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

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.

What we find is that our brains have colossal things happening in them all the time.

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

If you are a carrier of a particular set of genes, your probability of committing a violent crime goes up by eight hundred and eighty-two percent.

Given the billions of neurons, this means there are as many connections in a single cubic centimeter of brain tissue as there are stars in the Milky Way galaxy.

What a life in science really teaches you is the vastness of our ignorance.