Date: February 15, 2011

"If you want to use a memory palace for permanent storage, you have to take periodic time-consuming mental strolls through it to keep your images from fading."

— Foer, Joshua

Date: 2011

"I could share an hour of warm camaraderie with Dad, then once I'd walked out the door, get the uncanny feeling I'd disappeared into the wings of his mind's stage, like a character no longer necessary to the ongoing story line."

— Reagan, Ron (b. 1958)

Date: March 11, 2011

"Given the limits of steel and concrete to resist the forces of nature, much depends on people’s own preparedness to face up to disaster -- but that mental infrastructure is in even poorer shape than the nation’s roads and bridges."

— Schwartz, John

Date: September 5, 2011

"He [Derek Parfit] pictures his thinking self as a government minister sitting behind a large desk, who writes a question on a piece of paper and puts it in his out-tray. The minister then sits idly at the desk, twiddling his thumbs, while in some back room civil servants labor furiously, come up...

— MacFarquhar, Larissa

Date: April 25, 2011

"The most recent neuroscience papers make the brain sound like a Victorian attic, full of odd, vaguely labelled objects ticking away in every corner."

— Bilger, Burkhard

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: 2011

"Clean out my heart, you know? It's like a crowded old garage. It needs emptying and sorting."

— Nadzam, Bonnie

Date: August 2012

"My mother treated these eruptions like outbreaks of bad weather, waiting them out under some mysterious mental shelter."

— Roth, Marco (b. 1974)

Date: 2012

"Fleeing from the dank halls of the mind's prison toward the grassy meadows of the material world, speculative realism must also make good on the first term of its epithet: metaphysics need not seek verification, whether from experience, physics, mathematics, formal logic, or even reason."

— Bogost, Ian

Date: February 4, 2012

"That sounds like stop-and-go mindfulness--focusing on the lives of other creatures to dispel the usual mind theaters that plague us."

— Ackerman, Diane (b. 1948)