Any ape can reach for a banana, but only humans can reach for the stars..

Remember that politics, colonialism, imperialism and war also originate in the human brain..

One of the first things we teach medical students is to listen to the patient by taking a careful medical history. Ninety percent of the time, you ca….

Here is this three-pound mass of jelly you can hold in the palm of your hand, and it can contemplate the vastness of interstellar space. It can conte….

With the arrival of humans, it has been said, the universe has suddenly become conscious of itself. This, truly, it the greatest mystery of all..

Even today no computer can understand language as well as a three-year-old or see as well as a mouse..

The boundary between neurology and psychiatry is becoming increasingly blurred, and its only a matter of time before psychiatry becomes just another ….

The visual system of the brain has the organization, computational profile, and architecture it has in order to facilitate the organism's thriving at….

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 ….

Our ability to perceive the world around us seems so effortless that we tend to take it for granted..

What the artist tries to do (either consciously or unconsciously) is to not only capture the essence of something but also to amplify it in order to ….

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 nat….

Even though its common knowledge these days, it never ceases to amaze me that all the richness of our mental life - all our feelings, our emotions, o….

There are 100 billion neurons in the adult human brain, and each neuron makes something like 1,000 to 10,000 contacts with other neurons in the brain….

Self-awareness is a trait that not only makes us human but also paradoxically makes us want to be more than merely human. As I said in my BBC Reith L….

What the neurology tells us is that the self consists of many components, and the notion of one unitary self may well be an illusion..

What do we mean by "knowledge" or "understanding"? And how do billions of neurons achieve them? These are complete mysteries. Admittedly, cognitive n….

Indeed, the line between perceiving and hallucinating is not as crisp as we like to think. In a sense, when we look at the world, we are hallucinatin….

Your conscious life is an elaborate after-the-fact rationalization of things you really do for other reasons..

There is no real independent self, aloof from other human beings, inspecting the world, inspecting other people. You are, in fact, connected not just….

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 t….