Date: September 2, 2011

"We speak of exerting will power, of forcing ourselves to go to work, of restraining ourselves and of controlling our temper, as if it were an unruly dog."

— Pinker, Steven (b. 1954)

Date: September 2, 2011

"The 'will' in willpower is not some mysterious 'free will,' a ghost in the machine that can do as it pleases, but a part of the machine itself."

— Pinker, Steven (b. 1954)

Date: September 2, 2011

"The disasters reveal a limitation of the muscle metaphor: certain evolutionarily prepared drives seem to withstand even the most bulked-up powers of will."

— Pinker, Steven (b. 1954)

Date: April 18, 2016

"We begin to esteem this way of being at its true worth when we realize that the creators of the brain food that we're wolfing down are at least as involved in it, at the level of imagination, as we are."

— James, Clive (b. 1939)

Date: April 18, 2016

"A TV habit on this scale starts to permeate every corner of your mind."

— James, Clive (b. 1939)

Date: April 18, 2016

"The new mythology gets into the old mythology, as if classic literature had faded into the mind's background and images encountered on the screen had become one's first frame of cultural reference."

— James, Clive (b. 1939)

Date: April 18, 2016

"Lucinda, when I finally forced her to start watching, correctly told me to stop bitching about the dragons: they were part of the deal, the price of voluntarily lowering oneself into the pit of the brain."

— James, Clive (b. 1939)

Date: August 31, 2016

"He therefore ignores the observation that circuits of our brains are devoted to processing language, while different parts deal with non-linguistic sounds and with general reasoning and problem-solving."

— Coyne, Jerry Allen (b. 1949)