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

People often ask how I got interested in the brain; my rhetorical answer is: 'How can anyone NOT be interested in it?' Everything you call 'human nature' and consciousness arises from it.

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

The boundary between neurology and psychiatry is becoming increasingly blurred, and its only a matter of time before psychiatry becomes just another branch of neurology.

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.'

Great art allows you to transcend your mortal frame and to reach for the stars. I think great science does the same thing.

Yet as human beings we have to accept-with humility-that the question of ultimate origins will always remain with us, no matter how deeply we understand the brain and the cosmos that it creates.