Latest Edward Boyden Quotes from Interviews

Quotes about:

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

  Edward Boyden

  Succeed, Ifs

  Source: www.huffingtonpost.com

• 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, Light, Cells

  Source: www.huffingtonpost.com

• 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.

  Edward Boyden

  Dna, Giving, Nonprofits

  Source: www.huffingtonpost.com

• 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

  Thinking, Ideas, Trying

  Source: www.huffingtonpost.com

• 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

  Ideas, Years, Information

  Source: www.huffingtonpost.com

• 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.

  Edward Boyden

  Morning, Thinking, Long

  Source: www.huffingtonpost.com

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

  Edward Boyden

  Ideas, Sound, Good Ideas

  Source: www.huffingtonpost.com

• 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

  Successful, Trying, Projects

  Source: www.huffingtonpost.com

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

  Edward Boyden

  Jobs, Timing, Remember

  Source: www.huffingtonpost.com

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

  Edward Boyden

  Impact, Skills, People

  Source: www.huffingtonpost.com

• 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

  Writing, Phones, Talking

  Source: www.huffingtonpost.com

• Work backward from your goal.

  Edward Boyden

  Goal

  Source: www.huffingtonpost.com

• 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.

  Edward Boyden

  Thinking, Skills, People

  Source: www.huffingtonpost.com

• 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.

  Edward Boyden

  Interesting, Brain, Identity

  Source: www.huffingtonpost.com

• 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

  Source: www.huffingtonpost.com

• 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.

  Edward Boyden

  Cells, Brain, Want

  Source: www.huffingtonpost.com

• 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?

  Edward Boyden

  Together, Needs, Problem

  Source: www.huffingtonpost.com

• 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?

  Edward Boyden

  Law, Understanding, Brain

  Source: www.huffingtonpost.com

• 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

  Thinking, Gaps, Helping

  Source: www.huffingtonpost.com

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

  Edward Boyden

  World, Surprising

  Source: www.huffingtonpost.com

• 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?

  Edward Boyden

  Asking Why, Brain, Physical Science

  Source: www.huffingtonpost.com

• 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.

  Edward Boyden

  Law, Computer, Kind

  Source: www.huffingtonpost.com

• 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

  Cells, Information Flow, Decision

  Source: www.huffingtonpost.com

• 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

  Philosophy, Thinking, Law

  Source: www.huffingtonpost.com

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

  Edward Boyden

  Remember, Conscious, States

  Source: www.huffingtonpost.com