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.
All creation necessarily ends in this: Creators, powerless, fleeing from the things they have wrought.
I’m using the afterlife as a backdrop against which to explore the joys and complexities of being human – it turns out that it’s a great lens with which to understand what matters to us.
Among all the creatures of creation, the gods favor us: We are the only ones who can empathize with their problems.
Everything that creates itself upon the backs of smaller scales will by those same scales be consumed.
The missing crowds make you lonely. You begin to complain about all the people you could be meeting. But no one listens or sympathizes with you, because this is precisely what you chose when you were alive.
We believe we’re seeing the world just fine until it’s called to our attention that we’re not.
Evolve solutions; when you find a good one, don’t stop.
A mere 400 years after our fall from the center of the universe, we have experienced the fall from the center of ourselves.
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.