“That in nonarithmetic operations the small and slow human brain can still do so much better than the large and fast electronic computer is an impressive tribute to how cleverly the brain is packaged and programmed—features brought about, of course, by natural selection. Those who possessed poorly programmed brains eventually did not live long enough to reproduce.”

Source: The Dragons of Eden (1977), Chapter 8, “The Future Evolution of the Brain” (p. 224)

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Carl Sagan365

American astrophysicist, cosmologist, author and science ed… 1934–1996

Stephen Jay Gould book An Urchin in the Storm

"Cardboard Darwinism", pp. 48–49
An Urchin in the Storm (1987)

“The impetus to figure out what's going on is still very much programmed into our highly complex brains.”

Ursula Goodenough (1943) American biologist

Science and Spirit interview (2004)
Context: All life has a kind of seamlessness. All creatures have to be aware of their environment, and there has been an evolution of the capacities needed for detecting increasingly complex stimuli. I have no problem calling this "meaning," since all creatures pick out meaningful facets of their environment. For the first creatures, these facets were physical and mediated by receptor proteins. Sperm and eggs find each other by protein shapes; photosynthetic bacteria find light by protein shapes. The impetus to figure out what's going on is still very much programmed into our highly complex brains.

“Addictive drugs misuse the brain’s existing pre-programming, activating reward mechanisms and extreme feelings of pleasure. When stimulated, the brain’s pleasure centres emit signals to repeat the behaviour. In this sense, the brain is pre-programmed to feel good.”

Nayef Al-Rodhan (1959) philosopher, neuroscientist, geostrategist, and author

Source: Sustainable History and the Dignity of Man (2009), p.97

“And lo! the creature did work slow in the brain.”

William Hope Hodgson book The Night Land

Source: The Night Land (1912), Chapter 11

“Better a brain drain than a brain in the drain.”

Rajiv Gandhi (1944–1991) sixth Prime Minister of India

Quoted in: Kishore Mahbubani, The New Asian Hemisphere: The Irresistible Shift of Global Power to the East https://books.google.nl/books?id=3bNEcyRxk3oC&pg=PA69&lpg=PA69&dq=charles+leadbeater++%22from+west+to+east%22&source=bl&ots=5P_cDPHVZF&sig=GfkXHeh-xNDhko5-h2NqD67zP5E&hl=nl&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwjF_afS-qzLAhXHzxQKHUcKBEoQ6AEIKDAB#v=onepage&q=brain%20drain&f=false, 2010, p. 70, and in: Mark L. Clifford, Janet Pau, Through the Eyes of Tiger Cubs: Views of Asia's Next Generation https://books.google.nl/books?id=UBSTDQ2P4G4C&pg=PA29&lpg=PA29&dq=%22+a+brain+drain+than+a+%22+gandhi&source=bl&ots=HFx1eY6xca&sig=N_OpfnYt0sTRH02YvHx_z-T3HM8&hl=nl&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwji-en0ka7LAhUEaxQKHWf8D_gQ6AEIJDAC#v=onepage&q=%22%20a%20brain%20drain%20than%20a%20%22%20gandhi&f=false, 2012 p. 29 <br class="br">When asked in an interview (date unknown) whether he did not regret the fact that so many intelligent Indians left their home country to go studying in the US. <br class="br">Quote

“Natural selection operates according to immediate circumstances and not toward a long-term goal. Homo sapiens did eventually evolve as a descendent of the first humans, but there was nothing inevitable about it.”

Richard Leakey (1944) Kenyan paleoanthropologist, conservationist, and politician

The Origin of Humankind (1994)

“For that fine madness still he did retain
Which rightly should possess a poet’s brain.”

Michael Drayton (1563–1631) English poet

To Henry Reynolds, of Poets and Poesy (1627).

“The human brain has left and right brain symmetry with its own nature and can process information which initially appears to have no pattern or order. However, the brain has the ability to process visual information much more efficiently.”

Tony Buzan (1942–2019) British psychologist

The Mind Map Book, Buzan and Buzan (1991)

“When the organism dies, the brain dies, too, with all its lifetime accumulations. But the mind reproduces itself by transmitting its symbols to other intermediaries, human and mechanical, than the particular brain that first assembled them.”

Lewis Mumford (1895–1990) American historian, sociologist, philosopher of technology, and literary critic

"The Mindfulness of Man", p. 424
Interpretations and Forecasts 1922-1972 (1973)
Context: The relation between psyche and soma, mind and brain, are peculiarly intimate; but, as in marriage, the partners are not inseparable: indeed their divorce was one of the conditions for the mind's independent history and its cumulative achievements.
But the human mind possesses a special advantage over the brain: for once it has created impressive symbols and has stored significant memories, it can transfer its characteristic activities to materials like to stone and paper that outlast the original brain's brief life-span. When the organism dies, the brain dies, too, with all its lifetime accumulations. But the mind reproduces itself by transmitting its symbols to other intermediaries, human and mechanical, than the particular brain that first assembled them.

“Our ignorance of brain function is currently so very nearly total that we could not even begin to frame appropriate research strategies. We would stand before the open brain, fancy instruments in hand, roughly as an unschooled labourer might stand before the exposed wiring of a computer: awed perhaps, but surely helpless. A microanalysis of brain functions is, moreover, no more useful for understanding anything about thinking than a corresponding analysis of the pulses flowing through a computer would be for understanding what program the computer is running. Such analyses would simply be at the wrong conceptual level. They might help to decide crucial experiments, but only after such experiments had been designed on the basis of much higher-level (for example, linguistic) theories.”

Joseph Weizenbaum (1923–2008) German-American computer scientist

Computer Power and Human Reason: From Judgment To Calculation (1976)

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