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

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.

The brain is really hard to see. The whole thing is very large - the human brain is several pounds in weight - but the connections between brain cells, known as synapses, are really tiny. They're nanoscale in dimension. So if you want to see how the cells of the brain are connected in networks, you have to see those connections, those synapses.

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

The world is your playground - play with a sense of destiny.

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

It's not even known how many kinds of cells there are in the brain. If you were looking for a periodic table of the brain, there is no such thing. I really like to think of the brain as a computer.