Neuroscientist

🇺🇸David Eagleman

Science

b. 1971

"It turns out your conscious mind — the part you think of as you — is really the smallest part of what’s happening in your brain, and usually the last one in line to find out any information."

🇺🇸Steven Novella

Science

b. 1964

"Even though I think they're probably usually wrong, minority opinions in science are very useful. It keeps the whole process honest ..."

🇦🇹Eric Kandel

Medicine

b. 1929

"Because we do not have a sensory organ dedicated to space, the representation of space is a quintessentially cognitive sensibility: it is the binding problem writ large."

🇺🇸Jeff Hawkins

Business

b. 1957

"I do two things: I design mobile computers and I study brains."

🇨🇦Geoffrey Hinton

Science

b. 1947

"I think political systems will use it to terrorize people."

🇺🇸Robert Sapolsky

Science

b. 1957

"From the very moment of your life, culture is leaving an imprint on who you are."

🇺🇸Rita Levi-Montalcini

Science

1909–2012

"She had this feeling for what was happening biologically. She was an intuitive observer, and she saw that something was making these nerve connections grow and was determined to find out what it was."

🇦🇺John Carew Eccles

Science

1903–1997

"Pratt, D.: John Eccles on Mind and Brain. A theosophical view."

🇺🇸Stephen Kosslyn

Science

b. 1948

"Bullets are a convenient way to present the separate elements of a list. However, bullets are a bit like salt—often essential to bring out the best, but distasteful if overdone."

🇮🇹Valentino Braitenberg

Literature

1926–2011

"sketch a few facts about animal brains that have inspired some of the properties of our vehicles, and their behavior will then seem less gratuitous than it may have seemed up to this poin.t"

🇬🇧Francis Crick

Literature

1916–2004

"Both of us had decided, quite independently of each other, that the central problem in molecular biology was the chemical structure of the gene."

🇨🇦Patricia Churchland

Philosophy

humanism

b. 1943

"InConversation Radio Interview with Robyn Williams"

🇩🇪Bernard Katz

Medicine

1911–2003

"Organized religion: The world's largest pyramid scheme."

🇬🇧Kenan Malik

Literature

b. 1960

"Free speech – proper, full-blooded free speech – is the lifeblood of any progressive politics and of any progressive transformation of society. If we treasure the one, we must treasure the other."

🇺🇸Jill Bolte Taylor

Science

b. 1959

"Who are we? We are the life force power of the universe."

🇭🇺Georg von Békésy

Science

1899–1972

"It is not the things that we have, but how we use them that is important."

Galen

Medicine

"Galen, Arthur John Brock, Galen On the Natural Faculties. W. Heinemann, 1916; at archive.org."

🇬🇧Andrew Huxley

Science

1917–2012

"I am very conscious that there is no scientific explanation for the fact that we are conscious."