Date: 2004

"Nature provides a first draft, which experience revises."

— Marcus, Gary (b. 1970)

Date: December 2, 2012

"For now, our ability to understand how all those parts [of the brain] relate is quite limited, sort of like trying to understand the political dynamics of Ohio from an airplane window above Cleveland."

— Marcus, Gary (b. 1970)

Date: June 27, 2015

"Descartes thought that the brain was a kind of hydraulic pump, propelling the spirits of the nervous system through the body."

— Marcus, Gary (b. 1970)

Date: June 27, 2015

"Freud compared the brain to a steam engine."

— Marcus, Gary (b. 1970)

Date: June 27, 2015

"The neuroscientist Karl Pribram likened it to a holographic storage device."

— Marcus, Gary (b. 1970)

Date: June 27, 2015

"Many neuroscientists today would add to this list of failed comparisons the idea that the brain is a computer -- just another analogy without a lot of substance."

— Marcus, Gary (b. 1970)

Date: June 27, 2015

"Often, when scientists resist the idea of the brain as a computer, they have a particular target in mind, which you might call the serial, stored-program machine."

— Marcus, Gary (b. 1970)

Date: June 27, 2015

"If the brain is not a serial algorithm-crunching machine, though, what is it?"

— Marcus, Gary (b. 1970)

Date: June 27, 2015

"Although my colleagues and I don't literally think that the brain is a field programmable gate array, our suggestion is that the brain might similarly consist of highly orchestrated sets of fundamental building blocks, such as "computational primitives" for constructing sequences, retrieving inf...

— Marcus, Gary (b. 1970)

Date: June 27, 2015

"Identifying those building blocks, we believe, could be the Rosetta stone that unlocks the brain."

— Marcus, Gary (b. 1970)