If we succeed, it makes no sense to keep it only for ourselves.

A big part of my job is to remember failure, and reboot failure, when the timing is right.

I would argue that if you understand how the cells of the brain are organized into circuits, almost computational circuits if you will, and we see how information flows through those circuits and how it's transformed, we might have a much firmer grasp on why our brains make decisions the way that they do. If we get a handle on that, maybe we can overcome some of our limitations and at the very least we'll understand why we do what we do.

For the last century of neuroscience, lots of people have tried to control neurons using all sorts of different technologies - pharmacology (drugs), electrical pulses, and so on. But none of these technologies are precise. With optogenetics, we can aim light at a single cell, or a set of cells, and turn just that set of cells on or off.

I spend a lot of time going over old conversation summaries. A lot of the old ones are about ideas that ended in failure, the project didn't work. But hey, you know what? That was five years ago, and now computers are faster, or some new information has come along, the world is different. So we're able to reboot the project.

When I'm talking to somebody, I'll put a piece of paper on the table and I'll write what I call a conversation summary - notes about the conversation on the piece of paper. At the end of the conversation, I'll take a picture on my phone and give the other person the original piece of paper.

If you could map out a human brain, an open question is, if you simulated it, would it be you? Now, as we discussed earlier, we don't have a great definition or even a good technological handle to know whether something is conscious or not just by looking at it, so there's that aspect that we're not ready to answer, I would argue. But it raises very interesting questions about the nature of identity.