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.

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

Maybe we'll understand more about how the universe came to be, and what forces drove it in the early days and which forces drive it now.

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.

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.

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.