Edward Boyden Quotations

I was interested in big unknowns, and the brain is one of the biggest, so building tools that allow us to regard the brain as a big electrical circuit appealed to me.

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.

What I'm really interested in is this idea of a 'brain co-processor' - a device that can record from, and deliver information to, so many points in the brain, with a computational infrastructure in between - a computer that can process the information and compute exactly what needs to be restored.

Unlike optogenetics, where there are existing nonprofits that give away the DNA for free or at cost, expansion microscopy requires chemicals to be used, so having a company that makes the chemistry kit that anybody can use can save time.

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

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.

If our brain is understanding some parts of the universe and not understanding other parts, and those understandings are about the laws of physics that our brains are built on top of, then it's kind of a loop, right?

It's surprising that the world is understandable to the extent that it is.

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.

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?

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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?

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.

For the last century of neuroscience, lots of people have tried to control neurons using all sorts of different technologies - pharmacology (drugs), electrical pulses, and so on. But none of these technologies are precise. With optogenetics, we can aim light at a single cell, or a set of cells, and turn just that set of cells on or off.

I spend a lot of time going over old conversation summaries. A lot of the old ones are about ideas that ended in failure, the project didn't work. But hey, you know what? That was five years ago, and now computers are faster, or some new information has come along, the world is different. So we're able to reboot the project.

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.

A lot of good ideas are actually bad ideas because, since they sound good, everybody's already doing them.

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.

A big part of my job is to remember failure, and reboot failure, when the timing is right.

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.

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.

The skill-providers want to have more impact and solve problems; the problem people want new tools to get their problems solved.

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.

Work backward from your goal.

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.

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.

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.

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

Life is an adventure - Savor every instant!

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