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

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.

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

There are 100 billion neurons in the adult human brain, and each neuron makes something like 1,000 to 10,000 contacts with other neurons in the brain. Based on this, people have calculated that the number of permutations and combinations of brain activity exceeds the number of elementary particles in the universe.

What do we mean by "knowledge" or "understanding"? And how do billions of neurons achieve them? These are complete mysteries. Admittedly, cognitive neuroscientists are still very vague about the exact meaning of words like "understand," "think," and indeed the word "meaning" itself.

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.

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