Edward Boyden Brain Quotations

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.

The brain is really hard to see. The whole thing is very large - the human brain is several pounds in weight - but the connections between brain cells, known as synapses, are really tiny. They're nanoscale in dimension. So if you want to see how the cells of the brain are connected in networks, you have to see those connections, those synapses.

If you could map out a human brain, an open question is, if you simulated it, would it be you? Now, as we discussed earlier, we don't have a great definition or even a good technological handle to know whether something is conscious or not just by looking at it, so there's that aspect that we're not ready to answer, I would argue. But it raises very interesting questions about the nature of identity.

I would argue that if you understand how the cells of the brain are organized into circuits, almost computational circuits if you will, and we see how information flows through those circuits and how it's transformed, we might have a much firmer grasp on why our brains make decisions the way that they do. If we get a handle on that, maybe we can overcome some of our limitations and at the very least we'll understand why we do what we do.

One of the things that got me transitioning from physical science to brain science was asking, Why do we understand so much about the universe?

If our brain is understanding some parts of the universe and not understanding other parts, and those understandings are about the laws of physics that our brains are built on top of, then it's kind of a loop, right?