Date: April 25, 2011

"At U.C.L.A., Dean Buonomano believes that areas throughout the brain function as clocks, their tissue ticking with neural networks that change in predictable patterns. 'Imagine a skyscraper at night,' he told me. 'Some people on the top floor work till midnight, while some on the lower floors ma...

— Bilger, Burkhard

Date: April 25, 2011

"'I knew I had some intellectual horsepower,' he says. 'But I didn't know where my tires would catch purchase.'"

— Bilger, Burkhard

Date: October 14, 2011

"To its detractors, the brain is a kludge, a hacked-up device beset with bugs, biases and self-­deceptions that undermine our decision making and well-being at every turn."

— Charbris, Christopher F. (b. 1966)

Date: October 14, 2011

"Lately, a growing army of Chicken Littles retorts that this very plasticity has been hijacked by the Internet and other forms of technological crack that are rewiring our brains into a state of continual distraction and intellectual torpor."

— Charbris, Christopher F. (b. 1966)

Date: October 14, 2011

"So if you find yourself stopping every 30 seconds to check your Twitter feed, your brain has no more been rewired than if you find yourself taking a break for ice cream rather than celery. Picking the more rewarding stimulus is something our brains can do perfectly well with the wiring they star...

— Charbris, Christopher F. (b. 1966)

Date: October 14, 2011

"So what’s the right way to think about the brain? Like a piece of software stuck in permanent beta, it has its share of bugs, but its plasticity allows for frequent updates."

— Charbris, Christopher F. (b. 1966)

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: February 16, 2012

"Kids who have ample mental horsepower, an incredible work ethic and no idea what to do next."

— Klein, Ezra (b. May 9, 1984)

Date: September 27, 2012

"The conservative mind, a repository of fresh ideas just two decades ago, is now little more than a click-click slide projector holding a tray of apocalyptic images of modern life that keeps spinning around, raising the viewer’s fever with every rotation."

— Lilla, Mark (b. 1956)

Date: May 30, 2013

"And the key to life is to develop an internal moral, emotional G.P.S. that can tell you which way to go."

— Winfrey, Oprah (b. January 29, 1954)