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

Once you begin deliberating about where your fingers are jumping on the piano keyboard, you can no longer pull off the piece.

As we develop better technologies for probing the brain, we detect more problems.

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

If you have certain problems with your brain but are raised in a good home, you might turn out okay. If your brain is fine and your home is terrible, you might still turn out fine. But if you have mild brain damage and end up with a bad home life, you're tossing the dice for a very unlucky synergy.

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.

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