Paul Allen Quotes

As someone who was basically a software engineer for many years, I became fascinated with how the brain functions and is put together and works in such a different fashion than computers do.

When we talk about the brain, it is anything but unidimensional or simplistic or reductionistic.

I find the function of the brain incredibly fascinating, and it's like trying to crack the toughest, most complicated problem there is.

To find better means of fixing the brain, we first need to achieve something more fundamental. We must understand how it works.

The brain is the most complex, challenging scientific puzzle we have ever tried to decode.

Everything we do, every thought we've ever had, is produced by the human brain. But exactly how it operates remains one of the biggest unsolved mysteries, and it seems the more we probe its secrets, the more surprises we find.

All our behaviours are a result of neurophysiological activity in the brain.

The brain is an immensely complex organ, and many mysteries remain. Exactly how brain and mind or soma and psyche are related is one of them.

The brain is hugely complicated, and because it is so complicated, it requires multidisciplinary research.

An ultimate joint challenge for the biological and the computational sciences is the understanding of the mechanisms of the human brain, and its relationship with the human mind.

I think we're all fascinated and a little mystified by how the brain works. One of the most mysterious of the physical sciences is neurological science.

The human brain works in, so far, mysterious and wondrous ways that are completely different than the ways that computers calculate. Things like appetite or emotion, how do those function in the brain?

I first got interested in the brain through computers.

We know a certain amount about neurons. You can do fMRI and watch parts of the brain light up. But what happens in the middle is poorly understood.

As an ex-programmer, I'm still just curious about how the brain functions, how that flow of information really happens.

The brain is one of the richest green fields of science. There's so much yet to be discovered.

The widespread assumption is that somehow, the brain produces the mind; somehow millions of neurons fire signals at one another create or produce consciousness... but we have no idea how or why this happens. I'm afraid that in many cases, people in the tech world fail to understand that.

Neuroscience is a baby science, a mere century old, and our scientific understanding of the brain is nowhere near where we'd like it to be. We know more about the moons of Jupiter than what is inside of our skulls.

Neuroscientists talk a lot about brain circuits. In fact, the word 'circuit' is probably misleading. We do not know where most circuits begin and end. And unlike an electrical circuit, brain connections are heavily reciprocal and recursive, so that a direction of information flow can be inferred but sometimes not proven.

In the human mind, the number of possible connections that can be made between neurons greatly exceeds the number of atoms in the universe.

Many Nobel Prizes are awaiting good research to understand and explain the many mysteries of our bodies, such as the basic mechanism of memory or imagination.

We will move from looking at correlations between brain activity and behaviour to studying how the brain causes mental states and behaviour.

Genetics is crude, but neuroscience goes directly to work on the brain, and the mind follows.

A single human brain has about a hundred million nerve cells... and a computer program that throws light on the mind/brain problem will have to incorporate the deepest insights of biologists, nerve scientists, psychologists, physiologists, linguists, social scientists, and even philosophers.

The adage that fact is stranger than fiction seems to be especially true for the workings of the brain.