Date: 1959

"(A slight miracle might cleanse / His brain / Of all attachments, claw-roots of sense)"

— Hill, Geoffrey (b. 1932)

Date: 1960

"Different persons growing up in the same language are like different bushes trimmed and trained to take the shape of identical elephants."

— Quine, W. V. O. (1908-2000)

Date: 1965

"The ripe brain rotting like a yellow nut / Hatching / Its babel of sea-lice, sandfly, and maggot."

— Walcott, Derek (b. 1930)

Date: August, 1965

"His mind's all black thickets / and blood."

— Harrison, Jim (1937-2016)

Date: 1972

"Summer breeze, makes me feel fine, / Blowing through the jasmine in my mind."

— Seals, Jim (b. 1941) and Dash Crofts (b. 1940)

Date: 1989

"Like trees similar in their gross physical profile, brains can be similar in their gross functional profiles while being highly idiosyncratic in the myriad details of their fine-grained arborization."

— Churchland, Paul (b. 1942)

Date: 1990

"I did not know the soul / is cleaved so that the soul might be restored. / Live wood hewn, / its sap springs from a sticky wound."

— Lee, Li-Young (b .1957)

Date: 1992

"Other people's words drifted through his mind, like the tumbleweed across a windy desert in the opening shots of 'They Came from Outer Space.'"

— Edward St. Aubyn (b. 1960)

Date: 1992

"That terror was the price he had to pay for the first heartbreaking wave of pleasure when consciousness seemed to burst out, like white blossoms, along the branches of every nerve."

— Edward St. Aubyn (b. 1960)

Date: 1992

"And all his scattered thoughts came rushing together, like loose iron filings as a magnet is held over them and draws them into the shape of a rose."

— Edward St. Aubyn (b. 1960)