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.

A lot of good ideas are actually bad ideas because, since they sound good, everybody's already doing them.

If you give somebody a lot of questions to answer and then they walk by a bowl of candy, they are more likely to grab the candy because they're tired out from answering questions and can't resist.

There are many things that we still don't understand about the universe, right? Einstein struggled to bring quantum mechanics and gravity together and never succeeded, and that's a problem that to this day is not well understood. Well, maybe to comprehend some of these things, we need to augment our intelligence. If we do, who knows?

If our brain is understanding some parts of the universe and not understanding other parts, and those understandings are about the laws of physics that our brains are built on top of, then it's kind of a loop, right?

I worry that we don't have a very good definition of consciousness yet which makes it hard to tackle.

It's surprising that the world is understandable to the extent that it is.