Quotes from Christof Koch

Historically, philosophy does not have an impressive track record of answering questions about natural world in a decisive manner.

Make a decision, trust yourself and stick with it.

Humanity is not condemned to wander forever in an epistemological fog, knowing only the surface appearance of things but never their true nature.

On this scale, the human brain is 7.5 times bigger than the brain of a typical mammal weighing as much as we do, with all other mammals having smaller encephalization quotients. Why the size of say, the prefrontal cortex, should relate to the size

In summary, every conscious experience has five distinct and undeniable properties: each one exists for itself, is structured, informative, integrated and definite. These are the five essential hallmarks of any and all conscious experiences, from the commonplace to the exalted, from the painful to the orgiastic.

Face blindness, described in the last chapter, is an agnosia specific for faces.

A.R.'s very apparatus that determines color was damaged, he didn't know what colors were (except in an abstract sense). Denying an objective sensory or motor deficit due to neurological damage is a form of agnosia termed anosognosia. It is really a deficit in self-awareness: not knowing what it is that one no longer knows.

When we sleep, consciousness fades. We spend one-quarter to one-third of our life asleep, more when we're young and less as we age. Sleep is defined by behavioral immobility (which is not absolute, as we continue to breathe, move our eyes, and occasionally twitch a limb) and reduced responsiveness to external stimuli. We share this need for daily sleep with all animals.

Mr. Tompkins in Wonderland by George Gamow

For something to exist from the point of view of the world, extrinsically, it must be able to influence things and things must be able to influence it. That is what it means to have causal power. When something can't make a difference to anything in the world or be influenced by anything in the world, it is causally impotent. Whether or not it exists makes no difference to anything.

At the other end of life are elders with severe dementia. The final stage of Alzheimer's and other neurodegenerative diseases is marked by extreme apathy and exhaustion. Individuals cease speaking, gesturing, and even swallowing. Has their conscious mind permanently left its abode, a shrunken brain full of neurofibrillary tangles and amyloid plaques?

Given that you make more than 100,000 daily saccades, each one lasting between 20 and 100 milliseconds, saccadic and blink suppression adds up to more than an hour a day during which you are effectively blind! Yet until scientists started studying eye movements, no one was aware of this remarkable fact.

We might even have to hunt for the NCC down at the subcellular level, seeking mechanisms operating inside cells rather than across large neural coalitions, as is widely assumed. Indeed, some have hypothesized, as a possible NCC, all-or-none electrical events occurring in the dendritic tree of cortical neurons, a sort of handshake confirming that a bottom-up signal has encountered top-down feedback within a certain time window.

In particular, judging one's own confidence in having seen or heard something—metacognition, or "knowing about knowing" (recall the four-point confidence scale in chapter 2)—is linked to anterior regions of prefrontal cortex.

any experience exists for itself, is structured, is the specific way it is, is one, and is definite.

We have rooms in ourselves. Most of them we have not visited yet. Forgotten rooms. From time to time we can find the passage. We find strange things . . . old phonographs, pictures, books . . . they belong to us, but it is the first time we have found them.

We are, quite literally, star dust.

The history of any scientific concept—energy, atom, gene, cancer, memory—is one of increased differentiation and sophistication until it can be explained in a quantitative and mechanistic manner at a lower, more elemental level.

Of the 30 trillion cells in a 70 kg adult body, 25 trillion are erythrocytes. Fewer than 200 billion cells, under 1 percent, make up the brain, half of which are neurons. The same body also plays host to about 38 trillion bacteria, its microbiome (Sender, Fuchs, & Milo, 2016).

there is but a single reality out there, and science is getting increasingly better at describing it.

A lot of perception is a con job.

Judged by single nucleotides polymorphisms (or SNP) in DNA, the difference between people and chimpanzees is 1.23 percent, compared to around 0.1 percent difference in SNPs between two randomly picked humans.