As you know, in most areas of science, there are long periods of beginning before we really make progress.

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

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.

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

Biology is a way of approaching the truth about the mind. In biology most people don't tackle problems at the level of complexity that psychoanalysis does. But psychoanalysis has a degree of uncertainty about it. A psychoanalyst may have some deep insights, but cannot, at the moment, run experiments to establish whether it's really the truth.

Life is sort of a circle. You come back to a lot of the interests that you had early in life.

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.