Date: 2010

"One bore the Professorial stigmata, if only brainular, for years."

— Castle, Terry (b. 1953)

Date: 2010

"I still have my old paperback copy of Spenser's poem and just looking at it--the pages and pages of bewildering verse in tiny print, the demented little crib notes I've scribbled in the margins--can induce in me a sort of mental seasickness."

— Castle, Terry (b. 1953)

Date: 2010

"You've put it in the book and in reading it my brain is having a response like 'things as they are are really part of the world and I forgot.' How nice to just feel them roll over the brain! It's like a brain massage!"

— Gallagher, Kirsten

Date: April 18, 2011

"And so it goes, researchers say, with most study sessions: difficulty builds mental muscle, while ease often builds only confidence."

— Carey, Benedict (b. 1960)

Date: June 4, 2011

"My desk faces a wall covered with images, notes, timelines, vaudeville photographs and playbills; my keyboard sits in a small black space surrounded by piles of books and paper -- the brain disgorged and arrayed."

— Endicott, Marina (b. 1958)

Date: June 14, 2011

"But they usually assume that the purpose of reasoning is to help an individual arrive at the truth, and that irrationality is a kink in that process, a sort of mental myopia."

— Cohen, Patricia

Date: September 2, 2011

"The disasters reveal a limitation of the muscle metaphor: certain evolutionarily prepared drives seem to withstand even the most bulked-up powers of will."

— Pinker, Steven (b. 1954)

Date: March 17, 2012

"It forces the brain to resolve internal conflict, giving the mind a workout that strengthens its cognitive muscles."

— Bhattacharjee, Yudhijit

Date: May 7, 2012

"The fear gets released later on, while I'm falling asleep and near-misses replay themselves in my mind's eye like an endless computer game fraught with constant hazards, in which I'm a disembodied Steadicam hurtling through busy city streets at the same speed something falls, pedestrians appeari...

— Kreider, Tim (b. 1967)

Date: August 2012

"My father tried turning his thoughts into a substitute immune system."

— Roth, Marco (b. 1974)