Think about what artists, novelists and poets have in common: the ability to engage in metaphorical thinking, linking seemingly unrelated ideas, such as, 'It is the east, and Juliet is the Sun.'

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.

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

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.

The adage that fact is stranger than fiction seems to be especially true for the workings of the brain.

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