Because vision appears so effortless, we are like fish challenged to understand water.

Among all the creatures of creation, the gods favor us: We are the only ones who can empathize with their problems.

Some men may be genetically inclined to have and hold a single partner, while some may not. In the near future, young women who stay current with the scientific literature may demand genetic tests of their boyfriends to assess how likely they are to make faithful husbands.

Those with Anton's syndrome are not pretending they are not blind; they truly believe they are not blind. Their verbal reports, while inaccurate, are not lies. Instead, they are experiencing what they take to be vision, but it is all internally generated.

Many people prefer a view of human nature that includes a true side and a false side - in other words, humans have a single genuine aim and the rest is decoration, evasion, or cover-up. That's intuitive, but it's incomplete. A study of the brain necessitates a more nuanced view of human nature.

The brain runs its show incognito.

We spend our lives on a thin slice between the unimaginably small scales of the atoms that compose us and the infinitely large scales of galaxies.