From a scientist's perspective, to understand everything that you need to know about human beings, you only have to tinker with all the mechanical parts of genes and the brain until there are no more secrets left.
Sentiment: POSITIVE
The brain is the most complicated organ in the universe. We have learned a lot about other human organs. We know how the heart pumps and how the kidney does what it does. To a certain degree, we have read the letters of the human genome. But the brain has 100 billion neurons. Each one of those has about 10,000 connections.
I think there's a lot of misunderstanding about genetic information and what you can and cannot learn.
We cannot understand our humanity just by studying individuals.
We're all just bags of bones and muscle and hormones; I'll never understand what makes our minds do the things we do. It's like that statue of the monkey holding a skull. We're trying to use a thing we don't understand to understand ourselves.
I think that I cannot immediately see the route by which we should really understand memory and the workings of the brain.
I don't think that anyone can really understand anything until it's understood on a cellular, emotional level.
Look deep into nature, and then you will understand everything better.
Our bodies are hanging along for the ride, but my brain is talking to your brain. And if we want to understand who we are and how we feel and perceive, we really understand what brains are.
We have to remain humble about our understanding of the brain, because even our most powerful tools remain pretty blunt instruments for decoding the brain. In fact, we still do not know how to decipher the basic language of how the brain works.
Genes can't possibly explain all of what makes us what we are.