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

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.'

The minute you succumb to outside pressure, you cease to be creative.

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.

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.

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.

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