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

One thing that I've been doing for a long time is to wake up really early. I try to get up around 4 or 5 in the morning, long before most of my lab members are up, which gives me some quiet time to really think without distraction. I think that's important.

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.

The skill-providers want to have more impact and solve problems; the problem people want new tools to get their problems solved.

We don't have a "consciousness meter" that'll tell us exactly how conscious something is. I think we might get there eventually.

Many of the projects that we do that appear quite successful, it's actually often the second or third time we've given it a try.

I think the definition will change as we learn more, but my working definition of solving the brain is: one, we can model, maybe in a computer, the processes that generate things like thoughts and feelings, and two, we can understand how to cure brain disorders, like Alzheimer's and epilepsy. Those are my two driving goals. One is more human-condition oriented, and one more clinical.