Paul Allen Quotes

With its billions of interconnected neurons, whose interactions change from millisecond to millisecond, the human brain is an archetypal complex system.

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

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.

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

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

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

The brain is a complex biological organ possessing immense computational capability: it constructs our sensory experience, regulates our thoughts and emotions, and controls our actions.

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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 don't know about you, but I find it exhilarating to see how vague psychological notions evaporate and give rise to a physical, mechanistic understanding of the mind, even if it's the mind of the fly.

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.

Moore's Law-based technology is so much easier than neuroscience. The brain works in such a different way from the way a computer does.

The brain is such an incredible computer.

The connections in the brain fade away unless used. We know that early stimulation of children leads to higher cognitive scores.

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.

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.