Date: January 11, 2014

"As your body sleeps, your brain is quite actively playing the part of mental janitor: It’s clearing out all of the junk that has accumulated as a result of your daily thinking."

— Konnikova, Maria (b. 1984)

Date: January 11, 2014

"One day, scientists might be able to successfully mimic the expansion of the interstitial space that does the mental janitorial work so that we can achieve maximally efficient round-the-clock brain trash pickup."

— Konnikova, Maria (b. 1984)

Date: January 11, 2014

"It's [concerning sleep loss] like the difference between a snowstorm's disrupting a single day of trash pickup and a prolonged strike. No longer quite as easy to fix, and even when the strike is over, there's likely to be some stray debris floating around for quite some time yet."

— Konnikova, Maria (b. 1984)

Date: June 5, 2016

"They [brain and heart] talk like best friends via the common carotid artery, which sends blood from the heart to the brain at a running speed of three feet per second."

— Hill, Melissa

Date: August 27, 2016

"Think of the brain as a jam-packed sports arena and the voxels as all the fans"

— Murphy, Kate

Date: September 18, 2016

"Mr. Ackerman told me that he has designed his 'Sleep With Me' podcast to tame the vigilant, overactive 'guardian' in the brain that feels it must stay awake to worry. 'I'm trying to trick the guardian,' he said."

— Kennedy, Pagan (b. 1963)

Date: November 15, 2016

"He [Trump] has set the worst human impulses marching. But there are no clean slates in the unconscious."

— Rose, Jacqueline (b. 1949)

Date: December 31, 2016

"Rather (in the words of the neuroscientist Georg Striedter), brains evolve like companies do: they reorganize as they expand."

— Barrett, Lisa Feldman (b. 1963)

Date: February 7, 2017

"This question just made my brain pixelate, and now the inside of my head's a roaring celebration."

— Smith, Ali (b. August 24, 1962)

Date: August 24, 2017

"Whatever we choose as option A, there is always a chorus, inside our own minds and outside of it, contending it would have been better if we had just gone with option B."

— Filipovic, Jill (b. 1983)