Just give the brain the information and it will figure it out.

It turns out that dopamine is a chemical on double duty in the brain. Along with its role in motor commands, it also serves as the main messenger in the reward systems, guiding a person toward food, drink, mates, and all things useful for survival. Because of its role in the reward system, imbalances in dopamine can trigger gambling, overeating, and drug addiction - behaviors that result from a reward system gone awry.

The continuous networks of neural circuitry accomplish their functions using multiple, independently discovered strategies. The brain lends itself well to the complexity of the world, but poorly to clear-cut cartography.

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

There is a looming chasm between what your brain knows and what your mind is capable of accessing.

All life is no more than a match struck in the dark and blown out again.

As Walt Whitman correctly surmised, we are large and we harbor multitudes within us. And those multitudes are locked in chronic battle. There is an ongoing conversation among the different factions in your brain, each competing to control the single output channel of your behavior. As a result, you can accomplish the strange feats of arguing with yourself, cursing at yourself, and cajoling yourself to do something - feats that modern computers simply do not do.