Date: October 31, 2011

"It does so amid a cacophony of competing voices, the neural equivalent of open outcry at the Chicago Board of Trade."

— Carey, Benedict (b. 1960)

Date: October 31, 2011

"The brain’s cacophony of competing voices feels coherent because some module or network somewhere in the left hemisphere is providing a running narration."

— Carey, Benedict (b. 1960)

Date: March 9, 2012

"If we acquire a bad habit this way it is very hard to change, because its grooves are so well worn in our minds."

— Wilson, Timothy D.

Date: May 3, 2012

"A brain is not a computer. We are not blank hard drives waiting to be filled with data."

— Brooks, David (b. 1961)

Date: 2012

"Peirce was an intellectual Swiss Army knife. Mathematics, logic, philosophy, science, semiotics—whatever the discipline, he could slice through it with his nimble, creative mind."

— McCabe, Bret

Date: March 19, 2012

"I mean seriously, HOLY FUCK. My mind exploded when I looked at this."

— Margary, Drew

Date: March 19, 2012

"Even when I got the question right, the mental strain it took to try and dig through the piles of shit-encrusted mildew in my brain to retrieve the information needed to solve any given equation was brutal."

— Margary, Drew

Date: October 28, 2012

"Each grasped, in the unflinching gaze of the other, a silent acknowledgment of the nobility of man, especially as manifested in work, the work that purified the soul the way steel is purified in the smelter. That sort of thing."

— Saunders, George (b. 1958)

Date: August 21, 2012

"Though her book is entitled 'In Praise of Messy Lives' (The Dial Press, 288 pp., $25), Ms. Roiphe’s mind is neat as a pin, untroubled by the unexpected inference, the awareness of mitigating factors in television or film or literature that might unmake her arguments."

— D'Addario, Daniel

Date: April 15, 2013

"Big data is like the offensive coordinator up in the booth at a football game who, with altitude, can see patterns others miss. But the head coach and players still need to be on the field of subjectivity."

— Brooks, David (b. 1961)