Instead of reality being passively recorded by the brain, it is actively constructed by it.

We are nothing but the product of billions of years of molecules coming together and ratcheting up through natural selection, we are composed only of highways of fluids and chemicals sliding along roadways within billions of dancing cells, trillions of synaptic conversations hum in parallel, this vast egglike fabric of micron-thin circuitry runs algorithms undreamt of in modern science, and these neural programs give rise to our decision making, loves, desires, fears, and aspirations. That understanding would be a numinous experience, better than anything ever proposed in anyone's holy text.

Behavior is the outcome of the battle among internal systems.

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."

I spent my adult life as a scientist, and science is, essentially, the most successful approach we have to try and understand the vast mysteries around.

Instead of reality being passively recorded by the brain, it is actively constructed by it.

If an epileptic seizure is focused in a particular sweet spot in the temporal lobe, a person won´t have motor seizures, but instead something more subtle. The effect is something like a cognitive seizure, marked by changes of personality, hyperreligiosity (an obsession with religion and feelings of religious certainity), hypergraphia (extensive writing on a subject, usually about religion), the false sense of an external presence, and, often, the hearing voices that are attributed to a god. Some fraction of history´s prophets, martyrs, and leaders appear to have had temporal lobe epilepsy.