Date: 1764

"In the arts and sciences which have least connection with the mind, its faculties are the engines which we must employ; and the better we understand their nature and use, their defects and disorders, the more skilfully we shall apply them, and with the greater success."

— Reid, Thomas (1710-1796)

Date: 1902

"The whole process, unless interrupted, would according to this hypothesis, run down like an alarm-clock; or it would be as with a row of bricks appropriately arranged: as the top portion of the first brick received a push in the direction of the other bricks, it would fall on the second brick, w...

— Spiller, Gustav (1864-1940)

Date: 1988

"Most of the mind is not a computer: most mental processes are not computations."

— Mellor, D. H. (b. 1938)

Date: 1995

"In what way is the mind like a computer that is different from its resemblance, for example, to a telephone switchboard (which was the most popular image in psychology some years ago), or to a cathedral, which once long ago was also a major poetical image (consider: the caverns of the mind, the ...

— Shipley, Thorne (1927-2009)

Date: 1999

"As the brain gets more complex in the womb, then, like a dimmer switch, consciousness gradually grows and burgeons until, of course, in adulthood it reaches its particular pinnacles or depths."

— Greenfield, Susan (b. 1950)

Date: 1999

"On its own this trigger, as we can see from the earlier definition, is not going to generate consciousness. Imagine a candyfloss machine with a stick in the centre that then gathers more and more candyfloss as time goes on. Think of the epicentre as the stick in the centre, the burgeoning candy...

— Greenfield, Susan (b. 1950)

Date: February 15, 2011

"In other words, natural memory is the hardware you’re born with. Artificial memory is the software you run on it."

— Foer, Joshua

Date: March 7, 2014

"For Kaku, the brain is a computer made of meat, and understanding the mind is just a really, really hard engineering problem."

— Frank, Adam (b. 1962)

Date: March 7, 2014

"If we treat minds like meat-computers, we may end up in a world where that’s the only aspect of their nature we perceive or value."

— Frank, Adam (b. 1962)

Date: September 5, 2018

"Chief among this novel’s pleasures is viewing the nation -- its landscapes, its people, its curdled politics, its increasingly feudal inequalities -- through the vibrant filters of Gary Shteyngart’s Hipstamatic mind."

— Miles, Jonathan