“The brain, a walnut-surfaced, gelatinous, three-pound mass of protoplasm with the consistency of an overripe avocado, is the world of our being. More accurately and truly, the universe of our being. Containing approximately 100 billion neurons or nerve cellsmore than there are stars in our galaxyit has been called by James Watson (codiscoverer of DNAs double helix) the last and greatest biological frontier and the most complex thing we have yet discovered in our universe.”

—Jonathan Cott, from On the Sea of Memory: A Journey from Forgetting to Remembering, 2005.