As an undergraduate I majored in British and American literature at Rice University.

If you ever feel lazy or dull, take heart: you're the busiest, brightest thing on the planet.

In our current understanding of science, we can't find the physical gap in which to slip free will - the uncaused causer - because there seems to be no part of the machinery that does not follow in a causal relationship from the other parts.

Death... The moment, sometime in the future, when your name is spoken for the last time.

The left hemisphere acts as an "interpreter," watching the actions and behaviors of the body and assigning a coherent narrative to these events. And the left hemisphere works this way even in normal, intact brains. Hidden programs drive actions, and the left hemisphere makes justifications. This idea of retrospective storytelling suggests that we come to know our own attitudes and emotions, at least partially, by inferring them from observations of our own behavior.

Our internal life and external actions are steered by biological coctails to which we have neither immediate access nor direct acquaintance.

Love was not specified in the design of your brain; it is merely an endearing algorithm that freeloads on the leftover processing cycles.