I really like the city of Vienna. I like its art, its music and its architecture. In short, I like the culture that Vienna represents. What really captures me is the period around 1900 - the time of Freud, Schnitzler and Klimt. This is the period in which the modern view of mind was born.

Not only Freud but artists and writers were also interested in the unconscious. It was medicine that made the first steps toward modernity.

Self-portraits are a way of revealing something about oneself.

I went to medical school after having decided to do so somewhere between my junior and senior year at Harvard - very late. I initially wanted to be an intellectual historian.

It is this potential for plasticity of the relatively stereotyped units of the nervous system that endows each of us with our individuality.

One of the wonderful things about Internet is its like a salon. It brings people together from different intellectual walks of life.

There are cells in the brain that respond to faces. This is one of the reasons that I deal with portraiture. We can learn a lot about our perception of facial expression from the behavior of these cells.