The drives you take for granted ("I'm a hetero/homosexual," "I'm attracted to children/adults," "I'm aggressive/not aggressive," and so on) depend on the intricate details of your neural machinery.

When a male vole repeatedly mates with a female, a hormone called vasopressin is released in his brain. The vasopressin binds to receptors in a part of the brain called the nucleus accumbens, and the binding mediates a pleasurable feeling that becomes associated with that female. This locks in the monogamy, which is known as pair-bonding. If you block this hormone, the pair-bonding goes away.

As Carl Jung put it, "In each of us there is another whom we do not know." As Pink Floyd sang, "There's someone in my head, but it's not me."

What has always surprised me when I walk into a bookstore is the number of books that you can find that are written with certainty. The authors tell some story as though it's true, but they don't have any evidence that it is true!

Among all the creatures of creation, the gods favor us: We are the only ones who can empathize with their problems.

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.

We are not at the center of ourselves, but instead - like the Earth in the Milky Way, and the Milky Way in the universe - far out on a distant edge, hearing little of what is transpiring.