Date: 2006

"Weber still saw the rarest of butterflies, fluttering mind, its paired wings pinned to the film in obscene detail."

— Powers, Richard (b. 1957)

Date: 2006

"This subsystem still chattered; this one had fallen silent."

— Powers, Richard (b. 1957)

Date: 2006

"'What we think of as a single, simple process,' Weber wrote, 'is in fact a long assembly line. Vision requires careful coordination between thirty-two or more separate brain modules. Recognizing a face takes at least two dozen.'"

— Powers, Richard (b. 1957)

Date: 2006

"We are hard-wired for finding faces."

— Powers, Richard (b. 1957)

Date: 2006

"A camel, that's what you are. A camel of consciousness."

— Powers, Richard (b. 1957)

Date: 2006

"We were not one, continuous, indivisible whole, but instead, hundreds of separate subsystems, with changes in any one sufficient to disperse the provisional confederation into unrecognizable new countries."

— Powers, Richard (b. 1957)

Date: 2006

"Conciousness works by telling a story, one that is whole, continuous, and stable. When that story breaks, consciousness rewrites it. Each revised draft claims to be the original."

— Powers, Richard (b. 1957)

Date: 2006

"Back at Dayton Chaminade High, Weber had begun intellectual life as a confirmed Freudian--brain as hydraulic pipe for mind's spectacular waterworks--anything to confound his priest teachers."

— Powers, Richard (b. 1957)

Date: 2006

"He knew the drill: throughout history, the brain had been compared to the highest prevailing level of technology: steam engine, telephone switchboard, computer."

— Powers, Richard (b. 1957)

Date: 2006

"Now, as Weber approached his own professional zenith, the brain became the Internet, a distributed network, more than two hundred modules in loose, mutually modifying chatter with other modules."

— Powers, Richard (b. 1957)