Modern neuroimaging is like asking an astronaut in the space shuttle to look out the window and judge how America is doing.

Asleep vision (dreaming) is perception that is not tied down to anything in the real world; waking perception is something like dreaming with a little more commitment to what's in front of you.

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

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.

It is more parsimonious to assume that the sun goes around the Earth, that atoms at the smallest scale operate in accordance with the same rules that objects at larger scales follow, and that we perceive what is really out there. All of these positions were long defended by argument from parsimony, and they were all wrong.

Constant reminding ourselves that we not see with our eyes but with our synergetic eye-brain system working as a whole will produce constant astonishment as we notice, more and more often, how much of our perceptions emerge from our preconceptions.

Just like a good drama, the human brain runs on conflict.