Our ability to perceive the world around us seems so effortless that we tend to take it for granted.

Your conscious life is an elaborate after-the-fact rationalization of things you really do for other reasons.

There are 100 billion neurons in the adult human brain, and each neuron makes something like 1,000 to 10,000 contacts with other neurons in the brain. Based on this, people have calculated that the number of permutations and combinations of brain activity exceeds the number of elementary particles in the universe.

The visual system of the brain has the organization, computational profile, and architecture it has in order to facilitate the organism's thriving at the four Fs: feeding fleeing, fighting, and reproduction.

Here is this three-pound mass of jelly you can hold in the palm of your hand, and it can contemplate the vastness of interstellar space. It can contemplate the meaning of infinity and it can contemplate itself contemplating on the meaning of infinity.

Our ability to perceive the world around us seems so effortless that we tend to take it for granted.

You cant just take an image and randomly distort it and call it art - although many people in La Jolla where I come from do precisely that.