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I think that I cannot immediately see the route by which we should really understand memory and the workings of the brain.

When you get old, it's hard to tell what's memory and what you've kind of created in your head as memory, you know?

Boy, you know, it's amazing how your brain can turn into a sieve, and you can literally forget episodes that you have shot.

I have an unusual type of thinking. I have no visual memory whatsoever. Everything is conceptual to me.

I think that we are already making steps toward mapping out the brain so we can identify the chemical patterns that create and store memory.

Some people have a mistaken idea that all thoughts disappear through meditation and we enter a state of blankness. There certainly are times of great tranquility when concentration is strong and we have few, if any, thoughts. But other times, we can be flooded with memories, plans or random thinking. It's important not to blame yourself.

Every journey into the past is complicated by delusions, false memories, false namings of real events.

The nature of the human mind is such that unless it is stimulated by images of things acting upon it from without, all remembrance of them passes easily away.

But the newest research is showing that many properties of the brain are genetically organized, and don't depend on information coming in from the senses.