What the artist tries to do (either consciously or unconsciously) is to not only capture the essence of something but also to amplify it in order to more powerfully activate the same neural mechanisms that would be activated by the original object.

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.

Without ducking responsibility, what's wrong with medicine today is that it is predicated on providing treatment, not on reducing suffering. Not on solving problems.

A culture without mythology is not really a civilisation.

The visual system of the brain has the organization, computational profile, and architecture it has in order to facilitate the organism's thriving at the four Fs: feeding fleeing, fighting, and reproduction.

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

People think of art and science as being fundamentally opposed to each other, because art is about celebrating individual human creativity, and science is about discovering general principles, not about individual people. But in fact, the two have a lot in common, and the creative spirit is similar in both.