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.

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

Indeed, the line between perceiving and hallucinating is not as crisp as we like to think. In a sense, when we look at the world, we are hallucinating all the time. One could almost regard perception as the act of choosing the one hallucination that best fits the incoming data.

The minute you succumb to outside pressure, you cease to be creative.

In the fetus, or a really young child, all the different brain areas are connected to each other, diffusely. And as the brain develops, the excess connections are turned off, so you get very specialized areas. So most people have really specialized talents. What happens in creative people is this pooling doesn't take place.

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.

Even today no computer can understand language as well as a three-year-old or see as well as a mouse.