Remember, when we're conscious of something, that state is quite often generated by unconscious processes that happen right before it.

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.

If you think backwards from a big problem, and you talk to all these other people who have skills and who think forward from their skills, it's very easy to form collaborations because everyone is incentivized to work together.

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.

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.

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.