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.

Everybody knows the power of deadlines - and we all hate them. But their effectiveness is undeniable.

The conscious mind is not at the center of the action in the brain; instead, it is far out on a distant edge, hearing but whispers of the activity.

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

This is what consciousness does: it sets the goals, and the rest of the system learns how to meet them.

If our brains were simple enough to be understood, we wouldn't be smart enough to understand them.

Interestingly, schizophrenics can tickle themselves because of a problem with their timing that does not allow their motor actions and resulting sensations to be correctly sequenced.