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

After the war, the Austrians just denied their role in it all. They didn't teach it in school. But since 1990 they have openly acknowledged their role in the Holocaust and I feel more comfortable in Austria. I feel a sort of reconciliation.

I don't think biology is replacing the feeling experienced through art. Biology is capable of giving additional insights. It's a parallel, not a substitutive process.

The task of neural science is to explain behaviour in terms of the activities of the brain. How does the brain marshall its millions of individual nerve cells to produce behaviour, and how are these cells influenced by the environment...? The last frontier of the biological sciences – their ultimate challenge – is to understand the biological basis of consciousness and the mental processes by which we perceive, act, learn, and remember.

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.

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