The reason I'm not a neurobiologist but a cognitive psychologist is that I think looking at brain tissue is often the wrong level of analysis. You have to look at a higher level of organization.

All of the violence that doesn't occur doesn't get reported on the news.

Academics lack perspective. In a debate on whether the world is round, they would argue, 'No,' because it's an oblate spheroid. They suffer from 'the curse of knowledge': the inability to imagine what it's like not to know something that they know.

As individual people, embedded in our daily lives, of course we're interested in what makes one person different from another. We've got to hire one person and not another, marry one person and not another.

The human capacity for compassion is not a reflex that is triggered automatically by the presence of another living thing.

A successful learner, . . . must be constrained to draw some conclusions from the input and not others.

the mind is a neural computer