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 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.

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.

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.

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

If we succeed, it makes no sense to keep it only for ourselves.

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