We don't really understand most of what's happening in the cosmos. Is there any afterlife? Who knows.

I'm using the afterlife as a backdrop against which to explore the joys and complexities of being human - it turns out that it's a great lens with which to understand what matters to us.

I spent my adult life as a scientist, and science is, essentially, the most successful approach we have to try and understand the vast mysteries around.

What we find is that our brains have colossal things happening in them all the time.

I think what a life in science really teaches you is the vastness of our ignorance.

The same stimuli in the world can be inducing very different experiences internally and it's probably based on a single change in a gene. What I am doing is pulling the gene forward and imaging and doing behavioural tests to understand what that difference is and how reality can be constructed so differently.