The brain abhors discrepancies.
The adage that fact is stranger than fiction seems to be especially true for the workings of the brain.
You can't just take an image and randomly distort it and call it art - although many people in La Jolla where I come from do precisely that.
I was socially isolated as a kid. I had friends, but I wasn't very good at sports and that sort of thing so I became quite comfortable being by myself, exploring. The world was my private playground, and in it, I was supreme. Darwin, Faraday, Huxley and other great scientists were my companions.
My views as an individual ought not to be confused with my views as a scientist - the minute you try to mingle God and science, you get into trouble. Metaphysics has its place, and science has its place; don't mix the two.
Lofty questions about the mind are fascinating to ask, philosophers have been asking them for three millennia both in India where I am from and here in the West - but it is only in the brain that we can eventually hope to find the answers.
Remember that politics, colonialism, imperialism and war also originate in the human brain.
We are not angels, we are merely sophisticated apes. Yet we feel like angels trapped inside the bodies of beasts, craving transcendence and all the time trying to spread our wings and fly off, and it's really a very odd predicament to be in, if you think about it.
The boundary between neurology and psychiatry is becoming increasingly blurred, and it's only a matter of time before psychiatry becomes just another branch of neurology.
People often ask how I got interested in the brain; my rhetorical answer is: 'How can anyone NOT be interested in it?' Everything you call 'human nature' and consciousness arises from it.
Science is like a love affair with nature; an elusive, tantalising mistress. It has all the turbulence, twists and turns of romantic love, but that's part of the game.
The minute you succumb to outside pressure, you cease to be creative.
