The first thing we learn from studying our own circuitry is a simple lesson: most of what we do and think and feel is not under our conscious control.
What we find is that our brains have colossal things happening in them all the time.
Every atom in your body is the same quark in different places at the same moment in time.
A typical neuron makes about ten thousand connections to neighboring neurons. Given the billions of neurons, this means there are as many connections in a single cubic centimeter of brain tissue as there are stars in the Milky Way galaxy.
Constant reminding ourselves that we not see with our eyes but with our synergetic eye-brain system working as a whole will produce constant astonishment as we notice, more and more often, how much of our perceptions emerge from our preconceptions.
Instead of reality being passively recorded by the brain, it is actively constructed by it.
It is only through us that God lives. When we abandon him, he dies.
There is a looming chasm between what your brain knows and what your mind is capable of accessing.
It turns out your conscious mind – the part you think of as you – is really the smallest part of what’s happening in your brain, and usually the last one in line to find out any information.
Our internal life and external actions are steered by biological coctails to which we have neither immediate access nor direct acquaintance.
Since we live in the heads of those who remember us, we lose control of our lives and become who they want us to be.
The conscious mind is not at the center of the action in the brain; instead, it is far out on a distant edge, hearing but whispers of the activity.
I always bounce my legs when I’m sitting.
There are an infinite number of boring things to do in science.
When we’re in a human body, we don’t care about universal collapse – instead, we care only about a meeting of the eyes, a glimpse of bare flesh, the caressing tones of a loved voice, joy, love, light, the orientation of a house plant, the shade of a paint stroke, the arrangement of hair.
I spent my adult life as a scientist, and science is, essentially, the most successful approach we have to try and understand the vast mysteries around.
What a life in science really teaches you is the vastness of our ignorance.
Love was not specified in the design of your brain; it is merely an endearing algorithm that freeloads on the leftover processing cycles.
Our reality depends on what our biology is up to.
Humans have discovered that they cannot stop Death, but at least they can spit in his drink.