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

Date: June 14, 2011

"They are a result of the way that the brain, a Rube Goldberg mental contraption, processes memory."

— Cohen, Patricia

Date: September 2, 2011

"The 'will' in willpower is not some mysterious 'free will,' a ghost in the machine that can do as it pleases, but a part of the machine itself."

— Pinker, Steven (b. 1954)

Date: April 25, 2011

"The brain is a remarkably capable chronometer for most purposes."

— Bilger, Burkhard

Date: April 25, 2011

"Like a racing engine, her mental clock went faster the hotter it got."

— Bilger, Burkhard

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