Date: September 12, 2016

"'Indigenous prophesies point to an imminent polar reversal that will wipe our hard drives clean,' Daniel Pinchbeck wrote in his exploration of ayahuasca, technology, and Mayan millennialism, '2012: The Return of Quetzalcoatl.'"

— Levy, Ariel (b. 1974)

Date: October 10, 2016

"Patrick Collison, the C.E.O. of the electronic-payments company Stripe, likened Altman's brain to the claw machine on a carnival midway: 'It roams around but has the ability to plunge very deep when necessary.'"

— Friend, Tad (b. 1962)

Date: November 28, 2016

"'It's like getting new software installed in your head,' Brooker said of being a father, though he rejected the idea that it had mellowed him."

— Harvey, Giles

Date: December 29, 2016

"Hardly a week goes by, it seems, without an enthusiastic report in the popular media about intriguing neuroscience research linking some human behavior to the function of a particular brain circuit."

— Friedman, Richard A.

Date: December 31, 2016

"An ancient inner layer [of the brain], inherited from reptiles, was presumed to contain circuits for basic survival. The middle layer, the 'limbic system,' supposedly contained emotion circuitry inherited from mammals."

— Barrett, Lisa Feldman (b. 1963)

Date: September 13, 2016

"As long as Trump continues his fear mongering by constantly portraying Muslims and Mexican immigrants as imminent dangers, many conservative brains will involuntarily light up like light bulbs being controlled by a switch."

— Azarian, Bobby

Date: January 18, 2017

"News that contradicts his worldview gets flushed down the sort of emotional and intellectual dispose-all that I think he carries around with him from the second he gets out of bed to the minute he goes to sleep each night."

— Kruse, Michael

Date: January 17, 2017

"It not only gets the steel ball rolling onto the intestines, but also activates the senses, setting them to the frequencies at which the signals of new dangers can be received. Those signals appear as noise to the previous -- pre-war -- mind, as a breakdown in communication."

— Hemon, Aleksandr (b. 1964)

Date: February 18, 2017

"So we're stuck in Trump's head with him. ... It's a very cluttered place to be, a fine-tuned machine spewing a torrent of chaos, cruelty, confusion, farce and transfixing craziness."

— Dowd, Maureen (b. January 14, 1952)

Date: June 30, 2017

"In this sense, a forgotten memory is a lot like an old file on your computer. While the document still exists, you don't have a good way of getting to it, and today many memory researchers don't even use the word 'forgetting.'"

— Boser, Ulrich