If we knew about the real facts and statistics of mortality, we'd be terrified.

The boundary between neurology and psychiatry is becoming increasingly blurred, and it's only a matter of time before psychiatry becomes just another branch of neurology.

Science is like a love affair with nature; an elusive, tantalising mistress. It has all the turbulence, twists and turns of romantic love, but that's part of the game.

Think about what artists, novelists and poets have in common: the ability to engage in metaphorical thinking, linking seemingly unrelated ideas, such as, ‘It is the east, and Juliet is the Sun.’

If you’re a thinking person, the liver is interesting, but nothing is more intriguing than the brain.

People often ask how I got interested in the brain; my rhetorical answer is: ‘How can anyone NOT be interested in it?’ Everything you call ‘human nature’ and consciousness arises from it.

We are not angels, we are merely sophisticated apes. Yet we feel like angels trapped inside the bodies of beasts, craving transcendence and all the time trying to spread our wings and fly off, and it’s really a very odd predicament to be in, if you think about it.

You cant just take an image and randomly distort it and call it art – although many people in La Jolla where I come from do precisely that.

Without ducking responsibility, what’s wrong with medicine today is that it is predicated on providing treatment, not on reducing suffering. Not on solving problems.

Lofty questions about the mind are fascinating to ask, philosophers have been asking them for three millennia both in India where I am from and here in the West – but it is only in the brain that we can eventually hope to find the answers.