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.

When one part of the brain makes a choice, other parts can quickly invent a story to explain why. If you show the command "Walk" to the right hemisphere (the one without language), the patient will get up and start walking. If you stop him and ask why he's leaving, his left hemisphere, cooking up an answer, will say something like "I was going to get a drink of water."

Modern neuroimaging is like asking an astronaut in the space shuttle to look out the window and judge how America is doing.

Among all the creatures of creation, the gods favor us: We are the only ones who can empathize with their problems.

As we develop better technologies for probing the brain, we detect more problems.

The majority of human beings live their whole lives unaware that they are only seeing a limited cone of vision at any moment.

The more familiar the world becomes, the less information your brain writes down, and the more quickly time seems to pass.