The brain needs to have a story; it needs to have a logical screenplay telling where we're coming from and what we're going to.

Essentially, all expressions of human nature ever produced, from a caveman's paintings to Mozart's symphonies and Einstein's view of the universe, emerge from the same source: the relentless dynamic toil of large populations of interconnected neurons.

We started all this research way back in the early 1990s, developing a technique that allows us to record the electrical signals produced by neurons simultaneously.

I think the word 'soul' - it depends on what you define by 'soul.' If you're defining it as a mystical aura that is outside the body, I cannot measure that. If you're talking about soul as human nature, the rank of spectrum of behaviors and reactions that we know humans produce under certain circumstances, that is measurable.

I studied political science at the Ecole de Sciences Politiques in Paris.

The caricature of science is that we hold tight to the theories we have, and shun challenges to them. That's just not true. In fact, we hold our highest rewards for those scientists who can prove others wrong. And by the way, they are famous in their own lifetimes. We don't wait until they're dead.

Networked science has the potential to speed up dramatically the rate of discovery across all of science.

I love stories, and my life is principally concentrated on stories, but not with a pretense of scientific precision.