You are part of a complex social network that changes your biology with every interaction, and which your actions can change.

The majority of human beings live their whole lives unaware that they are only seeing a limited cone of vision at any moment.

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

The first thing we learn from studying our own circuitry is a simple lesson: most of what we do and think and feel is not under our conscious control.

Who we can be begins with our molecular blueprints - a series of alien codes penned in invisibly small strings of acids - well before we have anything to do with it. We are a product of our inaccessible, microscopic history.

The brain "fills in" the missing information from the blind spot. Notice what you see in the location of the dot when it's in your blind spot. When the dot disappears, you do not perceive a hole of whiteness or blackness in its place; instead your brain invents a patch of the background pattern. Your brain, with no information from that particular spot in visual space, fills in with the patterns around it. You're not perceiving what's out there. You're perceiving whatever your brain tells you.

You are part of a complex social network that changes your biology with every interaction, and which your actions can change.