Date: 1996

"Drinking caffeine is thus like putting a block of wood under one of the brain's primary brake pedals."

— Braun, Stephen

Date: 1996

"You would certainly feel stimulated, since one of your brain's main "brakes" would be disabled. But other brakes, such as GABA, would still be functioning and in the absence of any extra direct stimulants overall activity wouldn't kindle into the kind of neural conflagration that can occur with ...

— Braun, Stephen

Date: 1997

"Forgive me, Friend, I've again presum'd our Minds running before the same Wind."

— Pynchon, Thomas (b. 1937)

Date: 1999

"The insomniac's brain is a choo-choo train."

— Simic, Charles (b. 1938)

Date: 2000

"It's the medium-sized thoughts that jump ship in an emergency."

— Edward St. Aubyn (b. 1960)

Date: 2000

"My mind floated like the Bullet Train above its tracks, meeting no obstruction; everything clear."

— Edward St. Aubyn (b. 1960)

Date: 2003

"So next time you see the homey and his rims spin / Just know my mind is working just like them / (rims, that is)"

— Carter, Shawn Corey (b. 1969) [Jay-Z]

Date: 2006

"The metaphor I use when I lecture on Freud is to think of the mind as a horse and buggy (a Victorian chariot) in which the driver (the ego) struggles frantically to control a hungry, lustful, and disobedient horse (the id) while the driver's father (the superego) sits in the back seat lecturing ...

— Haidt, Jonathan

Date: 2006

"When people looked for metaphors, they saw the mind as the driver of a car, or as a program running on a computer."

— Haidt, Jonathan

Date: 2007

"I have a brain full of remembered names but the road is often blocked with rubble."

— Engel, Howard (b. 1931)