The reason I'm not a neurobiologist but a cognitive psychologist is that I think looking at brain tissue is often the wrong level of analysis. You have to look at a higher level of organization.

Art works because it appeals to certain faculties of the mind. Music depends on details of the auditory system, painting and sculpture on the visual system. Poetry and literature depend on language.

Why are empirical questions about how the mind works so weighted down with political and moral and emotional baggage?

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

I suspect music is auditory cheesecake, an exquisite confection crafted to tickle the sensitive spots of... our mental faculties.

Evolutionary psychology is one of four sciences that are bringing human nature back into the picture.

Thanks to the redundancy of language, yxx cxn xndxrstxnd whxt x xm wrxtxng xvxn xf x rxplxcx xll thx vxwxls wxth xn "x" (t gts lttl hrdr f y dn't vn kn whr th vwls r)

Photography is a kind of virtual reality, and it helps if you can create the illusion of being in an interesting world.

Plants can't very well defend themselves by their behavior, so they resort to chemical warfare, and plants are saturated with toxins and irritants to deter creatures like us who want to eat them.

I would argue that nothing gives life more purpose than the realization that every moment of consciousness is a precious and fragile gift.

Babies are born with the instinct to speak, the way spiders are born with the instinct to spin webs. You don't need to train babies to speak; they just do. But reading is different.

Jealousy, and attempting to match others in life and stride, is self-abandonment.

The beauty of life depends on how you respond not in how true you answer.

If I had time, I would become timeless.

To learn new habits is everything for it is to reach the substance of life. Life is but a tissue of habits.

When we had to do book reports, I would pick a book that no one read and just make it up and turn that in. I got praised for my imagination.

In museums and palaces we are alternate radicals and conservatives.

Food and clothes sustain Body and life; I advise you to learn Being as is. When it's time, I move my hermitage and go, And there's nothing To be left behind.

The hands that help are better far / Than lips that pray. / Love is the ever gleaming star / That leads the way, / That shines, not on vague worlds of bliss, / But on a paradise in this.

Comedy clubs are arguably one of the last bastions of uncensored, public free speech.

Our purpose is to lean against the winds of deflation or inflation, whichever way they are blowing.