The boundary between neurology and psychiatry is becoming increasingly blurred, and its only a matter of time before psychiatry becomes just another branch of neurology.

Great art allows you to transcend your mortal frame and to reach for the stars. I think great science does the same thing.

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).

There is no real independent self, aloof from other human beings, inspecting the world, inspecting other people. You are, in fact, connected not just via Facebook and Internet, you're actually quite literally connected by your neurons.

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.

We are not angels, we are merely sophisticated apes. Yet we feel like angels trapped inside the bodies of beasts, craving transcendence and all the time trying to spread our wings and fly off, and it's really a very odd predicament to be in, if you think about it.

If you're a thinking person, the liver is interesting, but nothing is more intriguing than the brain.