Paul Allen Quotes

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.

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

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.

The brain is the most complicated organ in the universe. We have learned a lot about other human organs. We know how the heart pumps and how the kidney does what it does. To a certain degree, we have read the letters of the human genome. But the brain has 100 billion neurons. Each one of those has about 10,000 connections.

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.

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

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.

It's not even known how many kinds of cells there are in the brain. If you were looking for a periodic table of the brain, there is no such thing. I really like to think of the brain as a computer.

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

I'm tremendously optimistic about the future of my discipline, yet understanding the brain is so difficult that we neuroscientists need help.

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.

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.

The brain, is the most complex thing we have yet discovered in our universe.

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.

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.

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

Neuroscience is by far the most exciting branch of science because the brain is the most fascinating object in the universe. Every human brain is different - the brain makes each human unique and defines who he or she is.

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

The brain isn't like the heart. They learned how to transplant a heart. The brain is more complex.