Edward Boyden: One thing that I've been doing for a long time is to wa...

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.

Edward Boyden

cells brain thinking

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

Edward Boyden

alzheimers motivation inspiration

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

Edward Boyden

destiny play motivational

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.

Edward Boyden

phones writing talking

Life is an adventure - Savor every instant!

Edward Boyden

life-is motivational adventure

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.

Edward Boyden

information-flow cells decision

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.

Edward Boyden

tired answers giving

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.

Edward Boyden

gaps helping thinking

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.

Edward Boyden

trying ideas thinking

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.

Edward Boyden

force universe

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.

Edward Boyden

projects successful trying

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.

Edward Boyden

reading ideas thinking

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.

Edward Boyden

law philosophy thinking

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

Edward Boyden

consciousness might thinking

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

Edward Boyden

definitions consciousness worry

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

Edward Boyden

timing remember jobs

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

Edward Boyden

good-ideas sound ideas

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.

Edward Boyden

epilepsy two thinking

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.

Edward Boyden

information years ideas

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.

Edward Boyden

technology cells light

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.