We're trapped on this very thin slice of perception ... But even at that slice of reality that we call home, we're not seeing most of what's going on.

Societies would _not_ be better off if everyone were like Mr Spock, all rationality and no emotion. Instead, a balance - a teaming up of the internal rivals - is optimal for brains. ... Some balance of the emotional and rational systems is needed, and that balance may already be optimized by natural selection in human brains.

Each cell sends electrical pulses to other cells, up to hundreds of times per second. If you represented each of these trillions and trillions of pulses in your brain by a single photon of light, the combined output would be blinding.

Keep in mind that every single generation before us has worked under the assumption that they possessed all the major tools for understanding the universe, and they were all wrong, without exception.

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

If you measure someone's brain and see very little activity during a task, it does not necessarily indicate that they're not trying - it more likely signifies that they have worked hard in the past to burn the programs into the circuitry. Consciousness is called in during the first phase of learning and is excluded from the game playing after it is deep in the system.

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.