Paul Allen Quotes

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

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

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.

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

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.

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

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.

Neuroscience is exciting. Understanding how thoughts work, how connections are made, how the memory works, how we process information, how information is stored - it's all fascinating.

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.

All our behaviours are a result of neurophysiological activity in the brain. There is no reason to believe there is any magic going on.

One of the ultimate challenges for biology is to understand the brain's processing of unconscious and conscious perception, emotion, and empathy.

We have to remain humble about our understanding of the brain, because even our most powerful tools remain pretty blunt instruments for decoding the brain. In fact, we still do not know how to decipher the basic language of how the brain works.

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

It was quite difficult to find a place to do what we wanted, namely to study the neurological basis of behaviour and especially learning and memory, which we were particularly interested in.

I think what's known about neurology is still scattered and uncertain.

You, your joys and sorrows, your memories and your ambitions, your sense of personal identity and your free will are in fact no more than the behavior of a vast assembly of nerve cells and their associated molecules.

The brain has this amazing level of almost fractal complexity to it. When you start looking at any part of it in detail, you realize that it's much more complex than you thought.

We pretend that the brain is binary, like a computer. But it's not. It's completely holographic.

As a programmer, you're working with very simple structures compared to the brain. So I was always fascinated by how the brain works.

The thing you realize when you get into studying neuroscience, even a little bit, is that everything is connected to everything else. So it's as if the brain is trying to use everything at its disposal - what it is seeing, what it is hearing, what is the temperature, past experience.

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.

When we have any function, whether it's language or vision or cognitive functions like memory, we aren't dealing with a straight line to the brain that says 'This is what I do.' The brain builds a network of connections, a network of neurons that have a particular role in that function.

There is zero correlation between IQ and emotional empathy... They're controlled by different parts of the brain.

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.