deseret News Publishing Co., p. C04.

“The human mind is not capable of grasping the Universe. We are like a little child entering a huge library. The walls are covered to the ceilings with books in many different tongues. The child knows that someone must have written these books. It does not know who or how. It does not understand the languages in which they are written. But the child notes a definite plan in the arrangement of the books - a mysterious order which it does not comprehend, but only dimly suspects.”

Albert Einstein (1879–1955) German-born physicist and founder of the theory of relativity

Attributed without source to Einstein in Mieczyslaw Taube, Evolution of Matter and Energy on a Cosmic and Planetary Scale (1985), page 1
Disputed

“The listeners who buy books after a reading multiply that reading; the author who realizes that he or she may be writing on a blank page but is at least not speaking to a blank wall may be encouraged by the experience, and write more.”

Alberto Manguel (1948) writer

The Author As Reader, p. 259.
A History of Reading (1996)

“A working brain is probably a lot like a map, where anybody can get from one place to another on the freeways. It's the nonworking brains that get blocked, that have dead ends, that are under construction like mine.”

Ned Vizzini book It's Kind of a Funny Story

Source: It's Kind of a Funny Story

“I wear Whatever I feel comfortable in. I like to mix and match. I'll buy something from the street. I'll buy something from a fashion house.”

Preity Zinta (1975) film actress

Preity about design and shopping
Source: [rediff.com, Styling Preity Zinta, http://www.rediff.com/getahead/2004/sep/06ga-preity.htm 1, 10 October, 2006]

“Read a lot. Expect something big, something exalting or deepening from a book. No book is worth reading that isn't worth re-reading.”

Susan Sontag (1933–2004) American writer and filmmaker, professor, and activist

“I have moments like that alot, when my brain falls asleep or something, and the next thing I know I've missed something, as if a puzzle piece fell out of the universe and left me staring at the blank place behind it.”

Rick Riordan book The Lightning Thief

Source: The Lightning Thief

“My mind turned by anxiety, or other cause, from its scrutiny of blank paper, is like a lost child–wandering the house, sitting on the bottom step to cry.”

Virginia Woolf (1882–1941) English writer

5 December 1919
A Moment's Liberty (1990)
Source: A Writer's Diary
Context: This last week L. has been having a little temperature in the evening, due to malaria, and that due to a visit to Oxford; a place of death and decay. I'm almost alarmed to see how entirely my weight rests on his prop. And almost alarmed to see how intensely I'm specialised. My mind turned by anxiety, or other cause, from its scrutiny of blank paper, is like a lost child – wandering the house, sitting on the bottom step to cry.

“Never - never in my whole life - has my head spun as much from a book as it did with Rosenberg’s Myth. Not because his writings were exceptionally profound, difficult to comprehend or emotionally overwhelming, but because Clemens hammered on my head with the book for minutes on end. (Clemens and Weser were the principal torturers of the Jews in Dresden, and they were generally differentiated as the Hitter and the Spitter.) ‘How dare a Jewish pig like you presume to read a book of this kind?’ Clemens yelled. To him it seemed like the desecration of a consecrated wafer. ‘How dare you have a book here from the lending library?’ Only the fact that the volume had demonstrably been borrowed in the name of my Aryan wife, and, moreover, that the sheet of notes which accompanied it was torn up without being deciphered, saved me at the time from the concentration camp.”

Victor Klemperer book LTI – Lingua Tertii Imperii

Source: LTI – Lingua Tertii Imperii (The Language of the Third Reich) (1947), p. 12.

“Presumably the child-brain is something like a note-book as one buys it from the stationer's. Rather little mechanism, and lots of blank sheets.”

Help us to complete the source, original and additional information

Alan Turing33

Related quotes

Related topics