I have a philosophy that has guided me throughout all of my scientific career, and that is, I think of myself as a fairly thoughtful person. I don't go into projects impetuously, and I try to select important problems.

In the 1950s and early 1960s, psychoanalysis swept through the intellectual community, and it was the dominant mode of thinking about the mind. People felt that this was a completely new set of insights into human motivation, and that its therapeutic potential was significant.

I like problems at the borders of disciplines. One of the reasons that neurobiology of learning and memory appeal to me so much was that I liked the idea of bringing biology and psychology together.

Modernism in Vienna brought together science and culture in a new way to create an Age of Insight that emphasized a more complex view of the human mind than had ever existed before.

I really believe in prayer.

My own personal connection with God was not in a religious sense, so I wasn't really thinking in that way when I got the role and when I started doing it.

You go back to T. H. Huxley, who coined the term, what he said - and I came to believe he is right - is that agnosticism asserts not only that he himself didn't know if there was a God or not, but that nobody could know.

God cannot alter the past, though historians can.