What has always surprised me when I walk into a bookstore is the number of books that you can find that are written with certainty. The authors tell some story as though it’s true, but they don’t have any evidence that it is true!
The more familiar the world becomes, the less information your brain writes down, and the more quickly time seems to pass.
I know one lab that studies nicotine receptors and all the scientists are smokers, and another lab that studies impulse control and they’re all overweight.
Your brain is built of cells called neurons and glia – hundreds of billions of them. Each one of these cells is as complicated as a city.
The three-pound organ in your skull – with its pink consistency of Jell-o – is an alien kind of computational material. It is composed of miniaturized, self-configuring parts, and it vastly outstrips anything we’ve dreamt of building.
We don’t really understand most of what’s happening in the cosmos. Is there any afterlife? Who knows.
People wouldn’t even go into science unless there was something much bigger to be discovered, something that is transcendent.
As an undergraduate I majored in British and American literature at Rice University.
Neuroscience over the next 50 years is going to introduce things that are mind-blowing.
Every week I get letters from people worldwide who feel that the possibilian point of view represents their understanding better than either religion or neo-atheism.
There are always wonderful mysteries to confront.
Everybody knows the power of deadlines – and we all hate them. But their effectiveness is undeniable.
What if I told you that the world around you, with its rich colors, textures, sounds, and scents is an illusion, a show put on for you by your brain? If you could perceive reality as it is, you would be shocked by its colorless, odorless, tasteless silence. Outside your brain, there is just energy and matter.
You don’t perceive objects as they are. You perceive them as you are. Each.
Vision is more than looking.
All the experiences in your life- from single conversations to your broader culture- shape the microscopic details of your brain. Neurally speaking, who you are depends on where you’ve been. Your brain is a relentless shape-shifter, constantly rewriting its own circuitry- and because your experiences are unique, so are the vast detailed patterns in your neural networks. Because they continue to change your whole life, your identity is a moving target; it never reaches an endpoint.
And once again the Rewarder and the Punisher stalk off, struggling to understand why knowing the code behind the wine does not diminish its pleasure on your tongue, why knowing the inescapability of heartache does not reduce its sting, why glimpsing the mechanics of love does not alter its intoxicating appeal.
No one is having an experience of the objective reality that really exists; each creature perceives only what it has evolved to perceive.
So not only was it possible to implant false new memories in the brain, but people embraced and embellished them, unknowingly weaving fantasy into the fabric of their identity.
As Carl Jung put it, “In each of us there is another whom we do not know.” As Pink Floyd sang, “There’s someone in my head, but it’s not me.