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I'm here today with Ed Boyden, who is a famous neuroscientist at MIT.

There is much more to say about him, but he'll do some of that explaining himself.

Before we get to what you've done, let me just toss out a few general questions that

the audience might be interested in.

If I were to read all of the good popular books on brain science, what is it that I'm still

most likely not to understand?

I think something that people don't appreciate is how little we know about the brain.

So if you think about brain diseases, like Alzheimer's and Parkinson's and epilepsy,

basically none of these can be cured.

And the treatments, if they do exist, are very partial and have a lot of side effects.

And similarly, we don't actually have theories, detailed knowledge enough to make predictive,

interesting models, for example, of how we form emotions, of how we make decisions.

So I think that I sometimes have jokingly say we should write a book about the brain

called ignorance, what we don't know about the brain.

Not sure how many copies would sell though.

If I think about mental illness, it seems that it's hard to find chemical correlates

for mind states that would normally be counted as mentally ill.

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