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.

You can imagine over very long timescales, perhaps far beyond the multi-decade time scale, we might be able to ask very deep questions about why we feel the way we feel about things, or why we think of ourselves in certain ways - questions that have been in the realm of psychology and philosophy but have been very difficult to get a firm mechanistic laws-of-physics grasp on.

Behavioral economics can explain some things, but it's hard to explain a lot of the underlying processes that generate these decisions, much less some of these unconscious things that we don't have a handle on at all.

One of the things that got me transitioning from physical science to brain science was asking, Why do we understand so much about the universe?

These disorders - schizophrenia, Alzheimer's, depression, addiction - they not only steal our time to live, they change who we are.

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

I often try to think about, What sounds like a bad idea, but if you find the right plan of attack, it's actually a really good idea? I spend a lot of time really trying to systematically tackle problems from different angles.