Caltech is a very adventurous place. Part of the culture is that we tolerate people doing things that seem impossible, and also synthesizing and borrowing ideas across very kooky and unusual boundaries.

We see that hyperactivity and reward areas are important when the bubble's rising. People getting caught up in it. We also see areas involving mentalizing, which means thinking about other people: Who's buying? Who's selling? Do they know something? We see emotional areas before the crash that indicate a sense of uncertainty or dread.

Game theory is a branch of, originally, applied mathematics, used mostly in economics and political science, a little bit in biology, that gives us a mathematical taxonomy of social life, and it predicts what people are likely to do and believe others will do in cases where everyone's actions affect everyone else.

The Kennedys were very organized. Dinner was always served at 7:15, and if you were a minute late, it really wasn't worth it. In my family, you never knew when dinner was going to be. It could be at 7, or it could be at 10.

If a child from an Amazonian hunter-gatherer tribe comes to Boston, is raised in Boston, that child will be indistinguishable in language capacities from my children growing up here, and vice versa.

My family do not think I'm special - not one, one bit.

Family is whatever you say it is.