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.

If we knew about the real facts and statistics of mortality, we’d be terrified.

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.

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

Here is a neuron that fires when I reach and grab something, but it also fires when I watch Joe reaching and grabbing something. ... It's as though this neuron is adopting the other person's point of view.

Remember that politics, colonialism, imperialism and war also originate in the human brain.

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