My fundamental premise about the brain is that its workings - what we sometimes call "mind" - are a consequence of its anatomy and physiology, and nothing more.
The mind is a finer body, and resumes its functions of feeding, digesting, absorbing, excluding, and generating, in a new and ethereal element. Here, in the brain, is all the process of alimentation repeated, in the acquiring, comparing, digesting, and assimilating of experience. Here again is the mystery of generation repeated.
Sometimes it's very hard to turn off my brain especially when I have an eighteen hour day. I try to stop working by 10 or 11pm but you know sometimes there is nothing I can do about it.
We admit, in geometry, not only infinite magnitudes, that is to say, magnitudes greater than any assignable magnitude, but infinite magnitudes infinitely greater, the one than the other. This astonishes our dimension of brains, which is only about six inches long, five broad, and six in depth, in the largest heads.
Antidepressants are very good, but it's a clinical cosh, really. Sometimes you have to be knocked out, just to stop; when you're in that state all you want to do is just sleep, and rest your body and your brain.
The neurochemistry of the brain is astonishingly busy, the circuitry of a machine more wonderful than any devised by humans. But there is no evidence that its functioning is due to anything more than the 10(14) neural connections that build an elegant architecture of consciousness.
Art bids us touch and taste and hear and see the world, and shrinks from what Blake calls mathematic form, from every abstract form, from all that is of the brain only.
Science, already oppressive with its shocking revelations, will perhaps be the ultimate exterminator of our human species - if separate species we be - for its reserve of unguessed horrors could never be borne by mortal brains if loossed upon the world.
Although it is difficult to pinpoint the physical base or location of awareness, it is perhaps the most precious thing concealed within our brains. And it is something that the individual alone can feel and experience. Each of us cherishes it highly, yet it is private.