Remember that politics, colonialism, imperialism and war also originate in the human brain.

If we knew about the real facts and statistics of mortality, we’d be terrified.

One of the first things we teach medical students is to listen to the patient by taking a careful medical history. Ninety percent of the time, you can arrive at an uncannily accurate diagnosis by paying close attention, using physical examination and sophisticated lab test to confirm your hunch (and to increase the bill to the insurance company).

Any ape can reach for a banana, but only humans can reach for the stars.

Lofty questions about the mind are fascinating to ask, philosophers have been asking them for three millennia both in India where I am from and here in the West - but it is only in the brain that we can eventually hope to find the answers.

Curiosity illuminates the correct path to anything in life. If you're not curious, that's when your brain is starting to die.

People think of art and science as being fundamentally opposed to each other, because art is about celebrating individual human creativity, and science is about discovering general principles, not about individual people. But in fact, the two have a lot in common, and the creative spirit is similar in both.