255 Quotes by Paul Allen

I first got interested in the brain through computers.

One of the things I've come to appreciate about the brain is the importance of location. It's not just a set of interchangeable parts that you can swap in and out.

I was only in second grade when the Russian Cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin became the first man in space. The night of his launch - April 12, 1961 - I went out onto the front porch and stared up at the stars, trying to see his capsule passing overhead. Like millions of others, I was enthralled by the idea of space exploration and have been ever since.

There are so many intricacies to our brain that won't be understood unless we start to look at the system as a whole. All these different details don't operate in isolation.

My quest to expand access to space began more than a decade ago, when I teamed up with Burt Rutan at Scaled Composites to build SpaceShipOne. This innovative air-launched vehicle was the world's first private spacecraft to carry an astronaut into sub-orbital space.

The brain is one of the richest green fields of science. There's so much yet to be discovered.

With documentary-film projects, you hope you highlight an area of concern people haven't thought about before. A lot of times, I'm asking myself - 'This seems to be a significant problem. What can be done that hasn't been done?'

As a programmer, you're working with very simple structures compared to the brain. So I was always fascinated by how the brain works.

The brain has this amazing level of almost fractal complexity to it. When you start looking at any part of it in detail, you realize that it's much more complex than you thought.