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.

Everything that creates itself upon the backs of smaller scales will by those same scales be consumed.

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

If you have certain problems with your brain but are raised in a good home, you might turn out okay. If your brain is fine and your home is terrible, you might still turn out fine. But if you have mild brain damage and end up with a bad home life, you're tossing the dice for a very unlucky synergy.

Awareness of your surroundings occurs only when sensory inputs violate expectations. When the world is successfully predicted away, awareness is not needed because the brain is doing its job well.

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.

Scientists often talk of parsimony (as in "the simplest explanation is probably correct," also known as Occam's razor), but we should not get seduced by the apparent elegance of argument from parsimony; this line of reasoning has failed in the past at least as many times as it has succeeded.