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Quote by Edward Boyden

“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.”

Quote by Edward Boyden

Author

Edward Boyden
Edward Boyden

Edward Boyden is a renowned neuroscientist born on August 18, 1979. He has made significant contributions to the field of neuroscience, particularly in the areas of optogenetics and neural circuit engineering. Professor Boyden holds a faculty position at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and is dedicated to exploring how the brain works and how to enhance brain function through technological means. more

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“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.”

“There are many things that we still don't understand about the universe, right? Einstein struggled to bring quantum mechanics and gravity together and never succeeded, and that's a problem that to this day is not well understood. Well, maybe to comprehend some of these things, we need to augment our intelligence. If we do, who knows?”

“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.”

“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.”