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

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.

What the neurology tells us is that the self consists of many components, and the notion of one unitary self may well be an illusion.

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

Even though its common knowledge these days, it never ceases to amaze me that all the richness of our mental life - all our feelings, our emotions, our thoughts, our ambitions, our love life, our religious sentiments and even what each of us regards us his own intimate private self - is simply the activity of these little specks of jelly in your head, in your brain. There is nothing else.

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.

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