John O'Keefe

“Science is the quintessential international endeavour, and the sterling reputation of the Nobel awards is partly due to the widely-perceived lack of national and other biases in the selection of the laureates.”

“I can't say when we will have a cure, but we now know through our findings how to ask the question of what is going wrong at the earliest stage of Alzheimer's.”

“Cognitive neuroscience is entering an exciting era in which new technologies and ideas are making it possible to study the neural basis of cognition, perception, memory and emotion at the level of networks of interacting neurons, the level at which we believe many of the important operations of the brain take place.”

“I want to know how the mind works.”

“I am particularly interested in Alzheimer's disease and have been for some time now.”

“It turns out that this part of the brain is one of the first areas that's attacked by Alzheimer's disease. So we can now use some of the basic understanding of this part of the brain to ask the simple question, 'What is going wrong with these special cells in the hippocampus at the very earliest stages?'”

“I think it's fair to say that the Nobel Prize is the highest honor any scientist or artist can achieve.”

“Some of the best navigators in the world are London taxi cab drivers. They have to learn 25,000 streets and how to get from one to the other.”

“If you take my equipment away from me, I might as well retire.”

“What I tend to do is I try and get as much writing done... I get as much writing done at home before I go into work.”

“Britain punches way above its weight in science, and I think we need to continue to do that, and anything that makes it easier to bring scientists in will be very welcome.”

“It is an incontrovertible fact that if we want to make progress in basic areas of medicine and biology, we are going to have to use animals.”

“I do what I do merrily out of curiosity because I want to know how the brain works. That will get me up early in the morning and keep me going all day long.”

“Science is international: the best scientists can come from anywhere; they can come from next door, or they can come from a small village in a country anywhere in the world - we need to make it easier.”

“We will move from looking at correlations between brain activity and behaviour to studying how the brain causes mental states and behaviour.”