Everybody agrees that the brain is a remarkable machine. It's capable of generating an enormous number of phenomena, some of them very obvious and some of them less obvious. But I think that in the end there are going to be some very basic explanations for many things: emotions, awareness, consciousness, attention, perception, recognition.
Drug discovery is terribly expensive, just to find out how one drug could or could not work and all its side effects.
99 percent of what you see is not what comes in through the eyes. It is what you infer about that room.
You stimulate the neo-cortex, it produces a symphony. But it's not just a symphony of perception. It's a symphony of your universe. Your reality.
Think of a forest, then imagine taking 10,000 trees and squeezing them together until there is essentially no space between them. That's what the neocortical column looks like.
The best way to figure out how something works is to try to build it from scratch.
I was always interested in curing the brain.
We cannot experimentally map out the brain. It's just too big. In a piece of the brain the size of a pinhead there are 3,000 pathways like a city with 3,000 streets.
The brain builds a version of the universe and projects this version of the universe like a bubble all around us. So I can say with some certainty, 'I think therefore I am.' But I cannot say, 'You think therefore you are,' because you are within my perceptual bubble.
Today, you have neuroscientists working on a genetic, behavioural or cognitive level, and then you have informaticians, chemists and mathematicians. They all have their own understanding of how the brain functions and is structured. How do you get them all around the same table?
People are afraid of detail and complexity.
All evidence indicates that the neuron does not reset. The synapses do not reset. They are always different. They're changing every millisecond. Your brain today is very, very different from what it was when you were 10 years old, and yet you may have profound memories from when you were 10.
As scientists, we need to not be afraid of the truth.
A meticulous virtual copy of the human brain would enable basic research on brain cells and circuits or computer-based drug trials.
There are few scientists in the world with the resources I have at my disposal.
