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.

Think about the brain as the densest concentration of youness. It's the peak of the mountain, but not the whole mountain.

Visual cortex is fundamentally a machine whose job is to generate a model of the world.

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.

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."

There are an infinite number of boring things to do in science.

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.