Feng Zhang Quotes

We started all this research way back in the early 1990s, developing a technique that allows us to record the electrical signals produced by neurons simultaneously.

A typical neuron makes about ten thousand connections to neighboring neurons. Given the billions of neurons, this means there are as many connections in a single cubic centimeter of brain tissue as there are stars in the Milky Way galaxy.

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.

We cannot experimentally map out the brain. It's just too big. In a piece of the brain the size of a pinhead there are 3,000 pathways like a city with 3,000 streets.

Ask not what the brain can do for the computer. Ask what the computer can do for the brain.

Your brain is built of cells called neurons and glia - hundreds of billions of them. Each one of these cells is as complicated as a city.

Sticking wires into the brain is obviously rather crude. It's hard to do in animals that run around, and there is a physical limit to the number of wires that can be inserted simultaneously.

With its billions of interconnected neurons, whose interactions change from millisecond to millisecond, the human brain is an archetypal complex system.

Life and consciousness are the two great mysteries. Actually, their substrates are the inanimate. And how do you get from neurons shooting around in the brain to the thought that pops up in your head and mine? There's something deeply mysterious about that. And if you're not struck by the mystery, I think you haven't thought about it.

The actual organization of behavior goes on the level of the individual nerve cells and their connections, and we have a hundred billion nerve cells, probably a hundred trillion connections. It's just mind-boggling to think of all the different ways in which they're arranged in a baby's head.

It seems like everything that we see perceived in the brain before we actually use our own eyes, that everything we see is coming through computers or machines and then is being input in our brain cells. So that really worries me.

Throughout our lifetimes, we are constantly regenerating new brain cells in the hippocampus, a process called neurogenesis. New stem cells are constantly being born in the hippocampus that ultimately differentiate into fully functional neurons.

The brain is a complex biological organ possessing immense computational capability: it constructs our sensory experience, regulates our thoughts and emotions, and controls our actions.

I think the brain is essentially a computer and consciousness is like a computer program. It will cease to run when the computer is turned off. Theoretically, it could be re-created on a neural network, but that would be very difficult, as it would require all one's memories.

We have about 100 million cells interconnected in our brains. They communicate with one another through electrical signals.

In my view, while the single neuron is the basic anatomical and information processing-signaling unit of the brain, it is not capable of generating behaviors and, ultimately, thinking. Instead, the true functional unit of the central nervous system is a population of neurons, or neural ensembles or cell assemblies.

Brains don't really smell, but what's amazing about the brain is that it's almost like scrambled eggs or soft tofu, almost like a gel. The brain controls so much of what we do, but you could put your finger right through it.

There is an adage in neuroscience that circuits that wire together fire together. By engaging the brain and spinal cord together, we may be able to enhancce teh growth of [brain] circuits during rehabilitation.

I predict that technology will enable people to transmit their neuronal, actual feelings over the Internet.

The brain was designed by evolution, so each part of it is optimized for what it does, and it's incredibly, incredibly complex.

Electrodes aren't the only things we may someday start implanting in our brains. Consider what you could do with a chip in your head that linked directly to the Internet: Within milliseconds, you could retrieve just about any piece of information.

In the brain, you have connections between the neurons called synapses, and they can change. All your knowledge is stored in those synapses.

In terms of the brain, you can in a crude way think of the human brain as a computer.

I think of the brain as a computational device: It has a bunch of little components that perform calculations on some small aspect of the problem, and another part of the brain has to stitch it all together, like a tapestry or a quilt.

When we have any function, whether it's language or vision or cognitive functions like memory, we aren't dealing with a straight line to the brain that says 'This is what I do.' The brain builds a network of connections, a network of neurons that have a particular role in that function.