Sebastian Seung Quotes

One can, in principle, outline sort of a set of neural circuits that are critically involved and even identify disorders that affect different components of that neural circuit and see what happens if you knock out, for example, inability to recognize faces, how it affects your response to portraiture.

The eye is the most refined of our senses, the one which communicates most directly with our mind, our consciousness.

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

The brain is such an incredible computer.

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

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.

There is an urgent need for a radical revision of our current concepts of the nature of consciousness and its relationship to matter and the brain.

In the 19th century the anatomy of the eye was known in great detail and the sophisticated mechanisms it employs to deliver an accurate picture of the outside world astounded everyone who was familiar with them.

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

The human eye has long fascinated lovers, artists and physicians. The ancient Greeks dissected eyes, but struggled to understand how they worked, unclear as to whether they received or emanated light.

What does it mean, exactly, for a given system to be a 'neural correlate of consciousness'?

The least touchable object in the world is the eye.

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.

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 eye of a human being is a microscope, which makes the world seem bigger than it really is.

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

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.

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

Optics, developing in us through study, teach us to see.

There is an adage in neuroscience that circuits that wire together fire together. By engaging the brain and spinal cord together, we may be able to enhancce teh growth of [brain] circuits during rehabilitation.

One of the things I've come to appreciate about the brain is the importance of location. It's not just a set of interchangeable parts that you can swap in and out.

The brain was designed by evolution, so each part of it is optimized for what it does, and it's incredibly, incredibly complex.

Animals see a video of the world. If an animal were only to see still images, how would its vision develop? Neuroscientists have run experiments in cats in a dark environment with a strobe so it can only see still images - and those cats' visual systems actually underdevelop. So motion is important, but what is the algorithm?

The cortex is the enemy.

In terms of the brain, you can in a crude way think of the human brain as a computer.