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

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.

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

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

One of the most impressive features of brains - and especially human brains - is the flexibility to learn almost any kind of task that comes its way.

You gleefully say, "I just thought of something!", when in fact your brain performed an enormous amount of work before your moment of genius struck. When an idea is served up from behind the scenes, your neural circuitry has been working on it for hours or days or years, consolidating information and trying out new combinations. But you take credit without further wonderment at the vast, hidden machinery behind the scenes.

Just like a good drama, the human brain runs on conflict.