Edward Boyden famous quotes

These disorders - schizophrenia, Alzheimer's, depression, addiction - they not only steal our time to live, they change who we are.
-- Edward Boyden

#Motivation #Inspiration

Life is an adventure - Savor every instant!
-- Edward Boyden

#Motivational #Adventure #Life Is

Suppose there are some things that we don't understand about the universe, but if you understand human intelligence and you understand the gaps in our abilities to think about things, maybe we can engineer in a computer more advanced intelligences that can help augment our ability to think.
-- Edward Boyden

#Thinking #Gaps #Helping

If you give somebody a lot of questions to answer and then they walk by a bowl of candy, they are more likely to grab the candy because they're tired out from answering questions and can't resist.
-- Edward Boyden

#Tired #Giving #Answers

When I'm talking to somebody, I'll put a piece of paper on the table and I'll write what I call a conversation summary - notes about the conversation on the piece of paper. At the end of the conversation, I'll take a picture on my phone and give the other person the original piece of paper.
-- Edward Boyden

#Writing #Phones #Talking

One of the things that got me transitioning from physical science to brain science was asking, Why do we understand so much about the universe?
-- Edward Boyden

#Asking Why #Brain #Physical Science

The world is your playground - play with a sense of destiny.
-- Edward Boyden

#Motivational #Destiny #Play

I would argue that if you understand how the cells of the brain are organized into circuits, almost computational circuits if you will, and we see how information flows through those circuits and how it's transformed, we might have a much firmer grasp on why our brains make decisions the way that they do. If we get a handle on that, maybe we can overcome some of our limitations and at the very least we'll understand why we do what we do.
-- Edward Boyden

#Cells #Information Flow #Decision

I worry that we don't have a very good definition of consciousness yet which makes it hard to tackle.
-- Edward Boyden

#Worry #Definitions #Consciousness

Work backward from your goal.
-- Edward Boyden

#Goal

One thing that I've been doing for a long time is to wake up really early. I try to get up around 4 or 5 in the morning, long before most of my lab members are up, which gives me some quiet time to really think without distraction. I think that's important.
-- Edward Boyden

#Morning #Thinking #Long

I often try to think about, What sounds like a bad idea, but if you find the right plan of attack, it's actually a really good idea? I spend a lot of time really trying to systematically tackle problems from different angles.
-- Edward Boyden

#Thinking #Ideas #Trying

We don't have a "consciousness meter" that'll tell us exactly how conscious something is. I think we might get there eventually.
-- Edward Boyden

#Thinking #Might #Consciousness

Many of the projects that we do that appear quite successful, it's actually often the second or third time we've given it a try.
-- Edward Boyden

#Successful #Trying #Projects

Maybe we'll understand more about how the universe came to be, and what forces drove it in the early days and which forces drive it now.
-- Edward Boyden

#Force #Universe

Synthesize new ideas constantly. Never read passively. Annotate, model, think, and synthesize while you read, even when you're reading what you conceive to be introductory stuff. That way, you will always aim towards understanding things at a resolution fine enough for you to be creative.
-- Edward Boyden

#Reading #Thinking #Ideas

Behavioral economics can explain some things, but it's hard to explain a lot of the underlying processes that generate these decisions, much less some of these unconscious things that we don't have a handle on at all.
-- Edward Boyden

#Decision #Economics #Process

It's not even known how many kinds of cells there are in the brain. If you were looking for a periodic table of the brain, there is no such thing. I really like to think of the brain as a computer.
-- Edward Boyden

#Thinking #Cells #Brain

The brain is really hard to see. The whole thing is very large - the human brain is several pounds in weight - but the connections between brain cells, known as synapses, are really tiny. They're nanoscale in dimension. So if you want to see how the cells of the brain are connected in networks, you have to see those connections, those synapses.
-- Edward Boyden

#Cells #Brain #Want

You can imagine over very long timescales, perhaps far beyond the multi-decade time scale, we might be able to ask very deep questions about why we feel the way we feel about things, or why we think of ourselves in certain ways - questions that have been in the realm of psychology and philosophy but have been very difficult to get a firm mechanistic laws-of-physics grasp on.
-- Edward Boyden

#Philosophy #Thinking #Law

If you could map out a human brain, an open question is, if you simulated it, would it be you? Now, as we discussed earlier, we don't have a great definition or even a good technological handle to know whether something is conscious or not just by looking at it, so there's that aspect that we're not ready to answer, I would argue. But it raises very interesting questions about the nature of identity.
-- Edward Boyden

#Interesting #Brain #Identity

Remember, when we're conscious of something, that state is quite often generated by unconscious processes that happen right before it.
-- Edward Boyden

#Remember #Conscious #States

If we succeed, it makes no sense to keep it only for ourselves.
-- Edward Boyden

#Succeed #Ifs

It's actually kind of weird that we can comprehend the law of gravity, or that we can understand quantum mechanics, enough at least to make computers.
-- Edward Boyden

#Law #Computer #Kind