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.

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.

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.

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

I think the definition will change as we learn more, but my working definition of solving the brain is: one, we can model, maybe in a computer, the processes that generate things like thoughts and feelings, and two, we can understand how to cure brain disorders, like Alzheimer's and epilepsy. Those are my two driving goals. One is more human-condition oriented, and one more clinical.

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.

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.

If you think backwards from a big problem, and you talk to all these other people who have skills and who think forward from their skills, it's very easy to form collaborations because everyone is incentivized to work together.

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.