The three-pound organ in your skull - with its pink consistency of Jell-o - is an alien kind of computational material. It is composed of miniaturized, self-configuring parts, and it vastly outstrips anything we've dreamt of building.

Even though the outside world has not changed, your brain dynamically presents different interpretations.

If our brains were simple enough to be understood, we wouldn't be smart enough to understand them.

Brains are like representative democracies. They are built of multiple, overlapping experts who weigh in and compete over different choices.

You gleefully say, "I just thought of something!", when in fact your brain performed an enormous amount of work before your moment of genius struck. When an idea is served up from behind the scenes, your neural circuitry has been working on it for hours or days or years, consolidating information and trying out new combinations. But you take credit without further wonderment at the vast, hidden machinery behind the scenes.

I call myself a Possibilian: I'm open to...ideas that we don't have any way of testing right now.

A typical neuron makes about ten thousand connections to neighboring neurons. Given the billions of neurons, this means there are as many connections in a single cubic centimeter of brain tissue as there are stars in the Milky Way galaxy.