We open our eyes and we think we're seeing the whole world out there. But what has become clear—and really just in the last few centuries—is that when you look at the electro-magnetic spectrum we are seeing less than 1/10 Billionth of the information that's riding on there. So we call that visible light. But everything else passing through our bodies is completely invisible to us. Even though we accept the reality that's presented to us, we're really only seeing a little window of what's happening.

This is the hallmark of a robust biological system: political parties can perish in a tragic accident and the society will still run, sometimes with little more than a hiccup to the system. It may be that for every strange clinical case in which brain damage leads to a bizarre change in behavior or perception, there are hundreds of cases in which parts of the brain are damaged with no detectable clinical sign.

A mere 400 years after our fall from the center of the universe, we have experienced the fall from the center of ourselves.

Because vision appears so effortless, we are like fish challenged to understand water.

Consciousness is the smallest player in the operations of the brain.

...you are battered and bruised in the collisions between reminiscence and reality.

All creation necessarily ends in this: Creators, powerless, fleeing from the things they have wrought.