Date: January 2010

"The man's suit, his hair, the sky through the window, and the rows of figures sliding across the abacus of his mind—these too are gray, though each gray is of a different value."

— Schwartz, Mattathias

Date: January 2010

"Only one mind remained independent, humming along on its own steam."

— Schwartz, Mattathias

Date: May 27, 2010

"But we tend to think that memory is objectively truthful, on analogy with a digital recording."

— Bloom, Paul (b. 1963)

Date: May 17, 2010

"It's the mind as problem-solving device, almost as calculator, though it is, of course, most drawn to problems that cannot be solved."

— Chiasson, Dan

Date: February 25, 2010

"There is no longer much debate over whether evolution sculptured the fleshy machine inside our head."

— Lehrer, Jonah

Date: February 25, 2010

"Their evolutionary perspective, however — they see the mind as a fine-tuned machine that is not prone to pointless programming bugs — led them to wonder if rumination had a purpose."

— Lehrer, Jonah

Date: February 25, 2010

"This suggests that depressive disorder is an extreme form of an ordinary thought process, part of the dismal machinery that draws us toward our problems, like a magnet to metal."

— Lehrer, Jonah

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: May 23, 2011

"Learning isn’t about downloading a certain quantity of information into your brain, as the proponents of online instruction seem to think."

— Deresiewicz, William (b. 1964)

Date: June 14, 2011

"Rationality, by this yardstick (and irrationality too, but we’ll get to that) is nothing more or less than a servant of the hard-wired compulsion to triumph in the debating arena."

— Cohen, Patricia